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
    • tbd Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss
    Voilà! A genuine tragedy, although not in the Shakespearean sense. A comprehensive list of what's wrong with Romeo & Juliet: Sealed With a Kiss would stretch farther than the unabridged works of William S.
  2. Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj
    To make a movie this charmless and uninspired takes a certain negligence that is rare among even the most cynical Hollywood moneymaking exercises.
  3. Dog Lover's Symphony
    The only suitable ending for such a stinker involves a twist-tie and a baggie.
  4. Premonition
    Its biggest failing -- and the ultimate one for a lightweight entertainment such as this -- is that it's a deadly bore from start to finish.
  5. Kickin It Old Skool
    A witless, mind-numbingly inert comedy.
  6. Postal
    Boll's rampant narcissistic showmanship creates such a bizarre, garish spectacle that it is almost tempting to give him credit for being something of a misunderstood artist after all. Almost, but not quite.
  7. Hounddog
    The problems that plague the movie land squarely with the writer, director and producer, Deborah Kampmeier, who has crafted a howler of a bad script, shows little affinity for working with actors and displays no visual sense behind the camera.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Saw V
    A particularly dull and discombobulated affair, shot and acted with all the flair of a basic-cable procedural. Patterson and Mandylor are so wooden that their cat-and-mouse game has all the excitement of watching dust bunnies swirl in an air current.
  9. Repo! The Genetic Opera
    The film is bad -- not good-bad, tacky-bad or fun-bad, just plain awful and nearly unwatchable.
  10. Crossing Over
    Forced, heavy-handed and overdone, it's a pretend serious film that offers crass manipulation in the place where honesty is supposed to be.
  11. The Last House on the Left
    A shockingly mundane disappointment taken on its own and a deeply misguided refraction of the original.
  12. Observe and Report
    It heaps piles of bad, crazy stuff at our feet then walks away. There is no moral to this story, and there's not much comedy either.
  13. What Goes Up
    Glatzer aims to wring laughter out of this desperation but succeeds only in producing a series of contrived characters and situations that make "The Breakfast Club" look like an unfiltered documentary.
  14. Swimfan
    This predictable teenage take on the 'Fatal Attraction' formula goes from dumb to even dumber.
  15. The In Crowd
    Trite and uninvolving.
  16. Beautiful Creatures
    Tedious and unfunny.
  17. The Specials
    The Specials is an unfortunate name for a film that's anything but.
  18. The Body
    Despite a premise that's provocative, to say the least, this one's a dud.
  19. Gossip
    A total waste of time.
    • Los Angeles Times
  20. Deuces Wild
    Skip it. Just fill in the blanks and you too can brew the same bland, goopy mixture, right down to such clunker lines as "There is a Santa Claus, Ma. He just doesn't come to Brooklyn anymore."
  21. Supernova
    Supernova isn't so super.
  22. Pinocchio
    The only way his (Benigni's) show-off performance could have a prayer of working would be if the film were released as a silent.
  23. Sakura Wars
    Duller-than-dirt.
  24. Nutty Professor II: The Klumps
    The thrill is definitely gone, leaving a disappointing and unpleasant mess in its place.
  25. The Glass House
    So laughably awful that it begs to have stones thrown at it; it's a wonder it got made at all.
  26. An American Werewolf in Paris
    A painfully anemic variation on John Landis' 1981 winner, "An American Werewolf in London." While the original had both wit and poignancy--and an affectionate and knowing tip-of-the-hat to werewolf movies past--this slapdash, silly new edition is so cut-rate it has Luxembourg and Amsterdam standing in for the City of Light.
  27. Extreme Ops
    Dude, one last thing: If you see my moms and pops, definitely don't tell them about this.
    • 5 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Vulgar
    Johnson does seem to have some psycho-sexual ax to grind amid all this visual and sexual crudity. For instance, women barely figure in the action, with Will taking on various stereotypical feminine attributes. But good luck finding meaning in all this mess.
