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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  1. The Edge of Seventeen
    Written and directed by the gifted first-timer Kelly Fremon Craig, and graced by a superb star turn from Hailee Steinfeld, The Edge of Seventeen is the rare coming-of-age picture that feels less like a retread than a renewal. It’s a disarmingly smart, funny and thoughtful piece of work, from end to beginning to end.
  2. Those Who Feel the Fire Burning
    Employing a restless, constantly moving camera and deliberately isolating soundscapes, the meditative and often mesmerizing film confronts the global issue of swelling immigration in the face of steely bureaucratic indifference with a disarming grace and palpable humanity.
  3. Colliding Dreams
    Colliding Dreams is a film of ideas and a film of history, a thorough and engrossing look at the root causes of the tortured relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.
  4. Little Men
    Ira Sachs’ beautifully observed Little Men zeros in on teen-spirit qualities that might, by conventional standards, be considered less cinematic: creativity and innocence, a tender spark brought to life by terrific newcomers Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri.
  5. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    It’s terrific — a quick-witted entertainment, daring and familiar by turns, that also proves to be sweet, serious and irreverent in all the right doses.
  6. Trapped
    While the situation seems at times dire, Trapped contains a distinct hopeful streak that is at once defiant and singularly human.
  7. American Honey
    It’s been a while since a film so powerfully evoked the thrilling possibilities and wasted pleasures of the open road.
  8. The Witness
    The strength of The Witness lies in its recognition that the truth is often not just elusive but unattainable.
  9. River of Grass
    At every turn, Reichardt confounds predictability, confronting us with the awful banality of many people's everyday lives rather than providing her characters with an escape from it. Yet Reichardt is so agile, ingenious and funny that she can make a lively, entertaining movie about how life isn't like the movies.
  10. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    Every once in a while, a small, unheralded film comes along, so smart and funny, such a pleasure to experience, you can't believe your luck. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is such a film.
  11. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    If this labor-of-love portrait is any indication, forgetting Frank Zappa is not going to happen any time soon.
  12. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is just the kind of percolating, wry probe we need into this fast-moving, digitally monopolizing age.
  13. Newtown
    It's heartbreaking stuff, and Newtown handles it all with a gentle grace.
  14. White Girl
    The story floats along like an intoxicating cloud of vice — an effect that Wood achieves with a throbbing, surging soundtrack and an alternately propulsive and hypnotic sense of camera movement. By the time the sensory rush dissipates and the hangover sets in, only Wood’s sharply observant social critique remains.
  15. Nuts!
    The real skill in Lane’s colorful tale about self-made millionaire, “inventor” and maverick John R. Brinkley is that it revels in how fun it is to believe in the unbelievable, and how sinisterly effective the mixture of fact and fiction can be. That includes, Lane eventually reveals, documentaries themselves.
  16. John Wick: Chapter 2
    The movie may look like disposable goods — it’s a sequel, a shoot-’em-up, starring an actor too often treated as a punchline — but it is also a connoisseur’s delight, a down-and-dirty B-picture with a lustrous A-picture soul.
  17. The Mermaid
    Crass and macabre, yet big-hearted, it makes a wonderfully adult bedtime story.
  18. The Handmaiden
    Without sacrificing his taste for psychosexual perversity or his flair for violent grace notes, Park has given us a teasingly witty and elegant puzzle-box of a thriller whose pleasures are rooted not in visceral shock but in narrative surprise, and which wisely opts to seduce rather than pulverize its audience.
  19. Fatima
    Faucon, whose own grandparents came to France without speaking the language, has a gift for artfully removing the melodrama from potentially overheated situations, leaving behind a scenario that is honest, direct and dramatic without any sense of special pleading or situations pushed too hard.
  20. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    What pulls us into Fireworks Wednesday is the universality of the emotions its characters display and the familiarity of the situations they find themselves in. Farhadi is a master navigator of these waters, and even his earlier films reward our close attention.
  21. April and the Extraordinary World
    This is one grand adventure, and, animated or not, those are always welcome.
  22. Notfilm
    For all its gifted collaborators, "Film" was not a match made in heaven. But for moviegoers who care about film not just as a title, Notfilm can be unreservedly recommended.
  23. Transfixed
    A sensitively wrought profile in courage, hope and self-respect that's truly transfixing.
  24. Richard III
    Made with gusto, daring and visual brilliance, this stripped-down, jazzed-up “Richard” pulsates with bloody life, a triumph of both modernization and popularization.
  25. Paths of the Soul
    The movie’s physicality is never pushed to suggest suffering. It’s like a constant meditation, something to absorb and exhale.
  26. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    Rather than being a film about an artist, it’s an attempt to show us what it's like to actually be an artist.
  27. Crush the Skull
    Easily the most thrilling thriller in recent memory, Crush the Skull seems destined for cult status.
  28. Kaili Blues
    Showing an unobtrusive mastery of camera movement, Bi lends concrete form and rich dramatic life to the Buddhist notion that past, present and future are all equally untenable.
  29. Graduation
    Bleak, naturalistic and flawlessly acted, Graduation distills the mood and moral decay of a place whose gray skies and nondescript housing blocks feel like permanent reminders of its dark history.
  30. The Salesman
    The world of The Salesman isn’t quite as intricately imagined as some of its predecessors, and the story’s sleuthing element, while absorbing, often feels more narratively expedient than germane. But if the setup is creaky, the payoff, when it arrives, is a thing to behold.
  31. Loving
    Loving is an unpretentious film about unassuming real people, but don't let that mislead you. Just as Richard and Mildred Loving ended up overturning the status quo and making American legal history, so this feature on their lives by writer-director Jeff Nichols turns out to be a film of quiet but quite significant strengths.
  32. Personal Shopper
    Personal Shopper is a gripping portrait of solitude, which is to say it’s a hell of a one-woman show for Stewart, the rare actress who can blur into the background and magnetize the camera in the same scene.
  33. Staying Vertical
    Its title a sly reference to what distinguishes men from beasts, Staying Vertical hinges on the tension between primal instincts and socially proscribed behavior. Guiraudie isn’t just trying to decimate sexual taboos; he is also taking gently comic aim at the overly rigid roles into which people tend to lock themselves.
  34. Hell or High Water
    That Hell or High Water makes you empathize with and understand (though not excuse) each member of this disparate quartet is a tribute to the way Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay works equally well as a thriller, character study and pointed social commentary.
  35. Neruda
    Although informed by the busy workings of history, politics and personal affairs, Neruda proceeds like a light-footed chase thriller filtered through an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” by the end of which the audience is lost in a crazily spiraling meta-narrative. Who exactly is the star and author of that narrative is one of the film’s more enticing mysteries.
  36. Raw
    Julia Ducournau, making a stellar feature writing-directing debut, fosters the kind of disquieting intimacy with her characters that leaves us continually uncertain of whether we should fear them or fear for them.
  37. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
    The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki is a lovely piece of work, a sweet, warmly observed tale overlaid with just the right amount of Scandinavian melancholy, a combination that perfectly suits its quietly engaging protagonist.
  38. Zero Days
    Gibney’s film cuts across subjects and genres with its own fluid, quicksilver intelligence.
  39. Gleason
    If this film portrait stirs deep emotions, they spring from a breathtakingly unsentimental embrace of life at its most challenging.
  40. Breaking a Monster
    Just when you thought you had seen every permutation of the “making of a band” documentary, along comes Breaking a Monster, a thoroughly engaging portrait of Unlocking the Truth, a heavy metal outfit composed of African American middle schoolers.
  41. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    In following this couple, Jin’s film celebrates the wonder and magic of every single life; finding the extraordinary in the ordinary.
  42. Life, Animated
    [Williams] spent two years on this project, and the trust everyone involved placed in him allowed for an emotional honesty that is Life, Animated's greatest strength.
  43. Summertime
    Artfully calculated and authentically felt, the unexpectedly effective Summertime combines the conventional structure of classic movie romance with a sensual same-sex frankness that couldn't be more up-to-date.
  44. Under the Sun
    One of the most fascinating things about Under the Sun is the contradictory thoughts it inspires.
  45. Demon
    Perhaps it’s best to appreciate Demon not for what it implies but for what it simply and unmistakably is: A bravura testament to a talent silenced far too soon.
  46. Notes on Blindness
    The film’s quiet impact comes as it leads us along John’s journey to understanding this disability as an unexpected, but ultimately accepted, gift.
  47. Long Way North
    Long Way North is a complete pleasure, a gorgeous piece of wide-screen animation that is as delightful as it is unexpected.
  48. 13th
    What “black lives matter” means in essence, one of this film’s voices says, “is that all lives matter,” a point “13th” makes with undeniable eloquence as well as persuasive force.
  49. Danny Says
    What emerges is a rich portrait of one of 20th century pop culture’s great facilitators, whose keen observations, quirky personality and natural affinity for the outré helped greatness happen.
