Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,520 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 16520
  2. Mixed: 5,806 out of 16520
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16520
16520 movie reviews
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  1. Kaye Ballard - The Show Goes On
    Perhaps, despite its lack of structure, the film will inspire a new generation to investigate this funny lady who could sing the lights out.
  2. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    The most important thing is that it is genuinely great, a singular and moving glimpse of loneliness, community and finding the strength to face another day.
  3. Relic
    For most of its running time, Relic feels more like a chamber piece than a full-fledged horror outing, but a nail-biting third act ups the ante.
  4. Palm Springs
    For a movie this fleet and funny (it’s a snap at 90 minutes), Palm Springs is surprisingly ripe for metaphorical plucking.
  5. The Old Guard
    It’s the rare superhero movie in 2020 that can leave you wanting to see more, closing-credits kicker and all.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Mucho Mucho Amor
    While the documentary recounts the arc of the astrologer’s life, with vintage video that is a veritable feast of over-the-top Mercado-ian aesthetics, it focuses — most compellingly — on his final years.
  7. Greyhound
    Schneider’s direction is taut, limiting much of the action to the confined spaces of the ship’s bridge and its vantage points. The close quarters ratchet up the tension and intimacy of a space where everyone can see you sweat.
  8. Family Romance, LLC
    In the final act, the film embraces some of those larger points, and Herzog ends with a striking final image leaving us to contemplate the transactional nature and true cost of all human relationships.
  9. The Truth
    Kore-eda furthers his storied reputation as an artist humanely attuned to what transpires between those who know each other all too well.
  10. The Outpost
    The Outpost is a visceral battle picture but little more.
  11. All I Can Say
    That Hoon lived such a prototypically rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle, while simultaneously commenting on it — he notes his first broken hotel room mirror — is fascinating. And heartbreaking.
  12. The 11th Green
    There are a number of sharp political and philosophical points made, but they are undercut by “The 11th Green’s” overload of history, speculation and fantasy that strands it in a narrative Bermuda Triangle.
  13. Mr. Jones
    Though it’s a shame that Mr. Jones is not more cohesive, the remarkable story of Gareth Jones retains its potency. It’s a bracing reminder that we can never allow the advocates of truth to be silenced.
  14. Unsettled: Seeking Refuge in America
    In sharing these often harrowing stories, “Unsettled” paints a sobering but ultimately hopeful portrait of possibility for those who are allowed to enter.
  15. Welcome to Chechnya
    As in his previous films, the Oscar-nominated "How to Survive a Plague” and “The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson,” France, an investigative reporter, presents ordinary citizens doing remarkable things. If only our governments could learn to follow suit.
  16. Hamilton
    One of the show’s more obvious lessons is that history is a living, breathing entity, and that the cyclical rise-and-fall narratives of leaders and empires can be studied and recounted in ways that uncover bold new patterns of meaning. This film, a straightforward capture of a momentous work of art, illuminates those patterns in ways both sobering and thrilling.
  17. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
    Inspired moments can be found throughout “Eurovision” if you have the patience.
  18. The Audition
    There’s a special thrill in seeing an actor known for her own eerie perfectionism playing a woman who can’t abide imperfection in herself or others.
  19. My Spy
    The slapstick generally works and the movie milks Bautista’s sheer size and roughness, compared with tiny Coleman’s crafty fearlessness. Much of the story is telegraphed, but it’s not about shocks or surprises. It’s a charming diversion stocked with people who are fun to watch.
  20. Irresistible
    If this misleadingly titled movie is meant to be a whimsical Capra-esque fantasy, as the production notes suggest, then why does it make such a show of its topical relevance? If it’s meant to lay bare the realities of the system, as the production notes also suggest, then why does it feel so toothless and inconsequential?
  21. Michael Jackson's Journey from Motown to Off the Wall
    Lee keeps his celebration smart and not soppy. He gets you excited, makes you feel the moment, see what was new in it, why it mattered.
