Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,550 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 56% higher than the average critic
  • 6% same as the average critic
  • 38% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 Sand Storm
Lowest review score: 0 Saw VI
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 8,714 out of 16550
  2. Mixed: 5,819 out of 16550
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16550
16550 movie reviews
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  1. Pay the Ghost
    Tidbits that would make the film interesting have been squandered. Instead, we get the standard-issue haunted-house fodder. The ghosts manifest in so many different ways that it seems like the movie is grasping for straws.
  2. My All American
    Strict adherence to the playbook may work in sports, but My All American shows the pitfalls of that approach with movies.
  3. Florence Foster Jenkins
    It’s a film that dares you to give it a bad review, simply so it can turn around and call you a bully who picks on the people who try. It invites you to giggle at Florence’s horrible singing and then promptly scolds you for laughing, creating a contradiction that goes unreconciled.
  4. The Martial Arts Kid
    The film has the vibe of something you might see on Nickelodeon or ABC Family but with a lower budget.
  5. Wrecker
    Aside from a few good jump-scares and a couple of original plot twists, Wrecker spends most of its running time cutting between footage of the roadster and footage of the truck, apparently assuming viewers will take those images and use them to imagine something more exciting.
  6. Uncle John
    Perhaps the vapid existence of millennials is precisely the point that co-writers Erik Crary and Steven Piet (who also directs) are driving at, but the film itself proves inarticulate and unsubstantial.
  7. Eden
    Commercial director Shyam Madiraju, making his feature debut, demonstrates a spare, sinewy visual grip on the low-budget film, especially during that crash sequence. But the mechanical script strands a capable young cast in a sea of hackneyed character types and soggy platitudes.
  8. The Man Who Saved the World
    The film is a disingenuous, thoroughly dramatized reenactment at best and a reality show at worst.
  9. Olvidados (Forgotten)
    By cramming in as many tangents as imaginable, Olvidados ultimately loses sight of what the story is even about.
  10. Mr. Right
    It feels at once overwritten and thematically thin, coasting on a cutesy concept before descending into relentless, and therefore meaningless, violence.
  11. Me You and Five Bucks
    A dull, meandering romantic comedy with serious believability issues.
  12. The Anomaly
    There's infinitely more than one anomaly to be found in The Anomaly, a thoroughly nonsensical futuristic sci-fi thriller that makes a case for the perils of vanity projects.
  13. Manhattan Romance
    Despite what the film might want us to believe, if he walks, talks and acts like a selfish, predatory creep, he is, and there's just no sympathizing with him.
  14. Heist
    As vapidly generic as its title, British director Scott Mann's Heist is a by-the-numbers crime thriller that squanders a decent cast, including Robert De Niro, Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Dave Bautista.
  15. Tower to the People: Tesla's Dream at Wardenclyffe Continues
    Tower to the People means well, and Tesla deserves his own movie, but it's like being cornered by a zealot: an educational slog that morphs into an infomercial.
  16. Darling
    By the umpteenth disruptive shock-cut and patiently framed shot of Carter staring us down, Darling has worn out its welcome even as a mood piece.
  17. Godspeed: The Story of Page Jones
    The film never gives a real sense of the daily travails associated with traumatic brain injury.
  18. Submerged
    Even the movie's brighter spots are undermined by ineptly staged action sequences, flatly functional dialogue and stock characters. Ultimately, Submerged is all wet.
  19. Shelter
    The story on screen comes off as a naive interpretation of the homeless experience as imagined from a place of great privilege.
  20. Western Religion
    A one-dimensional movie painted in painfully broad strokes and whizzing, hurry-scurry action sequences.
  21. Lost in the Sun
    Despite some scenic territory, there's just not much to this journey, leaving Lost in the Sun feeling like a short story stretched way too thinly toward feature length.
  22. Kill Your Friends
    The movie — glibly admiring of its hero's awfulness — is tone-deaf about genuine satire, assuming anything ugly (insults, nihilism, bloody violence) qualifies as sharp cultural commentary as long as the unceasingly venal, knowing narration explains it all for us.
  23. Ratchet & Clank
    From a storytelling perspective, the obsession with guns in a movie aimed at children is troubling, in poor taste and is lazy writing to boot.
  24. Bleeding Heart
    Writer-director Diane Bell suggests that these women are so steeped in low self-esteem and codependency that they would not be able to leave their men if they didn't have each other.
