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. The Health of Hope
    The documentary lacks the polish of films made by a more experienced team; however, its endearing cast of students and teachers largely make up for its flaws.
  2. 5 Weddings
    Despite chemistry between its attractive leads, 5 Weddings is a hot mess that deserves to be left at the altar. Inorganic and implausible, this Bollywood-inflected rom-com features little comedy and even less romance.
  3. Love Jacked
    Unfortunately, in Love Jacked, Anderson brings the heat, while West is barely present, unable to keep the necessary chemistry crackling.
  4. Killer Kate!
    The cast is talented, the direction is fairly crisp and the dialogue isn’t stiff. When the people who made this movie move on to something better, they’ll have no reason to be embarrassed by where they started.
  5. Solis
    The minimalist approach and premise of Solis should work, but the execution in the script keeps the viewer disengaged, wishing the pod would move more quickly toward its final destination.
  6. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Wang, weaving deftly in and out of his ensemble and revealing the characters’ interconnected relationships in piecemeal fashion, shows how the bonds of community and activism intersect, not always conveniently, with those of love and family.
  7. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    The pleasures of theatrical performance become more pronounced, playful and complex in Part Two: Walk With Me a While, which, as its title hints, takes a meandering but fascinatingly surreal turn.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Price of Everything
    Kahn is a quiet filmmaker, and he gently prods his sources to go beyond the typical art world hyperbole of “gorgeous” and “wonderful.” And in a cool, clear-eyed way, he reveals how the $400-million sausage is made, how capitalism has turned art from idea into inventory.
  9. Viper Club
    Viper Club is an attempt at a very difficult balancing act. It doesn’t quite succeed, but it deploys enough persuasive elements to make the attempt involving.
  10. Border
    Selected by Sweden as its entry for the foreign language Oscar, the refreshingly offbeat, sturdily handled Border is not just unlikely to resemble any of its subtitled competition but also anything else you’ll see this year.
  11. Silencio
    While Silencio could be fascinating sci-fi, it’s bogged down in all the family drama.
  12. Shirkers
    A knotty detective yarn, a funny valentine to Singapore and one of the year’s most ardent expressions of movie love, it tells a story of cinematic theft, and in the process, becomes an entrancing feat of cinematic reclamation.
  13. Bullitt County
    Although a third act reveal doesn’t quite pack the intended punch, Bullitt County nevertheless propels its characters in some unanticipated, intriguing directions.
  14. The Dark
    The Dark clicks (which is often), it’s a moving and poetic tale about how neglect and abuse can turn people into freaky beasts, and how love can bring them back.
  15. Dovlatov
    A dreamy, compelling, often wry look at a writer.
  16. Suspiria
    By the time the phantasmagorical finale arrives, you are flooded with blood and viscera, yes, but also something even more unsettling — a sudden onrush of feeling, a deep, overpowering melancholy.
  17. On Her Shoulders
    On Her Shoulders is an intimate, empathetic documentary, made with discretion and power.
  18. 1985
    Chiklis is first-rate as Adrian’s tough, deceptively aware Vietnam-vet father, while Madsen’s gentle, luminous portrayal of a deeply adoring mother is heartbreakingly authentic — and utterly award-worthy.
  19. Don't Go
    The idea of human memory as a kind of time machine is powerful, and writer-director David Gleeson and his co-writer Ronan Blaney make it pay it off well in their movie’s final 10 minutes. It’s the preceding 80 that are the problem.
  20. Life and Nothing More
    It’s a vital, singularly crafted film that simply tells it — or more specifically shows it — like it is through the eyes of a struggling African American single mother and the adolescent son she desperately wants to keep out of trouble against the mounting odds.
  21. The Advocates
    A straight-ahead but affecting documentary that acknowledges the stubborn obstacles inherent in their efforts to make a difference.
  22. 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.
  23. Fail State
    It’s an appalling, infuriating story.
  24. Big Kill
    Problem is, filmmaker Martin can’t seem to decide whether he’s making a tribute or a send-up, and the overlong, yet under-plotted, results, with awkward close-ups and prolonged, flatly delivered exchanges, take their toll.
  25. Transformer
    Transformer beautifully captures the process of Janae crafting her own sense of femininity, unique to who she was and who she continues to be.
  26. Travel Ban
    The film covers a great deal of honest, funny and timely ground, though be prepared to revisit some of Bush and Trump’s “greatest hits” via a rehashing of archival news clips.
  27. Reach
    The story veers off track, and Rokesh can’t cleanly execute the wild tonal shifts and haphazard story beats.
  28. Late Life: The Chien-Ming Wang Story
    Ultimately, it’s an inspiring account of an elite athlete with the tenacity (and resources) to battle adversity and keep his dream alive.
