Los Angeles Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 16,522 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 2.3 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: 8,697 out of 16522
  2. Mixed: 5,808 out of 16522
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16522
16522 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. 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.
  2. 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
  3. 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.
  4. Close Range
    There's no characterization to the cartel members beyond freeze-frame title cards; they are interchangeable and expendable.
  5. 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.
  6. Landmine Goes Click
    It's a shame that what could have been an intriguing situational thriller devolves into a hateful, arduous drag
  7. This Isn't Funny
    This first feature is populated by blandly underdeveloped main characters who tend to recite their lines rather than inhabit them.
  8. Moonwalkers
    A famously crackpot conspiracy theory, psychedelic humor and arty ultraviolence make for dreary bedfellows in the scattershot British comedy Moonwalkers.
  9. Joe's War
    The film, unfortunately, treats the important and complex subject of post-traumatic stress disorder in an oversimplified and reductive way.
  10. 400 Days
    The sci-fi drama 400 Days ultimately disintegrates upon impact because of a lazy payoff.
  11. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Misconduct
    To say everyone plays like they're in separate movies is an understatement.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. All Roads Lead to Rome
    The tone is wildly inconsistent, particularly with plucky, lighthearted music accompaniment scoring what is essentially a teen crime spree.
  20. Southbound
    For all its gore and violence, stabs at tension and nightmarish intrigue, the film proves a slow-going, largely unsatisfying ride.
  21. 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.
  22. Backgammon
    The film's musings on artists and muses tries to be deep but gets bogged down in tiresome booze-soaked mind games.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. 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.
  31. 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.
  32. 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.
  33. 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.
  34. 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.
  35. 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.
  36. 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.
  37. The Syndrome
    Unfortunately, The Syndrome fails to adequately elucidate the many nuances of this complicated subject.
  38. 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.
  39. 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.
  40. Pali Road
    Pali Road disappoints with ghost-romance squishiness and deadly dull pacing.
  41. Bourek
    Bourek is well-meaning but woefully lacking in dimension or urgency, the movie equivalent of a scenic tourist trap.
  42. 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.
  43. 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.
  44. Welcome to Happiness
    While its heart is in the right place, Welcome to Happiness is too fixated on its twee peccadilloes to truly succeed.
  45. The Last Face
    Shedding light on world atrocities is vital, but spelling them out in neon is deadly.
  46. 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.
  47. 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.
  48. 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.
  49. 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.
  50. Undrafted
    The unfocused Undrafted ultimately possesses all the dramatic intrigue of an intentional walk.
  51. Intruder
    This flavorless home-invasion thriller hasn’t ripened with age.
  52. 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.
  53. 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.
  54. 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.
  55. Table 19
    The movie is choking on fumes before it’s even had the chance to begin.
  56. The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    It’s an off-putting mix of matters whimsical and disturbing, more obvious and ludicrous than chilling.
  57. 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.
  58. For the Plasma
    [An] annoyingly oblique exercise in arty affectation.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. Maximum Ride
    The obvious exposition, tortured dialogue and shoddy special effects just make you wish you were watching something else.
  62. 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.
  63. I.T.
    Ultimately, there’s just nothing here that’s snappy or relevant. In tech-speak, this film is bricked.
  64. This Last Lonely Place
    The cryptic and mysterious story is crammed with overwrought issues — cancer, divorce, fraud, war — which the characters then over-explain.
  65. Milton's Secret
    Even for something preaching spiritual tranquility, Milton’s Secret exhibits the barest trace of a pulse.
  66. 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.
  67. 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.
  68. The People Garden
    The People Garden is so slow and spare that it barely registers. It just floats through the forest, silent and bloodless.
  69. 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.
  70. 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.
  71. Passage to Mars
    [A] misguided hybrid that makes tediously clear from the outset that the conceit just isn’t working.
  72. 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.
  73. Search Engines
    This overcooked Thanksgiving turkey succeeds only in managing to take all the fun out of dysfunctional.
  74. Blinky Bill: The Movie
    Even the most sophisticated software can’t give characters a sense of weight or a way of moving that suggests their personality. Nor can it create an engaging story. Sadly, director Deane Taylor and his crew fail to provide those elements.
  75. Better Off Single
    With its muddy timeline, kaleidoscope of fantasies, flashbacks and hallucinations, broad characterizations and sitcom slickness, the film never settles down long enough to congeal, much less feel remotely connected to reality.
