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. Sauvage / Wild
    Vidal-Naquet’s film knows that every wound and balm to the flesh is also one to the spirit.
  2. Pacifiction
    In scene after scene, Serra holds beauty and menace in a kind of uneasy equilibrium. He’s made a trouble-in-paradise movie where the trouble doesn’t overwhelm the paradise so much as poison it, at an almost imperceptible slow drip, from the inside.
  3. The Flower of My Secret
    Beautifully wrought and wonderfully acted, The Flower of My Secret is in fact the kind of film that George Cukor often made - and he surely would have been delighted at Almodovar's deft blend of humor, tenderness and wisdom. [13 Mar 1996]
    • Los Angeles Times
  4. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
    Wolf’s strange, sad and finally exhilarating portrait is one of radical consumerism turned into a searchable legacy — the viewer as activist.
  5. Lovely & Amazing
    Like the best of personal, independent cinema -- it is both marvelously observed and completely individual. There is no film like this film, and that is something you don't hear every day.
  6. Knafayim Shvurot
    When the melodrama does get strong, and it does, when bad things happen on a dark and stormy night, we go with it rather than resisting. The film has won our trust, given some heft to its characters and involved us in their lives, come what may.
  7. Joy Ride
    Terrific escapist fare, stylish, outrageous and compelling.
  8. Lambert & Stamp
    Under their all-encompassing tutelage the band originally billed as the High Numbers would go on to international renown as the Who, and the extent to which Lambert & Stamp can take credit for that transformation is thoughtfully weighed in this revealing film.
  9. Stan & Ollie
    Propelled by lovely, engaging writing and wonderful performances, Stan & Ollie, the story of the bittersweet final bow of legendary duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, should move and delight fans of the beloved performers while enjoyably exposing the less initiated to these comedy giants.
  10. Undine
    Undine is a poker-faced fairy tale, a fantasy wrought by a committed cinematic realist. It’s an example of how a filmmaker can take an outlandish central idea and play it beautifully straight.
  11. Under the Tree
    Screenwriters Sigurdsson and Breidfjord are fiendishly good at imagining the complimentary ways things spiral out of control, and the actors are expert at making us believe in what the director accurately calls “a war film where home is the battlefield.” On another level, however, with situations so grotesque it is often an effort to laugh.
  12. Attack the Block
    Pulsing with a rowdy energy, the film works as both a sci-fi horror flick and a teen adventure film.
  13. Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes
    All in all, Burstein’s film feels big and perceptive, a love letter to a remarkable, interesting and very human human.
  14. Get Me Roger Stone
    [An] endlessly fascinating, bracingly up-to-the-minute Netflix documentary.
  15. The Count of Monte Cristo
    Delaporte and De La Patellière understand that Dumas’ type of novelistic revenge, whether froid or chaud, is best served onscreen in the most picturesque European locations, with cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc’s cameras ready to swoop and soar as needed, and paced to gallop, never dawdle.
  16. The Wolf of Wall Street
    A very fast three hours, Wolf is a fascinating, revolting, outlandish, uproarious, exhilarating and exhausting master work on immorality.
  17. 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.
  18. Zombi Child
    Even when the picture eludes your narrative grasp, its estimable craft — evident in the shadows of Yves Cape’s photography and the moody ambience of the score, which Bonello composed himself — exerts its own hypnotic pull. The director’s talent, as ever, is predicated on an avoidance of the obvious.
  19. Terror's Advocate
    It is the gift of Terror's Advocate, Barbet Schroeder's riveting new documentary, to simply present Vergès as is, to say "here is the man" and let things speak for themselves. Do they ever.
  20. Nothing Lasts Forever
    Kohn’s talking heads are remarkably animated and, collectively, the interviews present a provocative debate about the meaning of “valuable.”
  21. Time and Water
    Dosa’s film is a meditation on change — both the kind that we accept with a heavy heart and something more general. Time and Water is a curiously vibrant elegy, teeming with appreciation for the intimate majesty that is all life, generational and geologic.
  22. I don't feel at home in this world anymore.
    In the end, it is the wit, warmth and coherence of Lynskey’s performance that lends this violent comic scherzo both its cruelly demented narrative logic and its curiously cheery aftertaste.
  23. Dark Horse
    A sweet if underwhelming documentary with plenty of character, but told in such a simple and gentle way, it doesn’t quite grab audiences as it could.
  24. Sweet Land
    A type of American independent we don't see often enough.