  29. Brampton's Own
    It’s better than a number of indie films in its craft — particularly the thoughtfully composed cinematography from Kieran Murphy — but a flawed script ultimately keeps it from eking out a win.
  30. Change in the Air
    The gentle drama Change in the Air is buoyed by its sweet spirit and a strong cast, but it ultimately tries too hard to win our affections.
  31. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
    At nearly two hours, An Evening With Beverly Luff Linn grossly overstays its welcome, but the Hail Mary ending proves it to be a rather sweet and tender story about love lost and found in the unlikeliest of places.
  32. Watergate
    Though this look back is formidably researched and should appeal to both obsessives and the uninformed, it’s the insistent echo to our present upheaval, and the refreshing reminder that a polarized nation only got more unified in its desire for the truth, that gives “Watergate” its peculiarly of-the-moment power.
  33. Thunder Road
    Cummings’ achievement is too singular to be reduced to a simple political reading; and in much the same way, Jim’s hard-won final scene is too ambiguous to be read as either celebration or damnation. If, by that point, there’s even any meaningful difference.
  34. The Guilty
    If the setting of The Guilty couldn’t be simpler, its immaculate execution by first-time director Gustav Möller couldn’t be more gripping and involving.
  35. Charm City
    Even when the epidemic of violence touches a beloved character, Ness’ careful quilting of compassion and action across her years of filming suggests a fight that won’t diminish for these citizens.
  36. Liyana
    The children’s stories alone would have been compelling, but illustrating them in this medium adds even more depth, nuance and emotion.
  37. The Great Buster: A Celebration
    The Great Buster briskly takes us through the stations of Keaton’s eventful life and career, mostly going the expected chronological route with one key exception.
  38. What They Had
    The radiant Danner, one of the greats, is perfection here, while Forster gives a stunning, Oscar-worthy turn as a man struggling to hold onto a blissful past to ward off a frightening future.
  39. Mid90s
    Mid90s possesses just enough sensitivity and feeling to make you wish it had more. Hill’s script aims for, and often achieves, a fleeting, fragmentary portrait of group dynamics, but it’s stymied in its attempts to distinguish Stevie’s pals as individuals rather than types.
  40. Nigerian Prince
    When the stakes are raised, ho-hum thriller plotting takes over and Okoro struggles to clarify what his characters want. By the end, everyone’s motivations are fuzzy and the promise of a uniquely complex story of cross-cultural education, opportunity and morality has withered.
  41. High Voltage
    Clumsy and corny, the film plays like a pat showbiz cautionary tale, half-heartedly reworked into lurid pulp.
  42. Galveston
    Director Mélanie Laurent and actors Ben Foster and Elle Fanning bring some seedy poetry to Galveston, a muted crime drama that runs out of plot too soon, but makes up for it with powerhouse performances and a finely shaded sense of place.
  43. London Fields
    The aggressively awful London Fields is, once again, proof that not every successful novel should become a movie.
  44. The Super
    Well-made but generic, the thriller The Super is noteworthy primarily for featuring one of Val Kilmer’s first substantial roles since recovering from throat cancer. Director Stephan Rick works around the actor’s infirmities, but Kilmer’s offbeat charisma remains unmistakable.
  45. The Big Bad Fox & Other Tales
    In divisive times, Pig and his friends, who consist of maybe a dozen drawn lines apiece, provide much-needed laughter in the tradition of the great Warner Bros. cartoons.
  46. Wildlife
    Mulligan's performance is too specific and too wrenching to be reduced to a mere generational statement. This is her most fully formed role since her performance in another early '60s piece, the British coming-of-age drama "An Education," and in some ways it feels like a rejoinder, perhaps even a corrective.
  47. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    Can You Ever Forgive Me? demands not our love for this supremely difficult person but rather our respect for her defiance of an unsympathetic world. With such an impeccable presentation of such an intransigent personality, it is hard to deny her that.
  48. Halloween
    With a canny balance of empathy and exploitation, Halloween treats its heroine’s lingering trauma with surprising emotional realism and only a hint of comic exaggeration.
  49. Apostle
    Shifting his energies to a Victorian-era island blood cult hasn’t dimmed Evans’ taste for feverish body harm, but it’s more clearly laid bare his narrative shortcomings.
  50. After Everything
    With real soul and gravitas, Marks and Power craft romantic drama that demonstrates that life’s hardest challenges can come at any age.
  51. Moynihan
    [A] crisp, engaging documentary.
  52. Bill Coors: The Will to Live
    The prescription of rest, meditation, exercise and nutrition is not exactly fresh, but Coors’ story is inspiring and the message that mental, physical and spiritual health are inextricably linked is one we cannot hear often enough.
  53. Beautiful Boy
    The detachment at work in Beautiful Boy suggests an attempt to speak clearly and truthfully, to resist the clichés of the addiction drama while acknowledging that those clichés can hardly be rewritten.
  54. The Queen of Hollywood Blvd
    The movie’s artier components are imbued with enough heart and poetry to hold the picture together — just barely — through the more tedious stretches.
  55. Bigger
    Director George Gallo, taking a cue from his 1991 film, “29th Street,” romanticizes everything in a nostalgic glow, but without a sturdier script featuring fully dimensional characters at his disposal, the performances prove to be as unconvincing as their ethnic accents and period wigs.
  56. Stella's Last Weekend
    Among all the loquacious chaos, Nat steals the film with the quieter performance as the pained, soulful and deeply feeling Jack.
  57. Wobble Palace
    This isn’t an idealized version of romance or L.A. millennials; Kotlyarenko and Nekrasova shine a glaring iPhone flashlight on their characters’ — and their generation’s — flaws.
  58. Look Away
    Bernstein stages a few good, tense moments in the film’s second half — in particular a skate-chase scene on an iced-over stream — but Look Away mostly fails as a “killer teen” movie. The pace is too slow, and the mood too somber.
  59. Gosnell: The Trial of America's Biggest Serial Killer
    The film adopts a sanctimonious tone that’s anything but subtle.
  60. Better Start Running
    An accomplished cast does what it can to bring the material to life, but it’s tough to add fine emotional shading to characters so thick and cartoonish.
  61. Studio 54
    Ultimately, Studio 54 proves a nostalgic, sometimes wistful, other times unsettling look back at a singular period of time.
  62. All Square
    A good supporting cast — including Isiah Whitlock Jr., Harris Yulin, Tom Everett Scott and Josh Lucas as a hindrance to John’s plans — gives Kelly much to play off, but the story is too rote to get worked up about any of the conflicts.
  63. The Kindergarten Teacher
    The Kindergarten Teacher may offer a less audacious, more stylistically muted version of its predecessor, but by the time its quietly perfect final shot arrives, the movie has reached the same provocative conclusion. It’s not poetry, exactly, but it’s pretty shattering prose.
  64. I Still See You
    Once all the pieces are in place, the film becomes a more conventional and less interesting thriller, with a single violent villain the heroes have to overcome.
  65. The Sentence
    What unnecessary imprisonment does to families is often written about in abstract terms, but to see what it did to one specific family runs an emotional gamut that the patience of this heroically committed filmmaker does full justice to.
  66. Sadie
    While the pace of “Sadie” meanders and is often a bit pokey, the excellent cast, including Danielle Brooks as Carla, the local bartender and Rae’s best friend, brings your attention fully to the dramatic goings-on in this tiny community.
  67. 306 Hollywood
    The need to make an ordinary life extraordinary is so prevalent it smothers any genuine emotion from family members losing a loved one.
  68. MFKZ
    MFKZ is obviously modeled on Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s “Akira” and Taiyô Matsumoto’s “Tekkonkinkreet,” but it lacks the gritty brilliance of the former and the underdog poignancy of the latter.
  69. Bad Times at the El Royale
    Truth be told, I don’t much mind the version of Bad Times at the El Royale we have before us. Even if, with its multi-chapter narrative and time-skipping plotlines, its mix of verbal longwindedness and abrupt violence, the movie initially seems to warn of a terminal case of Tarantino-itis: an El Royale with cheese.
  70. The Happy Prince
    It’s a film of decided care and forethought.
  71. 22 July
    Working closely with master editor William Goldenberg, Greengrass has given 22 July a relentless, remorseless quality, insisting on a matter-of-fact style that allows no escape from reality even while refusing to push anything too hard.
  72. At First Light
    Stone doesn’t explicitly ask the straightforward, big-picture questions you’ll find in a film like “Arrival.” But his attention to detail and character, and his ability to render those people in recognizable settings, is engrossing.
  73. Morning, Noon & Night
    A meandering, pointless and boring rumination on substances and those who love to abuse them.
  74. The Samuel Project
    Despite its flaws, The Samuel Project is likely to make an impact on open-hearted audiences, with extra credit due Linden for an authentic performance in line with the actor’s body of work.
    • Los Angeles Times
      • Posted Oct 4, 2018
  75. The Church
    If nothing else, The Church proves something: Better an amusingly terrible, eye-catching horror movie than a slick, nondescript, boring one.
  76. Above and Beyond: NASA's Journey To Tomorrow
    “Above and Beyond” is a slick, engrossing sizzle reel of the agency’s triumphs at turning curiosity about the universe into data about our place in it.
  77. Shine
    Though many of the character shifts and story beats are facile, Shine achieves its goal of presenting music and dance as love, connection, family and important forces for maintaining culture throughout the inevitability of urban gentrification.
  78. Scaffolding
    Reminiscent of the naturalistic social dramas made by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Scaffolding combines the nervous tension of a thriller about a bomb waiting to go off — Lax’s volatility is as nail-biting as his bursts of compassion are relief-inducing — and the mournful clarity of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about troubled students.
  79. Trouble
    It’s a film that begins as a raucous rural comedy and deftly evolves into a poignant and reflective, yet still wryly amusing, story of what becomes of a family.
  80. 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.
  81. Living in the Future's Past
    While the outlook often seems bleak, the message is to take the future into our own hands — to change our behavior and change the world.
  82. The Hate U Give
    More disturbing than you expect, its story of innocence lost and perspective gained holds us and will not let go.
  83. Bayou Caviar
    This picture tries to encompass many ideas: about loyalty, the lust for fame and the slippery slope of immoral behavior. All of that is in the film. It just hasn’t been put in any particular order.
  84. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    Both a fine introduction for those who don’t know the work and a thoughtful examination of the issues surrounding him for those who do.
  85. Loving Pablo
    Tolerating Pablo might have better suited this unremarkable picture in which the wealthiest criminal of all time’s reported charisma takes a back seat to his badness.
  86. Black '47
    The mournful film, which includes equally sturdy performances from old reliables Stephen Rea and Jim Broadbent, admittedly puts a hefty premium on tone at the expense of more intricate plotting and character development.
  87. Chasing the Blues
    The script from director Scott Smith and co-writer Kevin Guilfoile thinks the rivalry between the two collectors is enough to sustain the narrative, but it doesn’t devote much of its energies to developing the relationship between Alan and Paul.
  88. Ride
    Ultimately, Ride feels a little like a drama class exercise, with the leads digging deep into their characters’ motivations and feelings. All three nail their parts. But their story never gets out of first gear.
  89. Knuckleball
    For the most part, this is a tautly constructed exercise in suspense, set among striking-looking snowbound fields and farmhouses. It’s a vivid slice-of-life, even before the literal slicing begins.
  90. A Crooked Somebody
    Sommer, who did fine supporting work on TV’s “Mad Men,” doesn’t prove a distinctive or charismatic enough presence to carry an entire film, especially one as uneven as this.
  91. Private Life
    Jenkins constructs an entire narrative from little exchanges, reveries, complications and setbacks. With a mix of concentration and expansiveness that can take your breath away, she unpacks exactly what “they’ve tried everything” means.
  92. Venom
    Directed with flat, joyless competence by Ruben Fleischer (“Zombieland,” “Gangster Squad”), “Venom” brings with it a laborious, decades-spanning development history. A movie this long in the works should arrive on-screen feeling like more than just an afterthought.
  93. A Star Is Born
    Gorgeously shot, lighted and scored, and acted by both leads with an incandescence that feels fully lived in, Cooper’s movie seduces you almost immediately. It doesn’t promise the shock of the new, but from the first frame it casts a spell, the kind that lets you know immediately that you’re in good hands.
  94. Hell Fest
    Hell Fest has exactly one genuinely nail-biting scene.... Otherwise, the movie does little to update, subvert, or comment on the trappings of classic thrillers like “The Funhouse” and “Halloween.”
  95. The System
    Taking aim at American society’s seriously broken criminal justice system, Iroc Daniels’ well-intentioned multi-character drama The System compensates in compassion for what it lacks in a more accomplished delivery.
  96. Domain
    Writer-director Nathaniel Atcheson has found a clever way to tell a lot of story without many resources — although the end result is still more exhausting than enticing.
  97. Maggie Black
    Actress and screenwriter Jessalyn Maguire brings her own challenges with anxiety and depression to both the lead role and the script, but the good intentions don’t create a good film with this psychology-driven drama.
  98. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    It inspires deep respect for the fierce and independent artist she is, a person whose voice is necessary, now more than ever.
  99. Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution
    Leyser’s film is an important document capturing the influence of queercore, an underground movement that enjoys life on the fringes, where identifying as an anti-establishment “arty weirdo” is just as important as sexuality.
  100. 3 Years in Pakistan: The Erik Aude Story
    Padding Audé’s first-person account — and those hammy dramatizations — with glowing testimonials from family and friends including José Canseco and, distractingly, the director herself, the overlong hodgepodge proves to be an ordeal in and of itself.
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