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. M. Butterfly
    After sitting through M. Butterfly, you'll wonder why they even bothered to try. [01 Oct 1993]
    • Los Angeles Times
  2. 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.
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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
  8. 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.
  10. Sex, Politics & Cocktails
    Julien Hernandez's Sex, Politics & Cocktails gives all three a bad name.
  11. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. Banished
    A trite, incoherent tale.
  15. Lifelines
    There's so much ranting and raving, all of it boring and trite.
  16. 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.
  17. Happiness Runs
    An astoundingly bad memory piece that blows its potential dramatic heft at every turn.
  18. 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?
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. 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.
  22. Reagan
    A childish slog of hero worship.
  23. 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.
  24. Scary Movie 5
    If you think three months is an impossible amount of time to write and produce a feature film, well, it is.
  25. 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.
  26. Virginia
    With its soft jabs at hypocrisy and band-aid use of voiceover narration, Virginia is an excruciatingly slow train wreck.
  27. Cellmates
    A near complete exercise in mirthlessness and atonal satire, Cellmates is a sentence, all right.
  28. That's What She Said
    Avoid this one like, well, a yeast infection.
  29. Assassin's Bullet
    Assassin's Bullet is strictly '90s-era pay-cable genre-rip-off nostalgia, ripe for ridicule.
  30. A Haunted House
    No-holds-barred comedy is one thing, hurtful thoughtlessness is something else entirely. An ostensible comedy shouldn't have so many moments that feel so ugly.
  31. Olympus Has Fallen
    [Antoine Fuqua] gives in to terrible instincts here, flirting with overwrought patriotism, one too many laugh lines amid numerous characters being shot in the head, and a general chaos-inspired editing technique all too rampant in today's action cinema.
  32. Girls Against Boys
    Girls Against Boys is some odd male fantasy of what female revenge might be like, sexy and enigmatically charged rather than haunting or scary or even just weird.
  33. Gummo
    If nothing else, Gummo does challenge perceptions and presumptions: Is the perspective of youth in this country really so devoid of significance, and their existence so septic? These are good questions, although "Gummo" provides neither answer nor solution, nor even thematic cohesion.
  34. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace
    Sequels to big-budget popular hits usually end up super-slick, shallow and inflated. But this one isn't even super-slick; it's shallow and deflated...The overall effect is of a story atomized and dying before our eyes, collapsing into smashed pulp, ground down into big-budget Kryptonite ash. [27 July 1987, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  35. Oconomowoc
    Ironically, the only thing that makes much sense about the DIY effort Oconomowoc is its baffling title.
  36. How Sweet It Is
    Piscopo...isn't just too good for this film, he's too good to be giving it this much effort.
  37. Abandoned Mine
    Abandoned Mine is all that its title promises: something generic and empty, with the sense that much has been left behind.
  38. Search Party
    This spectacularly dumb and unfunny film will likely bore even the staunchest fans of the “Hangover” movies, of which “Search” is a kind of distant, fatally impoverished cousin.
  39. Ghost Team One
    It's frustrating that the filmmakers could only think to enrich the characters of one race by demeaning those of another.
  40. May I Kill U?
    A thuddingly unfunny vigilante satire.
  41. As Above, So Below
    An entertainment-free sinkhole of Dramamine-worthy nonsense.
  42. 10 Rules for Sleeping Around
    10 Rules for Sleeping Around is a dreadful sex farce with barely an authentic emotion, credible character or plausible plot point in its midst.
  43. Poseidon Rex
    The filmmakers forget the fundamentals of B-movie 101: Skin-baring spring breakers make for the most qualified carnage.
  44. Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
    [A] slack, dumb prequel.
  45. Highlander
    In spite of a sturdy cast and dazzling production design, Highlander is stultifyingly, jaw-droppingly, achingly awful.[11 Mar 1986, p.5]
    • Los Angeles Times
  46. Teen Wolf Too
    Teen Wolf Too embellishes its inane, cookie-cutter plot with remote direction, witless dialogue and charmless characters.
  47. Septic Man
    It's a grotesque, deadly dull piece of cinematic upchuck, a horror film minus tension or chills.
  48. Found
    Movies with no redeeming qualities are rare, but the execrable Found comes pretty close.
  49. 108 Stitches
    A fatally clueless, painfully overlong sports spoof.
  50. Muck
    Rather than evincing any expertise or affinity for the genre, Wolsh's effort seems glib and hollow.
  51. Hot Pursuit
    This is an equal-opportunity fiasco.
