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. 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
  2. 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
  3. The Killer Inside Me
    Little more than torture porn tricked out in art-house finery. That is the bigger crime here.
  4. 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.
  5. Soft Fruit
    Asks us to spend 101 minutes with people most of us wouldtake pains to avoid in real life.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. Captivity
    It's the movie business equivalent of encountering someone you once knew begging for money on the street.
  13. Midnight Eagle
    A stupor-inducing, would-be thriller from Japan whose sporadic action and inept storytelling is as generic as its title.
  14. A Beautiful Life
    The whole thing plays like a bad Equity-waiver one-act.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Chain Letter
    Chain Letter is a nonsensical, bloody mess that, well, is missing a few links.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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…
  24. 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.
  25. The Dark Tower
    From start to finish, the movie exudes a stiff, joyless coherence.
  26. The Devil Inside
    The Devil Inside plays like a horror film conceived on graph paper.
  27. 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.
  28. Fading of the Cries
    Enthusiasm isn't exactly a replacement for good sense or basic skills, and the film's truest mystery is why no one pulled Metcalf aside and suggested he keep all this to himself.
  29. After Earth
    The script has no nuance, none. And when Shyamalan moves into the director's chair, the script problems are magnified. Everything is spelled out, underlined in red.
  30. I, Frankenstein
    There's certainly no moviegoing reanimation in director Stuart Beattie's adaptation of Kevin Grevioux's graphic novel.
  31. I Am Singh
    What unfolds instead is a deadly dull trial and boatloads of speechifying about religious dignity, hate crimes and prejudice.
  32. Tyler Perry's Temptation
    Perry's ongoing disinterest in improving as a filmmaker is now seemingly part of his unshakable belief in himself, his insistence on doing his thing his way.
  33. Won't Back Down
    This poor film is so shamelessly manipulative and hopelessly bogus it will make you bite your tongue in regret and despair.
  34. Alex Cross
    The best of the Alex Cross mess suggests that as an actor, he has the talent to move beyond the world of Madea should he want to. He just needs to look for much better material.
  35. Dark Tide
    Dark Tide, directed with hopelessly flagging energy by John Stockwell, barely musters up enough interest to be thuddingly bad.
  36. The FP
    The FP so desperately wants to be cultishly admired for its bad-taste rollout of wacko characters, ugly costumes and vulgar slang that it forgets to be genuinely offbeat or funny.
  37. High School
    Lacking real kick, High School winds up as irksome as a bag of ditch weed and as lame as the pun of the film's title.
  38. Grown Ups 2
    Grown Ups 2 looks like it was a lot of fun to make. And the last laugh is on us.
  39. Battle of the Year
    This 3-D spectacle is less the dance movie that's going to make b-boying cool again than a shill for sponsors' gear.
  40. The Hangover Part III
    Chow is actually an apt metaphor for the movie - indescribably irritating and only in it for the money.
  41. Last Ounce of Courage
    The patriot-packaged Last Ounce of Courage has been made with the conviction of true zealots, but also the competence of amateurs.
  42. Excuse Me for Living
    Vaguely misogynistic and defiantly paternalistic, the movie fails at nearly everything.
  43. Getaway
    But unless you're a demolition-derby fetishist or a connoisseur of vehicular mayhem, none of that will buy you a thrill in this video game posing as a movie.
  44. The Brass Teapot
    Without a human dimension to ground its construct, The Brass Teapot ultimately feels like an interminably stretched-out skit rather than a storybook lesson stained with blood and hurt.
  45. The Counselor
    McCarthy has not done himself or his reputation any favors with this original.
  46. The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia
    The storytelling, from a script by David Coggeshall, is at times nearly incoherent and relies too often on random scares.
  47. Saving Lincoln
    Saving Lincoln feels amateurish, strange and beyond redress.
  48. The Numbers Station
    A predictable hodgepodge of uninteresting psychological cat-and-mouse, dimly lighted action.
  49. If I Were You
    This is Nancy Meyers territory, but leaden with passé observations about lovelorn women...and hardly ebullient as either oddball-pair comedy or housewife-revenge fantasy.