  76. The Unspoken
    This movie’s about as scary as a jackhammer.
  77. Best Fake Friends
    Unfortunately, the climactic table-turning here feels more mechanical than cathartic and does little to elevate the film’s undistinguished narrative.
  78. The David Dance
    The story of The David Dance might have seemed more timely and vital when first presented as a play in 2003. Today, however, the delayed film version (it was shot in 2009) feels remarkably dated. It’s also logy, stagey and overlong.
  79. Contract to Kill
    Contract to Kill looks remarkably cheap for a film whose characters wear Rolexes and take private planes. The money also wasn’t spent on the script from writer-director Keoni Waxman, which confuses a stream of expletives for wit.
  80. New Life
    Although it aspires to be a kind of latter-day “Love Story,” the rote, overly earnest drama New Life exists largely on the surface.
  81. Trash Fire
    Flaming out from the get-go, Trash Fire represents another soggy batch of Southern Gothic horror-comedy from writer-director Richard Bates Jr. that spews out pitch black smoke with little combustible substance.
  82. Jack's Apocalypse
    Jack’s Apocalypse is unable to convey any realistic stakes or authenticity in its story line.
  83. Chief Zabu
    Chief Zabu may have been buried for the past three decades, but this tiresomely talky would-be satire is no treasure.
  84. Sugar Mountain
    Pretty but oh-so-dumb, Sugar Mountain is the cinematic equivalent of a himbo.
  85. The Charnel House
    While the cast is talented and the tone is classy, The Charnel House never develops any momentum. The movie puts fright on the back burner to tease out a mystery that proves to be too profoundly idiotic to be worth all the bother.
  86. Run the Tide
    In his first feature outing, director Soham Mehta overplays the significance of virtually every aspect of Rajiv Shah’s script, no matter how minor, with painfully slow pans and needlessly lingering establishing shots.
  87. Hara Kiri
    This isn’t meant to be a polished, restrained indie drama, but its flaws don’t solely reside in writer-director Alberto’s avant-garde approach. Instead, its biggest misstep is the two central characters who are so unlikable as to be unwatchable.
  88. Adrift
    Lopez’s first feature comes across as fragmented and overwrought, with characters and performances that seem to have been egged on by the score’s achingly purposeful piano.
  89. Behind 'The Cove'
    It’s too scattershot to be persuasive, even if occasionally it sparks thought about issues of cultural tradition, unfair international agreements, and nationalistic defensiveness.
  90. Stevie D
    The borrowed concept is all it has going for it, and at nearly two hours it stretches the conceit and the performers far beyond their range. It’s a minor effort overly indebted to its references.
  91. The Belko Experiment
    By the end of the film, you're left with the unshakable feeling that everyone involved, from actors to filmmakers to the audience, is, and should have been, better than material like this.
  92. Anonymous
    Director Akan Satayev’s hacker thriller looks gorgeous, featuring locations around the world shot with crisp cinematography by Pasha Patriki. However, the script from Sanzhar Sultan is poorly structured and silly, revealing the emptiness beneath the shiny facade.
  93. The War with Grandpa
    The “pranks” just aren’t funny. The whole premise isn’t funny.
  94. Confessions of a Womanizer
    Somehow, despite the sexist, foul-mouthed rancor, there are messages to be found about the false promises of toxic masculinity and learning to be the person you want to be without repeating the sins of your parents. Though it’s rough going to get there.
  95. Virtual Revolution
    Cinematic life...is in short supply in this ambitious but leaden cautionary tale, which tries to pep things up with energetic fight scenes in the avatar worlds, but can’t escape the wooden acting and zipless storytelling.
  96. Youth in Oregon
    Moore is primarily known as an actor but this is the third feature he’s directed, and he proves surprisingly unable to get layered performances out of some great actors.
  97. Lost in Florence
    A seemingly tourist-bureau-sanctioned travelogue posing as a romantic drama.
  98. A Bad Moms Christmas
    What's offensive about A Bad Moms Christmas (and “Bad Moms”) is just how shoddily made it is.
  99. Suntan
    The story might have had some thematic heft if we knew or cared anything about the characters. But all we can glean about the disastrous Kostis is that he’s had hard times, while Anna is a total cipher.
  100. Spark: A Space Tail
    “Spark” should earn points for originality, but it never invests in establishing its world or its characters in a way that engages viewers.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »