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. Cutie and the Boxer
    For all of the eccentricities that come in any telling of an artist's life, Cutie and the Boxer's real magic is in so beautifully telling a familiar story of husbands and wives.
  2. Nebraska
    Nebraska offers something deeper and more mature, the ability to make us care about its characters and their story on a different level than Payne has given us before.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This Is Martin Bonner
    This Is Martin Bonner, wonderfully acted and something of a minimalist masterpiece, is a striking, moving ode to lives lived day to day, even hour to hour, in which the smallest gesture has the power to make one hopeful for the next, like a small fire gently stoked.
  4. Her
    Acerbic, emotional, provocative, it's a risky high dive off the big board with a plot that sounds like a gimmick but ends up haunting, odd and a bit wonderful.
  5. Heli
    Heli is a stunning piece of filmmaking. It's a hypnotic, starkly beautiful, often disturbing drama that puts a working-class Mexican family in the cross hairs of its country's drug war.
  6. Like Father, Like Son
    Powered by Kore-eda's innate restraint and natural empathy, Like Father, Like Son takes these characters to places they never expected to be. It's unnerving for them, of course, but watching so many hearts hanging in the balance is a rare privilege for us.
  7. Blue Is the Warmest Color
    The telling is beautiful and explicit. The truth of its emotionally raw, romantic drama is eternal and universal.
  8. Life Is Sweet
    You feel protective about Leigh's work because its almost indescribable virtues touch the heart, yet far from being some delicate flower, Life Is Sweet has the wild, brazen, anything-goes energy of a 2-year-old, willing to take chances that would freeze the blood of another, more timidly conventional film.
  9. Chungking Express
    Chungking Express ravishingly, seductively exudes the immediacy of everyday life as its spins its classically timeless tales of love lost and almost regained.
  10. Aliyah
    Tense, smartly crafted and highly resonant, Aliyah is one of the best films so far this year.
  11. Big Men
    When on-the-ground reality is conveyed with the complexity and fascination it is here, unforgettable documentaries are always the result.
  12. Wild Reeds
    The film perfectly understands the tentative experimentation and frequent self-loathing of adolescence, the difficulty of knowing whom to trust and how much to trust them, as well as how incendiary an age this can be, with uncertain psyches ready to explode at minimal provocation.
  13. Child's Pose
    A ferocious psychological drama with the pace of a thriller, Child's Pose combines, as have the best of the Romanian new-wave films, a compelling personal story about mothers and sons with an examination of socio-political dynamics in a way that is both intense and piercingly real.
  14. The Servant
    Glaciers might be melting, the polar caps might be crumbling, but not even the passage of half a century has taken the frozen edge off this brilliantly icy film.
  15. Best Kept Secret
    This is no sappy portrait of a saint: Mino is tenacious, critical and defensive, and in one memorable scene, a colleague tries to get her to face reality about what the real world holds for their students after graduation.
  16. Foxcatcher
    A despairing, intentionally disturbing film that draws us into a maelstrom of desperate emotions, it holds up a dark mirror to the American dream and does not like what it sees.
  17. First Cousin Once Removed
    Heartbreaking, haunting and unexpectedly heartening, First Cousin Once Removed is an uncommonly moving documentary portrait of a mind in disarray.
  18. The Wind Rises
    To see The Wind Rises is to simultaneously marvel at the work of a master and regret that this film is likely his last.
  19. 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.
  20. We Are the Best!
    Moodysson captures that moment — charged, goofy and transcendent — when personal style and wide-ranging outrage fuse in an all-encompassing manifesto.
  21. Under the Skin
    Watching this film feels like a genesis moment — of sci-fi fable, of filmmaking, of performance — with all the ambiguity and excitement that implies.
  22. The Square
    The Square bears witness to history in an articulate, thoughtful and intensely dramatic way.
  23. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    The writer-director's familiar style blends with a group of unexpected factors to create a magnificently cockeyed entertainment.
  24. Gone Girl
    Superbly cast from the two at the top to the smallest speaking parts, impeccably directed by Fincher and crafted by his regular team to within an inch of its life, Gone Girl shows the remarkable things that can happen when filmmaker and material are this well matched.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Intolerance
    As a medium for expressing art, moving pictures may not stand the test of time, but Intolerance is greater than any medium. It is one of the mileposts on the long road of art, where painting and sculpture and literature and music go jostling eagerly along together.
