Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,522 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 16522
  2. Mixed: 5,808 out of 16522
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16522
16522 movie reviews
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  1. Neorealism: We Were Not Just Bicycles Thieves
    It's like a cozy, informational visit with a beloved professor who assumes you come with a cineaste's built-in appreciation, but enjoys connecting the dots for you in a way that makes the movement's creative signposts — nonprofessional actors, street vitality, stories about poverty and desperation — feel freshly indelible.
  2. Western Religion
    A one-dimensional movie painted in painfully broad strokes and whizzing, hurry-scurry action sequences.
  3. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    It's an act of defiance that's also a sublime piece of cinema, and it ranks among the director's finest work.
  4. The Final Girls
    A playful deconstruction of the slasher film that ultimately packs a surprisingly affecting punch.
  5. Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
    Winter on Fire never takes its eye off the story's underlying and very dramatic theme, and that would be nothing less than revolution.
  6. Yakuza Apocalypse
    For those fans who don't mind enduring some tedium and confusion, Yakuza Apocalypse at least offers something memorably bizarre.
  7. Big Stone Gap
    The movie mostly plays so strained and corn pone that it undermines its sincere emotional core and good intentions.
  8. Victoria
    It's a film of exceptional technical virtuosity that could have used some help in the dramatic department.
  9. Steve Jobs
    Steve Jobs is a smart, hugely entertaining film that all but bristles with crackling creative energy. What it is not is a standard biopic.
  10. Partisan
    It's hard to tell if director and co-writer Ariel Kleiman is being serious or sarcastic with a story this preposterous.
  11. Shark Lake
    Shark Lake lacks bite. Its audience doesn't even get to revel in blood and guts; the whole thing seems like it was edited for broadcast.
  12. The Visit: An Alien Encounter
    Madsen brings our collective sense of identity into sharp relief through the lens of what could be called a first date with mysterious beings.
  13. Narcopolis
    Narcopolis starts off intriguingly and ends solidly. It's everything else in between that isn't particularly compelling.
  14. Saving Mr. Wu
    As can be gleaned from snippets of news footage shown during the end credits, Ding has done an outstanding job re-creating the events and conveying the complexity and prudence of the cops' investigative chess moves.
  15. Godspeed: The Story of Page Jones
    The film never gives a real sense of the daily travails associated with traumatic brain injury.
  16. Movement and Location
    Systematically yet subtly, the Bolings and their strong cast take this certifiably oddball film in some thoughtfully intriguing places.
  17. This Is Happening
    Leachman's facility with the wackadoodle senior is ever-admirable, but even she can't save the low-energy, charm-free thud that is This Is Happening.
  18. Olvidados (Forgotten)
    By cramming in as many tangents as imaginable, Olvidados ultimately loses sight of what the story is even about.
  19. Manhattan Romance
    Despite what the film might want us to believe, if he walks, talks and acts like a selfish, predatory creep, he is, and there's just no sympathizing with him.
  20. Gravy
    Although a talented cast and crew keep this party lively, the lack of a point becomes a problem.
  21. 99 Homes
    Because of its strong dialogue and convincing acting, 99 Homes stays on point for quite some time, artfully disguising the film's increasing reliance on plot devices.
  22. Becoming Bulletproof
    The term "inspirational" gets bandied about a lot, but Becoming Bulletproof is thoroughly deserving of that tag.
  23. A Christmas Horror Story
    As horror movies go, this one's not especially tense or scary. Instead, it's eerie, provocative and at times ridiculously violent. The ending feels like a cop-out after so much creative mayhem.
  24. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    No matter how reflectively mellow the gray-haired, reminiscing interviewees are, the blizzard of featured illustrations from the magazine's '70s heyday offer scads of they-couldn't-get-away-with-that-today laughter.
  25. Northern Soul
    The electrifying Northern Soul captures the 1970s British club scene of the same name with ethnographic detail and ebullient style.
  26. Shout Gladi Gladi
    The film can feel like an infomercial for the foundation, but that doesn't stop the power of the stories from coming through.
