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. Quo Vadis, Aida?
    Quo Vadis, Aida? re-creates history in the present tense, with a gut-clutching immediacy that Žbanić makes bearable through sheer formal restraint.
  2. The Orphanage
    It’s a modest coming-of-age period piece that incidentally diverges into over-the-top dreamscapes.
  3. The Devil Below
    The best thing The Devil Below has going for it is its stark, remote location, which evokes the feeling of a world unto itself, hidden away in rural America. But what happens in front of this striking backdrop is too blandly familiar — and not nearly hellish enough.
  4. The Canyonlands
    This is a pretty rote slasher premise, the Utah setting aside. And Devane doesn’t do himself any favors by making his potential murder victims — a techie nerd, a social media influencer, a boorish jock, a pot-head and a prickly lesbian — so gratingly cartoonish.
  5. Son
    Kavanagh and Matichak do a remarkable job of capturing an amped-up version of everyday parental paranoia. This is ultimately a movie about a woman who loves her child so intensely that she becomes irrational — and dangerous.
  6. The Stylist
    This story of a lonely Kansas City hairstylist (something Gevargizian knows about) is creepy in unexpected ways, poking at the audience’s rawest nerves.
  7. Lucky
    Grant and Kermani skillfully keep the audience in suspense from start to finish, even if it’s just by withholding what the heck is actually happening.
  8. Dementer
    The plainness of Kinkle’s style makes it all the more shocking when the story gets increasingly gory, as the gentle and mundane alike are shattered by the disturbing echoes of past trauma.
  9. The People vs. Agent Orange
    The People vs. Agent Orange has a gripping urgency, especially as a reminder that the history of chemicals’ effects on our bodies is still being written and fought over, and that what a secretive industry is allowed to cover up, it will.
  10. Keep an Eye Out
    The delightfully daft, dialogue-driven result makes for a languid farce that mischievously flips a funhouse mirror on jaded audiences to welcome, if fleeting, effect.
  11. Adam
    Subtly moving, Adam is a beautiful expression of untainted sorority.
  12. Lost Course
    This two-part, three-hour film is marked by immediacy and breadth, as if an on-the-fly news bulletin had naturally morphed into the richest of character-driven sagas.
  13. Coming 2 America
    Coming 2 America is the rare sequel whose title sounds identical to the original, which may be the cleverest thing about it.
  14. Boss Level
    Boss Level takes a well-worn gag and injects energy, showing the genre is still a game worth playing.
    • Los Angeles Times
      • Posted Mar 4, 2021
  15. Pixie
    Pixie isn’t exactly magical, but amusing enough whenever Cooke’s character casts her spell
  16. Stray
    Lo’s humane film helps us glimpse the lives of those who are often overlooked, whether they walk the streets of Istanbul on four legs or two.
  17. My Salinger Year
    Joanna’s journey of creative and emotional enlightenment — including the balancing act of trying to write when consumed by a day job — is managed with grace, tenderness and touching credibility by a wonderfully winning Qualley in concert with Philippe Falardeau’s smart, engaging direction and screenplay.
  18. The Affair
    We get slivers of moments and feelings described rather than experienced.
  19. Boogie
    Boogie tries to appreciate its own contradictions, and also to complicate the audience’s expectations. It positions Boogie as an underdog of the underrepresented, a potential breakout star in an arena where the odds are stacked against him. But it also resists the temptation to turn him into an easy emblem of success, while neatly sidestepping the feel-good uplift and predictable, reconciliatory outcomes that tend to hold sway in the sports-movie genre.
  20. Chaos Walking
    Liman, who has a reputation for reviving troubled productions and salvaging films in postproduction, excavates an hour and 48 minutes of relatively engaging action-thriller material. It moves quickly enough to gloss over plot holes but leaves the impression that the novel was stripped for parts.
  21. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
    This trip is filled with goofy fun, though it wanders enough to occasionally test the attention spans of those neither young enough nor high enough to be in the film’s target audience.
  22. Moxie
    For all its energy and charm, this overlong film contains its share of undermining missteps.
