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. Blood Road
    The film is a moving experience for both its subjects and the audience.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. Once Upon a Time in Venice
    A wincingly unfunny comedy caper.
  9. Moscow Never Sleeps
    Moscow Never Sleeps is well made but stilted, following too many characters to give any their due.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. Rough Night
    The title of this strenuously crude and crotch-obsessed movie may be lazy, but it’s also pretty apt.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. 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.
  21. Middle Man
    It commits the worst comedy crime of all — there’s no punchline.
  22. 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.
  23. Awakening the Zodiac
    The costars have good chemistry and bring a sense of desperation to their roles that animates a thin plot.
  24. As Good As You
    At its strongest, the movie dissects such pat notions as “closure” and “moving on” with wit and intelligence.
  25. 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.
  26. Random Tropical Paradise
    This mess never knows whether it’s a mob movie or a raunchy comedy.
  27. 11:55
    The affecting work by Almanzar, Rodriguez and the rest of the ensemble in this immersive film tenderly speaks for itself.
  28. 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.
  29. 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.
  30. 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.
  31. 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.
  33. 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.
  34. 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.
  35. 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.
  36. 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.
  37. 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.
  38. 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.
  39. The Hero
    Haley’s movie is ultimately a feature-length valentine to his star, and as such it’s something of a mixed blessing.
  40. 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.
  41. 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.
  42. 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.
  43. 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.
  44. 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.
  45. 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.
  46. 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.
  47. Elián
    Directors Tim Golden and Ross McDonnell, with the help of narrator Raul Esparza, do justice to all sides.
  48. Maurizio Cattelan: Be Right Back
    [A] playful, intriguing documentary.
  49. 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.
  50. Aaron's Blood
    The lifeless script and bland performances damn the film and the unlucky viewers who find it.
  51. 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.
  52. Dark Signal
    It creeps along without providing either scares or an unsettling mood.
  53. 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.
  54. 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.
  55. 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.
  56. Dean
    It’s almost afraid to invite true messiness or insightful belly laughs, and remains content to cruise on a wispy likability.
  57. 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.
  58. 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.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. 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.
  62. 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.
  63. 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.
  64. 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.
  65. 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.
  66. 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.
  67. Berlin Syndrome
    Shortland and Grant build to a climactic final act that’s almost unbearably intense.
  68. 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.
  69. 96 Souls
    Jacobs simply can’t make any of it work.
  70. 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.
  71. 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.
  72. 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.
  73. Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower
    Director Piscatella maintains an engaging grip on his unassuming subject’s ascendancy.
  74. 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.
  75. 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.
  76. Baywatch
    Baywatch...is for those fans who couldn’t resist the show’s soapy charms. New ones who crave a summer blockbuster comedy might enjoy how much it not only owns its dumbness but hurtles itself all the way back around through a flurry of genitalia jokes and F-bombs to splash unapologetically in an R-rated surf of winking postmodernism.
  77. Fight for Space
    Though Fight for Space doesn’t innovate artistically, first-time director Paul J. Hildebrandt’s documentary makes strong arguments for scientific innovation.
  78. Last Men in Aleppo
    It’s raw, powerful, moving and candid. This is what it is like to be on the ground in Aleppo.
  79. Hell on Earth: The Fall of Syria and the Rise of ISIS
    The 100-minute film does a phenomenal job detangling the numerous scenarios that led to Syria’s civil war and current bloodbath, dispelling the notion that this conflict is too complicated for those not versed on the Middle East to understand.
  80. Devil's Domain
    The film as a whole doesn’t make a lot of sense, but from moment to moment it is effectively visceral and raw. It’s compelling almost by accident.
  81. The Wedding Plan
    At its heart, the film is a kind of mystical fairy tale whose messages of belief, endurance, family and belonging transcend its memorably specific people and setting.
  82. The Commune
    As an ensemble movie, The Commune isn’t the most gripping, but when it zeroes in on Dyrholm’s affecting portrayal, it’s like Tolstoy’s famous line about the uniqueness of unhappy families, poignantly adapted for group living.
  83. The Last Shaman
    The film is a fascinating and sometimes terrifying introduction to ayahuasca. Surreal sequences mimicking the hallucinogenic experiences during the ceremonies are unnecessary and pale in comparison to the real transformation we witness.
  84. Sacred
    The film articulates a concept of universal humanity. No matter the religion or circumstances, we all have the same desires for peace and connection throughout life.
  85. The Survivalist
    The camera work is meticulous and exquisite in its expression, creating a sense of tense foreboding throughout, linking characters and images with a creepy omniscience.
  86. Paint It Black
    An intriguing audio-visual sense, deft editing and Shawkat’s committed performance elevate this strangely watchable film.
  87. Alien: Covenant
    This movie may be a convulsively entertaining throwback to Scott’s glory days, but to look upon Fassbender, with his icy and seductive post-human gaze, is to behold this franchise’s future.
  88. Wrestling Jerusalem
    Rather than pulling the viewer in, all the inter-cutting between the barren stage and the barren desert ultimately has a distancing, artificial effect that waters down much of the dramatic potency generated by the shared experience of a live performance.
  89. Dead Awake
    Despite Donahue’s best efforts in a grand finale sleep session with life-or-death stakes, the premise never lives up to its promise.
  90. Harold and Lillian: A Hollywood Love Story
    Their personal story is no less fascinating than their experiences working on hundreds of movies, together and separately.
  91. Paris Can Wait
    The refreshing element is that the story resists normative fantasies of sex or romance — in Paris Can Wait, Coppola focuses on the relationship to the self.
  92. A Woman's Life
    Riveting in its slow and steady accretion of details, its penetrating and richly textured gaze, A Woman’s Life is a bracing reminder that our experiences are often shaped less by what we achieve than by what we endure.
  93. Urban Hymn
    Urban Hymn is so carefully and lovingly made by director Michael Caton-Jones and his leads that it’s hard to begrudge the British drama its familiar premise, especially as you squint at the screen through tears.
  94. Hounds of Love
    Young’s vision of quiet middle-class mayhem, drawn from the three-handed struggle between young Vicki and her tormentors, is bold and unflinching.
  95. Snatched
    Snatched may represent a failure of sensitivity, but it’s an even greater failure of nerve.
  96. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    With Grace’s sure hand and the strong work of lead actors Wyatt Russell and Alex Karpovsky, Folk Hero & Funny Guy is the kind of road trip movie where it’s a pleasure to ride shotgun.
  97. Get Me Roger Stone
    [An] endlessly fascinating, bracingly up-to-the-minute Netflix documentary.
  98. Angkor Awakens: A Portrait of Cambodia
    Angkor Awakens won’t wow you with artfulness, but as an analytical narrative of tragedy, testimony and a way ahead, it has an undeniable power.
  99. Burden
    Whether as a constructor of large-scale enchantments or a notorious conceptualist, he emerges in this portrait as sincerely searching.
  100. The Wall
    The kind of tension you would expect is never completely present.
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