  50. Spa Night
    Ahn’s erotically charged, quietly devastating drama suggests David might yet find a way to be true to himself, but it finds no easy answers for this good son.
  51. Their Finest
    Their Finest is a treat that has something on its mind, a charming concoction that adds a bit of texture and bite to the mix. Genial and engaging with a fine sense of humor, it makes blending the comic with the serious look simpler than it actually is.
  52. The Eagle Huntress
    As unlikely as it is enchanting, The Eagle Huntress tells its documentary story with such sureness that falling under its sway is all but inevitable.
  53. The Lost City of Z
    The movie may, in the end, frustrate your desire for straight-up thrills and clear answers, but its irresolution is masterful — sincere, generous and entirely appropriate to the deeply searching story it has to tell.
  54. Being 17
    If the film has a governing principle, it’s that love doesn’t take root in a vacuum, and its path is never perfectly straight.
  55. No Asylum: The Untold Chapter of Anne Frank's Story
    Fouce mixes vivid, often disturbing archival footage and photos with moving latter-day interviews with several elderly Frank family members and Holocaust survivors, plus glimpses of Otto’s letters and daughter Anne’s famed writings.
  56. Starving the Beast
    Clear-eyed and urgent.
  57. 20th Century Women
    The beauty of Bening’s performance lies in those marvelously suggestive layers — all the delicate, tendril-like emotional possibilities that she manages to tuck into the margins of any given moment.
  58. Nocturama
    Bonello’s approach, always seeking to evoke rather than explain, doesn’t allow us either the clarity of analysis or the comforts of condemnation.
  59. The Age of Shadows
    Nothing in this gratifyingly focused movie feels excessive or gratuitous, and a situation that repeatedly threatens to spiral out of control is dramatized with the utmost assurance.
  60. Frantz
    It is a cunningly crafted fiction, full of visual artifice and narrative sleight-of-hand, that by the end could hardly feel more sincere.
  61. A Woman's Life
    Riveting in its slow and steady accretion of details, its penetrating and richly textured gaze, A Woman’s Life is a bracing reminder that our experiences are often shaped less by what we achieve than by what we endure.
  62. The Bad Kids
    This isn’t just a necessary or powerful story; it’s a well-told one.
  63. Chicken People
    The beguiling documentary Chicken People proves that truth is not only stranger than fiction, but often more poignant and illuminating as well.
  64. Tower
    Maitland’s experimental approach to a tricky subject leaves viewers with a deeper understanding of a terrible moment in American history.
  65. The Son of Joseph
    The Son of Joseph transforms from a lark into a revelation in its final scenes, which are piercing, absurd and pretty close to miraculous.
  66. Disturbing the Peace
    [A] vital, absorbing documentary.
  67. The Anthropologist
    The utterly winning documentary The Anthropologist takes a unique perspective on the field of anthropology through the lens of a pair of female anthropologists and their daughters.
  68. Your Name.
    The movie’s spirit is by turns energetic and serene, impetuous and wise, its wild shifts from comedy to tragedy to romance revealing themselves not as tonal swings so much as variations in a larger cosmic pattern.
  69. Off the Rails
    [An] excellent documentary.
  70. Esteros
    Director Papu Curotto brings Andi Nachon’s tender script to life with stirring economy and warmth as well as a wistfulness so palpable it’s practically its own character.
  71. A Star Is Born
    The result is a show business rush so pure it would be illegal if it were a drug. Though the film’s peek behind the celebrity-curtain love story inevitably falters a bit in the second half, the emotional waves it has already created manage to carry us over the rough spots.
  72. Two Trains Runnin'
    As we watch these once-marginalized artists thrillingly bring their past to bear on tense times, so does this look-and-listen complement the urgency of our newly charged civil rights moment.
  73. Wheeler
    It’s a terrific film that deserves far more attention than its low-profile release is likely to receive.
  74. My Life as a Zucchini
    As unexpectedly enchanting as its title is initially perplexing, My Life as a Zucchini is short but oh so satisfyingly bittersweet, an example of the kind of movie magic that's always hard to find.
  75. Manifesto
    Whatever Rosefeldt intended, Manifesto doesn’t quite set forth a manifesto of its own. But it’s a blast of fresh air. And like many of the gauntlet throwers it cites, it risks looking foolish and, in the process, creates something gorgeously defiant.
  76. The Beguiled
    The fascination and at times the frustration of her achievement is that she has drained away some of the story’s juiciest, most suspenseful elements.... There is compromise in all this narrative subtraction, but there is also purpose.