  23. Night of the Kings
    To say that not everything coheres in this swift, propulsive 93-minute film is to suggest that the filmmaker has done justice to the unruliness of his subject: In capturing and preserving a long-standing oral tradition, he has arrived at both a persuasive vision of the past and a hopeful glimpse of the future. Like all good storytellers, he leaves you wanting more.
  24. Erēmīta (Anthologies)
    As far as shutdown-inspired projects go, Erēmīta (Anthologies) has a certain felicitous intimacy, proof that when called to action, artists can meet a given moment — and the boundaries that come with it — with ideas at the ready, their eyes primed to see.
  25. Sex, Drugs & Bicycles
    The Netherlands must be doing something right, and Blank’s generally breezy film, packed with playful Monty Pythonesque animations by Fiely Matias, effectively sums up the contented mood.
  26. The Independents
    The Independents is a wisp of a movie, generally likable but largely insubstantial. But when Price, Naughton and Chartrand start to play? The film becomes a warm and welcoming celebration of music for music’s sake.
  27. My Darling Supermarket
    In this existentialist delight, whimsical and profound, the mundane gains new enlightenment.
  28. I'm No Longer Here
    It’s a deceptively dimensional portrayal, that of someone who worries his stage is getting smaller and smaller. And in Frias’ magnetic feature is enough spirit, sound and artistry to give his journey a meaningful spotlight.
  29. Tom & Jerry
    The slapstick physical comedy does provide some laughs, and coupled with the toilet humor “Tom & Jerry” will likely appeal to some members of the family audience. Still, if you’re in a mood for this flavor of cartoon violence, you’re better off hunting down the classic shorts or episodes of Tom and Jerry’s past TV shows.
  30. Raya and the Last Dragon
    Raya herself is an appealing amalgam of countless smart, unpretentious, down-to-earth action heroes before her — the kinds of characters that, as with this movie, you gravitate toward as much for their familiarity as for their novelty.
  31. Biggie: I Got a Story to Tell
    This movie is less about the myth of Biggie than it is about the everyday experiences of a man described by his friends as much funnier and more big-hearted than his public image sometimes suggested. Despite the title, “I Got a Story to Tell” is primarily concerned with all the tales that went untold.
  32. A First Farewell
    A First Farewell is a gorgeously shot window into a world most of us hadn’t looked through before, but it’s worth examining the meanings of its images.
  33. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    Within the confines of a straight-ahead, handsomely designed and photographed biopic beats the heart of a more adventurous presentation of Holiday’s tragic life. It’s hinted at in Day’s performance, the dreamlike memory sequences and a cheeky, meta-coda that plays out during the end credits but never quite pierces the film’s more varnished surfaces.
  34. Un Film Dramatique
    Had Baudelaire knocked out 20 or so minutes and leaned less into the vérité of it all, he might have had something more special — and less patience-testing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Billie Eilish: The World's a Little Blurry
    The portrait is of an imaginative, ultra-talented teenager whose poise onstage belies the ordinary insecurities in her head.
  36. The Father
    The moment-to-moment pleasures of trying to decipher the plot give way to crushing futility; you’re left sifting through the pieces of a puzzle that’s almost too painful to solve.
  37. Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art
    Accentuating the unrepentant Freedman (who has a distinctly monochromatic fashion sense) and her fellow interview subjects with fittingly artistic camera compositions, gallery-ready lighting and a refined strings-forward score, Made You Look makes for an exposé that’s suitable for framing.
  38. Crisis
    Whatever its goals, the filmmaking is uninspired. It’s heavily reliant on clichés, especially in its use of score, the lone-wolf cop and familiar devices to build tension.
  39. 17 Blocks
    It’s valuable when any vérité documentary with such a vantage point is able to show us how many societal ills — from addiction to gun violence to poverty to gentrification to incarceration — can touch one family, keeping them in a near-constantly reeling state.
  40. I Care a Lot
    A comic thriller with a delectably hard shell and a soft, hollow center.