  25. One Cut, One Life
    The film is an exploration of art as a way through immense and complex emotions. It is unexpectedly a breathtaking reminder of life's joys — in nature, in friendship and, in a particularly buoyant scene, in the bark of a deceased friend's poodle.
  26. The Two Popes
    Among the virtues of The Two Popes, a sparkling confection with a serious side, is that, given its prosaic title, its crowd-pleasing attributes come as pretty much of a surprise.
  27. Muscle Shoals
    Director Greg "Freddy" Camalier skillfully, unhurriedly unfurls a wealth of classic music-biz tales as told by a who's who of R&B, soul and rock 'n' roll royalty and various other players and purveyors.
  28. 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.
  29. Misery
    As compelling as Misery often is, I can't say that I really enjoyed it a whole lot. It's too flat-footed and vise-like. Reiner doesn't provide the kind of nasty, sophisticated finesse that might have lifted the film out of pulpdom and into more Hitchcockian terrain. [30 Nov 1990, p.F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  30. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
    At the film's heart is a fitful conversation that unfolds like a string of koans, epigrams, jokes and silences.
  31. Win Win
    Pure pleasure to experience. Written and directed by Tom McCarthy with an impeccable feel for off-center human comedy at its funniest and most heartfelt, its low-key qualities are so relaxed and unforced every moment feels like a gift.
  32. Clean
    Clean is one of those movies that's slightly off the mark in ways that are hard to put a finger on, but it is shot so soulfully and features such beautiful performances that it's easy to forgive the occasional false note.
  33. A Cry in the Dark
    With the same painstaking care that made John Bryson’s “Evil Angels,” the book on which the film is based, incontrovertible, Schepisi builds his mosaic with Australian faces and voices crisscrossing every social class and occupation.
  34. David Lynch: The Art Life
    Lynch devotees should dig this respectful, offbeat portrait.
  35. Heaven Knows What
    Despite the undeniable novelty of having Holmes on hand to keep it real, the absence of traditional character development ultimately takes its toll on viewer empathy.
  36. 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.
  37. Touch the Sound: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
    A potent and imaginative creative biography of virtuoso percussionist Glennie.
  38. Jing Ke ci Qin Wang
    A stirring, thought-provoking feat of filmmaking, accomplished in every facet.
  39. The Cider House Rules
    That Irving adapted his novel to the screen himself and, even more, that Hallström directed it, makes Cider House a far better film than other film adaptations of Irving's work.
  40. Tumbleweeds
    One of those wonderful, deeply personal pictures that pop up every now and then to lift your spirits.
  41. Croupier
    Intense, hypnotic, assured, Croupier mesmerizes from its opening image of a roulette ball on the move.
    • Los Angeles Times
  42. Girl on the Bridge
    Locale is crucial here, and Monte Carlo, Athens and Istanbul are a wonderful trio of cities for glamorous romance, intrigue and danger--and they could not seem more richly atmospheric with Dreujou's lush camerawork.
  43. Fyre
    Fyre makes sure not to lose sight of the hard-working Bahamians who tried hard to make things work and paid a considerable financial price.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Last Summer
    If anything, Last Summer is more commercial-looking and less shocking than much of Breillat’s previous work, but her eye and her insights are sharp as ever.
  45. Félicité
    If the movie’s form is a rich weave of grotty realism and soulful musical, the story itself is remarkably simple.
  46. The Crucible
    But whenever a film has hysteria as its subject, as this one does, the danger exists that it will become hysterical itself, and “The Crucible,” all its promise notwithstanding, falls into that trap with a demoralizing thud. Rife with screaming fits and wild-eyed rantings, this film is too frantic to be involving, too much an outpost of bedlam to be believable.
  47. Goodbye to Language 3D
    Always looking forward, Godard remains remarkably capable of seeing the world and thinking about filmmaking with clear eyes and fresh ideas.
  48. Time to Choose
    Most of Time To Choose is concerned with demonstrating that, as more than one speaker says, every crisis is an opportunity. That for every human action that increases global warming there are already workable alternatives in place just waiting to be embraced by a wider constituency.
  49. The French Dispatch
    If he is trying to say something (and it’s unclear what that might be), all of the fuss and muss obfuscates any message, and even worse, any emotional connection to the film. This latest dispatch is indeed a profound disappointment.
  50. Under The Wire
    Under the Wire brings a vivid immediacy to this tragic event. Conroy speaks candidly to the responsibility that he feels to survive and to tell the stories of the others, a task that he will carry with him for the rest of his life.
