Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,523 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: 8,698 out of 16523
  2. Mixed: 5,808 out of 16523
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16523
16523 movie reviews
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  1. The Thomas Crown Affair
    A moderately diverting entertainment as sleek and aerodynamically sound as the glider its characters tool around in, it takes no extraordinary chances and delivers no major surprises.
  2. Rejoice and Shout
    Rejoice provides both a melodic education and a once-in-a-lifetime concert in one soul-stirring package.
  3. In Bloom
    You can feel how personal a film In Bloom is and how promising a first feature this is for one of the country's new wave artists.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Berlin
    Reed stands at the center, taut and impassive, punching out words that are more often spoken than sung.
  5. God Grew Tired of Us
    Quinn discovers an unexpectedly funny, trenchant fish-out-of-water-eye-view of American life.
  6. Aimee & Jaguar
    With key scenes so vivid they barely feel scripted, this is more than a same-sex success, it's a most affecting, most sensual on-screen love affair, period.
  7. Kissing Jessica Stein
    For an American film it is a groundbreaker in exploring the realm of sexual fluidity, and it does so with wit, wisdom and in a completely entertaining fashion.
  8. Seabiscuit
    It is not as exceptional a film as the reality deserves, but with a story this strong and races this expertly re-created, it squeezes out a victory by being as good a movie as it needs to be. On some days, that is enough.
  9. Always Shine
    While the foreshadowing proves more fascinating than the upshot, the two leads breathe jittery life into every sinister twist.
  10. Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle
    What Salmerón is after, however, is a simple portrait of hilarious exuberance, hard-won togetherness and strange wisdom. That search yields results.
  11. A Secret
    A harrowing and wrenching coming-of-age story.
  12. King Jack
    Although he’s working with familiar tropes, writer-director Felix Thompson, in his feature debut, wisely keeps clear of big, dramatic moments, maintaining instead a palpable naturalism through dialogue that has an unmannered, improvised feel and acting that follows suit.
  13. Mickey 17
    As semi-inessential as Mickey 17 feels in Bong’s canon, I’m at peace that he keeps asking how to give everyone’s life value. He’ll keep repeating the question until we come up with an answer.
  14. 3-Iron
    Alternately witty, caustic, tender and endlessly imaginative and unpredictable.
  15. Blow the Man Down
    A briny Northeastern noir powered by women with secrets, Blow the Man Down is a pleasantly spiky slinging of small-town sin that should prove to be eminently companionable viewing for these sequestered, streamable times.
  16. No Ordinary Man
    This is a compelling, often profound film, one that creatively surmounts its inherent limitations and shines a vital and heartfelt light on being transgender.
  17. Happy End
    If Happy End is something of a bad-seed nightmare, it turns out to be an unpredictable one, marked by unexpected flashes of warmth, sympathy and blistering humor. (It's been a while since a Haneke movie left me cackling in horror rather than reeling in it.)
  18. His House
    A crafty feature debut for the English writer-director Remi Weekes, His House is one of those return-of-the-repressed freakouts in which suspense and social conscience effectively breathe as one. That’s the idea, anyway.
  19. Earth
    It would be Pollyannaish to pretend that the documentary Earth is without its problems, but the bottom line is, difficulties be damned, it shouldn't be missed.
  20. Burden
    Whether as a constructor of large-scale enchantments or a notorious conceptualist, he emerges in this portrait as sincerely searching.
  21. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    While the filmmaker's trademark mixture of talking heads, archival footage and investigative ethos is familiar, Gibney is certainly good at what he does, and "Steve Jobs" is at its best in providing a brisk summation of the man's life. Or, more accurately, lives, for Jobs seemed to have been more people than one would have thought possible.
  22. Strike
    Despite the grim Cold War environment, Schlöndorff blends, mostly successfully, goofiness and melodrama into the overall social realist tone.
  23. Aliyah
    Tense, smartly crafted and highly resonant, Aliyah is one of the best films so far this year.
  24. Princess Cyd
    As comfortable to slip into as an afternoon in the sun, as satisfying as a late-night piece of cake, Princess Cyd is a jewel of a film that plumbs thematic depths far below its surface.
  25. Big Fish & Begonia
    It's all strangely wonderful, and it will take your breath away if you give it the chance.
  26. Bone Tomahawk
    Zahler's still starkness, enhanced by a fondness for long shots and dark spaces, is refreshing in this shaky-cam era, and his ear for Old West sensibilities — from the mythically polite to the realistically xenophobic — is clinically effective.
  27. Cairo Conspiracy
    The inherent backstage machinations and underlying corruption and hypocrisy that go with the church/state backdrop may not be unfamiliar territory, but Saleh, who controversially took on the 2011 Egyptian revolution in his acclaimed 2017 political thriller, “The Nile Hilton Incident,” keeps it all quite compelling.
  28. Risk
    Risk is first and foremost an impressive cinematic coup, a triumph of access to an elusive and sometimes combative subject. It is also an unsettling and fascinatingly unresolved piece of work, with little of the moment-to-moment suspense and dramatic focus that made “Citizenfour” so riveting.
  29. Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Movie: Mugen Train
    The distinctive visual style is notably fluid and detailed. The layout artists craft lovely painted environments with rich textures. The action is enjoyable and character-specific. As one would expect from an anime this popular, the imagination is off the charts.
  30. Let Them All Talk
    The result is something refined, naturalistic, specific, enigmatic and funny — not unlike an Eisenberg story, for one thing — but also akin to any trip one might make in a reflective yet anxious state of mind, with people you think you know but might be unsure about.
  31. Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    Documentarian Amy Nicholson puts a human face on the deterioration of the iconic New York amusement park by focusing on the fate of her favorite ride.
  32. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
    Director Piscatella maintains an engaging grip on his unassuming subject’s ascendancy.
  33. 7 Days
    Despite occasional dips in energy that usually coincide with the root-worthy characters’ own flailing moments, 7 Days remains a buoyant and involving jaunt.
  34. 7 Boxes
    Given the routineness of the chase itself, what jumps out here is the pervasive desperation shared by just about every character.
  35. Meeting Gorbachev
    Less a journalistic endeavor than an admirer’s tour — with room for blackly funny Herzog-ian touches in his choice of archival clip or patently demonic voice-over.
  36. 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.
  37. Superman Returns
    Star Routh's presence and the joys of flight keep Superman Returns alive, but all those missteps dog its heels, holding it back like little touches of Kryptonite in the night.
  38. Weathering with You
    “Weathering” is a luminously beautiful film. Shinkai’s artists capture both micro- and macroscopic: the wonder of a raindrop acting a prism, casting refractions onto the surrounding surfaces and the glow produced by light shining through clouds.
  39. Men in Black
    A genially twisted riff on the familiar alien invaders story, a lively summer entertainment that marries a deadpan sense of humor to the strangest creatures around.
  40. Infinity Pool
    If you’re willing to surf on the wonderfully weird and wild wavelength of Infinity Pool it is indeed a singular, and unforgettable, ride.
  41. Blindsight
    Walker was the best choice to document this journey. For one thing, her first film, "Devil's Playground," and its examination of how Amish teenagers react when confronted with the outside world, showed her to be both curious and fearless. Plus, it turns out she is herself blind in one eye.
  42. Good Hair
    The result is a documentary that weaves as much comedy as fact into the narrative, making the experience a satisfying entertainment even for the lucky few who have no hair cares at all.
  43. Pi
    It is a brilliant intellectual adventure that fans of bold independent filmmaking will want to experience, even though the ending is something of a letdown.
  44. Dances with Wolves
    A clear-eyed vision. Authentic as an Edward Curtis photograph, lyrical as a George Catlin oil or a Karl Bodmer landscape, this is a film with a pure ring to it. It's impossible to call it anything but epic [9 Nov 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  45. Tibet: A Buddhist Trilogy
    In three parts, the film patiently unwraps the details of daily monastic life. Observation and translation is emphasized over explanation or interpretation.
  46. Czech Dream
    Czech Dream has an impish effectiveness. But what saves it from being an arrogantly aren't-we-clever? home movie is, refreshingly, the flimflammed masses themselves, lured as the bargain-hungry but left looking like cattle out for a graze.
  47. The Bitter Buddha
    [An] amusing, freewheeling documentary.
  48. Food Evolution
    Persuasive rather than polemical, it's the unusual issue film that deals in counterintuitive reason rather than barely controlled hysteria.
  49. Presumed Innocent
    Intelligent, complex and enthralling, Presumed Innocent is one of those rare films where all the players seem to be in a state of grace, where the working of the machinery never shows and after it's over, one runs and reruns its intricacies with a profound sense of satisfaction.
  50. Piggy
    Piggy is a masterful mix of dark comedy, social commentary and raw suspense.
  51. The Outrun
    The problem is that Ronan is also forging her compelling warts-and-all portrait of obliteration and recovery in another type of gale storm, that of undisciplined filmmaking at odds with the patient harvesting of characterization.
  52. Wreck-It Ralph
    The movie's subversive sensibility and old-school/new-school feel are a total kick.