  50. K-11
    K-11 has the makings of a cult movie campfest but little of the authentic wit, edge or outré vision it would take to get there. What's left is a dreary jailhouse drama that somehow managed to imprison a few notable actors within its lurid walls.
  51. Maniac
    The self-serious POV visual style has none of Brian DePalma's cheeky, unnerving and self-implicating virtuosity — it just reinforces how sick and dumb this whole feel-bad exercise in misogyny and dimestore pathology is.
  52. Paris-Manhattan
    The conceit grows more strained, its Talmudic potential unrealized, while the comedy never rises above bleh.
  53. The Second Meeting
    This mission, well intended as it may be, proves a no-go from the get-go.
  54. The Legend of Hercules
    If you admire Kellan Lutz's chiseled body, The Legend of Hercules does offer plenty of that in 3-D glory.
  55. Aftershock
    Lopez is a middling ringmaster of doom at best. But there's so little context to the litany of ugliness — some played for laughs, some meant to shock — that it's hard to discern where the entertainment value lies in any of this.
  56. Generation Um...
    Neither the film, nor the film within the film, hold our attention. Bummer, Keanu.
  57. Copperhead
    Painfully lugubrious, any sting Copperhead might contain for its contrarian's view of history is undone by its wayward sense of storytelling.
  58. Three Days (of Hamlet)
    The result is high school English crossed with "Waiting for Guffman," though the humor is largely accidental.
  59. The Colony
    The film strands its archetypal characters in a featureless danger zone and gives them overly familiar dialogue borrowed from a dozen other B-movies.
  60. Assault on Wall Street
    It's not the worst idea for a revenge fantasy, but Jim's payback is so lacking in logic and reality, not to mention tension, that it proves more laughable than cathartic.
  61. White Frog
    Like getting a half-dozen undercooked after-school specials at once, Quentin Lee's White Frog serves up a medley of messages and themes while generating no discernible dramatic heft.
  62. Lost and Found in Armenia
    The lowbrow comedy Lost and Found in Armenia so shamelessly wallows in its broad humor, silly contrivances and retrograde stereotypes it almost dares you to be annoyed. Mission accomplished.
  63. The Stroller Strategy
    It's a goofy, episodic trifle designed to induce swoons among the saccharine who coo every time they see a cute guy, or a baby, or a cute guy holding a baby while watching YouTube videos about how to change a diaper.
  64. Killing Season
    The pretentious, preposterous, dueling-dialect flameout called Killing Season has to stand as one of the biggest missed opportunities in iconic matchups.
  65. Rushlights
    If ever a movie signaled that the Quentin Tarantino copycat age of empty-headed wink-wink genre rehashing is still with us, Rushlights is that movie.
  66. Dealin' with Idiots
    The heavily improvised flick ambles as slowly as a toddler rounding first base. Hopefully, Garlin's next movie bothers to include a plot and jokes, i.e. the essential building blocks of a comedy.
  67. Problem Child
    They've jacked this loud, lame shrieker of a movie up to the highest decibels, both aural and visual, and rammed it in our faces with almost numbing aplomb.
  68. Implanted
    In the regrettably amateurish hands of writer-director Thomas Verrette, Ethan's journey toward the truth feels more like watching someone wandering through one of those pharmaceutical commercials with a laundry list of side effects.
  69. Chappie
    Chappie is a movie about the evolution of artificial intelligence that's as dumb as a post. It also marks the continuing devolution of the work of director and co-writer Neill Blomkamp.
  70. Vikingdom
    Once you look past the carnage, special effects and colossal locales, all you're left with is the supper show at Medieval Times Dinner & Tournament.
  71. Dead Before Dawn 3D
    There are zero thrills — 3-D or otherwise — and, for all the nutty mayhem, the pacing drags.
  72. Two: The Story of Roman & Nyro
    The fact that Child and Shaw share writing and producing credits here almost assures it will be a self-aggrandizing puff piece.
  73. Walter: Lessons from the World's Oldest People
    There's certainly a profound and valuable documentary to be made about our eldest living senior citizens. Sadly, Walter: Lessons From the World's Oldest People isn't it.