  25. Condemned
    Aggressively ugly and gross, the movie boasts a certain low-rent authenticity, but the auteur never figures out how to fill his grubby little rooms.
  26. The Girl on the Train
    The empathy that Taylor summoned so effortlessly in his previous films feels strained and unpersuasive here, and moments that should be lacerating...are overplayed to ghastly effect.
  27. The Ridiculous 6
    The jokes are often juvenile and gross, unsophisticated and insensitive, but one does not wish to strike juvenility or grossness or even insensitivity outright from the comic tool kit; these just aren't all that good.
  28. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
    This is the same infinitely repeated plot of "Halloweens" 1, 2 and 4 (3 took a slightly deviant turn), with the same unkillable bogyman Michael Myers, wreaking the same programmed havoc, and Donald Pleasence as the same distraught psychiatrist, repeating the same dire warnings to no avail.
  29. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
    The latest in a numbing series begun in 1978 by John Carpenter, and repeated five times since, with only a few plot and casting changes to detract from the brilliant slice-and-dice work of its masked hero. Mike may be getting older, but he can still sling a knife around like a chef at Benihana. [2 Oct 1995, p.F8]
    • Los Angeles Times
  30. Missing Child
    Writer-director Luke Sabis brings some interesting ideas to the well-known genre, exploring the nuances of abuse, spirituality and redemption. Unfortunately, the low-budget execution shows on screen, with a dim and dismal look, and the energy is decidedly lethargic.
  31. Close Range
    There's no characterization to the cartel members beyond freeze-frame title cards; they are interchangeable and expendable.
  32. Care of Footpath 2
    Director Kishan SS has made Care of Footpath 2 (a.k.a. Kill Them Young) as a bombastic, overlong melodrama that doesn't recognize the occasional need to takes things down a decibel or three.
  33. Landmine Goes Click
    It's a shame that what could have been an intriguing situational thriller devolves into a hateful, arduous drag
  34. This Isn't Funny
    This first feature is populated by blandly underdeveloped main characters who tend to recite their lines rather than inhabit them.
  35. Moonwalkers
    A famously crackpot conspiracy theory, psychedelic humor and arty ultraviolence make for dreary bedfellows in the scattershot British comedy Moonwalkers.
  36. Joe's War
    The film, unfortunately, treats the important and complex subject of post-traumatic stress disorder in an oversimplified and reductive way.
  37. 400 Days
    The sci-fi drama 400 Days ultimately disintegrates upon impact because of a lazy payoff.
  38. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    A convoluted narrative yields not a single, palpable moment of drama.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Cold Deck
    Although viewers have been dealt this sort of hand countless times before, director Zack Bernbaum lays it all down with little discernible style or dramatic heft, signaling the plot's obligatory turned tables and double crosses well ahead of their appearance.
  40. We Are Many
    Since the rally ultimately proved ineffectual, the film could at the least serve as a sobering postmortem on where it fell short. But filmmaker Amir Amirani instead gives protesters a figurative pat on the back by insinuating that they helped inspire the Egyptian revolution some eight years later.
  41. Synchronicity
    After an hour or so of bad noir dialogue and convoluted plotting, viewers may wish they could jump back in time and watch something else.
  42. Mojin: The Lost Legend
    Embracing the worst of Hollywood excess, director Wuershan crams in enough CG effects to fill a dozen Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay features, but the uninspired payoff quickly grows tiresome.
  43. Misconduct
    To say everyone plays like they're in separate movies is an understatement.
  44. The Abandoned
    Streak and Cooper are meagerly drawn characters, first-draft dialogue abounds, and the story proves more tedious and head-scratching as it goes.
  45. Yoga Hosers
    There’s enough weirdness for Yoga Hosers to possibly generate some stoner cult appeal, but it’s shoddily slapped together, with a clearly first-draft script, terrible editing (by Smith the elder) and continuity errors.
  46. All Roads Lead to Rome
    The tone is wildly inconsistent, particularly with plucky, lighthearted music accompaniment scoring what is essentially a teen crime spree.
  47. Southbound
    For all its gore and violence, stabs at tension and nightmarish intrigue, the film proves a slow-going, largely unsatisfying ride.