  53. Heavy Trip
    Playing like a Nordic “This is Spinal Tap,” the Finnish import Heavy Trip, a satire about an aspiring heavy metal band’s efforts to land its first legitimate gig, proves as affably goofy as its characters.
  54. First They Killed My Father
    Though this story couldn't mean more to Jolie, she hasn't been able to make it mean as much to us. Scrupulous and perhaps constrained at the thought of overdoing things, Jolie has allowed the enormity of the story to get the best of her, creating a film that is more disturbing than moving.
  55. Power
    Power could just as easily have benefited from the docuseries treatment, although at under 90 minutes, it lands plenty of hard truths and harder questions.
  56. ParaNorman
    It may be the most fun you'll have with ghosts and zombies all year.
  57. Screwball
    Inevitably, the oddball Elmore Leonard-meets-the Little Rascals conceit loses some of its wacky effectiveness, but while Corben might not hit this one out of the park, Screwball energetically rounds the bases.
  58. 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.
  59. The Rocket
    Australian writer-director Kim Mordaunt doesn't always succeed at balancing the sentimental, the political and the ethnographic, but at its strongest the story is a seamless melding of history's dark undertow and a child's indefatigable optimism.
  60. Sign 'o' the Times
    As a concert film, judged from the music, Sign O' the Times is near the top. As a movie -- carrying inside it the embryo of other movies -- it's not fully satisfying. But you sense it could be; however he stumbles, Prince gives you the impression he'll always, catlike, leap back. [20 Nov 1987, p.4]
    • Los Angeles Times
  61. Welcome to Sarajevo
    But bearing witness can be a complex thing and in its concern to illuminate Sarajevo is prone to overkill, to trying too hard to squeeze in every troubling wartime incident.
  62. Being Evel
    The rise-and-fall trajectory of Knievel's career is colorfully captured in Daniel Junge's Being Evel, a savvy documentary that gives the granddaddy of extreme sports his due while gauging the national climate that welcomed his shrewdly timed arrival.
  63. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    Whether Aaron Swartz is a personal hero or someone you've never heard of until now, his story cannot help but touch you.
  64. Extra Ordinary
    Like those cheeky genre-splicing comedies that came before it, the Ahern-Loughman collaboration doesn’t merely goose the boundary between charming and outrageous, it gleefully tramples it into oblivion.
  65. Only the Brave
    While Only the Brave is consistently involving and entertaining, that desire to be accurate about a heroic reality proves to be an at times awkward fit with the conventions of this kind of earnest and old-fashioned Hollywood film.
  66. The Tunnel
    It is the kind of superbly crafted, intelligent entertainment — a classic suspense thriller — that nowadays is as welcome as it is rare.
  67. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    Ever mindful of the line he straddled between thinker and flamethrower, this "Gore Vidal" is nevertheless a lovingly packaged greatest hits from a legendary rebel of letters.
  68. The Search for General Tso
    Like any well-researched piece worth its weight in MSG, the documentary uses food as an angle to something else: a look at immigration and at a melting pot stirred by prejudice and persecution, later seasoned with adaptation, innovation and acceptance.
  69. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    Fascinating stuff is at play here amid the heady theorizing and arcane references (panspermia, anyone?). But it’s blunted by Herzog’s clipped, Bavarian-tinged narration that’s by turns logy, deadpan and florid. Maybe his trademark voice-overs have simply worked better in the past.
  70. Breaking a Monster
    Just when you thought you had seen every permutation of the “making of a band” documentary, along comes Breaking a Monster, a thoroughly engaging portrait of Unlocking the Truth, a heavy metal outfit composed of African American middle schoolers.
  71. Dark Money
    No one has to see a documentary to understand that large sums of untraceable political campaign contributions are a bad thing. But Dark Money does need to be seen because it reveals with fascinating specificity how that crooked system works and details how one state decided to take it on.
  72. Tell Them Who You Are
    A remarkable work -- lively, painful, humorous, deeply revealing of both father and son -- that is worthy of one of Hollywood's finest directors of photography.
  73. Hellboy
    An enjoyable if somewhat neutered defender of the free world. Make no mistake: Hellboy still has a hide as hard-boiled as Lee Marvin in "The Dirty Dozen," but now he's also wearing a smile.
  74. Goldie
    Treading topical waters with an incisive flair, de Jong offers no didactic salvation or pessimistic prospects. Goldie’s sole assurance is to trudge one rocky step at a time, and that’s all any of us can do.
