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. Midnight Special
    Midnight Special announces the arrival of a filmmaker in total control of his technique as well as our emotions. A bravura science-fiction thriller that explores emotional areas like parenthood and the nature of belief, it's a riveting genre exercise as well as something more.
  2. Pee-wee's Big Holiday
    Despite a few delights — chiefly an adorably self-aware Joe Manganiello as the object of Pee-wee's man-crush — the new movie has an unsure tone and the barest thread of a story.
  3. The Divergent Series: Allegiant
    Because the series' plot reveal turns out to be more confusing than compelling, and because turning a novel into two films invariably leads to inflated productions, only the most devoted fans of the book will pledge allegiance to what's on the screen.
  4. Bleak Street
    The grubby melodrama should appeal to adventurous moviegoers — and to the director’s small-but-fervent cult — but even that crowd should brace themselves for something slow-paced and opaque.
  5. The Perfect Match
    The facade the film offers is a lovely, and mildly diverting one, but there’s little insight to be found below the surface.
  6. About Scout
    About Scout is a fantasy of escape rooted in the harshly lit realities of life.
  7. The Young Messiah
    In the end, as with too many Gospel-derived dramas, The Young Messiah could’ve used less literalism, and more mystery.
  8. Road Games
    Though built to divert, Road Games mostly feels untethered to any memorably crafty storytelling.
  9. Creative Control
    Creative Control is funny and imaginative, where many films of this type are dispiritingly plain.
  10. Barney Thomson
    Despite the fertile concept, it's hard to care about, much less root for, the irritable, charisma-challenged Barney. The character never emerges as an effective hero or antihero, and performer Carlyle does little to mitigate that.
  11. The Automatic Hate
    A compelling bit of family drama that packs a corrosive punch.
  12. Everything Is Copy
    It's a fitting tribute to the influential journalist-essayist-filmmaker: insightful about the life of a successful writer, engaging about how a smart modern woman navigated the world, but also quizzical about how Ephron was as a daughter, sister, wife and mother.
  13. Cemetery of Splendor
    Each scene, beneath its surface calm, throbs with longing, dislocation and intricately woven layers of time.
  14. Rise of the Legend
    Those looking to learn more about Wong are in the wrong place. Those looking for a slick slugfest with memorable characters will be well satisfied.
  15. Marguerite
    As written and directed by Xavier Giannoli, Marguerite is a thoughtful examination of an unusual, deeply eccentric woman.
  16. Hyena Road
    While the attempt at a certain, documentary-style naturalism is honorable, it's at the expense of focused plotting and sufficient character development.
  17. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Field amazes with her gameness, range and commitment.
  18. Backgammon
    The film's musings on artists and muses tries to be deep but gets bogged down in tiresome booze-soaked mind games.
  19. Admiral
    With loving shots of booming, towering ships so dominant, and decades squeezed into what feels like a week of action, there's barely enough time to develop De Ruyter as a character in his own movie, or even successfully explain his war strategies.
  20. The Brothers Grimsby
    It's not unfunny in spots, but it huffs and puffs (among other bodily functions) more often than it splits the sides.
  21. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    It is designed to be fun, efficient and accessible and delivers precisely and exactly on that and nothing more.
  22. Rabin, the Last Day
    An unusual work that mixes genres to at times awkward but always powerful effect.
  23. The Wave
    The Wave adds credible writing and effective acting to gangbusters special effects, resulting in a white-knuckle experience a bit higher on the plausibility scale than what we're used to from Hollywood versions of the genre.
  24. Marguerite & Julien
    The operatic tragedy of Marguerite and Julien's plight proves an effectively creepy dramatic engine.
  25. Of Mind and Music
    New Orleans locations and stirring tunes lend texture, intermittently breaking through the film's overriding flatness.
  26. The Final Project
    Even by the shaggy standards of found footage, The Final Project is amateurish.
  27. Camino
    Bell proves to be one tough cookie, but she's ultimately taken down by all the stiff, under-developed dialogue and iffy supporting performances.
  28. Colliding Dreams
    Colliding Dreams is a film of ideas and a film of history, a thorough and engrossing look at the root causes of the tortured relationship between Israel and the Palestinians.
