Los Angeles Times' Scores

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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
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    • 14 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    The Omega Code
    A hokey doomsday/millennialist thriller.
  2. High Heels and Low Lifes
    A broad and stale British crime comedy that wastes the considerable talent and presence of Minnie Driver.
  3. Simon Sez
    A lackluster international action adventure.
  4. All the Queen's Men
    Let's hope -- shall we? -- that the "true story" that allegedly "inspired" All the Queen's Men was a lot funnier and more deftly enacted than what's been cobbled together here.
  5. Langrishe Go Down
    Unearthing even the roughest gems serves a programming purpose, but in this case it has also led to a theatrical release of a movie that looks like a muddy second-generation Xerox and contains all the emotional and intellectual appeal of cold tea and soggy toast.
  6. Crossroads
    Spears acquits herself as well as anyone might, in a movie as contrived and lazy as this one.
  7. Thomas and the Magic Railroad
    Lays thick, goopy layers of uplift on what should be lighter on the heart and stomach.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Has promising raw material to burn--and that's pretty much what's been done.
  9. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
    Anyone who goes to Halloween 4 deserves what they get: stale, sordid tricks and no treats. [25 Oct 1988, p.C6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  10. Lana's Rain
    Michael S. Ojeda's film is so relentlessly shallow and excessive that it hardly matters whether Lana is eventually able to turn the tables on Darko. When it rains in Lana's Rain, it pours -- and what comes out is trash.
  11. Soul Survivors
    The actors are game, but their roles lack color and depth, and it's a real struggle to survive Soul Survivors to the finish.
  12. Woman on Top
    If Penélope Cruz were any less attractive, maybe someone would have noticed how dull this mild, would-be romantic fairy tale has turned out.
  13. Dungeons & Dragons
    Whalin is awful, Birch is saddled with lines that would make a silent film star blanch and Irons devours huge chunks of scenery with the ferocity of one of those dog-fighting dragons.
  14. Don't Tempt Me
    What ensues is so glum and disjointed that the film becomes an even bigger mess.
  15. 54
    Decadence has rarely looked so pathetic, lethargic and dispiriting as it does in this listless film.
  16. See Spot Run
    The gags, almost all of which involve the passage of gases and liquids, move at a fast-enough clip to keep you awake throughout. For which this review expresses a sorrow as profound as the sympathy it feels for all the actors.
  17. The Majestic
    The Majestic isn't. Rather it's "The Film That Wasn't There," a derivative, self-satisfied fable that couldn't be more treacly and simple-minded if it tried. And it tries, oh, how it tries.
  18. Loco Love
    Might have been offensive with its stereotypical, one-dimensional characters and Spanglish-laden "jokes" if it wasn't so utterly bland. With about as much flavor as iceberg lettuce, the movie really doesn't offer enough to get worked up about.
  19. Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
    Where there was a modicum of charm to Mick Dundee's earliest exploits in New York City, the joke has withered as markedly as Hogan's face.
  20. Loser
    Formulaic new teen opus
  21. Species II
    The best advice to give anyone who wants to see Species II--other than "don't go!"--is "don't eat!"
  22. Palmetto
    Revelations of betrayals, faked identities and double-crosses come in waves in the last half-hour of Palmetto, but by then, the film has raised the one question it can't answer: Who cares?
  23. Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
    The result is a comedy of errors. Errors, yes. Comedy . . . we're not so sure.
  24. But I'm a Cheerleader
    Works against its goals.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Pokémon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back!
    Pokémon isn't even good animation, unless the standard of measure is the crude LCD graphics of a Game Boy.
  26. The Adventures of Pluto Nash
    It's not awful, but the high cost of a movie ticket these days seems like a steep price to pay for 90 minutes of air conditioning and production design.
    • Los Angeles Times
  27. Hotel
    Figgis certainly was after something different, but like "Timecode," in which four linked stories unwind in separate panels, Hotel proves to be a fundamentally insipid bid at experimental narrative.
  28. Hollywood Ending
    It's as sad and painful to report as it is to experience, but Hollywood Ending makes the conclusion inescapable: Woody Allen has become his own worst enemy.