    • 99 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    City Lights
    Its last few moments are among the most brilliant (and risky) endings in film history.
  27. Mad Max: Fury Road
    Mad Max: Fury Road will leave you speechless, which couldn't be more appropriate. Words are not really the point when it comes to dealing with this barn-burner of a post-apocalyptic extravaganza in which sizzling, unsettling images are the order of the day.
  28. Tracks
    The desert trek in Tracks is as brutal as it is beautiful; the performance by Mia Wasikowska as raw as the reality. And the camels? If they don't steal your heart it must be stone-hinged.
  29. Inherent Vice
    Joaquin Phoenix and the terrific acting ensemble that joins him in this pot-infused '70s-era beach noir create such a good buzz you can almost get a contact high from watching.
  30. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    The director's surrealist portrait of modern times and the cult of celebrity is brilliant on so many levels that even the occasional downdraft can't keep Birdman from soaring.
  31. Boyhood
    An extraordinarily intimate portrait of a life unfolding and an exceptional, unconventional film.
  32. Carol
    Haynes understands that swooningly beautiful traditional technique bolstered by thrilling performances creates the greatest impact. He has made a serious melodrama about the geometry of desire, a dreamy example of heightened reality that fully engages emotions despite the exact calculations with which it's been made.
  33. Midnight Special
    Midnight Special announces the arrival of a filmmaker in total control of his technique as well as our emotions. A bravura science-fiction thriller that explores emotional areas like parenthood and the nature of belief, it's a riveting genre exercise as well as something more.
  34. A Most Wanted Man
    [A] crackerjack thriller, at once brooding, claustrophobic and unbearably tense.
  35. Clouds of Sils Maria
    Stewart does exactly what Valentine describes as Jo-Ann's great gift — she becomes the character, completing disappearing inside Valentine. It makes the interplay between Binoche, a master of that sort of disappearing act as well, and Stewart mesmerizing to watch.
  36. Two Days, One Night
    That Two Days, One Night retains such an organic sensibility, even with a major star in the lead, is credit to both filmmakers and actress.
  37. Mr. Turner
    Just as Turner's expressive, enthralling work changed the nature of painting, Mr. Turner, anchored in the rock of Timothy Spall's astonishing, Cannes prize-winning performance, pushes hard against the strictures of conventional narrative and ends up pulling us into its world and capturing us completely.
  38. The Skeleton Twins
    One of the better movies to come along this year.
  39. Love Is Strange
    In the hands of two of the craft's best, the most ordinary of moments become illuminating, penetrating.
  40. Calvary
    The film is then not so much a meditation but a reverie, a swirl of emotions and ideas, managing to be both calmly reflective and skittishly anxious at the same time. Calvary is a serious comedy, a funny drama, a ruminative film about life and a lively film about death.
  41. Whiplash
    It is one of those scorching films that burns through emotions, uses up actors, wrings out audiences. And the jazz, well, it has its own moments of brutal, breathtaking fusion.
  42. Low Down
    Low Down is one from the heart. It's a melancholy, evocative, beautifully made memory piece, unblinking and unromanticized, a lovely film that brings great emotion and a dead-on feeling for time, place and recaptured mood to a story that is as universal as it is personal.
  43. Ilo Ilo
    Ilo Ilo is writer-director Anthony Chen's first film, but breathtaking intimacy in storytelling is already second nature to him.
  44. Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
    Aatsinki is a work of cinéma vérité of the highest order: vivid, immersive and unflinching.
  45. Alphaville
    Alphaville is more than quintessential Godard. Despite its age it's that rare science fiction film that doesn't seem to have dated at all.
  46. Foreign Correspondent
    It's one of Hitchcock's most inventive works, a great favorite of French director Jean Renoir. [24 Sep 1995, p.71]
    • Los Angeles Times
  47. It Felt Like Love
    Hittman's debut isn't just a brilliantly tactile study of the mounting sexual curiosity and frustration of 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti); it's also an important landmark in the oft-ignored subgenre of realistic movies about female adolescence.
  48. Ida
    Spare, haunting, uncompromising, Ida is a film of exceptional artistry whose emotions are as potent and persuasive as its images are indelibly beautiful.
  49. Girlhood
    Beautifully observed, precisely directed and acted with wonderful conviction, it pulls us into the life of its protagonist in a deeply involving way.
  50. Hoop Dreams
    By focusing on the personal side of the city game, Hoop Dreams tells us more about what works and what doesn't in our society than the proverbial shelf of sociological studies. And it is thoroughly entertaining in the bargain.
  51. White God
    By turns Dickensian, Marxist and dystopian, it's a movie as deliriously unclassifiable as it is expertly focused in its desire to provoke and entertain.
  52. Silence
    Building implacable dread and tension from scene to scene, the story is as simple as its underlying ideas are endlessly complex.
  53. Level Five
    It humanely, intelligently questions the very nature of our desire to make sense of the past with the tools of the present, when the human mind remains the most aggressively obliterating battlefield of all.
  54. Wetlands
    Director and co-writer David Wnendt is after serious comedy here, a character study of psychic pain, wounds hereditary and self-inflicted, and body-conscious absurdity that treats the human condition with wry intelligence, not empty prurience.
  55. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is a marvel of Japanese animation, a hand-drawn, painterly epic that submerges us in a world of beauty.
  56. Last Days in Vietnam
    These stranger-than-fiction tales, piled one on top of the other in the most gripping way, not only mesmerize us, they also point up another of Last Days in Vietnam's provocative points, that the chaos surrounding the evacuation was, in effect, the entire war in microcosm.
  57. Phoenix
    Phoenix is an intoxicating witches' brew, equal parts melodrama and moral parable, that audaciously mixes diverse elements to compelling, disturbing effect.
  58. Top Five
    Top Five is fully loaded. The laughs are earned, the intelligence never disappears, all the performers shine. But Rock is the diamond — raw, rough and rare.
  59. While We're Young
    This delicious satire about aging hipsters and their discontents is everything we've come to expect from the best of Noah Baumbach, as well as several things more.
  60. A Most Violent Year
    A vibrant crime story filled to overflowing with crackling situations, taut dialogue and a heightened, even operatic sense of reality, A Most Violent Year captures us and doesn't let go.
  61. Ex Machina
    Shrewdly imagined and persuasively made, Ex Machina is a spooky piece of speculative fiction that's completely plausible, capable of both thinking big thoughts and providing pulp thrills. But even saying that doesn't do this quietly unnerving film full justice.
  62. Warsaw Uprising
    Warsaw Uprising is not only a unique, remarkably assembled documentary-narrative hybrid but also a powerful look at the personal and public devastation that can occur during wartime. Movies rarely feel as authentic as this.
  63. Virunga
    Urgent investigative report and unforgettable drama, Virunga is a work of heart-wrenching tenderness and heart-stopping suspense.
  64. Merchants of Doubt
    This enthralling film, based on the book by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, is as fascinating as it is horrifying.
  65. Night Will Fall
    Night Will Fall proves a riveting, devastating, heartbreaking and deeply important film, one that you will likely never forget.
  66. Song of the Sea
    Song of the Sea is a wonder to behold. This visually stunning animation masterwork, steeped in Irish myth, folklore and legend, so adroitly mixes the magical and the everyday that to watch it is to be wholly immersed in an enchanted world.
  67. The Cruise
    The Cruise validates beautifully a life that is its own validation.
  68. War for the Planet of the Apes
    It would be hard to overstate just how singular this picture feels in its seriousness of purpose and in its cumulative power to enthrall and astonish.
  69. Jason Bourne
    Made with a palpable sense of urgency, this tense, propulsive motion picture is a model of what mainstream entertainment can be like when everything goes right.
  70. Testament of Youth
    Unapologetically emotional and impeccably made in the classic manner, it tells the kind of potent, many-sided story whose unforeseen complexities can come only courtesy of a life that lived them all.
  71. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    A rare gem of a movie.
  72. The End of the Tour
    James Ponsoldt's magnificent The End of the Tour gives us two guys talking, and the effect is breathtaking.
  73. Tangerine
    With a witty and efficient script by director Sean Baker and co-writer Chris Bergoch, Tangerine peels back the curtain on a fascinating Los Angeles microculture.
  74. How to Change the World
    A fascinating, skillfully assembled chronicle of the rise and inevitable fallout surrounding the granddaddy of the environmental activism movement.
  75. Brooklyn
    A godsend for audiences who hunger for rich emotion presented with wit, grace and not a trace of sentimentality, Brooklyn illustrates the power of restraint in dealing with poignant, impassioned material.
  76. Steve Jobs
    Steve Jobs is a smart, hugely entertaining film that all but bristles with crackling creative energy. What it is not is a standard biopic.
  77. Boy Meets Girl
    The profoundly sensitive, often wryly funny look at friendship, romance, sexual attraction and gender identity carries themes and dynamics that feel as timeless as they do up-to-the-minute.
  78. Love & Friendship
    Love & Friendship is, first and foremost, a master class on the art of comic timing, in its filmmaking and acting.
  79. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    It's an act of defiance that's also a sublime piece of cinema, and it ranks among the director's finest work.
  80. 45 Years
    45 Years is a quietly explosive film, a potent drama with a nuanced feel for subtlety and emotional complications.
  81. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    Easily its most exciting iteration in decades — the first flat-out terrific “Star Wars” movie since 1980’s “The Empire Strikes Back.” It seizes upon Lucas’ original dream of finding a pop vessel for his obsessions — Akira Kurosawa epics, John Ford westerns, science-fiction serials — and fulfills it with a verve and imagination all its own.
  82. Krisha
    The fertility of Shults' image-making and storytelling skills is almost breathtaking, and much of Krisha draws on the subconscious power of his direction in tandem with Krisha Fairchild's mesmerizing turn.
  83. Youth
    Youth is a film that goes its own way. Quixotic, idiosyncratic, effortlessly moving, it's as much a cinematic essay as anything else, a meditation on the wonders and complications of life, an examination of what lasts, of what matters to people no matter their age.
  84. By the Sea
    As a writer, Jolie Pitt is better at ideas than dialogue, much of which is leaden here. But the characters' behaviors feel true.
  85. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
    It closes the trilogy like a lightning blast followed by the ominous, resonant drone of thunder. Great action sequences crop up frequently today, but great action movies are always few and far between. Beyond Thunderdome is one, every bit as much as its two predecessors.
  86. My Golden Days
    Film has always been especially effective it portraying what it can feel like, what it can mean to be in love, and My Golden Days is right up there with the best of them.
  87. The Assassin
    Combining Hou's patient, observant style with a historical martial arts tale, the film is a fascinating hybrid of craft, genre and story. Beautiful to look at and with deeply felt emotions, the film has a meditative aura punctured by sharp bouts of fighting.
  88. Son of Saul
    Son of Saul is an immersive experience of the most disturbing kind, an unwavering vision of a particular kind of hell. No matter how many Holocaust films you've seen, you've not seen one like this.
  89. Listen to Me Marlon
    A revelatory, strikingly emotional look at a complex, troubled, enormously gifted man.
  90. Top Spin
    Top Spin grips, exhilarates and breaks hearts like the 1994 film "Hoop Dreams."
  91. Room
    Larson has done exceptional work before... but the way she has taken the deepest of dives into this complex, difficult material is little short of astonishing. The reality and preternatural commitment she brings to Ma is piercingly honest from start to finish, as scaldingly emotional a performance as anyone could wish for.
  92. Spotlight
    Spotlight doesn't call attention to itself. Its screenplay is self-effacing, its accomplished direction is intentionally low key, and it encourages its fistful of top actors to blend into an eloquent ensemble.
  93. Welcome to Leith
    This cautionary tale couldn't be more timely or essential.
  94. Guidance
    Mills peppers his fresh script with an assortment of throwaway lines, kooky character beats and off-kilter emotional truths. That he packs so much memorable silliness into one 80-minute film is quite the feat. Sequel, please.
  95. Heart of a Dog
    Heart of a Dog is that rarest of pieces, an unabashedly experimental work that's as inviting as a visit with an old friend, one who may not always make sense, who's sometimes goofy, but has been through a lot lately and treasures the opportunity to artfully unload.
  96. Mustang
    It's a moving portrait of sisterhood, a celebration of a fierce femininity and a damning indictment of patriarchal systems that seek to destroy and control this spirit.
  97. Sherpa
    A documentary whose visual magnificence is more than matched by unforgettable characters and political urgency.
  98. A War
    A War is a film done exactly right about a situation gone horribly wrong.
  99. The Pearl Button
    By turns lyrical, impressionistic and profound, the documentary The Pearl Button requires patience but offers stirring rewards.
  100. The Emperor's New Clothes
    Advocacy documentaries simply don't get better or more compelling than this.
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