  22. If God Is Willing and da Creek Don't Rise
    Lee has sacrificed some clarity for inclusiveness; this is the document as monument, artful and rough by turns, and determined to be as big as its subject.
  23. Wasp Network
    It covers a lot of ground in a skin-deep manner that’s more useful as an intensive overview of the events — if you manage to keep track of who is working for which organization at any given time and why.
  24. Babyteeth
    Mendelsohn and Davis, among the finest Australian actors working today, are both awfully good at villainy, which is why their characters’ emotional restraint and fundamental decency here feels refreshing as well as true.
  25. Disclosure
    An engrossing, smartly contextual look at the history of transgender depictions in film and television.
  26. Miss Juneteenth
    The writer-director Channing Godfrey Peoples, making her feature debut, has a deft way with understatement, and here she casts an affectionate, gently ambivalent eye on the traditions and rituals that have long held sway in a small Fort Worth community.
  27. You Should Have Left
    Unfortunately, the movie’s thriller elements amount to pale reflections of many other works.
  28. 7500
    The cast, especially Gordon-Levitt and Memar as Vedat, the youngest of the hijackers, excel at combining drama and physicality. Rather than the over-choreographed fight scenes of most Hollywood movies, the violence here is clumsy, painful and visceral.
  29. Sometimes Always Never
    There’s a terrific ensemble — including Ella-Grace Gregoire as a girl Jack has a crush on — but it’s Nighy who will have you enthralled. He delivers a subtle, nuanced performance that allows the actor to shine while in full support of his costars.
  30. Exit Plan
    There is real potential in this premise, and a few flickers of genuine artfulness, but the storytelling is frustratingly abstruse, making for an Exit Plan that’s a real missed opportunity.
  31. Aviva
    The film fails to coalesce largely because viewers are left to wonder what joins the couple in the first place.
  32. Artemis Fowl
    This is not a “but the book was better” argument. It’s simply that by abandoning the original character and cobbling together broken story shards and spare parts, Branagh and company have produced something off an assembly line: safe, generic and utterly disposable.
  33. Marona's Fantastic Tale
    While it’s sometimes dizzying in its visuals or its joy, it’s often not cute. It can be fun, even exhilarating. It can also carry the emotional impact of loss.
  34. Da 5 Bloods
    The tonal shifts can be so abrupt as to induce whiplash, not to mention a kind of moral and narrative chaos, which seems to be very much to the movie’s point. The rich, tumultuous history of Black life over the past century could certainly find a worse cinematic analogue than this heady swirl of wry comedy, seductive music, ferocious argument and devastating carnage.
  35. The Trip to Greece
    It’s a simple recipe and remarkably effective.
  36. The King of Staten Island
    The King of Staten Island works hard to strike its own artful balance of humor and heartache, qualities that both seem permanently etched in Davidson’s face. Part of the movie’s inevitable fascination is the question of how much is made up and how much might be rooted in lived experience.
  37. Judy & Punch
    The movie would like to see itself as a feminist allegory of abuse and systemic oppression, but it comes off as something far more scattered and unfocused.
  38. Tommaso
    The camera stays close to Dafoe for nearly every moment of the movie and he brings a compelling vibrancy to the screen. He somehow conveys both the tranquility of Tommaso’s current life and all that simmers just under the surface.
  39. Parkland Rising
    The documentary “After Parkland,” released in 2019, takes a more intimate approach to the lives lost. Parkland Rising, on the other hand, focuses on the activism and the political impact it had, an impassioned record of incremental change in an age of uncertainty. The fight continues.
  40. Shirley
    To some extent, Shirley delights in its own dissembling, but it also uses these complications to arrive at a place of startling truth. The sorcery in which Jackson claimed to dabble in real life finds a cinematic corollary in the movie’s bewitching late passages, which are by turns disorienting and illuminating.
  41. 2040
    Powered by unbridled optimism, Gameau defies skeptics by doing his homework and bringing receipts.
  42. And We Go Green
    The film frequently feels like a branding exercise but manages to remain entertaining and informative.