  52. Sex and the Single Alien
    Had Daskaloff found an appropriately campy groove, he might have eked out some sexy-silly fun. As it stands, the film proves a cheesy, half-baked and decidedly retrograde effort.
  53. L.A. Slasher
    Even the most talentless and narcissistic fame seekers on reality television are not nearly as vile, reprehensible or worthless as a film that actively wishes harm on them.
  54. The Cain Complex
    It's not every day you get to see a satanic-revenge home-invasion martial-arts thriller, but should another come along that's as laughably cornball as The Cain Complex, you'd best hide until it blows over.
  55. Medusa
    The pedestrian writing and acting prove even more cringe-worthy and dreadful than the special effects.
  56. Excess Flesh
    The repetitively fetishistic camera work and lunatic-asylum sound cues are meant to signify a nod to something psychological and pointed, but all it is is bilious, empty-calorie extremism, and it only ever drags you where you expect.
  57. At Granny's House
    Seemingly meant for the stage, the film feels unnaturally theatrical with characters stiltedly reciting each line of dialogue even when supposedly conversing. But with Mahoney's pedestrian, shot-reverse-shot direction, these scenes play out like situational skits from an instructional video made for ESL students.
  58. Exposed
    It’s hard to imagine how anything salvageable could have been made out of [Gee Malik Linton's] comically pretentious script with its heavily religious overtones and plotting that grows more ridiculous by the minute.
  59. Capture the Flag
    Rarely has outer space seemed so unexciting.
  60. Martyrs
    The movie feels like a thin excuse to show image after image of women being abused. This Martyrs has the bones of its predecessor, but it's been bled dry.
  61. The Final Project
    Even by the shaggy standards of found footage, The Final Project is amateurish.
  62. The Snowman
    A wretched waste of time and talent.
  63. Mother's Day
    From awkward start to merciful finish, Mother's Day is a grim, listless affair that may leave you pining for the relative pep and coherence of its predecessors (both of which were scripted by Katherine Fugate), or at least a few of their incidental pleasures.
  64. Bling
    A family film no member of the family will enjoy.
  65. The Asian Connection
    Generically directed by Daniel Zirilli, who shares story credit with Tom Sizemore, the listless Asian Connection may be set in Bangkok and Cambodia but it feels about exotic as an order of take-out Thai.
  66. Fight Valley
    The whole thing has a very seedy, late-night cable feel, which is where you should catch this film — and only if you’re a die-hard UFC fan.
  67. Total Frat Movie
    It’s a rare film that can dredge up nostalgic fondness for 2002’s awful “National Lampoon’s Van Wilder,” but Total Frat Movie manages to rise to the dubious occasion.
  68. Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
    D’Souza might be preaching to the choir, but at least this voter recruitment tool could have aspired to something more challenging than an amateurishly slapped-together rehash.
  69. A Family Man
    Alternately crass and treacly, overbearing and under-finessed, the film, penned by headhunter-turned-screenwriter Bill Dubuque and directed by Mark Williams, is on life support from get-go.
  70. The Devil's Dolls
    It’s just a listless, routine exercise in religious horror, infused with a whiff of the exotic that tends toward the xenophobic. There might be a shred of entertainment to be found if only it were worse.
  71. In Search of the American Dream
    Sincerity alone cannot begin to compensate for a clunker of this magnitude, including an abundance of technical issues, bad dialogue and worse performances.
  72. The Green Fairy
    Like a wedding toast gone awry, the movie doesn’t know where to begin or end and is cluttered with factoids and awkward asides.
  73. New World Order
    What is semi-interesting — in a “huh?” kind of way — is how the Ferraras take various paranoid speculation from the darkest reaches of the Internet and weave it all into a barely coherent super-theory.
  74. The River Thief
    Chockful of hoary archetypes making hokey observations...leading to a truly laughable big-ending reveal, the film, with its wildly uneven performances, underscores the pitfalls inherent in shifting from the written page to the big screen.
  75. Courier X
    Courier-X is so inscrutable and tediously boring that it will test the patience of even the most tenacious truther.
  76. Kill Ratio
    Kill Ratio is a laughably inept political thriller that would have been right at home on the USA Network lineup circa 1990.
  77. The Drama Club
    Like “The Big Chill” and “Peter’s Friends” but without a single character you’d want to spend five minutes with, let alone a weekend, The Drama Club makes for a crassly unpleasant ensemble piece.