  27. Shanghai
    Under Mikael Håfström's visually clunky, rhythmless direction, it's a snooze of epic sameness: choppy action scenes, a blankly stern Cusack, and too many allegiance shifts to count or care for.
  28. He Named Me Malala
    While the subject is deeply moving — and bringing tissues is recommended — Guggenheim's treatment is restrained, as he deploys inventive storytelling techniques that invite viewers inside Malala's world, to feel her joy, trauma and ultimately forgiveness.
  29. Freeheld
    Having its heart and mind in the right place is not enough to make this a better movie than it is.
  30. Mississippi Grind
    Australian Mendelsohn (sporting a pitch-perfect American accent) and Reynolds are terrific, each wrapping himself up in the material like a well-worn favorite sweater.
  31. Sherpa
    A documentary whose visual magnificence is more than matched by unforgettable characters and political urgency.
  32. Addicted to Fresno
    Beyond a few nice closing emotional beats, the whole enterprise plays too desperate and slapdash to whip up the goodwill required to sell such thin, far-fetched material.
  33. The Martian
    The Martian is a film that respects the geekiest among us, and that pays off all around.
  34. Labyrinth of Lies
    Labyrinth of Lies too often feels like machine-stamped issue cinema from a moldy Hollywood playbook.
  35. The Walk
    It would be swell if all of The Walk came together as beautifully as the computer effects do, but it would also be churlish not to appreciate what we do have. This film may not talk the talk, but it definitely walks the walk, and for that we are grateful.
  36. Me You and Five Bucks
    A dull, meandering romantic comedy with serious believability issues.
  37. Unbranded
    It's a film with a cause, but it's also brimming with drama in the midst of jaw-dropping landscapes.
  38. My Last Year with the Nuns
    Like an uncle making a long-winded, embarrassing toast to the bride, Smith may have a lot of defining childhood memories at his disposal, but that doesn't mean they all need to be shared.
  39. The Anomaly
    There's infinitely more than one anomaly to be found in The Anomaly, a thoroughly nonsensical futuristic sci-fi thriller that makes a case for the perils of vanity projects.
  40. Shah Bob
    The writer-director, Babak Shokrian, has made an erratic autobiographical film about juggling artistic ambitions and family expectations in L.A.'s close-knit Iranian Jewish community.
  41. Forever
    The film slowly, painfully declines from merely oddball to awful, with vapid dialogue and muddy character motivations, particularly where Woll's unsympathetic Alice is concerned.
  42. Endgame
    The otherwise congenial film plays itself to a draw because of flat characters and a script that overdoes the melodrama in the service of checking off a series of genre tropes borrowed from sports movies.
  43. Brand: A Second Coming
    Whether you agree with his system-damning rhetoric or see him as no better than anyone else in our clogged punditocracy, Brand: A Second Coming is, if not a careful portrait, at least an orgy of personality.
  44. Prophet's Prey
    Prophet's Prey is a sobering reminder that tyrannical monsters who hide behind religion can be homegrown too.
  45. Veteran
    This is a tonally and visually inconsistent piece whose cracks at "Lethal Weapon"-style humor are needlessly silly or simply flat.
  46. The Man Who Saved the World
    The film is a disingenuous, thoroughly dramatized reenactment at best and a reality show at worst.
  47. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
    An organization that stubbornly resists being pigeonholed, the Black Panther Party emerges from this documentary with its significance enhanced but some of its tactics questioned.
  48. Ashby
    Rourke and Wolff certainly have chemistry, and Sarah Silverman (as Ed's concerned single mom) and Emma Roberts (as Ed's potential girlfriend) provide solid support on the edges. But the humor never feels aimed in any particular direction.
  49. The Keeping Room
    Though the movie is not without thoughtful observations on gender roles and the effects of war, Hart's characters tend to speak in poetic truths that call attention to their authorial polish. The cast breathes what life it can into the proceedings, with Otaru particularly impressive.
  50. Finders Keepers
    Directors Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel stick with this story long enough to emotionally deepen the proceedings and show us how the struggle changes lives in profound ways no one could have anticipated.
  51. Pay the Ghost
    Tidbits that would make the film interesting have been squandered. Instead, we get the standard-issue haunted-house fodder. The ghosts manifest in so many different ways that it seems like the movie is grasping for straws.
  52. The Green Inferno
    The film is measured and executed effectively to satiate horror fans' bloodlust, yet its underlying messages are just so repugnant.
  53. Stonewall
    The proceedings can seem less like a fresh retelling of a seminal story and more like, despite stabs at grit and terror, a theatricalized, dewy-eyed version of days past.
  54. Hotel Transylvania 2
    Genndy Tartakovsky is a talented director who knows how to telegraph what an animated character is thinking and doing and how to move a character in ways that suggest personality.
  55. A Brave Heart: The Lizzie Velasquez Story
    With simple storytelling, the film allows its star, Velasquez, to shine, and with her endless reserves of positive energy, eloquent speaking and willingness to be vulnerable, it's no wonder millions of people have already found her inspirational.
  56. The Intern
    With The Intern, Meyers has made another bright, contemporary American comedy with a lot on its mind — and works hard to make it look effortless.
  57. Wildlike
    Wildlike is an uncommon and deeply sensitive take on this type of story.
  58. Lost in Hong Kong
    This rollicking crowd-pleaser might just be smart and substantive enough to be one of the year's best.
  59. East Side Sushi
    Though the film has trappings of a crowd-pleaser like Jon Favreau’s “Chef,” writer-director Anthony Lucero has left much thematically to unpack.
  60. Sicario
    By turns thrilling, disorienting and draining, Sicario exists in a border zone seemingly of its own devising between the art film and the action movie.
  61. Eden
    Commercial director Shyam Madiraju, making his feature debut, demonstrates a spare, sinewy visual grip on the low-budget film, especially during that crash sequence. But the mechanical script strands a capable young cast in a sea of hackneyed character types and soggy platitudes.
  62. Radicalized
    Like the young social activists at its center, the documentary Radicalized is propelled by a ragged energy, a fuel that's equal parts outrage and idealism.
  63. Poached
    Director Timothy Wheeler manages to wrangle for interviews some active and reformed egg offenders along with authorities, conservationists and volunteers. Some are quite the characters, indeed.
  64. Montana
    Although the lead performances, including a turn by Michelle Fairley (Catelyn Stark on "Game of Thrones") as a no-nonsense police chief, are uniformly solid, the hollow Montana has trouble unloading all those stolen parts.
  65. Uncle John
    Perhaps the vapid existence of millennials is precisely the point that co-writers Erik Crary and Steven Piet (who also directs) are driving at, but the film itself proves inarticulate and unsubstantial.
  66. The New Girlfriend
    Director Ozon... infuses the picture with a provocative array of themes, imagery and moods. But it's French film heartthrob Duris' fluid, finely measured, physically deft portrayal of the blossoming David that sets the movie apart.
  67. Everest
    Though there is heroism as well as love here, because it involves the deaths of people we have come to care about, Everest is finally a sad story, though not always a dramatically involving one.
  68. Peace Officer
    The engrossing documentary Peace Officer looks at the militarization of police work from a fresh, provocative angle.
  69. Being Canadian
    It's all pleasant enough, but the film, ultimately more of a checklist than an in-depth analysis, never really shines any fresh light on Canada's identity crisis or gets to the source of all those preconceived notions.
  70. The Martial Arts Kid
    The film has the vibe of something you might see on Nickelodeon or ABC Family but with a lower budget.
  71. Breathe
    The entire piece is precisely woven together, from script to performance to execution, and the result is a chilling study of emotional annihilation and its aftermath.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Jeremy Scott: The People's Designer
    Anyone who follows Scott's career in any depth may be frustrated by the film because the brush strokes are broad, and the focus feels more about the scrum and swirl around the man than the man himself.
  73. Black Mass
    If the final result doesn't transcend emotionally in the manner of the gold standard of Boston noir, Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River," the fault is not in the execution but the unyieldingly oppressive nature of the underlying material.
  74. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    Ball and his cast overcome clichés with gusto.