  29. Emelie
    Irish actress Bolger plays her psychopath with cool, calculating intimidation, while first-time feature director Michael Thelin, sharing screenplay credit with Rich Herbeck, lays a solid foundation of suburban domesticity on which to build all the mounting menace.
  30. London Has Fallen
    As long as there are enemies in Islamic lands, we'll probably have to endure risible time-wasters like London Has Fallen, designed to justify blinkered foreign policy attitudes and stoke jokey hatred.
  31. Trapped
    While the situation seems at times dire, Trapped contains a distinct hopeful streak that is at once defiant and singularly human.
  32. Ava's Possessions
    Ava's Possessions is powered by an amusing conceit that configures demonic possession as a metaphor for addiction. But the metaphor alone is not enough to sustain this minor effort, which wears thin over the course of a feature length.
  33. Zootopia
    Bursting with a rich blend of timely themes, superb voice work, wonderful visuals and laugh-out-loud wit, Walt Disney Animation Studios' Zootopia is quite simply a great time at the movies.
  34. Knight of Cups
    The only thing that keeps Knight of Cups from terminal artistic overreach as it follows Rick around town is the knockout cinematography of three-time Oscar winner Emmanuel Lubezki, who does superb work showing us contemporary Los Angeles in a most magical way.
  35. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    There are a few inventive battles on a frozen pond and atop the tiled roof of a temple, but they are so CGI-enhanced as to seem cartoonish, not marvelous.
  36. They Look Like People
    An effective and unsettling neuro-psychological thriller, They Look Like People creates a creepily mundane sense of dread in its depictions of a schizophrenic's paranoid delusions.
  37. Backtrack
    While everyone involved with Backtrack is a polished pro, the movie's tastefulness gets in the way of the suspense.
  38. Who's Driving Doug
    By turns earnest and profane, the story of three twentysomethings' Sin City sortie contains flashes of wit.... But this road is lined with clichés and blunt dialogue, the emotional shifts all too neatly underlined by Death Cab for Cutie tracks.
  39. A Country Called Home
    A paint-by-numbers indie that barely uses its most vivid hues.
  40. Jack of the Red Hearts
    There's a poignant, powerful story lurking at the edges of Jack of the Red Hearts but, as is, the film proves a strained, implausible family drama.
  41. Only Yesterday (1991)
    Only Yesterday is a realistic, personal story made universal in a delicate way.
  42. Triple 9
    With a stacked cast and skillful filmmaking, Triple 9 proves to be a satisfying crooked-cop heist thriller, imbued with complicated topical issues that last long after the adrenaline rush.
  43. King Georges
    [A] poignant, funny and well-seasoned portrait of autumnal fervor.
  44. The Last Man on the Moon
    The film traces Cernan's career trajectory, going back to his days in San Diego as a hot-shot naval aviator, blending terrific archival footage with contemporary perspectives to quietly poetic effect.
  45. 1982
    It's little more than an artsy but hollow Lifetime cable movie.
  46. Eddie the Eagle
    Director Dexter Fletcher ("Sunshine on Leith") keeps things enjoyably hurtling forward, even when the otherwise engaging script by Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton overworks a cliché, shorthands certain practical and financial matters, or proves a bit one-note.
  47. The Mermaid
    Crass and macabre, yet big-hearted, it makes a wonderfully adult bedtime story.
  48. Becoming Mike Nichols
    By concentrating on the early projects, we get a richer sense of the development of Nichols the artist in his own words and illustrated with photos and extended clips of performances.
  49. Forsaken
    It's a treat to see Kiefer and Donald side by side, and both give fine performances. But a pairing this special deserved a story more unique than "reluctant killer reaches for his guns."
  50. Rolling Papers
    Generally leaving the weightier political stuff to others, Mitch Dickman's lively documentary functions as both a handy pot primer and a telling portrait of the volatile, adapt-or-die climate that continues to hover over the newspaper industry.
  51. Snowtime!
    Directors Jean-François Pouliot and François Brisson fail to organize the material into a coherent story or strike a consistent emotional tone.
  52. We Are Twisted F***ing Sister!
    The film itself is a bit rudimentary, with amateurish titles, and editing choices that bloat the already extended length, but the interviews with band members and fans are insightful and engaging, with archival footage that truly rocks.
  53. The Forbidden Room
    This exercise in beauty, derangement and memory can be contemplative or silly. Often it's both, in just the right proportions.
  54. Crazy About Tiffany's
    As glossy and tony as its rarefied subject matter, Crazy About Tiffany's, although entertaining enough, might be one of the least socially conscious documentaries since writer-director Matthew Miele's last valentine to high-end shopping, 2013's "Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's."
  55. Risen
    Risen is a fascinating cultural artifact, but as a film, it's destined for no glory greater than as an appropriate cable rerun on Easter.
  56. Embrace of the Serpent
    Beautiful, strange, disturbing, Embrace of the Serpent is a film with a lot on its mind.
  57. The Witch
    In a way, the movie is a tug of war between the fruits of exhaustive research into old-world madness — which plays out most prominently in the richly possessed performances (particularly Taylor-Joy and young Scrimshaw) and the evocative frontier trappings — and an entertainer's pulpier instincts.
  58. Mavis!
    Mavis! is maybe too short and too plain, but it covers a lot of ground and contains a lot of great music. It's a fitting tribute to a true American original, belatedly getting her due.
  59. Cabin Fever
    It doesn't help that what passes for acting here seems more like a table read.
  60. Glassland
    [Reynor's] performance — fractured yet strong — is a big reason why Glassland works so well.
  61. Nina Forever
    Thanks to a trio of solid performances (especially the dryly bitter O'Shaughnessy, who suggests a young Helena Bonham Carter), this first feature, although a tad long, nevertheless emerges as a diabolically effective anti-date movie.
  62. Touched With Fire
    Writer-director Dalio has firsthand experience with bipolar disorder, and his perspective sheds fresh light on the unique ways in which manic-depressive individuals experience love and creativity.
  63. Standoff
    Unfortunately in the hands of writer-director Adam Alecca, this overly talky, slackly executed game of cat-and-mouse comes off as cheesy rather than chilling.
  64. Deadpool
    You're initially jazzed by his effrontery, but Deadpool, with his relentlessly glib, nothing-sacred attitude, is not an individual who wears particularly well.
  65. The Club
    Larraín, who wrote the movie with Guillermo Calderón and Daniel Villalobos, approaches the material like a scientist both fascinated and cynically bemused by how a particularly virulent sickness operates.
  66. A War
    A War is a film done exactly right about a situation gone horribly wrong.
  67. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong
    The immensely likable Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong is a freshly contemporary change-up on the traditional cross-cultural romantic-comedy.
  68. Bad Hurt
    Although affecting and well acted, the family drama Bad Hurt is too airless and depressing to fully engage.
  69. Zoolander 2
    Zoolander 2 defines haphazard. You may smile at times, but not as often as you'd like.
  70. Regression
    Well-intended seriousness dismantles Regression, a not-exactly-horror horror movie that's also a mystery with no mystery.
  71. Misconduct
    To say everyone plays like they're in separate movies is an understatement.
  72. Southbound
    For all its gore and violence, stabs at tension and nightmarish intrigue, the film proves a slow-going, largely unsatisfying ride.
  73. All Roads Lead to Rome
    The tone is wildly inconsistent, particularly with plucky, lighthearted music accompaniment scoring what is essentially a teen crime spree.
  74. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    Greenaway's boundary-pushing, breathlessly in-your-face approach begins to take its toll on viewer patience.
  75. Monday at 11:01 A.M.
    Agron's screenplay and Harvey Lowry's direction seem more concerned with scattering bread crumbs than fashioning credible characters and an engaging story.
  76. The Pack
    While Robertson throws in too many cheap jump-scares, he mostly does well by Green's script, coaxing strong performances from the cast and making sure the viewers feel a sickly dread every time some creature is growling and scratching at the ranch-house door.
  77. Tumbledown
    Tumbledown sees its good intentions undermined by cloying sitcom conventions.
  78. Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
    Revolutionary zealots who did not necessarily get along with each other, the temperamental creators of land art took themselves very seriously. But as "Troublemakers" convincingly demonstrates, the work they produced justified their attitude.