  41. Blithe Spirit
    Any trenchant observations to be found in this Blithe Spirit only pop and fizz into thin air like Champagne bubbles. Though effervescent, it’s a bit too ethereal for its own good.
  42. Body Brokers
    The plot here is too plain, but the details are vivid and the outrage palpable. If nothing else, this movie is one hell of an education.
  43. Silk Road
    A film littered with tired tropes.
  44. Sin
    Neither agonizing nor ecstatic, but solidly cinematic, Andrei Konchalovsky’s Michelangelo biopic Sin sees the veteran Russian filmmaker tackling the mystery of genius with what might be described as sumptuous grit.
  45. The Violent Heart
    There’s a lot to like in The Violent Heart, with Adepo at the top of the list. But Sanga errs by giving his movie the deterministic structure of a potboiler and the muted tone of a slice-of-life indie drama.
  46. Supernova
    Both actors know how to hit Macqueen’s more emphatic dialogue with a soft, glancing touch; they also know how to settle into the script’s familiar narrative grooves, its intimations of mortality and grief, in ways that will yield fresh, distinctive notes of humor, emotion and even surprise.
  47. Twilight's Kiss
    Some may also wish this low-key film spent more time with Pak and Hoi together than it does with them apart. Yet this approach lends the story a kind of mosaic quality, effectively fleshing out our protagonists vis-a-vis their friends, family members and home lives.
  48. Days of the Bagnold Summer
    Not much happens in the understated British comedy Days of the Bagnold Summer, and that’s rather the point. It’s a truthful and sometimes moving slice of life (and cake) elevated by vivid lead performances.
  49. Jumbo
    It will surprise none of Merlant’s fans that she gives herself over to the role. Whatever you think of Jeanne’s attachment, Merlant lets you in on Jeanne’s feelings. You believe this really matters to her.
  50. Test Pattern
    A trenchant conversation piece from a promising new director, Test Pattern provides ample room for one’s biases and privilege to shape our interpretation of what’s on screen.
  51. Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus
    Chaotically arranged, like a feverish dance between mind-altering nightmares and pieces of reality, this ambitious mixed-media thesis operates under idiosyncratic rules to provoke a feeling of subconscious entrapment.
  52. Show Me What You Got
    The film’s higher aims never take hold. The breeziness feels at odds with implied gravitas.
  53. Breaking News in Yuba County
    Breaking News in Yuba County lacks both the form and substance to cash in on its acting assets.
  54. Fear of Rain
    Landon struggles to generate much tension from her plot, which frequently feels contrived. The story jerks its protagonist (and its audience) through several dark and heartbreaking moments, before inevitably landing on a final confrontation with an outcome that’s not too hard to predict … and thus not all that nerve-wracking.
  55. Willy's Wonderland
    The film has a nutty premise and a game star, but it too quickly runs out of fresh ideas.
  56. The World to Come
    Though admirably sensitive to the inner lives of opened souls, The World to Come is more a journal with faded photographs than a past made vividly present.
  57. Lapsis
    A refreshing instance of world building where the emphasis is on satirical wit, activist smarts and character, it feels like one of those movies we’ll be looking at decades from now and, however tech has transformed our lives, saying “Yeah, ‘Lapsis’ had that.”
  58. The Mauritanian
    The Mauritanian is a moral muddle as well as a narrative one, and it leaves you wondering why our empathy for Slahi has to be so mediated, negotiated and rationalized in the first place.
  59. French Exit
    The misadventures of the eccentrically wealthy may not exactly fit the mood right now, but the new French Exit is so genuine in its mix of arch and earnest, idiosyncrasy and earthiness that it creates a space all for itself.
  60. To All the Boys: Always and Forever
    Returning director Michael Fimognari and screenwriter Katie Lovejoy have made a love letter to all of these characters — not just Lara Jean and Peter — and audiences will find it hard not to be smitten too.
  61. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    This friendship comedy in which best friends Barb (Mumolo) and Star (Wiig), do, indeed, go to Vista Del Mar, is so outrageously infectious the only choice is to submit to its kooky charms.