  29. Where the Heart Is
    In comparison to Where the Heart Is, the Wal-Mart commercials seem like cinema verite.
  30. Enough
    Lacking a real actress, director Michael Apted is called upon to fudge the facts and make Slim's ordeal as taut as possible. He gets the job done, but the suspense scenes have a generic fright-by-numbers feel that tell us he's wearing his professional hat and knows it.
  31. Serving Sara
    Crushingly unfunny.
  32. Whipped
    Way too bleak to be funny, even as a contemporary satire of the battle of the sexes.
  33. Bless the Child
    Lapses into an exercise in foolishness.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Pokémon 3: The Movie
    Two Tylenol and a pair of earplugs might be enough to get you through Pokemon 3The Movie.
  35. 3000 Miles to Graceland
    One of those movies that makes you want to throw up your hands in despair, disgust, or maybe both.
  36. Whatever It Takes
    It's guys like Floyd who make a movie like Whatever It Takes feel like high school. And the rest of the losers make it feel like a movie.
  37. Dead Man on Campus
    Under Alan Cohn's straight-on direction, the film, written by various hands, huffs and puffs mightily just to keep a strenuously labored plot going.
  38. My Mother Likes Women
    The attempt to find humor in mean-spiritedness is way beyond Paris and Fejerman's abilities, and their last-reel attempt to portray Sofia as an ultimately liberating force for her daughters is as contrived as My Mother Likes Women is repellent.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Lost & Found
    All of this points to the two major differences between "Mary" and "Lost": Ben Stiller's character in "Mary" was likable (if pathetic), and "Mary" was sporadically funny.
  40. Jason X
    Like a dinner-theater version of the "Alien" movies without the good grooming.
  41. Predator
    It's arguably one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major studio movie. There's no need to do a Mad magazine movie parody of this; it's already on the screen.
  42. Daddy Day Care
    I laughed a couple of times, but mostly I was bored out of my mind and not a little depressed.
  43. Ready to Rumble
    A movie made for wrestling fans that makes fun of wrestling fans? That cuts a little too close to the vicarious masochism at the heart of pro wrestling's core constituency. Also, it's not funny.
  44. Detroit Rock City
    This aggressively stupid film is merely business as usual, a compendium of all the current obsessions and fixations that make so many of these films such unhappy experiences.
  45. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia
    The "crime" was that it was made in the first place and the "punishment" is having to watch it.
    • Los Angeles Times
  46. S1m0ne
    Such a tedious Hollywood farce, so unpleasantly glib and relentlessly shallow, that Pacino's excessive performance is not even the worst thing about it.
  47. Town & Country
    Seems merely tired and stale, the opposite of fresh, marked by ideas for jokes rather than things that are actually funny. Then, without warning, it goes from inept to complete disaster, sinking from indifferent to fiasco in the blink of an eye.
  48. Ghost Ship
    See evil. See evil run. Run, evil, run all the way to cable television purgatory.
  49. National Lampoon's Gold Diggers
    A one-gag movie and that one gag isn't funny. Taylor and Lasser are reduced to playing sex-starved Norma Desmonds, and while Friedle and Owen are certainly game, their plan is a waste of everyone's time, especially the audience's.
  50. Dragonfly
    Appalling, shamelessly manipulative and contrived, and totally lacking in conviction.
  51. Dudley Do-Right
    Tiresome, inept farce that's not even a fraction as clever or entertaining as it likes to imagine it is -- a complete waste of time.
  52. Mallrats
    A numbing and dispiriting experience aimed at the least discriminating parts of the teen-age audience.
  53. New Best Friend
    Struggles awkwardly to bring a twist or two to its hoary class-conscious story line, aiming for a subtlety in character development that's smothered by excessive kitsch and kink.
  54. Robot Stories
    Robot Stories isn't any good. I don't say this lightly. There's no pleasure in giving new directors bad reviews and it's especially unpleasant when what's wrong with their work isn't a clumsy performance or two, a sagging second act or a repugnant worldview, but a near-total absence of filmmaking talent.