  75. Sleepless in Seattle
    We don't make those kind of Lubitsch-Wilder-Capra movies anymore, because it's hard to kid about what goes on behind bedroom walls when the bedroom doors have long since been flung open. So Ephron invents strategies to keep us, teased, outside the boudoir. [25 Jun 1993 Pg.F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  76. Violette
    Director Martin Provost's epic portrait of novelist Violette Leduc is so compelling, even thrilling, in its frank depictions of female sexual voracity, professional egotism and twisted variants on the Electra complex that it's easy to overlook his film's shaggy, uneven plotting.
  77. Betting on Zero
    It all adds up to a timely, provocative and absorbing tale of money, power and a search for the truth.
  78. America America
    Elia Kazan drew from the experiences of his own uncle in this profound and exhilharating 19th-Century immigrant saga, made in 1963 and expressing passionately a love of this country. [27 Feb 1994, p.6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  79. The Outwaters
    Some may find all this tedious or confusing, but there’s an admirable integrity to Banfitch’s approach. The Outwaters genuinely feels like a first-person perspective on the end of the world.
  80. Hail, Caesar!
    The great thing about Hail, Caesar! is that it is fun whether you get all its references or not.
  81. Candy Mountain
    It's an '80s "road" film -- in the '70s vein of "Five Easy Pieces" or "Two Lane Blacktop" (which Wurlitzer wrote) -- and it's almost a little masterpiece: morally brave, beautifully measured, funny, sad and powerful. With quiet skill, it tears open and subverts some glittery fantasies of the American dream. [11 Mar 1988, p.27]
    • Los Angeles Times
  82. The Painted Bird
    The pummeling, totalizing horror of The Painted Bird ultimately proves its undoing.
  83. 4
    But most important, for the adventurous moviegoer, it's more than apparent throughout this inventive, hypnotic and queasily funny portrayal of socioeconomic chaos that this director is a talent to watch.
  84. Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
    An exciting, upbeat film, but not a very impressive example of the animator's art. [01 Feb 1989, p.8]
    • Los Angeles Times
  85. The Color Purple
    The craft is gorgeous, but The Color Purple would be nothing without its star turns, and Bazawule’s cast takes your breath away.
  86. The Lure
    The Lure may not be everybody’s siren song, but as debut features go, it counts as a splash.
  87. Mistaken for Strangers
    A documentary that's insightful, sweet and often hilarious.
  88. Planes, Trains & Automobiles
    There is no denying the craft of either Martin or Candy, however, and since they are the film, it will undoubtedly find its audience faster than any one of us can get from New York to Chicago.
  89. Igby Goes Down
    Writer-director Steers has chosen to overload "Igby" with phony archness and forced black humor, making it not the place to look for satisfying acting.
  90. Earth
    Approaching the world in his own specific visual way, Geyrhalter also gravitates toward exploring big ideas, and here he takes on one of the biggest, an exploration of, as he puts it, “the wounds we are inflicting on the Earth.”
  91. Babes
    Glazer and Buteau make their characters deeply believable in their differences as well as their connection, the jokes are plentiful, beautifully, er, delivered and at times painful in their truth-telling.
  92. Christine
    By turns coolly observed and disquietingly compassionate — qualities that also describe Rebecca Hall’s brilliant central performance — the movie drifts alongside its subject, Charon-like, through the hell of her last weeks.
  93. Die Hard
    As a grand flourish of cinematic technique, it is awesome; as a human drama, it is disgusting and silly, a mindless depiction of carnage on an epic scale. [15 July 1988, Calendar, p.6-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  94. Bubot Niyar
    A documentary about transsexuals from the Philippines working as caregivers in Israel sounds highly specialized in its appeal, but Heymann brings to Paper Dolls not only an engaging poignancy and depth but also a powerful universality.
  95. Saturday Church
    Sensitively written and directed by Damon Cardasis, the movie is punctuated by an affecting string of musical numbers (Cardasis co-wrote the film's song lyrics with composer Nathan Larson) that deepen and enliven this lovely, vital tale.
  96. Star Trek Into Darkness
    So many things are done right that even with the bombast, "Into Darkness" is the best of this summer's biggies thus far. It's a great deal of brash fun.
  97. Dope
    Dope is, in the end, just another unfunny grab bag of stereotypes. Don't believe the hype.
  98. Queer
    It is messy and it doesn’t totally cohere (just how those Beat forefathers liked it), but it does stick to a guiding principle of yearning, expressed in achingly poignant, unforgettable moments of sound and image.
  99. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer
    Even if you may not be putting a Pussy Riot song on your next playlist, there is something so of-the-moment and exciting about the group that Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer feels important, if not fully complete.
  100. The Great Invisible
    The Great Invisible gives voice to many of the previously nameless and faceless victims of the disaster. Some worked on the oil rig that fateful day; others have suffered its environmental and economic consequences.
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