  43. Ursula von Rydingsvard: Into Her Own
    While director Daniel Traub has little time to dive too deeply, the documentary serves as a fascinating glimpse into an artist’s work, inspirations and process.
  44. Yourself and Yours
    Though it is only now receiving a U.S. release, it says something about the ever-prolific filmmaker’s consistency and extremely high level of proficiency that the film still seems fresh and enchanting, by turns delicate, romantic, mysterious, witty and crushing.
  45. The High Note
    The High Note, written by Flora Greeson, sits less comfortably on the fence between insiderish melodrama and broadly accessible crowd-pleaser.
  46. End of Sentence
    Hawkes is terrific with a softer-edged character than we’re used to seeing from the actor (“Deadwood,” “Winter’s Bone”). He’s heartbreaking in scenes where disappointment and resignation play across his face. Lerman is a fine foil, energizing scenes with his edgy impatience and willingness to be unlikable for the majority of the film.
  47. I Will Make You Mine
    More evolution than sequel, Chen maintains the laidback, low-fi charm and black-and-white aesthetic infused with Nakamura’s dreamy, pensive music but also grows the characters, infusing them with more narrative purpose.
  48. The Vast of Night
    Its achievement is predicated not on novelty, but on modesty — the way it manages, using little more than a terrific cast and a few shadowy, sparsely furnished rooms, to populate your mind’s eye with ominous visions.
  49. Screened Out
    The film drifts from grown-up to kid problems with mostly anecdotal evidence but very little science to back it up. It tries to cover too much ground in 71 minutes without going deeply into any of the areas it lightly explores.
  50. Military Wives
    No surprises await, but the performances by Scott Thomas, Horgan and company and some pleasant harmonizing make Military Wives palatable Memorial Day weekend viewing.
  51. The Painter and the Thief
    The result is a movie that feels both truthful and evasive, deeply moving and a little perplexing.
  52. The Lovebirds
    Rae and Nanjiani have a quicksilver chemistry, flashing from playful banter to genuine, hurtful arguing in an instant.
  53. Scoob!
    Scoob! was never going to be a great musical, but did it have to turn out to be just another superhero movie?
  54. The Wrong Missy
    The Wrong Missy is a lightweight throwaway, the kind of movie it is difficult to suggest one actually choose to watch, but if your algorithm somehow lands on it provides a certain harmless diversion.
  55. Valley Girl
    The original film was not a time capsule; it was a snapshot, capturing a unique time and place. The new film simply doesn’t have the same spark and energy.
  56. Spaceship Earth
    One way to approach Spaceship Earth, Matt Wolf’s layered, absorbing and sympathetic new documentary, is as a madly inventive primer on responsible dystopian-hermetic living. But the film — which is being shown at drive-in theaters, in pop-up cityscape projections and on multiple streaming platforms — would make for fascinating viewing under any circumstances.
  57. Working Man
    Once the movie shifts gears, it’s less about the working man and more about the human. That sounds like a good thing, but the further Working Man creeps into emotionally over-calibrated basic cable territory, the less real it feels.
  58. Driveways
    Driveways, a movie that’s poignant now for reasons we doubtless wish it weren’t, shows us how unlikely people can come together under imperfect circumstances and fit together perfectly. It also shows us how fleeting that perfection can be.
  59. Arkansas
    Amiably paced with comfortable, lived-in performances, Arkansas isn’t so much a crime drama or dark comedy as a depiction of a world in which illegal activities and their aftermath are simply part of a way of life.
  60. Blue Story
    It’s a Shakespearean rhapsody in indigo where love, friendship, betrayal and revenge swirl and blur with life-changing consequences.
  61. Becoming
    Some would call this picture flattering — not unflattering, anyway — though it strikes me as a believable picture of a person who doesn’t need flattery, either to look good or to feel good about herself.
  62. The Infiltrators
    With The Infiltrators there is an audacity, an unrestrained boldness, to both the events depicted onscreen and the way in which they are portrayed in the movie itself.
  63. All Day and a Night
    The beats of this story are easy enough to recognize, which is not to say that they’re formulaic. Sanders’ quietly mesmerizing performance refuses to let anyone cast Jahkor as either victim or villain, instead locating a tricky middle ground.
  64. Capital in the Twenty-First Century
    As directed by New Zealand filmmaker Justin Pemberton, “Capital” is a sleek tour of economic history over the last 400 years or so.
  65. The Wretched
    What the Pierce brothers lack in flavorful storytelling or compelling characters, they almost entirely make up for in good old-fashioned atmosphere and suspense. The Wretched rarely surprises, but it’s well-crafted enough to get under your skin anyway, with an able assist from the creepy camerawork of cinematographer Conor Murphy and unsettling score by Devin Burrows.
  66. Bull
    The relative lack of “action” in Bull does mean the audience has to make more of an effort to engage with the film. But like the recent arthouse favorites “The Rider” and “Lean on Pete,” this movie has a rare sense of place. It preserves an entire world and the fragile people within it.
  67. Tammy's Always Dying
    Tammy’s Always Dying is a richly observed comedy-drama. Johnson’s direction is intelligent and restrained.
  68. The Half of It
    Wu is confident enough to make the bold strokes her characters speak of and craft a movie that’s comfortably different.
  69. Pahokee
    With a patient and unobtrusive eye, filmmakers Lucas and Bresnan paint impressionistic portraits of a quartet of charismatic teenagers over the course of a pivotal school year.
  70. True History of the Kelly Gang
    True History of the Kelly Gang, for its part, strikes just the right balance of scary and crazy, and it subjects both to an impressive measure of discipline.
  71. Bad Education
    Bad Education reminds us how synonymous great acting and great lying can be. Jackman and Janney, both giving their richest performances in some time, manage to pull the wool over your eyes with one hand even as they teasingly pull back the curtain with the other.
  72. Chichinette: The Accidental Spy
    The highly decorated Cohn is a feminist heroine who definitely deserves her own cinematic close-up. This one’s a start, but perhaps there’s a star-driven narrative feature to be had that can more richly bring her striking story to life.
  73. Sergio
    Barker and Borten have chosen to retain the documentary’s framing device of the rescue attempt. In the nonfiction film, it served as a propulsive engine, carefully balanced against the interviews that told Vieira de Mello’s story and its tragic conclusion. Here, it feels abstract, disjointed from the scenes with him and Carolina, thus weakening and muddying the story.
  74. Extraction
    Extraction would be better if it just doubled down on being dumb. Instead, although the movie does indeed have some dazzling action sequences, they are interspersed with dramatic scenes that feel increasingly belabored, giving the movie a peculiar stop-start rhythm as it makes its way to a lumbering, extended gun battle final set piece.
  75. To the Stars
    It is a movie that will reward your patience.
  76. Circus of Books
    Rachel Mason performs a nice bit of misdirection with the film, starting with humorous juxtapositions of this nice, elderly Jewish couple running a gay porn shop and then moving toward a poignant story of acceptance.
  77. Why Don't You Just Die!
    Why Don’t You Just Die! is too cartoonish and glib to have much to say about Russia or about genre films in general. But it is stylish and snazzy — a confident throwback to the knowing exploitation pictures of yesteryear.
  78. The Willoughbys
    The film’s bright colors and blaring happy music may not be enough for viewers to overcome the rather unfunny themes of neglect (“Back up the abuse caboose”) routinely excused in more engaging fare.
  79. Strike
    The handcrafted feel of the film is mainly a virtue, setting it apart from the vast majority of animated fare.
  80. A White, White Day
    To ascribe easy labels to A White, White Day — to call it a study of masculine rage or a portrait of a community perched at the edge of the world — is to risk bleeding it of its elemental poetry.
  81. Abe
    It almost works as food porn when we spend some time in Chico’s kitchen, but we never linger long enough for the experience to marinate.
  82. The Booksellers
    D.W. Young’s lovely film introduces us to several sellers of rare books, New Yorkers, all of them smart and self-aware enough to know how they’re perceived. (There hasn’t been this much tweed in a movie since “Gosford Park.”)
  83. The Quarry
    An ambitious combination of suspense thriller and brooding treatise on existential themes, The Quarry feels like a throwback to the era of late-night cable movies, when art, ambition and genre pulp would often collide.
  84. Endings, Beginnings
    Endings, Beginnings has some genuinely engaging moments somewhere in between its beginning and its ending, but too much gets lost in a saggy, shaggy middle.
  85. Selah and The Spades
    As a character study, Selah and the Spades is more than requiem for a mean girl. Think the stylistic snappiness of “Brick” meets the fastidious world-building of “Rushmore” with a fourth-wall-bending feminist perspective and two young black female leads, and you’ve got “Selah.”
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beyond The Visible: Hilma af Klint
    It’s more than worth a look — not only for its careful illumination of the artist’s biography, plus an abundant representation of her luminous paintings, but for the way in which it exposes the obstacles af Klint and her legacy faced.
  87. Children of Paradise (1945)
    As a piece of romantic/dramatic cinema, its peers are few, its superiors simply nonexistent.
  88. Butt Boy
    Some might describe Butt Boy’s plodding, procedural-style storytelling as (ahem) assiduous, though I’d say constipation is the more appropriate metaphor: The story strains and clenches for more than an hour before finally reaching its bloody, long-overdue and admittedly eye-popping release.
  89. The Main Event
    The filmmakers cast several comic performers — Adam Pally as the dad, Tichina Arnold as the grandmother, Ken Marino as the bad guy — but there aren’t really opportunities for them to shine. Arnold seems to have the most fun with it. The Main Event, sadly, never gets off the mat.
  90. Love Wedding Repeat
    The obstacles here soon prove so contrived and the setups so schematic the movie can feel like a not-very-well-oiled, Rube Goldberg-like machine. And a predictable one at that.
  91. Tigertail
    What distinguishes “Tigertail” is the way Yang explores Pin-Jui’s earlier life as a means of showing how duty and obligation brought him to that place. And as Yang takes us on that journey with him, he also offers a low-key lesson for redemption — examine the past to escape regret.
  92. The Mindfulness Movement
    There’s merit — and in fact, real present need — for what The Mindfulness Movement is trying to say, but the film often gets in its own way.
  93. Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind
    This “Close Encounters” is overlong and rambling — more concerned with disconnected anecdotes than making a compelling case or telling an interesting story.
  94. The Lost Husband
    While nearly everything about The Lost Husband is pat and predictable, the movie’s easy to watch. Credit the charisma and polished professionalism of Bibb and Duhamel.
  95. We Summon the Darkness
    We Summon the Darkness is fine throughout; but it peaks in its first third, when nothing much is happening beyond some very good actors recreating the small-town rock ’n’ roll lifestyle of the recent past.
  96. Stray Dolls
    Stray Dolls lacks some narrative momentum, as the characters drift from petty crime to petty crime and party to party. But the film has a remarkable sense of place.
  97. Sea Fever
    Writer-director Neasa Hardiman mostly keeps her debut feature at the level of a claustrophobic psychological thriller, saving her special effects budget for a few breathtaking undersea views of the glowing, multi-tentacled beastie. But after a fairly sedate start, the movie gets increasingly grim and violent.
  98. About a Teacher
    More aligned to the docudrama stylings of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach than the likes of a “Lean on Me” or “Stand and Deliver,” Harchol’s inspirational film eschews mainstream tropes in favor of a bracingly candid sociological study that has compellingly done its homework.
  99. Waldo on Weed
    There’s no definitive verdict on pot’s attributes here, but Waldo on Weed offers reasonable hope with discerning caveats.
  100. Trolls World Tour
    Despite the range of musical genres represented and the obsessive attention to visual detail, there is a bland, wearying homogeneity to the way Trolls World Tour looks and sounds.
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