Los Angeles Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 16,550 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 2.2 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: 8,714 out of 16550
  2. Mixed: 5,819 out of 16550
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16550
16550 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Good Fortune
    The movie itself plays more like a corporate recruitment video — or an extended episode of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” — than a deep, discerning dive into an American success story.
  2. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
    This is the rare Morris movie that feels led by the personality of its star figure, in this case Dorfman’s wry positivity and love of what she does, rather than his need to probe.
  3. The Reagan Show
    As a brisk, sobering reminder of — if you’re inclined to think this way — where it all went wrong with image over meaningful policy in politics, The Reagan Show may feel like the doc of the moment.
  4. Nowhere to Hide
    As captured through the ceaselessly unflinching lens of Sharif’s borrowed video camera, Nowhere to Hide offers an uneasy prognosis that is at once graphically gut-wrenching and doggedly life-affirming.
  5. Sami Blood
    Writer-director Amanda Kernell’s assured first feature has a classic sheen, but with its powerful sense of place and sensitive performances, it’s no fusty museum piece.
  6. Reset
    Though there are some cool moments, the film lacks the connective tissue to make an audience invest in Xia Tian’s efforts.
  7. Jumpin' Jack Flash
    It's Whoopi Goldberg, however, who gives you something extraordinary. At the center of all this formula tongue-in-cheek thriller pablum, she keeps sending out weird curves and bent splinters of off-center energy. She's a remarkably empathic actress, and you only hope she'll get a few vehicles that push her to the limit.
  8. Okja
    With his latest work, Bong has created a heroine for our times, an indelible movie creature, a story that balances heart and head and a movie that engages with the boundaries of technology both on-screen and off.
  9. Baby Driver
    This is movie craftsmanship and showmanship of a very high order.
  10. Ripped
    The time-travel stoner comedy Ripped blows a potentially funny idea on slapdash filmmaking and lazy storytelling. If much of this overly broad eye-roller wasn’t made up on the fly, it sure looks that way.
  11. Raising Bertie
    The film alternates between triumph and tragedy, but there’s never a moment that doesn’t feel intimate and authentic in its 96-minute running time.
  12. Score: A Film Music Documentary
    Anyone looking for a definitive survey may want more, but this enjoyable film will undoubtedly score with musicians and cinephiles alike.
  13. Can't Stop, Won't Stop: A Bad Boy Story
    It’s almost as though Combs knows his public image remains fuzzy, caught among such labels as “mogul,” “criminal,” “sellout,” and “under-appreciated genius.” Consider this movie a purposeful step toward cementing a legacy.
  14. Moka
    With a formidable presence that mainlines emotional intensity, Devos dominates this film, appearing in almost every scene, but she has key support from another of France's most accomplished actresses: the enigmatic, four-time Cesar winner Nathalie Baye.
  15. The Journey
    While Hamm and Bateman have the right idea overall, their love of contrivance too often gives The Journey the sense of being reverse-engineered to explain a breakthrough rather than driven by the messy, human possibilities of their what-if.
  16. The Beguiled
    The fascination and at times the frustration of her achievement is that she has drained away some of the story’s juiciest, most suspenseful elements.... There is compromise in all this narrative subtraction, but there is also purpose.
  17. 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.
  18. The Bad Batch
    Amirpour has vision to burn, and inside this not-so-bad batch of splendid atmospherics and half-baked ideas is a leaner, sharper movie trying to chew its way out.
  19. A Beginner's Guide to Snuff
    Thanks to three lively lead performances and smart storytelling choices, what could have been a distasteful premise becomes surprisingly entertaining.
  20. Night School
    Cohn’s slickly edited verité-style storytelling lets each person’s humanity rise to the top, just enough to mix expected poignancy with a simple clarity about the struggles of low-income, opportunity-challenged souls.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Nobody Speak: Trials of the Free Press
    Nobody Speak drifts at times and lacks sweep and historical perspective. But it is a troubling foreshadowing of things to come if journalists are threatened, sidelined or attacked by powerful institutions and people more concerned with their own interests than what’s best for the country or communities.
  22. The Big Sick
    The Big Sick is both a delightful comedy and an imperfect milestone. With any luck, we’ll look back on it someday and it won’t feel like a milestone at all.
  23. Hare Krishna! The Mantra, the Movement and the Swami Who Started It All
    The film effectively summons an evocative moment in time. But...the film ultimately feels like a marketing tool for ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.
  24. The House on Coco Road
    The House on Coco Road is a remarkable document of how social forces affected the lives of Baker and his ancestors. It might lack the scope to encompass all of the story it wants to tell, but it’s a compelling conversation starter.
  25. Long Live the King
    The documentary by Frank Dietz and Trish Geiger is big on enthusiasm though it ultimately lacks depth.
  26. Blood Road
    The film is a moving experience for both its subjects and the audience.
  27. Transformers: The Last Knight
    If the film’s trio of new screenwriters (replacing series mainstay Ehren Kruger) have seamlessly upheld the crass and juvenile “Transformers” sensibility, then Bay’s visual sensibility has, if anything, matured, to the point of demanding and earning your exasperated surrender.
  28. 47 Meters Down
    47 Meters Down doesn't have the campy sparkle that made “The Shallows” a cult hit, but it's the kind of cheesy thriller that's good for a few jumps and a few chuckles at its own silliness.
  29. Marina Abramovic In Brazil: The Space In Between
    More specific sense of time and route (a map, anyone?) and a bit of even basic scientific scrutiny would have improved this otherwise compelling and provocative journey.
  30. Can Hitler Happen Here?
    It’s a gutsy, often off-putting piece whose eccentric little New York story and experimental vibe might have been better served by a short film.
  31. Pray for Rain
    The drought is ultimately presented as a man-made occurrence, wrapped up in regulations and red tape, rather than a troubling environmental reality. The reality is far more complicated than anything that can be neatly wrapped up within the conventions of genre filmmaking.
  32. Hearing Is Believing
    Hearing Is Believing could have offered more insight into Rachel’s experience, but instead it invests in the action of its title, including long stretches of witnessing Rachel at the piano and on various other instruments.
  33. Once Upon a Time in Venice
    A wincingly unfunny comedy caper.
  34. Moscow Never Sleeps
    Moscow Never Sleeps is well made but stilted, following too many characters to give any their due.
  35. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    "Stefan Zweig" is only Schrader's second film as a director, but, armed with clear ideas of what she wanted to convey and how she wanted to convey it, she's made a movie that allows its actors to fully inhabit their characters in a potent but low-key way.
  36. Jasmine
    Even when the movie shades too far into the oblique or the obvious, its evocative scenes of urban life and Tobin’s powerful performance provide ample compensation. Plot twists or no, this is a vivid depiction of a lost soul.
  37. Maudie
    Unlike the thick directness in Maud’s work, the movie about her is almost pointillist in detailing the tiny steps that make up an enduring marriage.
  38. The Book of Henry
    At no point do the filmmakers seem to evince any real interest in the emotional misery they inflict on their characters; trauma here is just the quickest means to an uplifting end, or in this case, a montage’s worth of wretched epiphanies.
  39. Rough Night
    The title of this strenuously crude and crotch-obsessed movie may be lazy, but it’s also pretty apt.
  40. Cars 3
    This warmly sentimental G-rated film about facing new realities and recapturing lost dreams has, despite its relatively adult story line, a beguilingly effortless feeling to it, as if it had nothing to prove.
  41. Dawson City: Frozen Time
    The thrilling documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time is indescribable not because it's ambiguous (it's totally straightforward) but because it does so many things so beautifully it is hard to know where to begin.
  42. From Hollywood to Rose
    While it’s a cute love letter to a certain strip of L.A., and Annenberg brings a winsomeness to her role, the story is thin and clichéd, relying on tired gags and stereotypes for humor.
  43. Kill Switch
    It’s an illogical, simple-minded mess in which Stevens is primarily a disembodied voice in a first-person-shooter-style video game movie.
  44. The Farm (La Granja)
    Striking images of sex and violence combine with an often effective sense of dread as these grim story lines unfold. But without sufficient context and psychological underpinning, less proves decidedly less.
  45. Capps Crossing
    Unfortunately, the worst fault in this horror movie isn’t the amateur performances, beginner-level editing or the special effects; it’s the dreadfully dumb script.
  46. Middle Man
    It commits the worst comedy crime of all — there’s no punchline.
  47. Lucky
    An ethnically diverse cast and authentic New York locations help to effectively ground Lucky, a palpably gritty, if familiar, take on the immigrant experience.
  48. Awakening the Zodiac
    The costars have good chemistry and bring a sense of desperation to their roles that animates a thin plot.
  49. As Good As You
    At its strongest, the movie dissects such pat notions as “closure” and “moving on” with wit and intelligence.
  50. Radio Dreams
    Jalali peppers this darkly funny, often absurdist piece with enough socio-political messaging to add heft but not didacticism. It all makes for a singular, well-observed balancing act.
  51. Random Tropical Paradise
    This mess never knows whether it’s a mob movie or a raunchy comedy.
  52. 11:55
    The affecting work by Almanzar, Rodriguez and the rest of the ensemble in this immersive film tenderly speaks for itself.
  53. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    It's not every day that you end up rooting for a bank, but the story Abacus: Small Enough to Jail tells is no ordinary tale.
  54. The Hunter's Prayer
    Action movies don’t necessarily need logic, but in the absence of entertainment value, tracking what doesn’t make sense is often the only fun.
  55. I Love You Both
    Although I Love You Both never quite pays off on its provocative set-up, it proves to be a funny and endearingly quirky comedy about siblings, love and loyalty.
  56. 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.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Letters from Baghdad
    The film elegantly unfolds as if someone had peeked inside a steerage trunk and thumbed through the brittle pages of scrapbooks showing sailboats on the Euphrates and hieroglyphics in the moonlight.
  58. Megan Leavey
    An even-tempered slice of pro-animal sentimentality that may not be the smoothest piece of filmmaking, but wears its emotions honestly and benefits from offering a look at a rarely explored arena of human-animal relationships: dogs trained for combat.
  59. Miles
    At times Miles feels a bit rickety around the edges, but the character at the center is instantly relatable and has a relaxed charm that makes the story compelling.
  60. Camera Obscura
    Camera Obscura lurches between gory thriller sequences and dreary character development, and never develops any momentum. The movie gets in its own way — burdened with meaning.
  61. Beatriz at Dinner
    This queasily funny and suspenseful movie is more than a smirking exercise in ideological deck stacking, and to praise it for its political relevance would be to understate its subtlety and specificity.
  62. My Cousin Rachel
    Anchored in an exceptionally persuasive performance by Rachel Weisz, "My Cousin Rachel" is not only a triumphant exercise in dark and delicious romantic ambiguity, the pitfalls of being taken in are what this melodramatic thriller is all about.
  63. It Comes at Night
    The final moments of It Comes at Night go beyond the usual standards of horror-movie bleakness to achieve an almost unwatchable cruelty — a powerful accomplishment that also feels, in this context, like a limitation.
  64. The Hero
    Haley’s movie is ultimately a feature-length valentine to his star, and as such it’s something of a mixed blessing.
  65. The Mummy
    The Mummy does have elements that are effective, especially Sofia Boutella in the title role, but with all the hurly-burly on screen the virtues get lost in the shuffle.
  66. Handsome Devil
    Although the film can feel a bit been-there-seen-that, this earnest, well-drawn tale ultimately proves distinct and winning enough to warrant a look.
  67. Vincent N Roxxy
    There’s an absence of character details that could make the central romance of Vincent N Roxxy more believable. Luckily for the film, the palpable chemistry between Hirsch and Kravitz imbues the relationship with realism, even if we don’t have much else to go on.
  68. God of War
    Chan maintains his dexterous footing whether choreographing the colorful large-scale battle sequences or the stripped-down, hand-to-hand matchups that boil the conflict down to its most basic — and personal — essence.
  69. Opening Night
    It’s about as plausible as your average stage — or movie — musical, but Opening Night proves a funny and sexy, if decidedly slight, backstage comedy.
  70. The Exception
    "Exception" breaks no new ground but it is a solidly done and always engrossing piece of alternate history, mixing real people and events with fictional ones.
  71. Past Life
    Uneven but ultimately effective, convincing in mood and emotion despite its melodramatic plotting, Avi Nesher's Past Life is straight-ahead filmmaking heightened by a connection to a pervasive Israeli reality not often found on film.
  72. Elián
    Directors Tim Golden and Ross McDonnell, with the help of narrator Raul Esparza, do justice to all sides.
  73. Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back
    [A] playful, intriguing documentary.
  74. Cruel and Unusual
    The film has the feel of a television news program, and at feature length lags. But the sheer overwhelming enormity of this injustice pierces through, poignantly, again and again.
  75. Aaron's Blood
    The lifeless script and bland performances damn the film and the unlucky viewers who find it.
  76. The Death of Louis XIV
    In The Death of Louis XIV, Léaud shows us stray glimmers of the droll conversationalist and irrepressible bon vivant the Sun King once must have been. But his performance is finally a magnificent stare into the abyss, a sustained contemplation of things we would rather not dwell upon but will ultimately have to face.
  77. Dark Signal
    It creeps along without providing either scares or an unsettling mood.
  78. Rogue Warrior: Robot Fighter
    Falling just short of being so bad it’s good, Rogue Warrior: Robot Fighter is a shameless low-budget “Terminator”/“Star Wars”/“Mad Max” knock-off that will have to settle for being merely godawful.
  79. Legion of Brothers
    Looking at combat from all sides, examining the pride, the anger and the regrets, is what this fine documentary is all about.
  80. Churchill
    Cox masterfully captures Churchill’s contradictory nature, obsessive dutifulness to queen and country, and a volatility born out of fear, desperation and impending loss.
  81. Dean
    It’s almost afraid to invite true messiness or insightful belly laughs, and remains content to cruise on a wispy likability.
  82. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie
    The story of Captain Underpants is funny, fresh and frantic, playing with format and genre, adding meta, self-reflective winks. The film is propelled by its hyperactive energy and quirky style...and the combustible chemistry between the two leads.
  83. Band Aid
    The film is a true dramedy that wrestles with the darker, sadder elements of life in a frank, funny and deeply relatable way.
  84. Tatara Samurai
    Even with 15 minutes excised from its original running time, and stirringly photographed and well-acted, the film fails to deliver on a sense of mounting tension or convincingly staged battle sequences.
  85. From the Ashes
    There’s nothing particularly cinematic about the well-crafted film, but it’s a compelling piece of advocacy journalism, one that looks beyond the sloganeering on all sides of the debate.
  86. Wonder Woman
    Wonder Woman emerges as not only the strongest movie in the present DC cycle, but also the first one that feels like an enveloping, honest-to-God entertainment rather than a raging cinematic migraine.
  87. Afterimage
    Afterimage may depict a losing battle for one uncompromising artist, but it’s also a bracing final dispatch for the uncompromising artist who survived long enough to tell of it.
  88. American Media & The Second Assassination of John F. Kennedy
    Amounting to two-plus hours of conspiracy theorist porn, The American Media & the Second Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, directed and narrated by John Barbour, proves to be as long-winded as its accusatory title.
  89. Spirit Game: Pride of a Nation
    By detailing the enormous pride in who they are and what they do that lacrosse instills in the Iroquois, it provides the kind of window into another culture’s belief system that sports films rarely attempt.
  90. Manifesto
    Whatever Rosefeldt intended, Manifesto doesn’t quite set forth a manifesto of its own. But it’s a blast of fresh air. And like many of the gauntlet throwers it cites, it risks looking foolish and, in the process, creates something gorgeously defiant.
  91. Black Butterfly
    Thanks to tight direction by Brian Goodman and lively performances from Antonio Banderas and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, the film’s engaging even when it’s ridiculous.
  92. Berlin Syndrome
    Shortland and Grant build to a climactic final act that’s almost unbearably intense.
  93. Drone
    Utterly dull thriller Drone tries to raise ethical and moral questions about modern warfare, but the audience can only dwell on the illogical plot and unsympathetic characters — if they can engage at all.
  94. 96 Souls
    Jacobs simply can’t make any of it work.
  95. Buena Vista Social Club: Adios
    Beautiful gems of wisdom and life lessons are contained within Buena Vista Social Club: Adios. The picture is an edifying celebration of this music, humanizing and contextualizing it beyond its popularity, locating its roots within a history informed by politics, colonialism, oppression, and racism.
  96. Long Strange Trip
    Thoughtful, deeply affectionate and concerned more with essence than chronology, it recounts the band’s 30 years in a way that should enlighten diehards as well as the uninitiated.
  97. Wakefield
    If it struggles to make sense emotionally (or logistically), it benefits from the confident pace of a literate, mainstream entertainment, and the tactical showmanship of star Bryan Cranston, who’s made something of a specialty out of the average guy going through a metamorphosis.
  98. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
    Director Piscatella maintains an engaging grip on his unassuming subject’s ascendancy.
  99. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    There are no new treasures to be found in this installment, which is dragged down by the anchor of a prescribed franchise blueprint.
  100. War Machine
    War Machine is the first of Australian filmmaker Michod's three films...to have a dominant sense of humor. What unites it with its predecessors is Michod's fierce intelligence and formidable directing skill.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »