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. Killerman
    Despite the presence of theoretically interesting elements such as dirty cops, amnesia and money-laundering, Killerman is two hours of pure boredom.
  2. Spider in the Web
    Spider in the Web is slow and talky; and though it delivers a few good twists, it’s not really made for adventure-seekers. Mostly, the movie’s a magnificent showcase for Kingsley, who’s always at his best when his characters look like they know something we don’t.
  3. Itsy Bitsy
    The gothic atmosphere and the disgustingly gooey special effects are the main attraction. The existential dread is just an extra.
  4. The Fanatic
    It’s probably for the best that The Fanatic is so terrible. If it were made with any actual care, it’d be offensive instead of just dumb.
  5. Angel of Mine
    A terrific cast and a rich sense of atmosphere do a lot to keep the Australian drama Angel of Mine suspenseful, even when the plot’s barely developing.
  6. Before You Know It
    It’s a charming and quirky New York tale, if a bit disorganized, finding its voice when it quiets down to just listen to the three women at the center of the story.
  7. Bennett's War
    The film is content to sluggishly go through its preordained paces without bothering to take any compelling detours.
  8. Don't Let Go
    The time-traveling investigation is indeed optimistic, but in reality and execution, it’s just magical thinking wrapped up in a fussy, overly convoluted plot.
  9. Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool
    The considerable achievement of “Birth of the Cool” comes from the way it understands those words and places them in the context of American history. You’ll want to listen to Miles’ music after watching the film and, when you do, you might feel it a little deeper.
  10. Official Secrets
    A model of professionalism and energy, Official Secrets moves along at a brisk clip. It’s paced like a police procedural, but it focuses not on an investigator but rather a moral exemplar who takes a principled stand in defiance of the price that has to be paid.
  11. Overcomer
    Kendrick’s film eventually finds its legs in the final stretch, with an emotionally effective conclusion that might persuade even the cynics to its cause. Whether it converts them to running or to Christ will depend on the viewer.
  12. Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles
    This engaging and enlightening documentary is stuffed with anecdotes, history and information. It makes excellent use of both new interviews and carefully selected archival footage to reveal the building blocks of all this accomplishment.
  13. Adam
    The resulting film is tenderly provocative and markedly vital.
  14. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    A singular amalgam of humor, heartache and self-help that won the U.S. dramatic audience award at Sundance, “Brittany” resolutely goes its own way, entertaining us as richly as anything that’s come out in awhile.
  15. This Is Not Berlin
    Somehow existing both inside and outside the moment, This Is Not Berlin is clear-eyed enough to see that rebellion has its joys as well as its limits, and that coming of age — which is to say, coming into one’s own — means learning to recognize the difference.
  16. Jacob's Ladder
    The new Jacob’s Ladder is less strange and scary, and more mindlessly action-packed. It doesn’t feel like a dream. It’s more like hearing a stranger describe a dream.
  17. Jawline
    Jawline provides an evenhanded examination of celebrity and loneliness in the digital age.
  18. Asako I & II
    A peculiarly potent story about life’s unexpected little ruptures — those odd coincidences, repetitions and shifts in perspective that can set off aftershocks in the human heart.
  19. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    The emotion and the horror might have taken still deeper root if the world of the movie felt less hectic and more coherently realized, if the supernatural touches and occasional jump scares welled up organically from within rather than feeling smeared on with a digital trowel.
  20. Vision Portraits
    Evans has made a touchingly honest ode to the inner life of all artists.
  21. American Factory
    The real world is not a just or simple place, this thorough, compelling documentary points out, no matter how deeply we may wish it were.
  22. Ready or Not
    While the mocking tone mostly undermines any trenchant commentary, the strongest impression Ready or Not leaves, thanks to Weaving’s eye-rolling, primal-screaming, evil-giggling performance, is of the cathartic, transformative female rage at the center of it all.
  23. Sextuplets
    The movie surely isn’t meant to be mean. But there’s an underlying sourness that makes Sextuplets much less fun than the pictures it’s imitating.
  24. Awake
    The acting’s either overly muted or awkwardly broad (with terrible Southern accents throughout, for no real reason). The slack pacing drains the movie of its urgency. This is a neo-noir that never generates any spark.
  25. One Last Night
    While the tone of One Last Night is appropriately breezy — and while newcomer Schank makes a wonderful first impression — in a “strangers spend a long evening talking” story, the characters should be more witty and wise, and not as vaguely defined as this pair.
  26. Low Low
    A lot of fledgling filmmakers make autobiographical movies or lean on genre, but Low Low follows a different path, empathizing with the worries and woes of some people whose lives are rarely reflected on screen.
  27. Aquarela
    it’s an unexpectedly unnerving film that’s at least as terrifying as it is beautiful.
  28. Gwen
    McGregor has a good command of horror’s visual and sonic cues.
  29. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
    A twisty, thorny new documentary that grips, jolts and exasperates in roughly equal measure.
  30. The Second Sun
    Save Mailer’s pushy “New Yawk” accent, the leads do what they can with their unconvincing characters and the rusty plot, but it’s a hopeless effort. Nice opening title sequence though.
  31. Jay Myself
    In Wilkes’ heartfelt thank you note of a film, time, art and space collide, though in the end, all things must pass.
  32. Kingdom
    Director Shinsuke Sato’s film may lack nuance, but fans of martial spectacles will have an enjoyable if exhausting time.
  33. Driven
    Driven, the year’s second DeLorean-inspired film, veers from glib comedy to character-driven drama to crime thriller, but director Hamm always has his hands on the wheel.
  34. Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles
    At its most absorbing, Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles makes it clear there are no easy answers, perhaps especially when the art itself isn’t easy.
  35. The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
    A deeper dive into Szeles’ ostensibly complex psychological makeup might have given the movie more heft, though Szeles, magician that he is, clearly remains more about the illusion than the reveal.
  36. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged
    Roberts, working with a much larger scenic and visual palette this time, seems adrift.
  37. Good Boys
    Stupnitsky and Eisenberg have deftly mined this space for laughs, and the seasoned comedy vets (“The Office,” “Year One,” “Bad Teacher”) deliver a joke-dense and highly original coming-of-age tale that’s sweet and sour in all the best ways.
  38. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    The film is not without its problems, but its focus on the power of a mother-daughter bond and what can befall creative people when they no longer create generates considerable emotion by the close.
  39. Blinded by the Light
    The reality of intergenerational conflict is a given for Blinded by the Light, but nothing can stand up to the transformative power of the Boss. You can take that to the bank.
  40. The Angry Birds Movie 2
    The complications are ludicrous, but the movie navigates them with cheek and verve, and the jokes land with surprising consistency.
  41. Wicked Witches
    Wicked Witches is almost like a segment from an old British horror anthology. It’s simple, direct, rich in local color and dripping with irony. But it’s been stretched to about triple its ideal length.
  42. Ode to Joy
    The movie was inspired by a real person but nearly everything that happens here plays as phony.
  43. The Tracker
    Lundgren can play these kinds of driven, tortured loners in his sleep. But he still needs a story worth telling, in eye-catching locations, with action sequences that pop. “The Tracker” has none of those three.
  44. Every Time I Die
    The film works well when it’s purely existential — just telling the story of a person with a hazy memory, trying to survive long enough to understand his own life.
  45. Nekrotronic
    Nekrotronic is “fun,” but often in an off-putting, aggressive way. The Roache-Turners have prioritized fleeting moments of gross-out humor and special-effects dazzle over a controlled pace, or careful world-building.
  46. After the Wedding
    In too many scenes Freundlich prefers the arch heaviness of pained expressions in posh surroundings when what you’re waiting for is the messiness of humans letting fly after their careful worlds have been upended.
  47. Piranhas
    Piranhas drags in moments, but it jumps from scene to scene as quickly as the boys weave through Naples on their scooters. The film races at speeds so fast that viewers won’t find themselves bored, even if they’re jarred a bit by the transitions.
  48. This Changes Everything
    Perhaps inevitably because it is dealing with a big issue, This Changes Everything suffers a bit from being all over the map, touching so many bases that, though each is important, they don’t all cohere into a whole.
  49. Angels Are Made of Light
    What is life like on the ground for ordinary people in another culture, another world? That’s been the bread and butter of observational documentaries for forever, but almost never is it done with the kind of beauty and grace filmmaker James Longley brings to his Afghanistan-set Angels Are Made of Light.
  50. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
    f you’re not in the mood for messages or social commentary, however, “Scary Stories” is still fertile enough with its accessible gross-outs and giggle shocks to serviceably add to a legacy of kid-centric mainstream mayhem Del Toro clearly loves.
  51. Light of My Life
    A heartrending survivalist saga positioned in the proximity of Debra Granik’s indie darling “Leave No Trace” and Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic novel “The Road.”
  52. The Art of Racing in the Rain
    The Art of Racing in the Rain, while a tearjerker, is a very strange movie, starting with its mouthful of a title.
  53. Brian Banks
    Conventional but effectively so, more tense and involving than might be anticipated as obstacles pile on obstacles, this emotionally affecting story knows enough not to push too hard and reaps the benefits from its relative restraint.
  54. The Peanut Butter Falcon
    LaBeouf brings the soul to The Peanut Butter Falcon, while Gottsagen brings the spirit.
  55. Socrates
    The writing by the director and co-scribe Thayná Mantesso is deft and pithy, and there’s a rawness of spirit in both the stellar central performance and the film’s social realist aesthetic.
  56. South Central Love
    South Central Love tries to deal with heavy issues with grace, but its clumsiness undercuts its message.
  57. One Child Nation
    The individual stories that make up One Child Nation, the worthy winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize for U.S. documentaries, illuminate an entire history of institutional corruption, medical brutality and pervasive misogyny — a history that was both masked and advanced by a national propaganda campaign of near-Orwellian absurdity.
  58. The Kitchen
    The gender politics are as appealing as the rock-solid trio of lead actors (Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss), even when the movie itself proves less than persuasive.
  59. La Flor
    La Flor, as sweeping and addictive as much of it is, doesn’t have the structural predictability that a more conventional serialized narrative does. It’s too freewheeling, too experimental, too eager to carve out fresh avenues of meaning. At a time when duration is no guarantee of depth, it’s the definition of a must-see.
  60. Otherhood
    Otherhood does have a few genuine and genuinely funny moments — thanks largely to its stars — but they’re overshadowed by the bad behavior of both the mothers and their sons.
  61. MOOP
    While Moop might appeal to the Burning Man die-hard set, or for aficionados of the tales of doomed, Sisyphean film productions, beyond that, it’s not much more than a minor curio.
  62. Kings of Beer
    Directed by Sean Mullin, this is 83 minutes of marketing for mega-brewer Anheuser-Busch InBev, but it’s made with enough skill that it might bring some former fans back to the fold.
  63. Ladyworld
    While “Mean Girls Apocalypse” sounds like a winning premise, and an incredible thought experiment, the result is something narratively slack and intensely off-putting, which no amount of excellent acting can save.
  64. Consequences
    For all its loaded potential to evolve into a gripping look at life in a correctional facility plus an atypical spin on gay longing, the film squanders much of its running time with thin, repetitive scenes of young men behaving badly.
  65. Love, Antosha
    You feel the love in Love, Antosha, that’s for sure. But you also feel something else, a sadness that is close to overwhelming. How could it be otherwise?
  66. Coyote Lake
    The setting and the characters are fairly unique. But they’re put to fairly mundane use, in service of a blah coming-of-age tale.
  67. 15 Minutes of War
    This movie is a broadly sketched but illuminating depiction of what happens when powerful nations grow weary of sorting through the subtleties of geopolitics and start letting heavily armed secret agents handle diplomacy.
  68. The Operative
    The movie hits all the right plot points but never connects them to a story with any kind of momentum or tension.
  69. Is That You?
    Sánchez really has something difficult but necessary to say here, about how sometimes an oppressive patriarchy endures because the people who benefit from it — even if just marginally — won’t let it stay dead.
  70. A Score to Settle
    Without Cage, there’d be almost no reason to see the by-the-numbers revenge thriller A Score to Settle. With him, the movie isn’t just watchable, it’s occasionally riveting.
  71. Union
    Apparently, at least 400 women fought as men during the Civil War, but the perplexing Union is not the exploration they deserve.
  72. Them That Follow
    A film as atmospheric as its title, Them That Follow is an ambitious and impressive independent production, where the creation of mood and place is so convincing it enables us to buy into a richly melodramatic plot about a taboo romance.
  73. A Faithful Man
    A tart, seriocomic morsel of desire and doubt.
  74. Tel Aviv on Fire
    Genial mirth and the nightmarish gloom of the Middle East do not sound like natural companions, but the droll and delightful Tel Aviv on Fire has made the impossible possible.
  75. Exit
    Vertigo-inducing set pieces help shape Korean disaster movie Exit and its distinctive threat into a simplistically digestible and ultimately predictable big-budget outing with a slight edge.
  76. Jirga
    A remarkable truthfulness shepherds Benjamin Gilmour’s tightly written and conscientiously produced drama Jirga as it renders an image of Afghanistan not as a ravaged battleground but as an arrestingly rich land.
  77. American Heretics: The Politics of the Gospel
    For anyone interested in politics, religion, American culture or the ever-overlapping space they occupy, this documentary has the potential to move hearts and minds.
  78. Cassandro, the Exotico!
    “Cassandro,” which recalls the grabbed verve of a ‘60s-era verité snapshot, charts the reluctant dimming of this extravagant icon with affectionate energy and lasting poignance.
  79. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    It’s like a “Fast & Furious” movie that’s been deconstructed and reassembled as a gleefully demented live-action cartoon.
  80. Luce
    Luce has a lot on its mind, and its desire to provoke and disturb is far from unwelcome. But in attempting to think outside the box, the movie may unwittingly trap itself inside one, too.
  81. Teacher
    Adam Dick makes a solid feature writing-directing debut with “Teacher,” a tense and propulsive thriller with several vital, provocatively rendered thoughts on its seething mind.
  82. The Ground Beneath My Feet
    Kreutzer, who wrote the screenplay, proves especially adept, in conjunction with editor Ulrike Kofler, at the natural suspense of pinging between Lola’s professional and personal lives, and where the vulnerabilities in one bleed into the other. It’s a steady tension that’s greatly enhanced by Kreutzer’s spatially conscious visual style.
  83. The Red Sea Diving Resort
    Interesting and timely, The Red Sea Diving Resort highlights the plight of refugees and casts those helping them in a heroic light, but it doesn’t quite deliver dramatically.
  84. Be Happy! (the musical)
    Repetitive lyrics, nonsensical camera angles and incomprehensible edits will leave viewers feeling anything but positive.
  85. Wish Man
    It’s a largely mechanical, on-the-nose, vaguely faith-oriented retelling of Shankwitz’s fraught life and the singular string of episodes that led the Arizona motorcycle cop to his true calling.
  86. Mike Wallace Is Here
    What results is a portrait of Wallace in effect in dialogue with himself, a presentation that puts viewers on edge a bit the way the man himself interacted with the world.
  87. Honeyland
    [A] lovely, heartrending movie.
  88. The Son
    Schindel succeeds at creating unnerving ambiguity aided by an ear-piercing score.
  89. See You Soon
    The whole film is a bizarre exercise in fantasy-building on a budget, from the computer-generated sets to the over-long, predictable story.
  90. Girls with Balls
    This is a deranged nightmare of wildness, as full of laughs as it is arterial sprays. It won’t be everyone’s cup of thé, but its joyously vulgar title probably deters those likely detractors anyway.
  91. Boi
    Its stylish features overpower its many attempts at philosophical depth.
  92. At War
    At War has plenty of cinematic energy for a movie devoted primarily to people shouting at, but mostly past, each other.
  93. Skin
    Bryon’s real experience is certainly incredible, but Nattiv’s in-your-face approach to every scene — literally so, since the frame is rarely anything but a sloppy, unimaginative close-up — strips this character study of believability, or any nuance or gathering power.
  94. Astronaut
    A sluggish drama about aging and holding onto your dreams.
  95. The Mountain
    You’ve probably figured out by now that “The Mountain” isn’t for everybody, but for the art-house faithful who like their critiques of American soullessness made with a humming austerity, this one’s a painstakingly designed (courtesy Jacqueline Abrahams) and visually transfixing beaut, even when it succumbs to its own zombified vibe toward the end.
  96. I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians
    The difficulty of turning mass spectacle into moral edification, of getting the public to think and care about history in ways that go beyond simple-minded patriotism, is a problem that this brilliantly multifaceted picture both critiques and embodies.
  97. The Great Hack
    The Great Hack couldn’t be more timely, or unsettling. An intentionally disturbing examination of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, it both explains and offers a warning shot about the misuse of personal data and how that influenced past elections and might well do so in the future.
  98. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    Tarantino was a boy of 6 in 1969, living far from the center of Los Angeles, and in a sense what he’s done here is re-create the world he’s imagined the adults were living in at the time. If it plays like a fairy tale, and it does, don’t forget the first words in the title are “Once Upon a Time.”
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