  75. Cooties
    With Cooties, what starts as recess fades all too rapidly into movie detention.
  76. Some Kind of Hate
    Despite all the mayhem, Mortimer never whips up any real sense of dread or tension.
  77. The Cut
    Atom Egoyan's 2002 "Ararat" had been perhaps the most notable film to tackle the Armenian genocide, but it did so only anecdotally. The historical epic approach seems long overdue, and Akin does it justice.
  78. Hellions
    Hellions is art book horror, something to flip through but never truly eerie or scary.
  79. Captive
    Oyelowo and Mara's riveting, embodied performances rise above the material.
  80. Pawn Sacrifice
    The film's straight-ahead approach matters less than the complete and utter strangeness of the true story it convincingly tells.
  81. The Perfect Guy
    Despite its serious imperfections, the soapy escapism provided by The Perfect Guy at least arrives at an opportune time.
  82. 12 Rounds 3: Lockdown
    Though not as thrilling as the original, this third installment is an improvement over the paint-by-number 2013 direct-to-video “12 Rounds 2: Reloaded.”
  83. 90 Minutes in Heaven
    Although this well-meaning film may appeal to its intended audience on a spiritual level, the result is a sluggish, clinical, largely dreary portrait that tends to mistake trauma for drama.
  84. Listening
    To call it amateurish would be kind.
  85. Paulette
    Far too broad and simplistic to enjoy as the offbeat soufflé it so desperately aims to be.
  86. Blind
    It's a fascinating exploration of the things that can thrive in the soil of a jealous mind, fertilized by suspicion and a lack of sight.
  87. The Beauty Inside
    It's satisfying, charming and surprising — a film that keeps its supernatural elements grounded in reality, with the focus on the spirituality of true love.
  88. Wolf Totem
    There's no denying the beauty of the film's imagery, violent and tender, or the emotional power of the final moment in the boy-and-his-dog love story.
  89. Goodnight Mommy
    Beginning with a gentle lullaby and ending with a tightly packed wallop, Goodnight Mommy is one viscerally chilling, seriously unsettling horror film.
  90. The Visit
    Shyamalan's script puts down reality shows, but this shocker works on the level of a game show, compelling audiences to yell out advice for Becca and Tyler as they steer through one trouble spot after another. This writer-director depends on hoary provocations.
  91. A Brilliant Young Mind
    A Brilliant Young Mind doesn't fit into any familiar inspirational box. Many of its characters are complex, contrary individuals who are not even close to being comfortable in their own skins, and this film refuses to shortchange how frustratingly edgy and difficult they are to interact with.
  92. Sleeping with Other People
    Though the leads lend charm and comic timing to the unpersuasive material, it would take a ground-up rewrite to make the fate of their characters matter.
  93. Time Out of Mind
    Given what it attempts, Time Out of Mind should be considered a success. An attempt to use a movie star to shine a dramatic light on the intractable problem of urban homelessness, the film's tone of austerity helps it to avoid sentimentality and simplistic answers.
  94. Meet the Patels
    Meet The Patels is more than just a hoot. Its candor and empathy allow it to make keen points about love, marriage, family and the unexpected complications that American freedoms can bring to immigrant lives.
  95. Coming Home
    Zhang and his sterling actors have made something fairly unforgettable about the tragedy of forgetting.
  96. The Transporter Refueled
    Cheap silliness abounds, including car chases that are more about loud crashes and CGI than the thrill of speed.
  97. Slow Learners
    Being big on improvisation doesn't necessarily mine nuggets of comic brilliance, and there are times you wish Argott and Joyce would have adhered more closely to the Matt Serword-penned script.
  98. Contracted: Phase II
    Novice screenwriter Craig Walendziak has followed England's template, charting the daily worsening of the symptoms. But he doesn't get that the 2013 "Contracted" was special because it was much more than a zombie flick.
  99. My Voice, My Life
    The film might have gained some heft had director Ruby Yang let the transformations unfold before our eyes instead of force-feeding us testimonials.
  100. Dirty Weekend
    That Les isn't one of LaBute's garden variety sadists is the best thing you can say about Dirty Weekend.
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