  74. Charlie Countryman
    Pulpy dross of surpassing dumbness, Charlie Countryman takes the blender approach to mixing dark adventure, doofus comedy and pie-eyed romance, but forgets to put the lid on when pulsed.
  75. DSKNECTD
    It is a series of free-associating non sequiturs underscored by nonillustrative graphics and an intrusive soundtrack.
  76. The Impaler
    Director Derek Hockenbrough's vision is bigger than his budget, and it shows.
  77. Nurse 3D
    Co-writer and director David Aarniokoski's clunky, crude blotch of prurience and bloodletting is too self-satisfied with its wink-wink naughtiness to be either fun-dumb or scary-sexy.
  78. A Journey to Planet Sanity
    It mostly plays like a slapdash mockumentary crossed with a bad reality TV show.
  79. Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club
    Tyler Perry's The Single Moms Club is a sitcom masquerading as a feature film... Too bad he didn't just spare us the awfulness of this flat and phony slices-of-life dramedy and go right to series, where half-hour bites might have helped mitigate the pain.
  80. Barefoot
    It's dispiriting enough that we're still getting movies about the cute side of mental illness, but to turn someone rendered childlike by abusive trauma into desirable girlfriend material — and sporting cast-off stripper attire to boot — is more than a little creepy.
  81. A Fantastic Fear of Everything
    The dreary, loud, amateurish horror-comedy A Fantastic Fear of Everything...isn’t terribly interested in logic. Or continuity. Or filmmaking acumen. Or, most glaringly, laughs.
  82. Dancing on a Dry Salt Lake
    The film's lack of momentum makes the pace stultifyingly slow, but it's the script's reliance on the musty Wise Indian trope that makes "Dancing" dead on arrival.
  83. Ice Age: Collision Course
    "Collision Course” is simply a perfunctory, watered-down entry in the series that feels like it should have been released on home video.
  84. Cavemen
    Cavemen writer-director Herschel Faber has sketched such a thin and unfunny look at L.A. singles, it should mark the death knell for movies about child-men on the make.
  85. Repentance
    The ludicrous and bloody New Orleans melodrama Repentance offers the despairing sight of talented actors in full flounder.
  86. Shirin in Love
    An abject filmmaking lesson in the many ways to irk moviegoers: cardboard characters, dippy plotting, sentimental overkill and tortuous logic.
  87. Authors Anonymous
    The exhausted mockumentary genre provides yet another reason for its demise in Authors Anonymous, a tenaciously unfunny comedy.
  88. Bad Johnson
    Little more than an 88-minute "it has a mind of its own" gag, Bad Johnson should have kept its premise in its pants.
  89. Drive Hard
    The stars' banter is insipid and unfunny, the wacky shocks short out and, most unforgivably, the car chases are a snooze, filmed as a series of stationary close-ups and diced in the editing room until they suggest anything but movement.
  90. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    If it only had a brain, a heart and the nerve.
  91. War of the Worlds: Goliath
    War of the Worlds: Goliath is just a few cereal commercials shy of a pointlessly cartoon marathon — violent, messily drawn and lifelessly dragging.
  92. Southern Baptist Sissies
    Irrational camera work and editing render Southern Baptist Sissies more fitting for the theater merchandise stand than for theatrical distribution.
  93. Tennessee Queer
    This unevenly acted yuckfest, which is as unsubtle as its title, has all the pizazz of a bad sitcom episode.
  94. Wolf Creek 2
    Everything we can gather seems to nullify any virtues we saw in the original film.
  95. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn
    The movie doesn't even need five minutes to signal that it's already a goner.
  96. Stage Fright
    None of it works, really, as either musical satire or genre Chex mix.
  97. After
    After catalogs so many clichés in the dysfunctional family at its center that the film could be taught in a screenwriting class as a lesson in what not to do.
  98. Among Ravens
    There's simply nobody to care about in Among Ravens, even as a case study in unhappiness and delusion.
  99. The Prince
    So unless you're a fan of yawn-worthy shootouts and showdowns, The Prince is a "Taken" retread hardly indicative of any special set of skills.
  100. The Longest Week
    Like so many filmmaking wunderkinds who could have used a course in common sense, Glanz is technically assured but emotionally hollow.
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