Los Angeles Times' Scores

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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
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  1. Mia Madre
    With an unassuming directness, Moretti...toggles between work and life pressures in a way that finds the curious feelings and epiphanies that bind the two, and somehow give meaning to the whole dance.
  2. The Sea of Trees
    The Sea of Trees proves a stronger movie experience than one might expect. It’s anchored by a fine, understated performance by Matthew McConaughey and a deeply felt, if at times melodramatic, story that proves strangely immersive.
  3. Don't Breathe
    [Alvarez is] a master at orchestrating tension in close quarters, at painting his characters into a corner one minute and dangling them out a window the next.
  4. Southside with You
    “Southside” does have its standard, conventional aspects, but it was a popular Sundance item despite that, in large measure because of the performances of its finely matched pair of stars.
  5. 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.
  6. In Search of the American Dream
    Sincerity alone cannot begin to compensate for a clunker of this magnitude, including an abundance of technical issues, bad dialogue and worse performances.
  7. Blood in the Water
    Nearly every shot of Blood in the Water looks like it could be some band’s album cover. And when it comes to stylish crime pictures, appearance counts.
  8. Greater
    The movie’s length is excessive and its arc over-familiar, but for those who don’t mind a little sap — or a lot — Greater is effective.
  9. I Am Not a Serial Killer
    The film meanders, and the climax descends into campy fantasy worthy of any ’80s B-movie, but Records is quietly winning.
  10. Ixcanul
    Even as it moves from tender ethnographic portraiture into a realm of hushed, intimate tragedy, Ixcanul quivers with a fierce if understated feminine energy.
  11. The People vs. Fritz Bauer
    Energizing the entire film, in fact powering us past its more conventional aspects, is the compelling performance of veteran German actor Burghart Klaussner, who captures Bauer’s firebrand intensity exactly.
  12. A Tale of Love and Darkness
    Actors gravitate toward passion projects, films they care deeply, even obsessively about, but the end result is hardly ever as convincing as A Tale of Love and Darkness a film of beautiful melancholy.
  13. No Asylum: The Untold Chapter of Anne Frank's Story
    Fouce mixes vivid, often disturbing archival footage and photos with moving latter-day interviews with several elderly Frank family members and Holocaust survivors, plus glimpses of Otto’s letters and daughter Anne’s famed writings.
  14. Einstein's God Model
    Though the acting is inconsistent and the dialogue often laughable (and not in the good way), the film has an appealing can-do quality and a strong dose of craziness that keeps it from ever becoming boring.
  15. Never
    It feels more like the sketch of an idea than a fully realized film, and it ends on a note that seems it should be the beginning or middle of the story, not the end.
  16. Making a Killing: Guns, Greed, and the NRA
    As always with Greenwald, it’s refreshing that he doesn’t simply indulge in fear-mongering. He has the resources and the research team to sort through lots of data, culling the relevant points and encouraging action.
  17. Ben-Hur
    As directed by Timur Bekmambetov, this 21st century Ben-Hur is more phlegmatic than awful, a by and large dull and lethargic piece of work that is not bad enough to get mad at. What it lacks most of all is a convincing reason to exist.
  18. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    Kampai! For the Love of Sake serves as an occasionally enlightening if long-winded primer that will prove best suited to connoisseurs.
  19. Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    Considering its subject often enjoys the simple wonder inherent in characters who look into the distance, Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny does an extra-fine job of looking back with similarly rich and appreciative curiosity.
  20. Spaceman
    While a fictionalized account of Lee’s career certainly held some sex, drugs & rock ’n’ roll potential, the blandly pedestrian film Spaceman seldom delivers despite an engagingly game lead performance by Josh Duhamel.
  21. Billionaire Ransom
    Excellent production values and a decent premise help hold together “Billionaire Ransom,” an otherwise rickety thriller constructed from used parts.
  22. Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World
    Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is just the kind of percolating, wry probe we need into this fast-moving, digitally monopolizing age.
  23. Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV
    The slick animation and exciting battles lose their novelty eventually, and there’s just not enough here in the way of edge-of-the-seat storytelling or vivid characters to compensate.
  24. Disorder
    For all Winocour’s obvious skill behind the camera, too much of “Disorder” bogs down in ill-defined motivations and credulity-straining plot turns.
  25. Kubo and the Two Strings
    It recognizes that our most cherished legends are an endless source of consolation in times of suffering and loss, as well as a vital repository of cultural and generational memory. If that message sounds trite or familiar, it has rarely been driven home with this much conviction and intensity of feeling.
