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. Andron
    Italian writer-director Francesco Cinquemani, in his feature debut, has essentially done a cut-and-paste job, assembling a thoroughly uninvolving, tension-free futuristic sci-fi thriller.
  2. Time to Choose
    Most of Time To Choose is concerned with demonstrating that, as more than one speaker says, every crisis is an opportunity. That for every human action that increases global warming there are already workable alternatives in place just waiting to be embraced by a wider constituency.
  3. Approaching the Unknown
    Under the steady hand of writer-director Mark Elijah Rosenberg, tension and pathos build, slowly sweeping us along with the captain’s fraught yet hopeful exploration.
  4. The Final Master
    Writer-director Xu Haofeng’s movie doesn’t feel like many other movies of its ilk. That’s mostly a good thing, even if the movie can’t quite fit all its eccentric pieces into a satisfying whole.
  5. The Wailing
    What makes The Wailing so unusually disturbing is the almost palpable aura of evil it radiates from calm start to sorrowful finish. More disturbing still is the way that evil can seem indistinguishable from compassion.
  6. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    The pleasure of Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping derives not from the sting or accuracy of its satire (though Will Arnett does a pretty killer Harvey Levin), but from the precision of its timing and the singular comic energy it derives from the talents on display.
  7. Stressed to Kill
    This tedious picture botches both the setup and the punchline.
  8. High-Rise
    High-Rise is a stubborn, incoherent wreck of a movie, and I mean that as fairly high praise. You won’t follow everything that happens, but you may feel weirdly at home.
  9. To Life
    More resonant in theory than in execution, the post-Holocaust drama To Life never truly embraces the promise of its title or the roiling emotion beneath its surface.
  10. Princess
    The young actress Haas is riveting in a performance far beyond her years. Princess takes its time, but patience pays off in this sensitive slow burn of a story.
  11. Lasseter's Bones
    The film, like Walker’s trek, occasionally feels like a bit of a slog to those unexposed to the folklore, but it makes some interesting observations in regard to the pursuit of fact over fiction.
  12. ma ma
    The model here may be the florid, female-centered movies of Douglas Sirk, but the effect is as poetic and inspiring as a waiting-room pamphlet.
  13. The Idol
    The rare feature to be shot on location in Gaza, The Idol offers implicit commentary on everyday deprivations and work-arounds. Yet the screenplay stumbles when it plants self-conscious observations in the mouths of characters of all ages.
  14. Presenting Princess Shaw
    With a unique narrative conceit and a highly root-worthy underdog at its center, the movie stands apart as a kind of feel-good, audio-visual experiment.
  15. Holy Hell
    It’s not a complete journalistic picture, unfortunately, and it’s ham-fistedly structured to withhold information for maximum dramatic impact. But that impact, as predictable as it is, hits hard.
  16. The Ones Below
    The chillingly twisty plotting is dispensed in painstakingly measured increments that allow for maximum dread and, ultimately, well-earned shock value, while his four leads deliver equally subtle performances that sync with the pacing beat for beat.
  17. Alice Through the Looking Glass
    At every turn the filmmakers have simplified, banalized and sentimentalized Alice and her psychological landscape in ways that reek of ignorance at best and cynicism at worst.
  18. X-Men: Apocalypse
    Disorganized but engaging, full of visual pyrotechnics and earnest emotion, it is diverting, if not necessarily convincing.
  19. Back in the Day
    Director Paul Borghese, who previously attempted to ape Scorsese with his 2013 mob drama, “Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn,” is content to simply rehash shopworn tropes.
  20. Hard Sell
    It’s hard to keep track of all the old high school comedies that writer-director-producer Sean Nalaboff nods to in his feature film debut, Hard Sell. Eventually, though, the movie finds its own voice and groove, and avoids being a mere retro exercise.
  21. Margarita with a Straw
    Koechlin gives such a remarkably warm, expressive performance (she and Gupta are non-disabled) it’s hard not to be captivated by much of this tender, if choppy film.
  22. Manhattan Night
    It’s not a great movie but a welcome one, if only for how it attempts to revive a whole genre.
  23. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    Although the title might suggest cheesy sensationalism, A Monster With a Thousand Heads serves as a sobering, all-too-relatable indictment of the bureaucratic Hydra that is the medical insurance industry.
  24. Welcome to Happiness
    While its heart is in the right place, Welcome to Happiness is too fixated on its twee peccadilloes to truly succeed.
  25. The Measure of a Man
    Sensitively handled yet unafraid to elicit squirming, and boasting a seriously affecting turn by Lindon — who won last year’s Cannes award for Best Actor — it’s a miniature portrait of quotidian desperation that nevertheless speaks to the collective psychic moan of job-seekers and those barely holding on everywhere.
  26. Weiner
    Once again, truth proves stranger than fiction in the raucous and provocative documentary Weiner.
  27. Almost Holy
    Almost Holy captures something meaningfully urgent in the brutal day-to-day of tough love amid a world of tougher indifference.
  28. Maggie's Plan
    The writing crackles, and Miller doesn’t waste time getting right at the meat of the story.
  29. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    Title IX has finally hit the college party movie genre and the result is just as goofily funny and mind-bendingly stupid as its testosterone-driven predecessors.
  30. The Nice Guys
    Though the plot here may be a confusing, multi-threaded mess (which may in fact be the script’s truest homage to Chandler), it’s occasionally offset by the exuberance with which Black blends splatter and slapstick, and the leeway he grants his two very game leads.
  31. Serial Killer 1
    While a film like Serial Killer 1 may disappoint anyone expecting “Bullitt” or “Lethal Weapon,” its focus on legwork and motivation could well appeal to fans of “Law & Order” — the TV show and the social construct.
  32. The Asian Connection
    Generically directed by Daniel Zirilli, who shares story credit with Tom Sizemore, the listless Asian Connection may be set in Bangkok and Cambodia but it feels about exotic as an order of take-out Thai.
  33. A Bit of Bad Luck
    Cursed with obnoxiously broad characters and nonsensical plotting, A Bit of Bad Luck is an intended backwoods satire that runs hopelessly off-course from the outset.
  34. Crush the Skull
    Easily the most thrilling thriller in recent memory, Crush the Skull seems destined for cult status.
  35. Most Likely to Die
    The biggest problem with Most Likely to Die, though — beyond it being unimaginative, unfunny and frightless — is that it has no sense of place or time.
  36. Starcrossed
    Barton is a standout as the alluring, broken young woman who hides as much as she reveals.
  37. Divine Access
    It isn’t terribly exciting as a movie — director/co-writer Steven Chester Prince mistakes drab pacing as a stylistic match for the laconic charm of his lead actor — but the serious-minded humor has a probing sincerity that carries you along.
  38. Under the Gun
    Director Stephanie Soechtig’s passionately contended, slickly produced film may not sway the most fervid 2nd Amendment defenders, but in its problem-solving vigor could spur a lot of others who believe in change to make that call, join that group, or vote a certain way.
  39. The Darkness
    While McLean and company admirably aim for some relevance by tying the Taylors’ haunting to their personal demons, ultimately The Darkness is just the same old show: things that go bump in the night, and the tasteful decor they defile.
  40. Sundown
    Sundown is a distressingly sexist and tone-deaf spring break sex comedy cobbled together from references to other classic party films and sounds as though it was written by aliens approximating teen speak.
  41. The Congressman
    Earnest and well-meaning, The Congressman devolves into predictable schmaltz.
  42. The Curse of Sleeping Beauty
    The Curse of Sleeping Beauty is a hard-working but dreary horror-thriller inspired by the classic Grimm’s fairy tale.
  43. Kill Zone 2
    Mostly, just as “SPL” did with Yen, this sequel serves as an ideal showcase for talented martial artists. Kill Zone 2 watches with awe as Jaa and Wu move with balletic force. There’s grace within their violence.
  44. Queen Mimi
    Offering more than a portrait of a woman about town, Rokah gradually exhumes the hardship of surviving the streets of Los Angeles for four decades and the associated stigma and shame that have prevented Haist from reaching out to family.
  45. Search Party
    This spectacularly dumb and unfunny film will likely bore even the staunchest fans of the “Hangover” movies, of which “Search” is a kind of distant, fatally impoverished cousin.
  46. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    Belladonna of Sadness is an interesting curiosity from the early days of modern anime, but material that may have seemed daring and adult in the era of Disney's “Robin Hood” and “Snoopy, Come Home” looks exploitative and misogynistic 43 years later.
  47. Last Days in the Desert
    At times a beautiful wandering, at other times an admirable character study, but rarely a powerful whole.
  48. How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town
    The film ends up as a heartwarmingly raunchy celebration of unabashed and diverse sexuality without shame or hang ups. And somewhere along the way, writer-director Jeremy LaLonde manages to squeeze in some romance too, turning this sex comedy into a rom-com.
  49. I Am Wrath
    Travolta, who took over the role from Nicolas Cage, and Meloni, who’s looking more and more like Robert De Niro every day, have a loose, easy chemistry that goes a long way to enliven all that overworked familiarity.
  50. The Trust
    For reminding us all that Cage has a peculiarly gifted way with erratic types, The Trust has merit, but the rest of it strains to hold one’s interest.
  51. Pelé: Birth of a Legend
    The childhood years of Brazil’s national treasure have been given a lamentably pedestrian big-screen treatment by Pelé: Birth of a Legend.
  52. What We Become
    Fans of blood and guts won’t find what they’re looking for here (until the final 10 minutes, that is); but serious-minded genre fans should feel satisfied.
  53. Love & Friendship
    Love & Friendship is, first and foremost, a master class on the art of comic timing, in its filmmaking and acting.
  54. Money Monster
    Money Monster is all over the map, mixing earnest contemporary relevance, black comedy, bogus emotion and tragedy with its nominal thriller plot, all to frankly bewildering effect.
  55. Dheepan
    The nagging lack of specificity with which the film concludes can’t help but call its entire dramatic construction into question.
  56. The Lobster
    It’s a wondrously silly premise, and one that Lanthimos, not unlike those great cine-surrealists Luis Buñuel and Charlie Kaufman before him, executes with rigorous illogic and immaculate formal control.
  57. Sunset Song
    Sunset Song, Davies’ adaptation of a 1932 novel about a Scottish farming family, falls short of the intended cumulative effect, its emotional power undercut by its studied, episodic unfolding.
  58. Eva Hesse
    A vibrant, affecting piece of filmmaking that’s sure to widen Hesse's following.
  59. Doukyusei (Classmates)
    The visuals in Doukyusei are more original than the rather standard story.
  60. Dragon Inn (1967)
    A director in command of everything from the watchful eyes of his actors, to the beauty of a misty morning light, to the heart-stopping vectors of arrows and swords bursting across a widescreen frame, Hu creates cinema that's the definition of kineticism.
  61. Bling
    A family film no member of the family will enjoy.
  62. Love Thy Nature
    With its twinkly piano and soul-stirring cinematography, Love Thy Nature feels like the visual equivalent of a hot oil spa massage — and leaves a residual effect that proves equally as fleeting.
  63. The Offering
    [An] uninspired, nonsensical mishmash, which crudely cobbles together second-hand religious imagery, abrasively noisy jump-scares, and — for some reason — techno-phobia.
  64. Memoria
    Despite clocking in at a scant 70 minutes, the troubled-youth drama Memoria manages to make a hauntingly poetic impression.
  65. Bite
    After an opening 10 minutes that promises something depressingly mediocre, the film takes a turn to the atmospheric and gruesome, and winds up being one of the year’s more provocative shockers.
  66. The Professor: Tai Chi's Journey West
    Director Barry Strugatz, a screenwriter best known for 1988’s “Married to the Mob,” has crafted a brief but disarmingly cordial tribute to an overlooked Tai Chi “sifu” who didn’t believe in kowtowing to convention.
  67. Rabin in His Own Words
    "In His Own Words" is a deeply involving look at the man's entire life, using archival footage, home movies, private letters but most of all filmed interviews Rabin gave, to let us hear him tell his own story just about from cradle to grave.
  68. Being Charlie
    The film is well-made — the direction is strong, the cinematography by Barry Markowitz compelling and the script by two first-time writers is confident. The biggest problem with the film is Charlie himself.
  69. Mothers and Daughters
    The emotions about the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters are spot on, and there’s no shortage of star power. But there’s an insistently dour fog over the proceedings, and the film feels subdued and sedated without the levity to brighten up things.
  70. Beautiful Something
    Bits and pieces of the gay-themed drama Beautiful Something feel real and essential. But this slow-going film often suffers from a forced, navel-gazing quality that can prove exasperating.
  71. Sacrifice
    That the film looks good matters little when director Peter A. Dowling’s script, based on the novel by Sharon Bolton, is filled with so many thinly drawn characters, blunt warning signs and telegraphed plot points.
  72. Phantom of the Theatre
    This visually restless and ultimately ludicrous Chinese horror film from director Yip Wai Man (a.k.a. Raymond Yip) is unlikely to either shorten your breath or curl your toes.
  73. Code of Honor
    In the laughably awful Code of Honor, Steven Seagal continues his campaign to make minimal onscreen movement, alarming chunkiness, and slurred, whispered threats in a weird Southern drawl, into the greatest assault on disbelief suspension in action filmmaking.
  74. Dark Horse
    A sweet if underwhelming documentary with plenty of character, but told in such a simple and gentle way, it doesn’t quite grab audiences as it could.
  75. Elstree 1976
    The best parts of "Elstree," not surprisingly, are the war stories these nine men and one woman share, their vivid memories of a shoot one calls "as primitive as it gets."
  76. Captain America: Civil War
    If you live and breathe Marvel, this is one of the MCU's stronger offerings. If you are a spy coming in from the cold, the answer is not so clear.
  77. A Bigger Splash
    [Guadagnino's] made the rare movie that, for all its delight in its own beautiful surface, turns out to be altogether less shallow than it appears.
  78. Term Life
    Term Life is cleanly plotted and tautly paced, but it’s never as fun as it should be.
  79. We the People: The Market Basket Effect
    There are good lessons to be learned from the Market Basket saga. "We the People" doesn't trust the audience to figure them out for themselves.
  80. Pali Road
    Pali Road disappoints with ghost-romance squishiness and deadly dull pacing.
  81. Papa: Hemingway in Cuba
    The film manages to be exceedingly dull, perhaps because it's too enamored of its own design, concept and location to bother with a captivating story.
  82. Rio, I Love You
    Despite its connotation of sun-drenched sensuality, Rio, I Love You is a dispiritingly dull affair.
  83. L'Attesa (The Wait)
    The film is a moody and lyrical contemplation of grief and the connections that can be found within the void of loss.
  84. Dough
    The challah may be extra special, but the humor found in John Goldschmidt's direction and the conventional script by Yehudah Jez Freedman and Jonathan Benson is disappointingly stale.
  85. Tale of Tales
    Diverting but rarely transporting, unpredictable yet strangely overdetermined, Garrone's film never conjures the sustained, enveloping magic promised by its extravagant design and its agreeably unhinged story sense.
  86. The Man Who Knew Infinity
    If The Man Who Knew Infinity had been more concerned with the soul of a raw talent instead of the learn-and-earn ethos of so much accomplishment cinema, it might have produced something soulful rather than something institutional.
  87. Ratchet & Clank
    From a storytelling perspective, the obsession with guns in a movie aimed at children is troubling, in poor taste and is lazy writing to boot.
  88. Viva
    Nothing happens you won't see coming, but it's all so deftly done you're more than happy to wait for the inevitable to arrive.
  89. The Family Fang
    For a project that is a showcase for his talents as both actor and director, Bateman never gets too showy on either front, keeping the emotions of the film at something of a restrained simmer.
  90. Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
    A thoughtful, nuanced examination of a complex thinker.
  91. Sworn Virgin
    Skipping deftly between time frames while keeping her camera close to her protagonist — played with tremulous understatement by the remarkable actress Alba Rohrwacher — Bispuri traces a journey of delicate interior shifts and reversals.
  92. Mother's Day
    From awkward start to merciful finish, Mother's Day is a grim, listless affair that may leave you pining for the relative pep and coherence of its predecessors (both of which were scripted by Katherine Fugate), or at least a few of their incidental pleasures.
  93. An Eye for Beauty
    Insistently distancing if aesthetically pleasing.
  94. No Home Movie
    With its focus on domestic interiors (and interior lives), the movie doesn't simply recall Akerman's past efforts; it reveals their roots.
  95. Keepers of the Game
    Even if its trajectory hews to a well-worn format, Keepers of the Game is as strong an argument that can be made for the rich emotional rewards of schoolgirls hitting the field to show everyone and themselves what they can achieve.
  96. Sky
    Though the first half of the film is far more interesting than the overwrought melodrama that it becomes, Sky remains a deeply compelling and optimistic valentine to the possibilities of the West.
  97. Paradox
    The temporal puzzle is enough to distract from the artless direction, visibly cheap set designs and tacky special effects. But if the expository scenes are any indication, his writing could benefit from some refinement.
  98. Our Last Tango
    While Our Last Tango is a little schematic overall, from moment to moment, it's beautifully choreographed.
  99. Holidays
    The film mostly feels perfunctory and awkward — like calling home at Christmas.
  100. Men & Chicken
    In Jensen's uniquely wacky world, there's a genuine affection for his offbeat characters.
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