  55. Hollow Man
    Despite a wealth of special effects...this movie is surprisingly inert, more dull than anything else, with little to recommend it on any level.
  56. The Master of Disguise
    But even Carvey's protean talent can't dent this ponderously unfunny and uninspired comedy. It's hard to imagine anyone older than 10 being diverted by its broad buffoonery, and kids deserve better than this in the first place.
  57. Stealing Harvard
    It's so bad that you have to wonder whether Tom Green was looking for a project to match last year's "Freddy Got Fingered" -- Green didn't direct this turkey, but it surely is a contender for the bottom of the barrel award for 2002.
  58. Kangaroo Jack
    88 minutes of desperate gyrations intended to simulate humor.
  59. FeardotCom
    The story leapfrogs abruptly from scene to scene, and it makes such a mockery of narrative logic and continuity that the cast tends to look either baffled (Dorff) or as if they're trying to remain unrecognized.
  60. Queen of the Damned
    Turns out to be a muddled limp biscuit of a movie, a vampire soap opera that doesn't make much sense even on its own terms.
  61. True Romance
    It is hard to say what is more dispiriting about True Romance the movie itself or the fact that someone somewhere is sure to applaud its hollow, dime-store nihilism and smug pseudo-hip posturing as a bright new day in American cinema. [10 Sept 1993]
    • Los Angeles Times
  62. Mr. Deeds
    What's most interesting about this new film is how lacking it is in any of the things, from humor to emotion to halfway decent acting, we might go to a movie for. There's not even enough here to get mad at.
  63. The Replacements
    A haphazard film about half as sophisticated as the average beer commercial.
  64. The New Guy
    An unintentional parody of every teen movie made in the last five years. Which can be the only rational explanation for making such a mess all over the screen.
  65. Out Cold
    It's the perfect image for a smelly and instantly flushable comedy that telegraphs punch lines in advance like a boorish dinner party guest.
  66. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    Mean-spirited vulgarity and homosexual panic.
  67. The Cat in the Hat
    Critics are paid to suffer bad art, no matter how icky it is from the start. So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit.
  68. Freddy Got Fingered
    Even the movie finds itself asking when it'll end. Not soon enough.
  69. Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
    The result is hopelessly inane, humorless and under-inspired.
  70. Crash
    The filmmaking here is so glacially paced (the final script was only 62 pages for a 100-minute film) and enervating that boredom is the most frequent result.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Mortal Kombat: Annihilation
    The sequel is quite serious, charmless and critic-proof (in fact, it wasn't screened for the media), and it may attract the teenagers who have made the game so popular. [24Nov1997 Pg.10]
    • Los Angeles Times
  72. Congo
    Not only have bothersome plot changes been made, but the entire tone of the book has been transformed from tension to tongue-in-cheek with dismal results.
  73. M. Butterfly
    After sitting through M. Butterfly, you'll wonder why they even bothered to try. [01 Oct 1993]
    • Los Angeles Times
  74. The Fan
    Even in thriller terms, nothing rings remotely true here, with even the baseball action--including a game that is not called despite enough rain to unnerve Noah--laced with a heavy dose of preposterousness.
