Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,524 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 16524
  2. Mixed: 5,809 out of 16524
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16524
16524 movie reviews
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  1. A Dark Song
    The two leads are resolute soldiers about it all, but they’re dutifully edgy elements in a stylist’s frame instead of fully realized characters living out what is supposed to be the riskiest time of their lives.
  2. Twilight's Kiss
    Some may also wish this low-key film spent more time with Pak and Hoi together than it does with them apart. Yet this approach lends the story a kind of mosaic quality, effectively fleshing out our protagonists vis-a-vis their friends, family members and home lives.
  3. Erupcja
    The edgy appeal of Erupcja is in the way it maps humans as molecules and electrons, fizzed by location, inspired by connection, driven to hover, fuse and release. The characters may get bounced around a bit and some will feel stranded, but you’ll know you’ve been taken somewhere new by this charming indie.
  4. We Are What We Are
    Like the family, the film occasionally comes apart at the seams. But Childers and Garner are absolutely mesmerizing as Iris and Rose.
  5. Young Adult
    When it's done right, as it is in Young Adult, there is something absolutely mesmerizing about watching a train wreck unfold on screen. When the wreck in question is a narcissistic beauty played to scheming, sour, downward-spiraling perfection by Charlize Theron, cringing is definitely called for, but so is laughter.
  6. Postcards from the Edge
    These and wickedly funny backstage snapshots of moviemaking are the good times of Postcards, but even they can't hide its emotional starvation. [12 Sep 1990, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  7. Oasis: Supersonic
    The frenetic, ad-hoc aesthetic of the visuals complements the shaggy dog brilliance of Oasis.
  8. Winnebago Man
    Whenever Rebney gets to be Rebney -- be it insulting, sweet or wearily perturbed -- "-Winnebago Man shows a full tank of irascible charm.
  9. Gemini
    You sense the messier aesthetics of Katz's mumblecore origins have fallen away to reveal a born alchemist of story and imagery — in its arresting visual tour of L.A.'s groovy neighborhoods and rich hideaways, Gemini captures a secret, abiding and even menacing melancholy behind its oft-regarded surfaces.
  10. Singles
    Singles is a bright and beautiful piffle about love American-style, junior division.
  11. Brad's Status
    Starting from a single key insight into human behavior — the natural compulsion to compare oneself to others — White has spun a funny, empathetic and surprisingly grounded comedy that itself defies obvious comparisons.
  12. The Pledge
    A forced march toward certain disaster, a scenario only passionate believers in predestination are likely to savor.
  13. Nicholas Nickleby
    McGrath, who adapted the novel, manages to catch the flavor of it without its tang.
  14. Real Women Have Curves
    Honest and wise enough to strike the right bittersweet note.
  15. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    She was guilty, no doubt, but as this immensely moving film makes clear, Aileen Wuornos was also heartbreakingly human.
  16. The Score
    A top-drawer heist movie that ratchets up the tension inch by careful inch, The Score will remind you of classic caper films of the past, and that is a good thing.
  17. The Road Home
    A gorgeous film with a vision strong enough to sustain heart-tugging, heightened by San Bao's romantic score, that verges on the sentimental.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Making the Boys
    Making the Boys reveals just how bound up Crowley's play is with the history of the gay community, most heartbreakingly in the number of original company members who died from AIDS.
  19. Nothing Personal
    As for the many loose ends the director leaves, you can either tie them or leave them loose, either way is fine since the experience as much as anything is what Antoniak was after.
  20. Last Days Here
    It's the offbeat love story at the heart of Liebling's resurrection that provides the film's most powerful - and touching - surprise.
  21. Scenes of a Crime
    A cool documentary that makes the blood boil, it examines how people can be psychologically manipulated into confessing. Not only to crimes they may not have committed but, even worse, to crimes that may never have happened.
  22. Hanna Ranch
    Without passing judgment, Dickman illustrates how Hanna's way of life and personal convictions compelled his politics. He also allows Steve Hanna a fair shot at presenting his version of the events.
  23. Copenhagen
    The will-he-or-won't-he question becomes the focus of director Mark Raso's film, and how William responds under the mercy of Effy's whims ultimately determines whether he can emerge from his self-absorption at long last.
  24. Botso
    Walters engagingly captures Botso teaching music, sculpting, conducting, spending time with his wife and young daughters and even traveling back to his Georgian hometown of Tbilisi. The energy, dedication, kindness and optimism he displays are truly infectious.
  25. Equal Means Equal
    Equal Means Equal is a lot to process, but offers an unflinching look at the fight for equal civil rights for all.
  26. The Ruins of Lifta
    Daum acts as a thoughtful onscreen guide to what the picturesque hillsides and its stone remains represent.
  27. 32 Pills: My Sister's Suicide
    While “32 Pills” is a devastating depiction of the effect suicide has on families, it’s more so a heartfelt tribute to her sister’s work and the connection that they shared.
  28. Bill Frisell: A Portrait
    “A Portrait” may not make Frisell’s biography fascinating, but it does give the proper due to a guitarist whose music flows like water into any handy vessel.
  29. Waldo on Weed
    There’s no definitive verdict on pot’s attributes here, but Waldo on Weed offers reasonable hope with discerning caveats.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Period of Adjustment
    A rare Williams comedy, this featherweight 1962 version, directed by George Roy Hill, is made palatable by the performances of Jane Fonda and Jim Hutton as newlyweds. [27 Apr 2003, p.29]
    • Los Angeles Times
  31. Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker
    Unfolding deftly under Asher's direction, Night Warning combines darkly outrageous humor with persuasive psychological validity. [12 Feb 2004, p.E14]
    • Los Angeles Times
  32. A Quiet Place Part II
    The relentless tension and close-quarters intimacy that [Krasinski] established in the first film can’t help but slacken under the weight of a swiftly expanding narrative.
  33. River of Grass
    At every turn, Reichardt confounds predictability, confronting us with the awful banality of many people's everyday lives rather than providing her characters with an escape from it. Yet Reichardt is so agile, ingenious and funny that she can make a lively, entertaining movie about how life isn't like the movies.
  34. Anthropocene: The Human Epoch
    The film isn’t the most cohesive look at startling global transformation. It’s strongest, however, as a dizzying, dimensional tour of scale and time, forcing us to wonder how a sense of earth-centric balance can be restored.
  35. Mad Hot Ballroom
    A documentary experience to savor. Warm, funny and very difficult to resist, this engaging film combines the charm of "Spellbound" with the kinetic energy of "Strictly Ballroom" in a way that will make you want to laugh, cry and do a little dancing yourself, maybe all at the same time.
  36. Mr. Gaga
    If you are familiar with his mesmerizing work, nothing more need be said; if you’re not, this feast of dance illustrates why others are.
  37. What Is Democracy?
    It all adds up to a kaleidoscopic, somewhat random, yet always involving approach to a major concept that, despite the wealth and breadth of Taylor’s offerings here, feels like just the first step in surveying anew where democracy stands — and falls — in our present universe. But what a crucial first step it is.
  38. Only the Young
    Only the Young rarely coalesces into anything more meaningful than a casual collection of moments. Maybe that's the point.
  39. Bronson
    Whether it's Peterson/Bronson's more theatrical bits or his untamable character's many blood-spitting, knuckle-beating, explosions, Hardy chomps down on his once-in-a-career role with stunning ferocity and never lets go. He's extraordinary.
  40. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    This film's cold, almost robotic conception of Salander as a twitchy, anorexic waif feels more like a stunt than a complete character, and so the best part of the reason we care enough to endure all that mayhem has gone away.
  41. The Cage Fighter
    At just 81 minutes, The Cage Fighter has been whittled down to its fighting weight, trimmed of every ounce of fat. Unay tells Carman's story without interviews or narration, but the film lands every punch without their help.
  42. Searching for Ingmar Bergman
    A chatty and enjoyable but decidedly nondefinitive look at one of the cinema’s most acclaimed, influential auteurs.
  43. The Outpost
    The Outpost is a visceral battle picture but little more.
  44. The Spanish Prisoner
    The Spanish Prisoner is the smoothest and most convincing of Mamet's elaborate charades and features intriguing performances by Steve Martin and Campbell Scott.
  45. Desperately Seeking Susan
    Desperately Seeking Susan is a lark, an exhilarating celebration of people who have the good sense to be in touch with themselves and with each other.
  46. Rita, Sue and Bob Too
    The movie’s tone is light, absurd; its sharper comments lie a little below the waterline.
  47. Predator: Badlands
    There isn’t much of an original signature here. Returning director Dan Trachtenberg hits the beats competently but not too stridently, like a good superfan should.
  48. The Booksellers
    D.W. Young’s lovely film introduces us to several sellers of rare books, New Yorkers, all of them smart and self-aware enough to know how they’re perceived. (There hasn’t been this much tweed in a movie since “Gosford Park.”)
  49. The Last Laugh
    At times haphazard but always involving, The Last Laugh confronts a question that sounds anachronistic in today's anything-goes world:
  50. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    Perhaps the highs feel so stirring, in part, because they are surrounded by so much conventional din and clatter.
  51. Swingers
    Confident of its emotional effects, Swingers knows how to breathe life into its people, and hooking audiences is its reward.
  52. Shadow Dancer
    The character mechanics... leave the viewer always feeling a step ahead of the story and its too-late-to-excite twists. As a portrait of violence-riven motherhood, however, Riseborough gives Shadow Dancer most of its grave power.
  53. Horton Hears a Who!
    Unlike so many computer-animated movies, "Horton" doesn't have that garish, sealed-in-plastic effect that can be so claustrophobic.
  54. The Wonder
    The Wonder undeniably resonates in these confounding times concerning belief, fact and manipulation.
  55. Emma.
    Emma partisans, fortunately, never say die, and a very satisfying new version of Austen’s sprightly novel has been directed in high style by Autumn de Wilde.
  56. The Nomi Song
    Horn, who knew Nomi, does an excellent job of evoking the exhilaratingly hedonistic period the film covers as well as the long shadow that the coming of AIDS casts over it.
  57. Falcon Lake
    A work of surprising, commanding depth.
  58. Collapse
    A grueling peek at a doomsday prophet's rigorous mind but in a sly way also a compassionate look at the strain Ruppert endures from knowing he has only ever been right.
  59. Damage
    High-class entertainment, carefully controlled, beautifully mounted and played with total conviction. Its lurid soul may have more in common with Jackie Collins than Jane Austen, but its passionate nature and convincing performances can’t help but draw you in.
  60. Sweaty Betty
    Though it's not entirely satisfying, the loose-limbed feature exerts a genial pull in its offhand exuberance.
  61. The Disappearance of My Mother
    The film reveals its truest self as a cinematic act of negotiation, acceptance and farewell between mother and son.
  62. Mansfield Park
    It's an interesting take, and it always holds our interest, but it's finally too ham-fisted to be a completely winning one.
  63. Divan
    The result is a touching and humorous documentary that for all its enlightening scope, encompassing centuries of religious and cultural history and a physical voyage of thousands of miles, is ultimately a deceptively simple tale of a daughter trying to reconnect with her father across two boroughs.
  64. Next Stop Wonderland
    Smart and beguiling, it manages the impressive feat of believing wholeheartedly in the power of love without checking its mind at the door.
  65. No Date, No Signature
    Beautifully performed and penetratingly photographed, Jalilvand’s assured second feature bears the probing precision of one of those meticulous autopsies.
  66. Becoming Astrid
    The film’s occasional flatness of tone isn’t always well-used — these may be the raw materials for a classic Hollywood weepie, but sometimes you want to see filmmaking, not a camera pointed in the general direction of who’s talking.
  67. Macbeth
    It's the gripping and verbally deft cast, led by a swaggering, formidably brooding Fassbender and a searing and poignant Cotillard, that may emerge most memorable here.
  68. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
    In The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, Friedkin holds you rapt with the nimbleness of his camera placement (the sharp cinematography is by Michael Grady), the crispness of Darrin Navarro’s editing and, above all, the initially stiff but ultimately spellbinding rhetorical force of the actors.
  69. Warrior
    It shows promise but finally hits things so hard, both literally and metaphorically, that it's hard not to feel pummeled yourself by the time it's over.
  70. Ms. Purple
    If you think of second features as pitfalls of either sameness or overreach, Chon’s Ms. Purple is more curious than most in that it feels like an alluring mixture of the two, a family story with artistic ambitions that’s tone-conscious to a fault, but rarely chord-rich.
  71. I Will Follow
    The structure, sliding between memories evoked by objects in the house and the common difficulties of moving day, should play with more elegance than it does. Instead, it feels awkward and frequently - as does the film on the whole - too on the nose, too obvious.
  72. Far from the Madding Crowd
    Between the sheer on-screen beauty and the finely wrought performances of Mulligan and Schoenaerts, Far from the Madding Crowd has its appeal. Yet like unrequited love, one can't help but lament what might have been.
  73. Sleepwalk with Me
    Having seen the show on stage, I wondered if Birbiglia could morph the ideas into an equally funny movie. He hasn't quite, but he's come pretty close.
  74. Pleasantville
    Ross' missive is earnest and well-intentioned, but it's difficult not to feel that his film both runs on too long and overreaches its dramatic resources in its attempt to deliver it.
  75. Tales from the Gimli Hospital
    It's a dry, fluky comedy about the perils of immigrant communities and bad health facilities -- shot in a style that's a clever pastiche of early '30s experimental talkies. The imagery is purposely deranged and the movie pumps it out in slow, deliberate rhythms that become daffy and excruciating. [11 Sep 1989, p.6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  76. The Perfect Candidate
    Less a hand-wringing dispatch from a repressive land than a judiciously glossy nudge toward a better world, The Perfect Candidate isn’t complicated, yet earns its mixed/hopeful conclusion.
  77. Requiem for a Dream
    A work of art whose beauty has the eternal power of redemption.
  78. Separate Lies
    To watch the film is to marvel at the cast's virtuosity at fleshing out the shallowest people in England, and the observable intelligence and talent of all those involved doesn't make Separate Lies any more compelling, or its characters more resonant.
  79. No One Knows About Persian Cats
    The narrative arc swings between light and darkness, from the sheer joy of the Persian rappers who practice on top of an unfinished skyscraper, to Nadar's arrest and interrogation for his black-market DVDs. In Ghobadi's hands, though, it always feels real.
  80. Where the Wild Things Are
    When faced as a director with the rudderless screenplay he (Jonze) co-wrote with Eggers, he's been powerless to energize it in any involving way. Sometimes you are better off with 10 sentences than tens of millions of dollars, and this is one of those times.
  81. Fallen Angels
    An exhilarating rush of a movie, with all manner of go-for-broke visual bravura that expresses perfectly the free spirits of his bold young people. [22 May 1998, Pg.F9]
    • Los Angeles Times
  82. Paint It Black
    An intriguing audio-visual sense, deft editing and Shawkat’s committed performance elevate this strangely watchable film.
  83. Run & Jump
    Green's resolution is sensitive, expected, yet visionary. And, like the rest of the film, it is shot with a magnificent play of color and light that makes the characters' corner of the world seem like the cradle of compassion.
  84. All My Friends Hate Me
    This movie is uncompromisingly discomfiting, meant to remind people of all those drunken nights where they overreacted to every well-intentioned joke, and woke up choking on the stench of burned bridges.
  85. Animals
    It's gritty and grim, but Animals is also a gripping portrait of young junkies in love.
  86. Ingrid Goes West
    Ingrid might be a lying, manipulative stalker, but Plaza also lets us see her humanity, engendering a crucial empathy for the desperation that drives her.
  87. The Breaking Ice
    It’s bracing to watch a movie whose very flow communicates how to experience it, which can also be said of Zhou’s captivating turn as a young woman committed to being elusive as a ward against what being still and reflective might bring up.
  88. In Search of Beethoven
    A splendid work that will be a revelation to the uninitiated and a joy to music lovers.
  89. Blood Brother
    Hoover's stubbornly ground-level perspective renders the documentary's lack of context about HIV in India...rather frustrating. But Blood Brother feels important anyway, not so much as a snapshot of one volunteer but for its passionate portrayal of the curative powers of love.
  90. As It Is in Heaven
    This journey into "Martha Marcy May Marlene" territory is never as tense and gripping as it should be, the incidents and most of the performances too tamped-down to spark a much-needed sense of animating friction.
  91. Revoir Paris
    It’s in that soulful shift from repair’s confusion to renewal’s fullness where Revoir Paris is most powerful, dramatizing what it can mean to outlive something unimaginable — and look at the world anew.
  92. RBG
    Make no mistake about it, this woman is a force, and the great service this clear-eyed and admiring documentary provides is to emphasize not just Ginsburg's work on the court but how extraordinarily influential she was before she even got there.
  93. Roman de gare
    The freshness and originality that flow through Roman de Gare now burst into full flower, revealing the director's depth and perception.
  94. Earth
    Telling things through the eyes of a spoiled, precocious, troublemaking 8-year-old narrator is both an overdone device and not a particularly engaging one.
  95. Carnage
    There's undeniable pathos to many of these encounters, and because the director has a wonderful feel for color and knows how to throw a frame around the world, there's also unmistakable beauty.
  96. Carandiru
    Carandiru is Babenco's fourth film set inside some type of incarceration facility and meshes his documentary style and fondness for realism with the escapism of storytelling found in "Kiss of the Spider Woman." It plunges us deep inside a corrupt system and its sincere empathy creates a stirring mix of emotions.
  97. Twin Falls Idaho
    A graceful mood piece that is infinitely moving.
  98. Shadow of the Vampire
    Willem Dafoe's performance in Shadow of the Vampire is so irresistible it not only breaks that cycle but turns an otherwise just adequate film into something everyone will want to take a look at.
  99. Collateral
    As a result of Mann's craftsmanship and concern, Collateral crackles with energy and purpose, a propulsive film with character on its mind and confident men and women on both sides of the camera.
  100. The Third Wife
    There is much that is finely wrought here as a tactile slice of women’s history told in careful observances, hidden textures and the sights and sounds of nature unbound.
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