  51. Lost in La Mancha
    Records an accident while it's happening, revealing a situation that makes you laugh again and again while weeping, metaphorically at least, for the sheer frustration of it all.
  52. Blue Velvet
    The most brilliantly disturbing film ever to have its roots in small-town American life. [19 September 1986, Calendar, p.6-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  53. Bernie
    This is writer-director Richard Linklater at his wry, whimsical best, and considering he was the filmmaker behind 1993's "Dazed and Confused," that makes the movie something of a milestone.
  54. Jinn
    Jinn is a familiar story, told in a cultural context rarely depicted on film, and Mu’min’s approach is so lyrical and empathetic that it feels completely fresh and new. It’s a remarkable film with sensitive and stirring turns by Renee and Missick in the mother-daughter roles.
  55. Road to Morocco
    Road to Morocco is light and airy family entertainment, yet at a time when the Production Code was at its height of power, it is surprising what Crosby and especially Hope, of course, manage to suggest. [07 Jun 2001, p.34]
    • Los Angeles Times
  56. Chasing Ice
    The before and after imagery of Balog's project speaks for itself, with the power and strange beauty of the evolving landscape strong evidence that something is indeed happening, now and fast.
  57. Bridesmaids
    From the first overheated moments of Bridesmaids...it's clear we're in for that rarest of treats: an R-rated romantic comedy from the Venus point of view.
  58. Fever Dream
    Elegantly intoxicating in its atmospheric construction, “Fever Dream” maintains its incantation to its very final twist. Even as clues inch us closer to a logical explanation for the collective malaise, the mystical undercurrent Llosa sets in place fosters our doubt.
  59. Benedetta
    Verhoeven clearly wants us to laugh; the movie’s a gas. But he doesn’t mind if we think too — about the earthy realities of the body, the higher abstractions of the soul and all the thornily ambiguous ways they do and don’t connect.
  60. A Wounded Fawn
    The film is really all of a piece in the way it toys with expectations, keeping viewers off-balance. Stevens and company put the audience in the place of both the predator and prey. They’ve built a clever little anxiety-generating machine.
  61. Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion
    The most comprehensive and devastating documentary yet on that tragic country.
  62. Queer Japan
    There’s a lot to see and to think about here, all well-curated by a documentarian with a clear passion for his subject.
  63. The Invisible Woman
    The Invisible Woman is an exceptional film about love, longing and regret. It's further proof, if proof were needed, that classic filmmaking done with passion, sensitivity and intelligence results in cinema fully capable of blowing you away.
  64. Tully
    It's one of the more viscerally accurate portraits of parenthood, and specifically motherhood, that the movies have recently given us.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Elizabeth
    Period movies inevitably reflect more about the period in which they're made than the period of their subject, and rarely has that been more evident -- or more distracting -- than it is with Elizabeth.
  66. Separated
    One wishes that space in Separated had been saved instead for real stories told by the policy’s victims, or perhaps more historical context. Nonetheless, what we glean from the totality of the interviews and research, and Morris’ well-honed style of coalescing information, is damning enough.
  67. Pleasure
    A stirring debut by both Thyberg and Kappel and a daring picture that makes you love it, not for tawdry reasons but for all of the truthful crimes, perils and delights it covers.
  68. The Muppets
    For all its sharpness, the movie has a very sweet streak.
  69. Time Out of Mind
    Given what it attempts, Time Out of Mind should be considered a success. An attempt to use a movie star to shine a dramatic light on the intractable problem of urban homelessness, the film's tone of austerity helps it to avoid sentimentality and simplistic answers.
  70. Darkest Hour
    From its grab-for-all-the-gusto Gary Oldman performance to its direction by Joe Wright, Darkest Hour is nothing if not an energetic, showy piece of work, but some types of showy have more staying power than others.
  71. Dirty God
    Polak’s film is an unflinching exploration of beauty, identity, sex and self in the wake of a life-changing event.
  72. The Automat
    [A] lovely, deeply nostalgic tribute.
  73. An Inconvenient Truth
    Although the message of the film sounds bleak, it is actually quite rousing.
  74. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    What has resulted is a blistering film you feel in the pit of your stomach, a jumpy, edgy piece of work that thrusts us into a personal maelstrom so tortured and intense, the emotions could be spread with a knife.
  75. Twelve Monkeys
    Mystifying, intriguing, even infuriating, it shows what happens when an unconventional talent meets straightforward material.