  48. Standoff
    Unfortunately in the hands of writer-director Adam Alecca, this overly talky, slackly executed game of cat-and-mouse comes off as cheesy rather than chilling.
  49. Backgammon
    The film's musings on artists and muses tries to be deep but gets bogged down in tiresome booze-soaked mind games.
  50. Camino
    Bell proves to be one tough cookie, but she's ultimately taken down by all the stiff, under-developed dialogue and iffy supporting performances.
  51. Collateral Beauty
    This movie doesn’t rise to the level of so-bad-it’s-good. But no less impressively, perhaps, it’s just bad enough that you actually wish it were worse.
  52. The Dead Room
    Minimalist to a fault, this psychological horror exercise is fairly tedious, distinguished only by the moody lighting and the slow, fluid pans and dollies.
  53. Sacrifice
    That the film looks good matters little when director Peter A. Dowling’s script, based on the novel by Sharon Bolton, is filled with so many thinly drawn characters, blunt warning signs and telegraphed plot points.
  54. The Cloverfield Paradox
    Narrative incompetence is one of the more venial sins of big-budget filmmaking, but there is something particularly ugly and cynical about the sloppiness of The Cloverfield Paradox, as if its status as a franchise stepping stone excused its blithe contempt for the audience's satisfaction.
  55. They're Watching
    The movie doesn't do justice to a promising premise. A scarcity of laughs and scares limits this property's curb appeal.
  56. The Dog Wedding
    The Dog Wedding is rather a minor effort, and the amateurish acting of the supporting cast and stilted energy are hard to forgive.
  57. Ktown Cowboys
    The film persistently misses the mark as a raunchy comedy amid all the side commentaries and Park's earnest tone. Yet it's equally clumsy at making sense of its portrayals of the indignities that Asian Americans routinely endure.
  58. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    The film manages to be exceedingly dull, perhaps because it's too enamored of its own design, concept and location to bother with a captivating story.
  59. No Letting Go
    No Letting Go has all the subtlety of an after-school special, and the performances feel like they're from a public service announcement about mental illness.
  60. The Curse of Sleeping Beauty
    The Curse of Sleeping Beauty is a hard-working but dreary horror-thriller inspired by the classic Grimm’s fairy tale.
  61. Rescue Dogs
    There just aren't enough rescue dogs in the world to save "Rescue Dogs," a shrill, yappy live-action comedy that proves considerably more annoying than adorable.
  62. Someone Else
    Those taking in Someone Else, an unconvincing, nonlinear drama about a pair of dramatically different Korean American cousins who are attracted to the same woman, will soon likely be wishing they had chosen to watch something else.
  63. High Strung
    In the end, you'll either succumb to the silliness of it all and cheer Johnny B. on to his green card or, more likely, be in desperate need of your own exit visa.
  64. The Syndrome
    Unfortunately, The Syndrome fails to adequately elucidate the many nuances of this complicated subject.
  65. Pelé: Birth of a Legend
    The childhood years of Brazil’s national treasure have been given a lamentably pedestrian big-screen treatment by Pelé: Birth of a Legend.
  66. ma ma
    The model here may be the florid, female-centered movies of Douglas Sirk, but the effect is as poetic and inspiring as a waiting-room pamphlet.
  67. Pali Road
    Pali Road disappoints with ghost-romance squishiness and deadly dull pacing.
  68. Bourek
    Bourek is well-meaning but woefully lacking in dimension or urgency, the movie equivalent of a scenic tourist trap.
  69. Urge
    The lack of any likable characters ultimately undoes Urge. Kaufman and Stahl have made a classic party-throwers mistake: overrating the entertainment value in watching other people get high.
  70. Phantom of the Theatre
    This visually restless and ultimately ludicrous Chinese horror film from director Yip Wai Man (a.k.a. Raymond Yip) is unlikely to either shorten your breath or curl your toes.
  71. Welcome to Happiness
    While its heart is in the right place, Welcome to Happiness is too fixated on its twee peccadilloes to truly succeed.
  72. The Last Face
    Shedding light on world atrocities is vital, but spelling them out in neon is deadly.
  73. No Stranger Than Love
    Few will likely embrace the insufferably chirpy, high-concept rom-com that struggles to stretch a mighty shallow premise into a feature-length proposition.
  74. Back in the Day
    Director Paul Borghese, who previously attempted to ape Scorsese with his 2013 mob drama, “Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn,” is content to simply rehash shopworn tropes.