  77. The Wedding Plan
    At its heart, the film is a kind of mystical fairy tale whose messages of belief, endurance, family and belonging transcend its memorably specific people and setting.
  78. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    "Stefan Zweig" is only Schrader's second film as a director, but, armed with clear ideas of what she wanted to convey and how she wanted to convey it, she's made a movie that allows its actors to fully inhabit their characters in a potent but low-key way.
  79. The Murder of Fred Hampton
    It’s the rare film that decades later can seem as timely as it was the day it came out. The searing documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton is such a film.
  80. Golden Exits
    This exquisitely textured ensemble portrait is a gentler, more forgiving piece of work, not least because the filmmaker's jabs — and his sympathies, such as they are — feel more evenly distributed.
  81. Detroit
    What makes Detroit vital is not that its images are new or revelatory, but rather that Bigelow and Boal have succeeded, with enviable coherence and tremendous urgency, in clarifying those images into art.
  82. A Hidden Life
    Malick, a Christian philosopher-poet whose meanings can often be vague and elusive, seems to have been stung into an uncharacteristically blunt response, a forceful denunciation of the complicity of church and state.
  83. Wind River
    The focus here is always on character and storytelling and the acting that brings it all alive. With thrillers this good becoming a lost art, Wind River is definitely one to savor.
  84. Beach Rats
    Harris Dickinson, the spellbinding British newcomer who plays Frankie, rewards the director’s scrutiny with piercing emotional depth and a startling lack of self-consciousness.
  85. Beatriz at Dinner
    This queasily funny and suspenseful movie is more than a smirking exercise in ideological deck stacking, and to praise it for its political relevance would be to understate its subtlety and specificity.
  86. Crown Heights
    Acted with gravity, emotion and a sense of the serious issues involved by stars Lakeith Stanfield, Nnamdi Asomugha and Natalie Paul, Crown Heights deals with the intensely human factors tragic events bring into play — perseverance and despair, love and longing.
  87. Marjorie Prime
    Beautiful untruths and half-truths abound in Michael Almereyda’s quietly shimmering new movie.
  88. Trophy
    With lines drawn along politics, class, race and economics, the strange-bedfellows issue of top-dollar killing and queasy conservation is one that Trophy...lays bare with gruesome, grim exactitude.
  89. Chasing Coral
    While governments and politicians dither about global warming, the world’s undersea coral is moving toward a devastating death. If you don’t believe that, or don’t think it really matters, Chasing Coral presents the evidence with beauty, intelligence and a surprising amount of emotion.
  90. Super Dark Times
    What makes Super Dark Times one of the most exciting American filmmaking debuts in recent years is how well Phillips and company grasp both the intensity and ephemerality of adolescence.
  91. Final Portrait
    Final Portrait is quietly involving, amusing in a shaggy-dog-story way and impeccably made.
  92. Spoor
    This wildly entertaining eco-feminist crime caper, anchored by a winning lead performance from Agnieszka Mandat, isn’t just worth the wait, it’s an imperative watch.
  93. Félicité
    If the movie’s form is a rich weave of grotty realism and soulful musical, the story itself is remarkably simple.
  94. Step
    Heartening and unashamedly emotional, it's a certified crowd pleaser that doesn't care who knows it.
  95. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
    This is the rare Morris movie that feels led by the personality of its star figure, in this case Dorfman’s wry positivity and love of what she does, rather than his need to probe.
  96. War Machine
    War Machine is the first of Australian filmmaker Michod's three films...to have a dominant sense of humor. What unites it with its predecessors is Michod's fierce intelligence and formidable directing skill.
  97. The Settlers
    Smart, thorough and thoughtful, this disturbing film unfolds like a slow-motion nightmare that has taken half a century to fully reveal itself, a trenchant examination that deserves to stand next to compelling Israeli documentaries on similar themes, including “The Law in These Parts” and “The Gatekeepers.”
  98. Cries from Syria
    Anyone with even a shred social conscience should find the comprehensive Syrian civil war documentary “Cries From Syria” a truly devastating experience.
  99. White Sun
    That so packed (and pictorially arresting) a scenario is not only well-acted — from the kids to the elders — but handled with emotional intelligence and even eye-rolling humor, speaks to Rauniyar’s narrative gifts regarding matters of his homeland.
  100. School Life
    School Life is as charming, intimate and warm-hearted an observational documentary as you'd ever want to see.
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