  29. 50 First Dates
    Has nothing going for it -- and much going against it.
  30. American Psycho
    Stillborn, pointless piece of work.
  31. The Other Sister
    By coddling viewers and micromanaging our responses, The Other Sister shows almost as little respect for the audience as Elizabeth does for her feisty, underappreciated daughter.
  32. Enemies of Laughter
    Paymer and many others in a large cast are well-established players with strong credits, and they do the best they can to pump life into remorselessly glum material.
  33. Going Down
    Teen sex comedies don't come more mindless than Joseph A. Pineda's Going Down, a movie so seriously underinspired it's hard to imagine it appealing to anyone but fantasy-prone middle schoolers who can barely wait to live it up like their older brothers and sisters.
  34. Quills
    Soon becomes a sadistic experience in its own right. Experiencing this pretentious wallow -- overwritten, under-thought and overdone -- is a very sophisticated form of torture.
  35. Catch That Kid
    Serviceable trash. It looks and moves like a low-end action movie, complete with thumping soundtrack, nanosecond-fast edits, stunts that probably look scary to anyone who doesn't know better and even a third-act police chase through downtown L.A. In other words, it's Bruckheimer for babies.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    3 Strikes
    The bad news is that it's also vile, not to mention sophomoric and unfunny.
    • Los Angeles Times
  37. View from the Top
    Worth commenting on only for its shocking ineptitude.
  38. Swordfish
    A kind of dirty fairy tale in which people with nasty attitudes inhabit a trash-talking, macho world of fast cars and complaisant women.
  39. How It All Went Down
    The only element that keeps the film from falling apart entirely is powerful physical presence of Pollio, an experienced, impassioned young actor.
  40. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
    Almost completely lacking in genuine thrills. Even the attractive presence of star Angelina Jolie can't keep this leaden, plodding, completely underwhelming film from playing like "Lara Croft: Yawn Inducer."
  41. Slackers
    A standard issue undergrad gross-out comedy notable only for the showy role it provides Jason Schwartzman, well-remembered as "Rushmore's" geeky high school student Max Fischer.
  42. Superstar
    If Superstar were meatloaf--and that would be an improvement--the recipe would be 4 pounds bread crumbs to 3 ounces sirloin. Make that chuck.
  43. Very Bad Things
    Hollow, simple-minded and about as profound an experience as stepping in a pile of road kill.
  44. The Center of the World
    All this sadness becomes so depressing to watch, testing the limits of the patience of even a viewer prepared to take Wang's underlying concerns seriously.
  45. Romance
    As pretentious as it is hard-core specific, this fiercely anti-erotic film makes even the chilly "Eyes Wide Shut" play like "The Big Easy."
  46. Bait
    But what little humor there is in the movie becomes subservient to the grisly violence, gratuitous cruelty and ugly car chases.
    • Los Angeles Times
  47. 28 Days
    Too glib too often to make much of an impression any way you look at it.
  48. The Whole Ten Yards
    Disastrously unfunny sequel.
  49. Gigli
    Nearly as unwatchable as it is unpronounceable.
  50. The Avengers
    So how then do you duplicate a magic aura from 30 years ago? You don't.
  51. Dancer in the Dark
    So exasperating in its contradictions, so frustrating in its fakery, so deeply irritating in its pretensions, it's frankly hard to know where to begin to dissect it.
  52. What Lies Beneath
    Feels more planned than passionate, scary at points but unconvincing overall.
  53. Digimon: Digital Monsters
    It's an awfully confusing journey, unless you're of pro-Digi-ous intelligence. Or a digimaniac. Or just 6.
  54. What Planet Are You From?
    Sporadically funny, often strange and almost never poignant.
  55. The Salton Sea
    Taking issue with efforts like The Salton Sea, cold and unemotional films that couldn't be more pleased at the opportunity to enthusiastically drag audiences through unhappy material, is as futile as getting mad at the wind.