    • Los Angeles Times
  76. Nimona
    Nimona is imaginative and boisterous, just like its main character — the kind of inspirational free spirit who gets a kick out of shocking and tormenting anyone who won’t just let her be who she is.
  77. Make It Funky!
    There's not a second in the film that isn't a reminder that New Orleans in its architecture, cuisine and multicultural diversity as well as in its music is a unique and major American center of culture. Murphy has made a film more valuable than he surely ever could have imagined.
  78. Enchanted
    Enchanted is as good as its name.
  79. Kippur
    A classic war film, at once elegiac and immediate, that takes you smack into the chaos of combat yet is marked by a detached perspective.
  80. Lawless Heart
    Charming, disarming and in some ways humbling film.
  81. The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi
    Kitano uses exaggerated acting, choreo-graphed violence and, most radically, the rhythms of everyday life -- farmers pounding the earth, the syncopated plop of falling rain -- to turn this genre story into a crypto-Kabuki play and one blissfully idiosyncratic diversion.
  82. Shrek 2
    Its cleverness and its good heart enable it to overcome a slow start, which is how all good fairy tales end.
  83. I Shot Andy Warhol
    Might have benefited from a more satirical edge.
  84. The Strange Case of Angelica
    This fresh, highly original film, inspired by Oliveira's substantially different, never-filmed 1952 script, has been made with the greatest of ease and simplicity and with drollery and wit, yet its underlying impact is profoundly spiritual.
  85. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    It has opulent, stylized settings of elegance, grandeur and scope, flawless special effects, and awesome martial arts combat staged by the master, Sammo Hung. Yet bravura spectacle never overwhelms either the plot or the key characters. Chang Chia-lu's intricate script bristles with wit and suspense; the film from start to finish is a terrific entertainment.
  86. I'll See You in My Dreams
    Director Brett Haley, who co-wrote the film with Marc Basch, has managed to create a film about those final years that gets to the heart of things like loss and love without patronizing or parody. No small thing to create a movie whose cast is mostly in their 70s yet whose story is so relatable whatever your age.
  87. Our Little Sister
    A delicate, unforced meditation on the bonds of family and the joys and wonders hidden in everyday life, this film is able to move audiences without apparent effort, and that must be experienced firsthand to be appreciated and understood.
  88. Sound of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story
    Collectively, the mixed approaches illuminate a complicated man, at once spiritual and temperamental.
  89. Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures
    In the new documentary Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures, directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato do an ultra-fine job tracing a born provocateur's commitment to his calling.
  90. 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.
  91. Nico, 1988
    Dyrholm, an actress of formidable presence who expertly handles her own singing as well as the acting, gives a strong, truthful, unflinching performance that powers the film the way Christa's energy powered the bands she was in those late days.
  92. Santosh
    To watch Santosh is to feel the undeniable power of a discerning, resonant case study. To fully know this character, however, is a goal just outside this otherwise intelligently wrought movie’s considerable reach.
  93. Jean de Florette
    Jean de Florette is like good peasant bread: honest, chewy, unsurprising and heavily satisfying.
  94. Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost
    Stiller’s approach is musical; his assembly of clips and photos is musical — poetic, not prosaic
  95. Spy
    Spy may not be a great movie, but it is great fun. And at times it will have you wondering if there's that much of a difference.
  96. Lilo & Stitch
    Looser and less obviously formulaic in its fresh approach to our hearts, the brash Lilo & Stitch has an unleashed, subversive sense of humor that's less corporate and more uninhibited than any non-Pixar Disney film.
  97. A Chiara
    What’s best about A Chiara is its totality of naturalism and subjectivity — how it humanely complicates a teenager’s newfound self-possession, so that we admire her quest for clarity and reckoning about her family, while worrying how it will affect the decision she makes about her future.
  98. An Unreasonable Man
    Though the second half contains the fireworks, it's the film's first hour that is ultimately most memorable. Mantel and Skrovan do a commendable job in covering a lot of territory, mixing pertinent and entertaining archival footage with interviews.
  99. Night Moves
    What happens when a seemingly righteous operation goes wrong and anxiety threatens to overtake ideals? It is the question Night Moves asks and answers in chilling ways.
  100. Casualties of War
    It conveys a sense of moral quagmire, of sinking into squishily dangerous terrain, honeycombed with tunnels and traps, all hell exploding around it. That’s the imagery of the movie’s first battle scene, a taut prologue for a superb film.
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