  79. 4th Man Out
    Old stereotypes are trotted out for humor's sake, and it's not a question of offensiveness, just that the jokes feel 10 years old.
  80. Rams
    Rams is so much its own film that figuring out where its unusual, unpredictable plot will end up is difficult if not impossible.
  81. Hail, Caesar!
    The great thing about Hail, Caesar! is that it is fun whether you get all its references or not.
  82. The Choice
    There's such mechanical artifice at work that it's hard to do more than squirm and groan at the couple's ultimate travails.
  83. Jane Got a Gun
    Jane Got A Gun may not have reinvented the wagon wheel, but it rolls out as a sturdy, well-crafted genre piece despite its rocky road to the screen.
  84. Fifty Shades of Black
    "Black” foregoes too much scene-setting, chronology and logic to stand completely on its own. As a piece of cultural criticism, however, it painstakingly eviscerates nearly every scene in “Grey” and skewers latent sexism, classism and ludicrous sexual innuendoes, as well as the original’s numerous plot holes.
  85. Jim: The James Foley Story
    Foley's family members, colleagues and prison cell mates vividly recount his 2011 imprisonment in Libya, his difficulty reacclimating to home life in sleepy New England after his release, before leaving again for Syria and enduring imprisonment by ISIS.
  86. In the Shadow of Women
    Like his previous feature, "Jealousy," the film is shot in sumptuous black-and-white and revolves around artistic Parisians. But in its elegant almost threadbare simplicity, it's a more effective story, anchored by three persuasive performances and a sly sense of irony.
  87. Rabid Dogs
    Although the original sometimes looked like a bunch of loosely connected scenes, this Rabid Dogs feels more purposeful.
  88. Portrait of a Serial Monogamist
    Despite a few inspired moments and some fun banter, Portrait of a Serial Monogamist is a slight, often random lesbian comedy that offers little new in the way of authentic depth or enlightenment.
  89. Mountain Men
    Tyler Labine, known for his comedic work, contributes a fine dramatic performance tinged with comedy, and Crawford is equally as good. A smart script deftly opens and builds upon itself in a controlled slow burn.
  90. The Finest Hours
    This tale of nautical derring-do has several things going for it to counteract the inherent obviousness of the material. These include a director who knows his way around this kind of material, special effects work that makes the peril fearfully alive, and a pip of a true story of what is considered as daring a rescue mission as the U.S. Coast Guard ever attempted.
  91. Kung Fu Panda 3
    A beautifully rendered, lovingly constructed action-comedy that's sure to please kids and adults alike.
  92. Exposed
    It’s hard to imagine how anything salvageable could have been made out of [Gee Malik Linton's] comically pretentious script with its heavily religious overtones and plotting that grows more ridiculous by the minute.
  93. JeruZalem
    JeruZalem is just a wobble-a-thon with incessant screaming and a predictable trajectory for its leading ladies, even if the final, arresting image of a malevolently transformed skyline makes one wish a more enticing, original road had led there.
  94. The Abandoned
    Streak and Cooper are meagerly drawn characters, first-draft dialogue abounds, and the story proves more tedious and head-scratching as it goes.
  95. The Boy
    If only writer Stacey Menear and director William Brent Bell took the very real horrors of domestic abuse as seriously as they do the virtual horror of paranormal activity.
  96. Dirty Grandpa
    Bright spots are found in the supporting cast.... They just are not enough to pull "Dirty Grandpa" out of its ill-conceived and poorly executed gutter.
  97. Yosemite
    Although evocative and nicely observed, the coming-of-age drama Yosemite ultimately proves too low-key and elliptical to make much of an impression.
  98. Synchronicity
    After an hour or so of bad noir dialogue and convoluted plotting, viewers may wish they could jump back in time and watch something else.
  99. Prescription Thugs
    Despite [Bell's] casual aura, the filmmaker is eloquent and thoughtful. He argues that Big Pharma merely services consumer demand for quick fixes with "magic" pills, bringing his cautionary tale full circle.
  100. Monster Hunt
    While individual sequences are genuinely entertaining, Monster Hunt remains considerably less than the sum of its many parts.
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