  62. Earwig and the Witch
    If pitted against other entertainment aimed at young viewers with much less panache, “Earwig and the Witch” wins, at least in conceptual adventurousness. Even if far from being top-tier Ghibli, it’s not without its fantastical pleasures.
  63. Life in a Day 2020
    Even as the concept of crowdsourcing isn’t as novel as it was at the time of the film’s predecessor and the 90-minute running time can feel unnecessarily expansive given the repetition of those pandemic-related sequences, “Life in a Day 2020” nevertheless serves as a telling time capsule. The world has never felt so compact.
  64. Dear Comrades!
    Konchalovsky has said that he meant to recapture the look of films from the ’60s, but these crisp, high-contrast images speak to another impulse as well: to look into a past shrouded in the fog of delusion and doublespeak, and to see through it with a clarity that burns and even heals
  65. Cowboys
    Despite the film’s compact length, it contains a wealth of tense action, complex emotion, deft observations, vital messaging and gorgeous vistas.
  66. Dead Pigs
    Dynamic in a Hollywood-friendly manner, the film has a deliberately broad tone, but by no means does that detract from its thematic acumen.
  67. The Map of Tiny Perfect Things
    The Map of Tiny Perfect Things mingles happiness and sadness as easily as it does genres, ultimately resulting in a film that is its own little joy.
  68. Music
    While the movie is hit and miss, under the rookie’s direction, several veteran actors still turn in solid work.
  69. Land
    Land is a movie of hard truths that go down a little too easily, a story as terse but never as elemental as its title.
  70. The Wanting Mare
    It’s remarkable how fully fleshed out Bateman’s hell-scape is, given that much of this movie was shot in an empty storage facility. There’s something haunting and poetic too about the simplicity of this story, which is primarily about how people find reasons to persevere once they find a companion.
  71. Bliss
    Convoluted doesn’t begin to describe the sci-fi drama Bliss, which starts off intriguingly enough but loses its way once it attempts to explain itself, before surprising us entirely in the end — and not in a particularly satisfying way. How this loopy film got made may prove its biggest mystery.
  72. Rams
    Rams isn’t earth-shattering, but real-feeling and engaging, with a strong cast and fine sheep and a good dog.
  73. M.C. Escher: Journey To Infinity
    M.C. Escher: Journey to Infinity succeeds where so many documentaries about artists fail: It provides real insight into the art. It’s a welcome trip for those fascinated by his iconic, mind-bending depictions of illusions, evolutions and eternal cycles.
  74. Falling
    Ultimately, this grueling, overlong picture — think a chamber piece but with multiple characters and locations — never zeroes in on what it wants us to think or feel about Willis or John. But if it’s sympathy, it doesn’t get there.
  75. Dara in Jasenovac
    The veneer of historical reality is thin on the baldly nativist and manipulative Serbian World War II movie Dara of Jasenovac, a slickly made extermination camp drama about child peril that will test the patience of even the most rigorous students of cultural representations of genocide.
  76. A Glitch in the Matrix
    While the doc may be overlong, it’s consistently fascinating because of its implications.
  77. Two of Us
    Two of Us is one of those artfully crafted movies that never plays as such, because its proud, beating heart is so front and center, and its faith in the power of love and desire so energizing.
  78. Judas and the Black Messiah
    As reinforced by every capacious widescreen frame of Sean Bobbitt’s cinematography, the movie is both a portrait and a panorama, a story about Black self-determination as an individual and collective enterprise.
  79. Rocks
    Heartfelt but not cloying, Rocks is a radiant must-see.
  80. Softie
    For Mwangi, Softie serves as testament of the domesticity he’s been absent from to satisfy the demands of his thankless vocation. But for the rest of us, it stands as a portrait of the kind of selfless, unifying and much-needed patriotism, from both Mwangi and Njeri, that could enact improvement if more subscribed to it wholeheartedly.
  81. True Mothers
    In Kawase’s delicate hands, however, it breathes with an everyday poignancy.