    • Los Angeles Times
  56. Batman & Robin
    Lacking most kinds of inspiration and geared to undemanding minds, this project is so overloaded with hardware and stunts, it's a relief to have it over.
  57. Resident Evil
    A ditsy and dizzying spook-house thriller in high-tech, high-hemline gear.
  58. Super Troopers
    There's nothing super about Super Troopers except for those deep into the low end of the frat-house mentality that equates smart-alecky with hilarity.
  59. The Butterfly Effect
    As the requisite love interest, Amy Smart gives the film's only professional performance, while co-star Eric Stoltz, as the story's villain, walks somnolent through the scenery with what seems to be barely suppressed mirth. Given the deeply unpleasant plot machinations and amateurish direction, the actor's amusement is understandable.
  60. Garfield
    Bill Murray completists, tots under 5 and their unfortunate chaperons are the only ones who need experience the soulless excuse for an entertainment called Garfield: The Movie.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    House on Haunted Hill
    Soon enough, it becomes clear how much this movie disrespects both the audience and the genre.
  62. Darkness
    Some movies should never come to light, either, and Darkness, bearing a 2002 copyright, might well have been better left on the shelf.
  63. Billy Madison
    Director Tamra Davis and screenwriters Sandler and Tim Herlihy scatter the bad jokes like fertilizer. Nothing sprouts.
  64. Excess Baggage
    Excess Baggage, a scruffy romantic comedy about a despairing rich girl who hatches a kidnapping scheme to test her father's love, is an aimless waste, a star vehicle without a compass. It wants very much to be both funny and poignant, but is more often just noisy and pointless. [29Aug1997 Pg 14]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 25 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Spy Hard
    It could have used several more passes on the screenplay to strengthen the gags and flesh out the characters.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Hush
    Hush is a would-be suspense film without a single major plot twist that isn't ham-handed. [9 Mar 1998, pg.F4]
    • Los Angeles Times
  67. Mrs. Winterbourne
    Ricki Lake, who occupies one of the lower links on the TV trash-talk food chain, is promoted to ugly duckling in Mrs. Winterbourne, a film that waddles through the movie-memory super-mart shoplifting everything but charm.
  68. The Basketball Diaries
    The Basketball Diaries is a lose-lose proposition. Although it masquerades as a cautionary tale about the horrors of heroin, this epic of teen-age * Angst is more accurately seen as a reverential wallow in the gutter of self-absorption.
  69. Vampire in Brooklyn
    There isn't a moment of genuine suspense or tension in the film, and the paltry laughs are supplied not by Murphy but by Hardison, whose character, a lowlife Brooklyn habitue forcefully turned into the vampire's bug-eating sidekick, spends the entire movie moaning about his decomposing body and embarrassing the boss with his earthy patter. [27 Oct 1995, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  70. The Quick and the Dead
    The Quick and the Dead is showy visually, full of pans and zooming close-ups. Rarely dull, it is not noticeably compelling either, and as the derivative offshoot of a derivative genre, it inevitably runs out of energy well before any of its hotshots runs out of bullets.
  71. My Blue Heaven
    When director Herbert Ross is away from his dance numbers, he lets the pace sag frightfully. A lot of good talent on both sides of the camera goes down with this PG-13-rated ship. [20 Aug 1990, p.6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  72. Another 48 Hrs.
    Walter Hill, who also directed the first film, surely recognizes the hollowness of what he's doing here. He tries to ram through the muddled exposition as quickly as possible; essentially, the film is wall-to-wall mayhem, with more shots of hurled bodies shattering windows than I've ever seen in a movie. [8 Jun 1990, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  73. Days of Thunder
    You can leave Days of Thunder feeling positively chafed. That clanking noise, however, comes from Robert Towne's tinny story and its malnourished characters. [27 Jun 1990, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  74. Scrooged
    Actually it's not a bad notion for a satiric comedy and this one begins well, but then veers entirely out of hand until it's as over-inflated as its own Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come and as funny as a mugging. [23 Nov 1988, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  75. UHF
    The problem with UHF is that everything in it is a parody. The only logic for anything that happens is that there's some new thing to make fun of-mostly inanely. It's not much of a movie. [21 Jul 1989 p.11]
    • Los Angeles Times
  76. The Killer Inside Me
    Little more than torture porn tricked out in art-house finery. That is the bigger crime here.