  26. Morris from America
    Much like the father-son bond at its center, the comic drama is warmhearted but never cloying.
  27. War Dogs
    In the end, there’s no outrage in War Dogs — no lacerating insight, no gonzo satiric energy, nothing more than warmed-over cynicism and some mild titters at the spectacle of boys being boys under uniquely deadly circumstances.
  28. Imperium
    A chilling, surprisingly effective crime thriller.
  29. Sausage Party
    The film is not quite smart enough to overcome the clichés and stereotypes it acknowledges but can’t entirely dismantle. At the same time, it often isn’t quite outrageous enough, as if it should be more willing to be outright offensive.
  30. Ants on a Shrimp
    Director Maurice Dekkers stops far short of shooting “food porn” here, instead deftly capturing the often spare beauty of Redzepi and company’s rarefied concoctions including, yes, ants on a shrimp.
  31. Blood Father
    Luckily for Gibson fans, the movie’s a small gem: a good old-fashioned chase picture, thickened with pulp.
  32. Anthropoid
    The movie both embraces and questions the romance of heroism, a provocative paradox that would have had more dramatic oomph if the screenplay were less staid, the characters more fully fleshed.
  33. Downriver
    Downriver is the kind of graceful provocation that slips around a corner before you can pinpoint its intentions, and that keeps it arresting as both an inquiry and a character study.
  34. This Last Lonely Place
    The cryptic and mysterious story is crammed with overwrought issues — cancer, divorce, fraud, war — which the characters then over-explain.
  35. The Model
    Matthiesen offers no easy answers, but The Model paints a decidedly unglamorous picture, while pulling back the curtain on the exploitative realities of the business.
  36. Sole Proprietor
    The movie sports more personality than most low-budget thrillers, yet sometimes devolves into the kind of ponderousness that a collaborator might have second-guessed.
  37. Joshy
    Ultimately, it’s a fascinating depiction of the way men do — or don’t — confront life’s tragedies and traumas.
  38. Abortion: Stories Women Tell
    If there is a through line that unites all the women in Abortion: Stories Women Tell, it’s that they take the potential responsibilities of parenthood very seriously. And no matter how tough and self-reliant they are, this decision is always an impossible one, and one that the outside world's unbending attitudes do not make any easier.
  39. Pete's Dragon
    Experiencing Pete's Dragon is like seeing something thought to be extinct, a creation every bit as magical and mythical as the flying, fire-breathing beast its named after. That would be the straight ahead, unapologetic family film.
  40. Emily & Tim
    An intriguing casting gimmick can’t mask a story — and a relationship — that’s largely unremarkable.
  41. Neither Heaven Nor Earth
    Neither Heaven Nor Earth is a case of the inexplicable rendered without forced mysticism or explanation, but rather explored with a clinical dramatic focus that somehow boosts the eeriness.
  42. Edge of Winter
    A frostbitten B-movie can still provide a little welcome relief in the dead of summer. Edge of Winter suffices as a diverting breath of recycled cool air.
  43. The Fight Within
    The Fight Within is too generic as a sports flick, and too pro forma as a tract. There’s more vitality and humanity in the closing-credits blooper reel than in anything in the actual picture.
  44. For the Plasma
    [An] annoyingly oblique exercise in arty affectation.
  45. Front Cover
    Unfortunately, writer-director Ray Yeung leapfrogs over several key emotional beats and points of credibility. At the same time, he plies an ambitious slate of social, sexual and cultural messages, some more fully formed than others.
  46. Hell or High Water
    That Hell or High Water makes you empathize with and understand (though not excuse) each member of this disparate quartet is a tribute to the way Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay works equally well as a thriller, character study and pointed social commentary.
  47. Florence Foster Jenkins
    It’s a film that dares you to give it a bad review, simply so it can turn around and call you a bully who picks on the people who try. It invites you to giggle at Florence’s horrible singing and then promptly scolds you for laughing, creating a contradiction that goes unreconciled.
  48. Little Men
    Ira Sachs’ beautifully observed Little Men zeros in on teen-spirit qualities that might, by conventional standards, be considered less cinematic: creativity and innocence, a tender spark brought to life by terrific newcomers Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri.
  49. Nine Lives
    The most disappointing thing is that Nine Lives doesn’t even dare to be an audacious mess. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of Hollywood’s worst instincts, a movie made with a math formula where its vision should have been.
  50. The Tenth Man
    The Tenth Man is a low-key charmer, an unlooked-for combination of Jane Austen and Isaac Bashevis Singer. With a twist of Buenos Aires thrown into the mix.
  51. Embers
    While one wishes Carré, who shares screenplay credit with Charles Spano, might have hung those stirring visuals on more involving plotting, Embers nevertheless makes a strong, not to mention timely, impression.
  52. Sun Choke
    With a highly stylized form, and thick, syrupy ribbons of blood splashing everywhere, Sun Choke evokes a creepy, eerie vibe, but it’s difficult to muster more than a passing interest in the story, because we don’t know who this girl is, or why she does these things.
  53. Amateur Night
    The film insistently asserts its autobiographical roots at the expense of sharper plotting and characterizations, not to mention more energetic pacing.
  54. The Mind's Eye
    Begos gets the texture and atmosphere right, but there’s nothing beneath his cool ’80s fog.
  55. Let's Be Evil
    Admirably imaginative but frustratingly clunky, the sci-fi thriller Let’s Be Evil is a technophobic cautionary tale that ironically demonstrates how fancy new digital filmmaking tools make a low-budget project look spiffy.
  56. Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil
    Deeper socio-historical context and a more electric approach could have helped us better appreciate the far-flung impact of this visionary artist.
  57. Five Nights in Maine
    The dreary postmortem drama Five Nights in Maine is barely kept afloat by the gravitas of dueling leads David Oyelowo and Dianne Wiest.
  58. Lace Crater
    Lace Crater is a thoroughly modern ghost story that creeps into camp, testing the audience as it wavers between terrifying and deadpan funny.
  59. Citizen Soldier
    Citizen Soldier makes for an honorable addition to the densely populated modern war film field.
  60. Miss Sharon Jones!
    There’s no overarching life-story chronology; biographical details emerge in bits and pieces. The director doesn’t wring maudlin tears from her subject’s ordeal, in part because Jones never asks for pity.
  61. Olympic Pride, American Prejudice
    History is not neat and tidy, however much we wish it could be, and Olympic Pride, American Prejudice is more than adept at getting to the truth about perhaps the most mythologized event of the modern Olympic movement.
  62. The Little Prince
    Although Mark Osborne’s new CG/stop-motion feature succeeds in bringing the essence of Saint-Exupéry to life in the lovely stop-motion sequences, there are only a few of these delightful moments in an otherwise muddled movie that feels like three films ineptly grafted together.
  63. Suicide Squad
    Suicide Squad is a concept in search of a story worth telling. Both energized and betrayed by its “Worst.Heroes.Ever” theme and writer-director David Ayer’s trademark visceral filmmaking, it ends up in a kind of limbo, not as strong as partisans will insist or as worthless as its weakest elements would have you believe.
  64. Tallulah
    Despite the melodrama, the connections these women forge are heartfelt and earned.
  65. Women He's Undressed
    The clips Armstrong and her team have rounded up make us appreciate how, in a whole range of situations, costumes express character.
  66. Shelley
    After a strong start, Shelley becomes frustratingly vague in the middle, before rebounding with a finale that makes the implicit menace more explicit.
  67. Equity
    The screenplay by Amy Fox is mechanical, the plot more contrived than charged under Meera Menon’s lackluster direction. But as a study of endurance and self-preservation in the face of persistent double standards, the movie clicks.
  68. Gleason
    If this film portrait stirs deep emotions, they spring from a breathtakingly unsentimental embrace of life at its most challenging.
  69. Don't Think Twice
    For a movie that involves creating laughs on the fly, the story is tightly told and acted, which adds to its buoyant pacing, astute observations and well-judged poignancy.
  70. Hooligan Sparrow
    Against considerable odds, Wang managed to smuggle the various media out of China and back to her New York base where she adroitly edited it into a quietly powerful first feature about the untapped potential for bearing witness in our social media-driven society.
  71. Can We Take a Joke?
    The film, narrated by comedian Christina Pazsitzky, raises some interesting observations about the climate on many of today’s college campuses, where the former havens for free speech (it’s noted that Bruce lectured at UCLA in 1966) have become especially vulnerable in regard to violated comfort zones.
  72. The Childhood of a Leader
    The Childhood of a Leader is a chilly — and chilling — political thriller by way of a provocative domestic chamber piece. Strikingly mounted, lighted, shot and scored, this tense, decidedly arty film marks a bravura feature directing debut for young American actor Brady Corbet.
  73. The Land
    The Cleveland locations — along with some memorable visual flourishes via skateboard tricks — show that Caple has a unique eye and a strong sense of place. Here’s hoping that next time he applies them to a fresher story.
  74. Into the Forest
    Rozema has a careful but unflinching eye when it comes to presenting the physical and emotional traumas the sisters experience. Even when some of the events escalate to operatic, nearly mystical levels, the direction feels assured and solidly rooted.
  75. Indignation
    Indignation tells a very particular story, one that’s bittersweet, heartbreaking and bleakly comic all at once, and it gets it right.
  76. Jason Bourne
    Made with a palpable sense of urgency, this tense, propulsive motion picture is a model of what mainstream entertainment can be like when everything goes right.
  77. Don't Blink - Robert Frank
    Rather than being a film about an artist, it’s an attempt to show us what it's like to actually be an artist.
  78. Bad Moms
    Like husbands who think that carrying in the groceries is really pitching in, Lucas and Moore have their hearts in the right place, but their efforts have little real insight or impact.
  79. The President
    Although Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf says The President was inspired by the turbulent events of the Arab Spring, there’s also a timeless quality to this absorbing and powerful fable that provides added resonance.
  80. Free to Run
    Some legs of the journey are detours, and the film can feel overlong and diffuse, but as a capsule history it offers revelatory insights, particularly in its emphasis on the role of distance running in the women’s movement.
  81. Phantom Boy
    Like their Oscar-nominated “A Cat in Paris” (2010), Phantom Boy by Jean-Loup Felicioli and Alain Gangol is a modest, engaging film that reminds viewers of the intimate pleasures of drawn animation in an era of CG blockbusters.
  82. Train to Busan
    The key to the fun is that Yeon eschews lookie-loo gore for thrilling set pieces: his fleet, imaginative action scenes recall Brad Bird’s crisp transition to real people in peril when he made his “Mission Impossible” movie.
  83. Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
    D’Souza might be preaching to the choir, but at least this voter recruitment tool could have aspired to something more challenging than an amateurishly slapped-together rehash.
  84. Quitters
    Even as you recognize echoes of Woody Allen, Noah Baumbach and Todd Solondz here, Pritzker has a good ear for authenticity, and he draws terrific performances from a cast.
  85. Summertime
    Artfully calculated and authentically felt, the unexpectedly effective Summertime combines the conventional structure of classic movie romance with a sensual same-sex frankness that couldn't be more up-to-date.
  86. The Blackout Experiments
    The emphasis on Blackout’s therapeutic qualities gets overly repetitive and banal — a little like listening to strangers analyze their dreams. But like Blackout itself, The Blackout Experiments is often chilling and hard to shake.
  87. Ice Age: Collision Course
    "Collision Course” is simply a perfunctory, watered-down entry in the series that feels like it should have been released on home video.
  88. Fight Valley
    The whole thing has a very seedy, late-night cable feel, which is where you should catch this film — and only if you’re a die-hard UFC fan.
  89. Indian Point
    No matter which way you come down on the nuclear power issue, watching Indian Point will clarify your thinking.
  90. Don't Worry Baby
    Despite the tale’s potential for an overly broad and crass approach to its loaded setup, Branciforte’s sly, incisive writing and even-handed take on his authentic characters instead errs on the side of wit, candor and a kind of hip sophistication.
  91. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie is a raucously funny, often endearing, subversively feminist, bloody good time.
  92. Lights Out
    Bello gives a tremulous wacko-mom performance from which she has eliminated every whisper of camp. She’s both sympathetic and infuriating, and her scenes with her daughter hint at a more painful, complicated emotional history than the movie has time to explore, though it’s nice that it bothers to explore it at all.
  93. Star Trek Beyond
    Fun but in a careful way, the film lasts just two hours, but it can seem much longer than that.
  94. Undrafted
    The unfocused Undrafted ultimately possesses all the dramatic intrigue of an intentional walk.
  95. Lucha Mexico
    An insightful and wildly entertaining look at the wrestlers who ply their trade south of the border.
  96. Under the Sun
    One of the most fascinating things about Under the Sun is the contradictory thoughts it inspires.
  97. Yarn
    It’s an inspiring portrait of a truly feminist mode of art.
  98. Outlaws and Angels
    While Mollner elicits some strong performances — especially from Francesca Eastwood as a vengeful farmer’s daughter — Outlaws and Angels can’t overcome its distractingly showy camera moves or its tendency toward scenes that drag on interminably.
  99. Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
    For a movie about the creator of some of the most pointed, controversial comedies in television history, Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You has a curious habit of sidestepping some of the thornier and more interesting aspects of its subject’s life.
  100. Men Go to Battle
    Men Go to Battle isn’t always effective, in that way DIY filmmaking sometimes irritates by deliberately avoiding “moments.” But as an offbeat lens through which to view an oft-mined era, it has a quiet pull.
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