  75. Beverly Hills Cop III
    There's a fundamental lack of human feeling in Beverly Hills Cop III that makes you want to avert your eyes from the people around you when the lights come up. Attending this movie makes you feel like an accomplice to the corruption. [25 May 1994, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  76. Boomerang
    A film that is more listless than funny and could surely use some of the energy that animated both Art Buchwald and Paramount Pictures in the lawsuit surrounding authorship of [Eddie Murphy]'s 1988 "Coming to America." [01 Jul 1992]
    • Los Angeles Times
  77. Coming to America
    James Earl Jones proves that he is probably the only actor in America who can wear the skin of a full-grown lion-jewels in its eyes, its tail in its mouth-over street clothes and not look like a damn fool. But there's not a thing he can do with this flaccid, foolish film. [29 Jun 1988, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  78. Cocktail
    Arm wrestling and hamburger building have been exhausted as backgrounds for movies, so it was probably inevitable that bartending would be next. But nothing quite prepares you for the hamburger that Cocktail makes of an old and relatively honorable profession. [29 Jul 1988, p.14]
    • Los Angeles Times
  79. Harlem Nights
    The movie is full of phallic gags about little-bitty guns and crude jokes at physical or emotional infirmities. [17 Nov 1989, p.6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  80. All Dogs Go to Heaven
    The animation is of variable quality; the story is a garbled pastiche of "Oliver Twist" and "Little Miss Marker;" the songs, including four by Charles ("Annie") Strouse, are eminently unhummable. [17 Nov 1989]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 21 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Killers
    Is it some monstrosity of awfulness, as its lack of advance screening suggested? No, that would imply at least a spark of some kind. This is just an empty summer hodgepodge of stale romantic comedy exchanges, witlessness and lackluster action.
  82. Sex, Politics & Cocktails
    Julien Hernandez's Sex, Politics & Cocktails gives all three a bad name.
  83. Walking on the Sky
    Carl T. Evans' tedious drama Walking on the Sky serves primarily as an acting exercise for its cast and a showcase for its primary location, a scenic Manhattan rooftop.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Beyond Honor
    As the movie turns into a shrill revenge tragedy, complexity is discarded. The characters might as well be stapled to Popsicle sticks.
  85. The Boy Who Cried Bitch: The Adolescent Years
    It is terrible in every aspect -- wretchedly written, directed with a ham fist (by Matthew Levin) and over-acted.
  86. Banished
    A trite, incoherent tale.
  87. Lifelines
    There's so much ranting and raving, all of it boring and trite.
  88. After.Life
    The afterlife is not, however, nearly as deadly or as ghastly as the movie itself, an undertaking so tortured that it digs a deeper grave with every passing scene.
  89. Happiness Runs
    An astoundingly bad memory piece that blows its potential dramatic heft at every turn.
  90. I Spit on Your Grave
    For most, there will be no adrenaline rush from fear or thrill, or vicarious release from seeing tormentors tormented; one leaves feeling sad. Sad that this is what "entertainment" has come to. Come on, filmmakers. Can't you do better?
  91. Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son
    A film so drained of entertainment or simple humanity it is difficult to relate to as anything other than industrial artifact.
  92. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    What galls is that for all the perspiration in jazzing up an old yarn, there's not a whiff of originality in how Wirkola engages with the perverse pleasures enshrined by the Grimm brothers, two of their era's shrewdest storytellers.
  93. Passion Play
    Inexplicably filmed in a handful of styles - including, bizarrely, obviously processed shots - by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Passion Play would be midnight-movie fodder if it weren't so drearily wrapped up in its wounded-male aesthetic and a clumsy approach to art-movie moodiness that was abandoned in the '80s.
  94. Reagan
    A childish slog of hero worship.
  95. The Abduction of Zack Butterfield
    Subscribing to the philosophy that creepy equals interesting, the film contains barely a moment that isn't flat-footed, ludicrous or both.
  96. Scary Movie 5
    If you think three months is an impossible amount of time to write and produce a feature film, well, it is.
  97. Seventh Son
    I know it's early, but Seventh Son may actually be the worst movie of the year. It will most certainly be a contender. The medieval/fantasy/action/drama/romance hits pretty close to a perfect 10 on the egregious scale.
  98. Virginia
    With its soft jabs at hypocrisy and band-aid use of voiceover narration, Virginia is an excruciatingly slow train wreck.
  99. Cellmates
    A near complete exercise in mirthlessness and atonal satire, Cellmates is a sentence, all right.
  100. That's What She Said
    Avoid this one like, well, a yeast infection.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »