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. Poor Things
    Lanthimos may have cobbled together a rambunctious psychosexual odyssey from many Frankensteinian parts — a little “Alice in Wonderland,” a dash of “Metropolis,” a soupçon of Voltaire by way of the Marquis de Sade — but he and his skilled collaborators have marshaled them into a remarkably coherent and purposeful vision.
  2. 45365
    A graceful, affectionate yet clear-eyed portrait of daily Middle America small-town life in which no individuals are interviewed but instead are observed with detachment as they go about their lives.
  3. Marooned in Iraq
    Even though the film's tone grows ever more elegiac, it stubbornly remains a celebration of the Kurdish capacity to endure.
  4. Aquarius
    Some might well accuse this stubbornly singular woman of living in the past, but to watch Aquarius is to see her surrendering again and again to the bliss of the present moment — never more so than in a final scene of thrilling, annihilating ferocity.
  5. 2000 Meters to Andriivka
    2000 Meters to Andriivka is a war chronicle like no other.
  6. Back to the Future
    It's big, cartoonish and empty, with an interesting premise that is underdeveloped and overproduced. [3 July 1985, p.Calendar 6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  7. Everything Is Copy
    It's a fitting tribute to the influential journalist-essayist-filmmaker: insightful about the life of a successful writer, engaging about how a smart modern woman navigated the world, but also quizzical about how Ephron was as a daughter, sister, wife and mother.
  8. Toy Story 2
    Toy Story 2 may not have the most original title, but everything else about it is, well, mint in the box.
  9. Black Panther
    Energized to a thrilling extent by a myriad of Afrocentric influences, Black Panther showcases a vivid inventiveness that underscores the obvious point that we want all cultures and colors represented on screen because that makes for a richness of cinematic experience that everyone enjoys being exposed to.
  10. Cemetery of Splendor
    Each scene, beneath its surface calm, throbs with longing, dislocation and intricately woven layers of time.
  11. The Human Voice
    Swinton manifests, with magnificently nuanced modulation, an emotional tangle; at times, it is raw with a cathartic force, while enmeshed with meekly conciliatory moments of codependence. Wielding a hatchet with violent purpose or begging for a final rendezvous, Swinton’s every scorching word cuts deep.
  12. 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.
  13. Nobody Knows
    Beguiling but long-winded.
  14. 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.
  15. Apollo 11
    One of the unexpected but welcome things Apollo 11 accomplishes is restoring a sense of how insanely complex the lunar mission was, and how audacious.
  16. Faces
    The plot is bare and a little cliched, but the film's dramatic scenes, usually shot with a roving camera and lighted in fairly crude ways, are realistically, almost voyeuristicly, staged. [04 Jul 1991, p.13]
    • Los Angeles Times
  17. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    If the second film never reaches the highs of the first -- we have met the players before and there are no new worlds of wonder -- it nonetheless invests moviegoing with a sense of adventure.
  18. L'Enfant (The Child)
    The Belgian directing brothers deal with themes they have made their own: the difficulty of being moral in an amoral world and the grinding, unforgiving nature of reality for those forced by poverty to live on the margins of society. These are not easy films to experience, but they are uncompromising and unforgettable.
  19. Jane Fonda in Five Acts
    All in all, Jane Fonda in Five Acts proves a captivating, extremely well-told and crafted, decidedly fitting tribute to a Hollywood legend, fighter and survivor who just might surprise us one day with a “sixth act.”
  20. Poetry
    Daring in the ways only quiet, unhurried but finally haunting films have the courage to be. A character study of remarkable subtlety joined to a carefully worked-out plot that fearlessly explores big issues like beauty, truth and mortality, it marks the further emergence of Korean writer-director Lee Chang-dong.
  21. Newtown
    It's heartbreaking stuff, and Newtown handles it all with a gentle grace.
  22. If Beale Street Could Talk
    In cutting against the aesthetic grain, Jenkins gently and wisely corrects our vision. The passionate glow of this filmmaker’s embrace belongs, quite rightly, to his characters. He is generous enough to also extend that embrace to us.
  23. Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan
    The film captures the intense emotion of the October 2014 performance that capped Whelan’s 30-year career. But more crucial is the way it shows her creating new challenges for herself, turning the terrifying prospect of irrelevance into a shot at reinvention.
  24. 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.
  25. Little Women
    Armstrong, screenplay adapter/co-producer Robin Swicord and their colleagues have got everything just right. [23 Dec 1994]
    • Los Angeles Times
  26. Tokyo Twilight
    Ozu cherishes tradition but accepts the inevitability of loss and change, and is as all-embracing as Jean Renoir. His people may judge and not forgive, often understandably, but as one of the greatest filmmakers he does not do so. [04 Oct 2007, p.E13]
    • Los Angeles Times
  27. Shine
    Popular filmmaking at its smartest and most persuasive.
  28. Aftershock
    Eiselt and Lee cover how these families — and in particular the fathers left behind by their partners’ passing — are still coping with unexpected loss. The film also provides some history lessons on how Black women have been either exploited or ignored by the medical establishment.
  29. The Awful Truth
    McCarey and his team of Dunne and Grant bring a patina of slapstick to this high-society story based on Arthur Richman's play and adapted for the screen by Vina Delmar. [03 Oct 1991, p.12]
    • Los Angeles Times
  30. 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.
  31. Wolfwalkers
    It is the type of stirring entertainment that delivers both the thrill of the moment and the kind of sophisticated ideas that can lead to discussion and even debate long after viewing.
  32. My Neighbor Totoro
    My Neighbor Totoro is a gentle and affirming film. It's certain to delight smaller children, although boys accustomed to the slam-bang violence of super-hero cartoon features and TV shows may chafe at its leisurely pace.
  33. The Missing Picture
    The Missing Picture is personal and unexpected, a documentary that mixes media in an unusual way to very potent effect.
  34. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
    Don’t let its florid, mouthful of a title mislead you: The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open is a film that’s as urgent and unpretentious as it is remarkable. It’s safe to say you haven’t seen too many movies quite like it.
  35. Our Father, the Devil
    Our Father, the Devil is the type of movie for which a satisfying ending is less about tidy resolution than potent insight, and in that respect, Foumbi delivers something befitting her grueling, clenched character study.
  36. Of Men and War
    The access that Bécue-Renard got, reportedly after five months of being there without a camera, is remarkable.
  37. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
    As splendid as John Wayne is in these films, the elegiac She Wore a Yellow Ribbon provides him with one of his finest roles. [19 May 1996, p.72]
    • Los Angeles Times
  38. Pain and Glory
    But if the tone is more restrained, more elegiac, and lacking that signature Almodóvar outrageousness, the emotional force still knocks you sideways.
  39. Russian Ark
    An astonishing technological feat, but what is even more remarkable is that the technology does not overwhelm the artistry.
  40. The Farthest
    The film is a stirring salute to human ingenuity.
  41. Genèse (Genesis)
    Genèse concludes as a sober reminder that the young always feel intensely, but that the years between the crush that shines and the ardor that confounds are short ones, indeed.
  42. Gomorrah
    The fingerprints of the Camorra are everywhere, this film wants us to know, and its grip is lethal.
  43. Familiar Touch
    Friedland’s acute debut feature, drawn from her experience in the memory-care field, is a small miracle of realigned empathy, turning away from the condescension and easy sentiment of so many narratives about late-in-life adaptation.
  44. To Be and to Have
    Part of what makes a great documentary great is the subject, and though the film never scrapes below the surface of the schoolteacher -- we never find out if he lives alone or has children of his own -- Lopez pulls as hard on the imagination as a fictional character.
  45. Withnail and I
    For all the laughter it generates in its confrontations between city and country folk and their ways, Withnail and I has a decidedly dark and subtle undertow. One hilarious incident after another may keep the semiautobiographical Withnail and I perking along, but it is at the same time a ‘60s joy ride about to tailspin into the sobering ‘70s.
  46. Return to Seoul
    A staggering masterwork that reveals itself unhurriedly, one permutation at a time, Chou’s third feature is perhaps the only film this year in which every single scene and every line of dialogue within them feel absolutely indispensable. The richness in every detail, and their unexpected ramifications over time, make for a one-of-a-kind character study.
  47. The Velvet Underground
    The spiritual truth of Haynes’ spellbinding The Velvet Underground is that ultimately it’s about the thing that can’t be described, that defies parsing when gifted outcasts make great art — it’s to be experienced.
  48. All That Breathes
    As deliberate as the image-making often is, it’s always to train us in looking as the brothers do, to consider the breadth of life and interconnectedness in our world: Wherever you are, All That Breathes is asking, can you see what’s there, what needs your attention?
  49. I Vitelloni [re-release]
    It was this ineffably poignant semiautobiographical reverie that unleashed fully Fellini's shimmering, flowing poetic style, echoed perfectly in a plaintive score by Fellini's potently evocative collaborator, Nino Rota.
  50. Attica
    Attica is a jarring, engrossing, and enraging reminder of how those in power will lie, humiliate, kill and cover up to retain it, and the documentary is one of the year’s best.
  51. Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters
    Death and grief may exist in the soul of “D-Man in the Waters” but “Can You Bring It” is full of vitality and energy, a testament to the power of art in the face of tragedy.
  52. Three Colors: Blue
    Daring in its willingness to risk looking maudlin by dealing with extremes, Blue doesn't hesitate to explore spiritual and psychological states that are beyond many films.
  53. Mami Wata
    It’s easy to be reminded of silent film’s who-needs-words heyday while watching Mami Wata, even when the foreboding sound design is doing its part and the actors are delivering their sparely written lines as if their characters’ lives depended on it.
  54. In the Mood for Love
    The result is a kind of ultimate romantic film, joining an almost Jamesian sadness and discipline to that extraordinary visual sensibility. It's not the kind of thing you see every day.
  55. Mulholland Dr.
    Likely as not, these things mean nothing in a conventional plot sense, but as powerful images, as pictures from a dreamlike world, they are unforgettable. And that, David Lynch would probably say, is exactly the point.
  56. Fire at Sea
    What Fire at Sea appears to be and what it is are not the same thing, and it's that difference that makes it a masterful documentary.
  57. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    This is a film that wants you to live in the moment, to enjoy what is on screen when it is there in front of you and not worry how it fits into a plot that can be confusing but clears up in time for the inevitably rousing conclusion.
  58. Grizzly Man
    Shows and tells an astonishing story, a disturbing and provocative tale of obsession, bravado and self-invention that leaves you open-mouthed for all kinds of reasons.
  59. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    Boseman, evincing the same integrity he clung to his entire career, refuses to soft-pedal the destination. He imparts to this seething, shattered man the gift of a broken soul, riven by anger and trauma, and makes him all the more human for it. His final moments of screen time are among his darkest, and also his finest.
  60. 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.
  61. One False Move
    For most of the way, One False Move is taut and sure-footed.
  62. Descendant
    With Descendant, Brown wisely chooses to be respectfully, poetically alert instead of imposing, as her use of archival footage shot by Hurston suggests: She’s adding to a pioneering Black filmmaker’s anthropological empathy, updating the conversation, witnessing the witnessers.
  63. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    As we hang on the film’s plot twists, we also quietly absorb its points about the power of community and the purposeful determination of immigrants to create better lives for their families, not as special pleading but as something powerful and convincing.
  64. Jane
    No stranger to found footage, Morgen (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”) has tapped into NatGeo’s treasure trove with a bracing immediacy.
  65. Walk Up
    Walk Up flows as absorbingly as a dream and is no less pleasurable to puzzle over afterward.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jaws
    While I have no doubt that Jaws will make a bloody fortune for Universal and producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown, it is a coarse-grained and exploitive work which depends on excess for its impact. Ashore it is a bore, awkwardly staged and lumpily written.
  67. 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.
  68. Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese
    If Scorsese’s 2005 Dylan documentary “No Direction Home” was the exhaustive origins portrait that reveals how a man and myth were launched, “Rolling Thunder Revue” is the home movie party that energizes and humanizes while still preserving a counterculture god’s mystique.
  69. About Endlessness
    The absence of God, the trauma of war, the weight of history: None of these are new ideas for Andersson, a fact that reaffirms the wisdom of this movie’s title. But the implied grandiosity of those themes is dissipated, again and again, by the exquisite lightness of his touch and the startling tenderness of his gaze.
  70. Pompei: Below the Clouds
    The notion of Naples as a place in perpetual contact with its ghostly, grand history, whether you’re a citizen living on top of it or a visitor passing through, is what gives Gianfranco Rosi’s patient, eccentric documentary Pompei: Below the Clouds its strangely beautiful atmosphere of reflection and restlessness.
  71. Nomadland
    There is no transcendence at the end of her long, harrowing journey, but there are unexpected gifts, guardian angels and places of refuge. It would be hard to overlook the spiritual presence — a good word for it would be “grace” — that hovers over every frame of this movie and the spare, wrenching story it has to tell.
  72. Hope
    Hope isn’t about getting you to cry, even as some of its characters occasionally do, but rather giving you an invigorating, even uplifting sense of what hearts can do under duress; nothing is forcibly tragic here, just experienced fully and openly.
  73. My Journey Through French Cinema
    As its title indicates, My Journey Through French Cinema is personal with a capital “P,” a passionate, opinionated, drop-dead fascinating documentary essay about that country’s film history put together by a clear-eyed enthusiast who was born to tell the tale.
  74. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    Most of all, Wallace & Gromit retains the clever, one-of-a-kind sensibility that made its shorter predecessors so delightful. With every studio comedy looking for a formula for success, it's refreshing to find a heroically whimsical film that succeeds by following no formula known to dog or man.
  75. About Elly (2009)
    Emotional intensity is Farhadi's métier, and to see About Elly is to revel in his skill.
  76. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    A rare gem of a movie.
  77. Lincoln
    There is nothing bravura or overly emotional about Spielberg's direction here, but the impeccable filmmaking is no less impressive for being quiet and to the point.
  78. Elena
    The script, by Oleg Negin and Zvyagintsev, uses spare dialogue to quietly devastating effect. Performances are superb across the board, framed in elegant widescreen compositions that simmer with violence.
  79. All Is Lost
    All Is Lost, which is only Chandor's second film, reveals itself as remarkably skillful, surprisingly insightful and deeply moving. It's a confident work by an artist who knows himself and trusts his audience.
  80. The Banshees of Inisherin
    One measure of the movie’s skill, and its generosity, is that it embraces the wisdom of both its protagonists. You’ll share Colm’s exasperation and defend his right to pursue an unimpeded life of music and the mind, but you’ll also concede Pádraic’s point that kindness and camaraderie leave behind their own indelible if often invisible legacies.
  81. Love & Friendship
    Love & Friendship is, first and foremost, a master class on the art of comic timing, in its filmmaking and acting.
  82. Hereditary
    The sensationally gifted writer-director Ari Aster may tip his hat to the horror canon (“Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Shining”), but he has no interest in making a coy, winking exercise in horror pastiche. With breathtaking deliberation and quiet, unshowy mastery, he spins a devastating portrait of an American family in sudden, inexplicable decline.
  83. Listen to Me Marlon
    A revelatory, strikingly emotional look at a complex, troubled, enormously gifted man.
  84. The Fugitive
    A super-adrenalized stemwinder, a crisp and jolting melodrama that screws the tension so pitilessly tight it does everything but squeak.
  85. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    In its atmosphere of gnawing discomfort with imposed secrecy about bad men, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” is a uniquely dimensional work of character and temporality. Nyoni’s brilliance is in portraying the gap between public and private, past and present, as spaces where submerged feelings awkwardly co-exist, leaving nobody able to feel truly whole.
  86. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Though it is undeniably bleak and pessimistic and marked by a texture of observation worthy of British director Mike Leigh, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu is not as forbidding as it sounds.
  87. Odd Man Out
    What makes Odd Man Out effective is Reed's love of detail, especially when it comes to the mix of characters Johnny encounters along the way. With economical cinematic strokes, Reed describes these people, getting us to wonder about them and, ultimately, to have a sense of who they are. [19 Jan 1995, p.14]
    • Los Angeles Times
  88. Maria Full of Grace
    In its vitality and finesse, Maria Full of Grace is all of a piece -- and both artistically and spiritually itself full of grace.
  89. Shakespeare in Love
    One of those entertaining confections that's so pleasing to the eye and ear you'd have to be a genuine Scrooge to struggle against it.
  90. Fateless
    A first-rate contribution to the Holocaust canon.
  91. Happy as Lazzaro
    Happy as Lazzaro is slow to reveal its full shape: It’s a realist snapshot of downtrodden lives that gradually takes on shadings of fable and myth, a deceptively plain story that, by the end, all but glows with wonderment and surprise.
  92. Caught by the Tides
    Caught by the Tides serves as a handy primer on Jia’s fascination with China’s political, cultural and economic evolution, amplifying those dependable themes with the benefit of working across a larger canvas of a quarter-century.
  93. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    Never one to shy away from challenges, Morris has come up with one of the best documentaries of this or any year.
  94. All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
    This is a movie that teaches you how to watch it.
  95. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
    What is clear is that this is a director with a great sense of the magical and the mystical residing in the everyday.
  96. Brokeback Mountain
    Confidently directed by Ang Lee and featuring sensitive and powerful performances by Jake Gyllenhaal and a breathtaking Heath Ledger, this film is determined to involve us in the naturalness and even inevitability of its epic, complicated love story.
  97. The Kid with a Bike
    The ambiguity is refreshing. And despite the complicated emotional story at the center of this film, the Dardennes, who wrote and directed, have opted to handle it all with a minimalist narrative style.
  98. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    It’s terrific — a quick-witted entertainment, daring and familiar by turns, that also proves to be sweet, serious and irreverent in all the right doses.
  99. Blue Jean
    Oakley’s interrogating approach of a moral moment and McEwen’s portrayal of see-through armor help us understand the viewpoint of someone who was never going to be a hero, but who could tragically internalize a rising hatred that might upend her life at any moment.
  100. The Wicker Man
    An odd, one-of-a-kind little film that features an involving plot by Anthony Shaffer and a performance by Christopher Lee that the iconic actor declares is his best. It also features paganism. Lots and lots of paganism.
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