  75. Buddymoon
    Had the film and its poky lead characters at least managed to pick up the sluggish pace, experiencing Buddymoon wouldn’t have felt like such a slog.
  76. Queen of Spades: The Dark Rite
    A compendium of genre clichés — or, more charitably, “homages” — Queen of Spades offers little that fright fans haven’t seen before.
  77. Undrafted
    The unfocused Undrafted ultimately possesses all the dramatic intrigue of an intentional walk.
  78. Intruder
    This flavorless home-invasion thriller hasn’t ripened with age.
  79. Septembers of Shiraz
    The trouble is, director Wayne Blair’s perfunctorily handled adaptation of Dalia Sofer’s 2008 novel is long on cardboard characterizations and short on genuine tension.
  80. The Pickle Recipe
    Rose’s pickles might have a pleasant snap, but there’s none to be found in the tired, limp shtick in Sheldon Cohn and Gary Wolfson’s screenplay, which has been choreographed at a lumbering, drawn-out pace by director Michael Manasseri.
  81. The Debt
    Despite its best efforts to be thought-provoking, the film is dramatically inert, slow and its revelations aren’t all that politically illuminating, relying on coincidence and worn tropes to obfuscate its lack of ingenuity.
  82. Table 19
    The movie is choking on fumes before it’s even had the chance to begin.
  83. The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    It’s an off-putting mix of matters whimsical and disturbing, more obvious and ludicrous than chilling.
  84. Kickboxer: Vengeance
    While Moussi has ample skills as a fighter — and is plenty handsome to boot — he lacks Van Damme’s charisma. It turns out that just slapping the title “Kickboxer” onto a movie isn’t enough to revive a B-movie favorite. The actual kickboxer matters.
  85. For the Plasma
    [An] annoyingly oblique exercise in arty affectation.
  86. A Beautiful Now
    The ambitious but unwieldy screenplay suffers from a lack of cohesion and loses control of the nonlinear memories and fantasies of seven people, with some of the characters’ motivations also lost in the shuffle.
  87. Autumn Lights
    American writer-director Angad Aulakh tries to agitate the pensive set-up with sex and a supposed mystery that never raises the pulse. The Bergman-esque posturing falls so far short of the Swedish master that it wouldn’t even qualify as accidental parody.
  88. Maximum Ride
    The obvious exposition, tortured dialogue and shoddy special effects just make you wish you were watching something else.
  89. The Fight Within
    The Fight Within is too generic as a sports flick, and too pro forma as a tract. There’s more vitality and humanity in the closing-credits blooper reel than in anything in the actual picture.
  90. I.T.
    Ultimately, there’s just nothing here that’s snappy or relevant. In tech-speak, this film is bricked.
  91. This Last Lonely Place
    The cryptic and mysterious story is crammed with overwrought issues — cancer, divorce, fraud, war — which the characters then over-explain.
  92. Milton's Secret
    Even for something preaching spiritual tranquility, Milton’s Secret exhibits the barest trace of a pulse.
  93. ClownTown
    It tests the theory that a creepy clown lurking in the dark is always terrifying. It turns out that with repetition, some nightmares become boring.
  94. Summer of 8
    The film is more mood and aesthetic than anything else, and it nails the fictionalized, aspirational high school look — down to the actors who appear to be in their mid-to-late 20s playing 18-year-olds.
  95. The People Garden
    The People Garden is so slow and spare that it barely registers. It just floats through the forest, silent and bloodless.
  96. Happy Birthday
    From the overwritten, pop-culture-reference-laden dialogue to the incessant attempts to be shocking, Happy Birthday tries way too hard. For a movie that doesn’t have much to say, it sure never stops jabbering.
  97. The Lennon Report
    Despite the admittedly unique angle, this ambitious drama gets crushed under the considerable weight of its artistic, as well as budgetary, limitations.
  98. Passage to Mars
    [A] misguided hybrid that makes tediously clear from the outset that the conceit just isn’t working.
  99. Good Kids
    One could say the mechanical direction leeches the energy out of virtually every sequence, but that would imply there was any there to begin with — and, although the young actors seem likable enough, their characters never credibly come to life.
  100. Search Engines
    This overcooked Thanksgiving turkey succeeds only in managing to take all the fun out of dysfunctional.
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