  78. Despicable Me 3
    Under the pretext of offering fun for the whole family, the movie winds up doing almost precisely the opposite; its attempts at grown-up sophistication and cheeky, knowing humor are clueless and hectoring enough to leave any adult in the audience wishing they’d been straight-up ignored.
  79. Arsenal
    Despite attracting some top-drawer talent, “Arsenal” is a brutally unpleasant, bottom-of-the-barrel crime drama that unsuccessfully attempts to drown the terrible dialogue and pedestrian direction with buckets of gushing blood.
  80. Walk of Fame
    Aggressive and aggressively unfunny, Hollywood-set comedy Walk of Fame hates its characters and its audience — and the feeling is mutual.
  81. Diamond Cartel
    The largely Russian- and Kazakh-speaking cast is so incongruously dubbed into English it evokes an old Japanese monster movie.
  82. Overdrive
    Choked with clichés, joyless, and with a suspense meter on empty, this France-set caper about classic-car-thieving half brothers (Scott Eastwood and Freddie Thorp) mixed up with a pair of violent, automobile-collecting crime lords (Simon Abkarian and Clemens Schick) is only for those who think the “Fast and the Furious” movies aren’t white and charmless enough.
  83. The Clapper
    Writer-director Dito Montiel, adapting his novel, takes an ill-conceived premise and drives it into the ground with a painful, tone-deaf approach to both social satire and romantic comedy.
  84. Dark Signal
    It creeps along without providing either scares or an unsettling mood.
  85. Road House
    The crushing assault that Road House delivers to fun at the movies is enough to send you crawling out of the theater on hands and knees, bloody and bowed. [19 May 1989, p.C1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  86. Aaron's Blood
    The lifeless script and bland performances damn the film and the unlucky viewers who find it.
  87. American Media & The Second Assassination of John F. Kennedy
    Amounting to two-plus hours of conspiracy theorist porn, The American Media & the Second Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, directed and narrated by John Barbour, proves to be as long-winded as its accusatory title.
  88. Tyler Perry's Boo 2! A Madea Halloween
    While its predecessor at least pleased his fans, writer-director-star Perry’s latest offers few laughs and embarrassing post-production work.
  89. Sleepwalkers
    Morbid, silly and ultra-violent, Stephen King's Sleepwalkers is pure trash from the popular horrormeister. It is so bad that surely the only way that it could have been made was to have King's name on it.
    • 8 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Mangler
    Hooper could have also made at least a token attempt to create one interesting or sympathetic character and shot more than one take per scene--even by horror standards, the acting here is lame. Call it "The Bungler."
  91. The Only Living Boy in New York
    "Only Living Boy" fails to convince as a character study, romance or love letter to the CBGB-era New York City. It drops a plot bombshell close to the end of its 88-minute running time, but the filmmakers haven’t laid the track to make it plausible.
  92. Cobra
    Cobra's pretentious emptiness, its dumbness, its two-faced morality make it a movie that begs to be laughed off.
  93. 9/11
    9/11 trades on the emotional weight of its namesake day, manipulating audiences into feelings that have nothing to do with the mess that is actually on screen.
  94. The Layover
    Second-tier airline safety videos are more entertaining than this fourth-rate comedy. Flight attendants on Southwest’s less-traveled routes are far funnier than the cast here. Watching a lonely suitcase circle a baggage claim conveyor belt is more diverting.
  95. Blind Date
    What boggles the mind is how this bit of navel lint could have seemed even remotely funny to anyone at any stage along its way. Even as a low moment in high concept, it is inconceivable that someone would undertake to make this into a film.
  96. Mike Boy
    None of this makes a lick of sense, but it’s fascinatingly asinine. It feels wrong to encourage this kind of misbegotten DIY project, but if you’re a fan of the likes of “The Room” or “Birdemic,” honestly, you can’t miss “Mike Boy.”
  97. Ryde
    This slick and stylish exterior belies a rotting core underneath. Ryde thinks little of its characters or its audience; it's an exercise in misanthropy with a nasty streak of misogyny running through it.
  98. Cook Off!
    Wafting into theaters after sitting on the back burner for the last decade, Cook Off! is a shrill, gloppy mess of a mockumentary being served up well past its "best before" date — if there ever actually were one.
  99. The Truth About Lies
    On a single day, the protagonist of The Truth About Lies is fired from his job, his apartment burns down and his girlfriend dumps him. He has it easy compared to anyone who actually watches this thoroughly unpleasant, unfunny comedy.
  100. The Doll
    There are limits to how much of an edge a movie gets from incompetence — as writer/director/producer Susannah O’Brien’s The Doll proves definitively.
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