  77. Heartbreak Hospital
    A dreary indulgence. An unfunny satire set in the world of daytime soap opera, it isn't offensive enough to inspire passionate response.
  78. Soft Fruit
    Asks us to spend 101 minutes with people most of us wouldtake pains to avoid in real life.
  79. Garmento
    Garmento has nothing going for it. First-time writer-director Michele Maher spent three years working in Manhattan's fashion industry...her attempts at satire are feeble and trite, and her stereotypical characters are without interest.
  80. The Price of Air
    Smartly shot in digital and transferred to 35 mm, suggests that Evans needs more seasoning to make genre conventions and characters work for him rather than against him.
  81. Games People Play: New York
    Whitney takes having it both ways to new heights -- depths is perhaps more like it. He satirizes reality TV while showing total nudity and at times carrying sex to the verge of soft-core porn. As titillating and energetic as the film is, it is also rather sad because it reveals what aspiring actors will endure for what they apparently regard as an opportunity.
  82. Hollywood Buddha
    Isn't remotely funny or pointed enough to qualify as satire. Intentionally or not, it comes across instead as a portrait of a man whose self-regard knows no limits.
  83. The Ex
    Originally titled "Fast Track" when it was scheduled to open last January, neither the wait nor the new title makes it worthwhile. The only fast track here is the one to home video.
  84. Hoboken Hollow
    Writer-director-producer Glen Stephens does occasionally have grim fun, but something as irredeemably sadistic as this packaged as entertainment is almost depressing.
  85. Captivity
    It's the movie business equivalent of encountering someone you once knew begging for money on the street.
  86. Midnight Eagle
    A stupor-inducing, would-be thriller from Japan whose sporadic action and inept storytelling is as generic as its title.
  87. A Beautiful Life
    The whole thing plays like a bad Equity-waiver one-act.
  88. The Black Waters of Echo's Pond
    Director/co-screenwriter Gabriel Bologna, working vigorously at hokey predictability, wastes little time getting us to wish his obnoxious characters (why do people who seemingly hate each other always vacation together?) would find their inner maniacs already.
  89. Furry Vengeance
    A film so exhausting in its mean-spirited unfunny business that it would prompt Al Gore to empty his recycling bin and light a match to the contents -- and the plastic bin itself -- in full view of news camera crews.
  90. Chain Letter
    Chain Letter is a nonsensical, bloody mess that, well, is missing a few links.
  91. Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore
    As for the movie itself, it is better than the original "Cats & Dogs." But so is a rabies shot.
  92. Alien Girl
    From its title, Alien Girl seems to promise some kind of playful intergalactic adventure. That, it is not. Rather the film is a grim, artless Russian-made gangster picture that is neither stylish nor fun.
  93. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
    The scenario makes for an inept, lazy R-rated movie whose sole purpose is as a glossary of euphemisms for genitalia and sexual acts.
  94. Waiting for Forever
    It's rare to find a movie protagonist who singularly fails on every count to be a compelling, sympathetic or even understandable figure.
  95. 6 Souls
    6 Souls is regrettably sick with that familiar disease afflicting movies of this ilk: ostentatious, hollow moodiness that spreads like an unwelcome rash.
  96. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    I fear the furry singing sensations may have finally run completely aground. If only they were truly stranded on that desert island…
  97. The Butcher, the Chef, and the Swordsman
    Wuershan's heavy hand, never letting up for a moment to allow any air or life to enter the film, cuts off the film's energy even as it rattles relentlessly on.
  98. The Dark Tower
    From start to finish, the movie exudes a stiff, joyless coherence.
  99. The Devil Inside
    The Devil Inside plays like a horror film conceived on graph paper.
  100. Safe Haven
    This sloppy sentimental journey is long on beauty shots, short on depth and seriously intent on tugging your heartstrings. Indeed, it demands you reach for those tissues. Sob.
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