  82. The Human Factor
    An engrossing peek inside the Mideast peace talks during the Clinton administration.
  83. The Night
    A goosebumps-inducing affair, The Night is at its most effectively unsettling when the focus is to evoke fear as opposed to when it physically shows what’s haunting the characters trapped in their respective secret tragedies. Their unseen demons spook harder.
  84. The Dig
    Sometimes you just don’t want a movie to end. The characters are so vivid and multidimensional, the milieu so inviting, the circumstances so compelling, you don’t want to let go. The Dig, starring Carey Mulligan and Ralph Fiennes, is such a movie.
  85. Beginning
    There is cruelty here but also tenderness, and hellish images that are followed by glimpses of a terrestrial paradise.
  86. Palmer
    The frankness with which Palmer addresses the very adult challenges that kids sometimes face is refreshing, not to mention the ways that kids can influence adults about living life authentically, before the undue influence of strict social norms takes hold.
  87. Finding 'Ohana
    While its beats are familiar, TV director Jude Weng’s debut feature diverges from its well-worn path when it matters, staying true to its heart and love of Hawaiian culture.
  88. Saint Maud
    In only an hour and 24 minutes, Glass has crafted a film rich in history, reference, psychology, spirituality, style and even some gore, but it never overstays its welcome, recognizing that less is more.
  89. Notturno
    Of course, our desire to know more may be the aim in his making art out of civilization’s rubble — that he can get us to pay attention through the sheer majesty of how he pays attention, hopefully making for true engagement, not mere spectating. Still, sometimes you just want more than what you’re given. That’s human too.
  90. The Little Things
    The Little Things has a couple of hair-raising scenes and a few nifty, low-key twists in store, though little about the overall experience of watching it can really be called surprising. I don’t mean that as a knock. The pleasures and comforts of crime fiction, even with the built-in expectations of suspense and revelation, are not always dependent on novelty.
  91. Penguin Bloom
    Aided by its deft performances, the film manages its tricky emotional territory with aplomb, rarely dipping into sentimentality or easy conciliations.
  92. You Will Die At Twenty
    A vibrant and transfixing revelation, You Will Die at 20 is as novel a vision as we may see this year. From its meaningful ideas on the here and the hereafter, its lesson for Muzamil is that after perishing a rebirth may follow.
  93. Breaking Fast
    Mosallam’s incisive and heartfelt, if occasionally on-the-nose, approach to matters of love, religion, family and culture sets the film apart.
  94. Identifying Features
    Hypnotic and heartbreaking, Identifying Features is a feature debut to marvel at, but only once you’re able to shake off the bone-deep chills emanating from Mexican filmmaker Fernanda Valadez’s disorienting tale of a mother’s search for her missing son.
  95. Atlantis
    What exists in this visualized afterward may not look like anything, but that’s why we’re fortunate to have artists like Vasyanovych to show us what’s dazzling, strange, tragic, comic, touching and eventually optimistic about the way forward.
  96. The White Tiger
    The movie naturally pulses with life and energy, invigorated by its narrative sweep, its nimble camerawork and propulsive musical score composed by Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. But Bahrani scrupulously resists the temptation to turn India into a flashy, exoticizing spectacle, as more than a few critics accused “Slumdog Millionaire” of doing.
  97. Malcolm & Marie
    Zendaya . . . has a way of rendering dialogue irrelevant. She holds a closeup here more skillfully and naturally than her co-star does, and her silence proves far more eloquent than his words. And those words turn out to be the undoing of Malcolm & Marie, not just because there are so many of them, but because they feel like the building blocks of a meta-movie parlor trick, an intellectual exercise that exists for no purpose other than its own justification.
  98. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    As its delightfully loquacious title suggests, Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is both methodical and enigmatic. It’s a movie that sees no real contradiction between the rational and irrational, only degrees of difference. The instinctive intelligence and curiosity that Márta brings to her emotional investigation, tempered by the kind of humility that only comes with great knowledge, is what makes her such an involving protagonist — someone you naturally want to follow down any rabbit hole that may present itself.
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