Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,524 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: 8,698 out of 16524
  2. Mixed: 5,809 out of 16524
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16524
16524 movie reviews
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  1. Let Him Go
    In many ways, it feels like the midcentury pulp thrillers it emulates: well-plotted and grisly, but almost ephemeral. It is Lane’s performance that lingers, one that dares to be uniquely hopeful about the future, and letting the old ways die.
  2. Eden
    Director Declan Recks underlines every emotion, every brooding pause, working against the spare dialogue with fancy-footwork camera moves and an insistent score.
  3. Batkid Begins
    As to truly exploring the phenomenon of a live-tweeted collective fiction, the documentary makes a couple of intriguing observations but doesn't look far beyond the metrics, content to exult in the wow factor of it all, which admittedly is considerable.
  4. All Saints
    The cinematic execution of All Saints is serviceable at best. It's stilted at times, with too much dead air hanging around, and the stakes and roller coaster of ups and downs in the script often seem out of step with the emotion on-screen.
  5. Things We Lost in the Fire
    Things are sporadically troublesome about the film. The story goes in and out of being self-consciously earnest and ponderous, a situation that numerous tight close-ups of people's eyes does nothing to help.
  6. City of Men
    Morelli uses plentiful flashbacks drawn from the earlier movie and television series that are at times intrusive to the narrative but eventually serve to deepen the relationship of Ace and Laranjinha.
  7. Freaks
    It’s watchable and intriguing stuff, yet also silly and inconsistent.
  8. Cry-Baby
    Watching it is a bit like checking out a grade-school talent show on parents’ night. The eagerness of the performers, their flat-out verve and innocence, wins you over. For a while at least...Finally, the film wears you down.
  9. World War Z
    It's fun to see this kind of familiar material done with intelligence and skill.
  10. Maria
    I wish Larraín had cut Callas down to size more. He’s too protective of his fellow artist to slosh around in the fury that fueled her art. Callas could sing three octaves, but the film is mostly one note.
  11. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Field amazes with her gameness, range and commitment.
  12. Love, Cecil
    38 years after his death, Beaton's name is not so much on everyone's lips, and one of the pleasures of this film is to revisit his gifts beyond his best known work, the Oscar-winning production design and costumes for "My Fair Lady."
  13. Hannah Takes the Stairs
    There's something to be said for cinema this perversely naturalistic.
  14. The Foot Fist Way
    It's all saved by actor Danny McBride, who has created such a distinctive character in Simmons, at once engaging and repulsive, that it's hard not to keep watching even while cringing.
  15. The Last Suit
    The Last Suit is a bumpy ride tonally, but its stubborn heart is in the right place.
  16. Beautiful Something Left Behind
    Beautiful Something Left Behind, which won the documentary award at last year’s South by Southwest Film Festival when the film was called “An Elephant in the Room,” serves as a snapshot of kids in emotional crises, but sadly, little more.
  17. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    It's hard to imagine many films surpassing or even equaling the effect of this supple, breathtakingly direct, small French film.
  18. Split
    Split doesn’t just revive Shyamalan’s career; it resurrects his brand.
  19. Mayor Pete
    Involving as the film is, it is decidedly short on propulsion and significant conflict.
  20. The Adventures of Felix
    An odyssey of self-discovery of much charm, humor and admirable subtlety.
  21. Suddenly
    Works its charms slowly but steadily.
  22. I Capture the Castle
    It's a rich, emotional story, a wonderfully appealing film made with humor and intelligence, but there is also something almost magical about how it takes the stuff of innumerable previous films -- love, romance and adolescent coming of age -- and turns them into something that feels one of a kind.
  23. Blue My Mind
    As push-pull friendships in churning waters go, Mia’s and Gianna’s is the visceral heart of Brühlmann’s film, which otherwise isn’t the greatest mix of teen angst and body horror you’re likely to see, but also nowhere near the worst.
  24. Life
    Gracefully bittersweet and balanced. [16 April 1999, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  25. The Hole in the Ground
    It’s always welcome to see a chiller that builds suspense from ideas and characters — and where the beasts from beyond are almost beside the point.
  26. L'amour fou
    The documentary is fascinating as a museum piece with Berge serving as docent.
  27. Chef Flynn
    Yates’ verité collage approach naturally leads to an elliptical narrative. But it occasionally feels frustratingly indulgent, like being cornered in a one-way conversation where you can’t ask a question.
  28. The Upside of Anger
    A squarely suburban movie with a distinctly bourgeois-shaped window on the world, but it's genuine and exceptionally well observed.
  29. We Have Always Lived in the Castle
    Heightened but airless, this “Castle” is like a checklist of the novel’s peculiarities, rather than its singular soul brought to life.
  30. The Dreamers
    Does have its pleasures, but the feeling is inescapable that the person most pleased is Bertolucci himself. In essence he is the dreamer of the title, as eager to retreat into this hermetic world of his own creation as his characters are into theirs. Fair enough, but why does he have to drag us along with him?
  31. This Changes Everything
    Perhaps inevitably because it is dealing with a big issue, This Changes Everything suffers a bit from being all over the map, touching so many bases that, though each is important, they don’t all cohere into a whole.
  32. Faces of Death
    As a satire, it’s almost too implied — the filmmakers barely bother to develop their ideas, figuring correctly that people already agree the internet is, at best, a neutral-evil. I liked it and was impatient with it in equal measure, the way a teacher feels about a lazy, gifted child.
  33. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    This can be strong stuff for kids, but the film's humanistic approach preaches tolerance and hope.
  34. Sleeping Dogs Lie
    Rather than the escalating gross-out spectacular it could have been, Sleeping Dogs Lie is an unexpectedly thoughtful look at what it takes to make relationships work.
  35. How to Get Ahead in Advertising
    It's cruel, funny, knowing, never less than biting and occasionally brilliant. [05 May 1989]
    • Los Angeles Times
  36. Laggies
    The director is increasingly adept at getting her actors to bask in emotions without any pretensions. It makes for easy watching. Seigel's breezy script makes the dialogue easy listening.
  37. Another Thin Man
    Third in the series, the effortlessly effervescent Powell and Loy and a sharp supporting cast are all but overwhelmed by a tedious, impenetrably complicated plot, involving the murder of Nora's late father's business partner (C. Aubrey Smith). [14 Jul 1996, p.4]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Eureka
    It's an absorbing study of power couched in thriller format. As with any Roeg film, the stunning visuals are the real star. [20 Dec 1985, p.22]
    • Los Angeles Times
  39. The Devil Wears Prada 2
    The storytelling is wonky, given the film’s competing needs to be Miranda-blunt about the modern magazine business while pairing marvelously with a glass of rosé.
  40. True Lies
    As the perfectionist creator of bravura set pieces, Cameron is still the leader of the pack. [14 Jul 1994 Pg. F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  41. SubUrbia
    With each succeeding picture, Linklater seemed to grow as a filmmaker, just as his characters became more defined and developed. But with his fourth picture, subUrbia, he takes two giant steps backward.
  42. Free Fire
    Free Fire is a savagely funny and viciously precise distillation of one of the pair’s favorite themes: Men are idiots.
  43. In the Earth
    Wheatley’s film works on a purely elemental level; like nature itself, the film is a sensory event, the narrative often subsumed by the aural and visual experience.
  44. Beau Is Afraid
    Beau Is Afraid offers arresting confirmation of Aster’s talent and fresh evidence of his limitations. It’s a big, wildly ambitious swing of a movie, one that seems eager to liberate itself and its characters from the conventions of form and genre. But that more expansive energy is at odds with and ultimately constrained by the story’s mother/man-child dialectic.
  45. A Haunting in Venice
    Gorgeously shot on location by cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos, “A Haunting in Venice” is easily the best of Branagh’s three big-screen Christie adaptations, largely because it is also the most flagrantly unfaithful.
  46. Megamind
    More impressive than the multi-dimensions is Megamind's minimalist, modernist look. It creates a crispness that feels more contemporary than retro, which not only is very aesthetically pleasing but makes it easier to savor the film's many sight gags.
  47. Burn After Reading
    Because it's a Coen brothers film before it's anything else, this is about as dark and nihilistic as comedies are allowed to get before the laughter dies bitterly on your lips.
  48. The Matrix Resurrections
    The result is a swift, self-reflective, often funny and always original reimagining of the material, which sees Wachowski reassessing the existing characters and lore of “The Matrix” while embroidering the text with new ideas and details. It’s less of a reboot than a remix, and this time, it’s a bop.
  49. Peter von Kant
    Specific as Ozon’s approach here may be (nothing feels accidental or arbitrary), his lovingly made curio, which often borrows verbatim from its predecessor, comes off a bit tired and trifling.
  50. Shutter Island
    Martin Scorsese has created a divinely dark and devious brain tease of a movie in the best noir tradition with its smarter than you'd think cops, their tougher than you'd imagine cases to crack and enough nods to the classic genre for an all-night parlor game.
  51. Shinjuku Incident
    An earnest gang-warfare melodrama that may make some Chan fans long for "Rush Hour 4."
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Boiler Room
    Tries to make larger points, but it trips over itself just trying to make the small ones.
  53. Amigo
    The history lesson is often framed in stagy exchanges of dialogue, diluting the strong sense of place.
  54. Wretches & Jabberers
    The road trip provides some spectacular images, but it's the two protagonists that hold the most interest. Their reactions are unpredictable; their insights, illuminating and often quite funny.
  55. Keyhole
    When Udo Kier is the sanest person around, you know you're in strangeville.
  56. State 194
    With a two-state solution still elusive, "State 194" may feel a bit like yesterday's news — literally and figuratively. But as an aid to better understanding this vital, complex dispute, the film is definitely worth a look.
  57. Llyn Foulkes One Man Band
    For a movie about art and artists, it's not a particularly visually inspired or vibrantly crafted work. Still, Foulkes... holds interest with his off-kilter narcissism, obsessive creative process and frank views on his place — or lack thereof — in the art world.
  58. Kung Fu Elliot
    Whether the con is truly on or the filmmakers have simply taken an awful lot of poetic license where the post-Michael Moore documentary format is concerned, moviegoers certainly have less amusing ways to be bamboozled.
  59. 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.
  60. Love at First Fight
    Cailley never truly builds a narrative head of steam, resulting in periods of logy pacing and diffused focus. Still, the strong leads, several amusing moments and a clutch of intriguing character bits sketch what might have been.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Station to Station
    Its individual moments are quite seductive. But if there is a deeper meaning — of what it means to hit the rails in the 21st century, to peer into America's de-industrialized guts — it lies well beyond the scope of this film.
  62. Karski & the Lords of Humanity
    Although it is often moving, the film is less satisfying than it could be.
  63. 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.
  64. Sheikh Jackson
    Salama gently, effectively examines the role religion can play in one’s life and outlook versus how a secular, more free-thinking existence may offer greater latitude but not always better or happier choices.
  65. Still/Born
    There's nothing all that original about Still/Born. But it's sharp and shocking, and parents especially should appreciate how it turns caring for a screeching newborn into an inescapable nightmare.
  66. The Golem
    A well-crafted and idiosyncratic supernatural thriller, the film plays like a mix of “Frankenstein,” “The Witch,” and some of the Coen brothers’ more explicitly Jewish movies.
  67. Age Out
    As with “The Better Angels,” Edwards’ new movie is magnificently impressionistic, with Colin Stetson’s rhythmic score and Jeff Bierman’s sun-dappled cinematography making Richie’s life seem as wondrous as it is hard.
  68. Phantom of the Opera
    Arthur Lubin's elegant 1942 color version of the Gaston Leroux chiller remains one of the best, with a chilling yet poignant Claude Rains prowling a Paris Opera house, wreaking hideous revenge. [20 Oct 1996, p.4]
    • Los Angeles Times
  69. Convergence: Courage in a Crisis
    When “Convergence” feels rushed for trying to squeeze in a global snapshot, its impact is diluted.
  70. Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
    Everything that ensues is laughably predictable and silly, but primitive as it is, Spider Baby is a professional effort in which Hill makes an attempt at style, aided by Al Taylor's shadowy black-and-white cinematography and Chaney's willingness to play straight. [01 Apr 1994, p.F8]
    • Los Angeles Times
  71. Money Shot: The Pornhub Story
    This is a tricky topic, and Hillinger sometimes strays too far away from it, indulging in sexually explicit digressions that are more titillating than germane. For the most part, though, this is a thoughtful look at a controversy unlikely to fade away, so long as modern technology and prurient interests continue to exist.
  72. Bubble
    Despite its refreshingly straightforward style and compelling performers, the movie feels encased in an invisible, filmy membrane of its own. Soderbergh keeps his characters on one side of the wall and his audience on the other. As to which is living in the real world, I guess that's open to discussion.
  73. The Lost Boys
    Midway through The Lost Boys there's a brief scene that suggests the magic and power it could have had. This scene suggests a fable of seductive evil-but nothing in the movie is ever half as evocative again. It's more lost than the Boys: a glossy fiasco with most of the real blood sucked out of it.
    • Los Angeles Times
  74. 18½
    This movie is about creating the hazy feel of early ‘70s American cinema, filled with kooky and paranoid characters who talk nonstop.
  75. Thanksgiving
    If Thanksgiving had to be any specific dish on the holiday table, it would be stuffing: disparate chunks tossed together and baked. Stuffing is a dish where old bread goes to shine — a cheap and easy crowd-pleaser. But this particular serving of it is missing a crucial element, the binder.
  76. Love and Monsters
    While it’s well-acted and slickly made, the movie’s derivative qualities — coupled with its inadvertent reminders of how crummy everything is outside our doors right now — make it less fun than intended. The light-hearted tone is often grating, working against the inherent drama of a world dominated by giant critters.
  77. Mayhem
    While Lynch has experience delivering breezy action, “breezy” can shade into “frivolous” — or even “forgettable.” As good as Yeun and Weaving are, there’s not a lot here that hasn’t been done
  78. Art & Copy
    One of the main treats of Art & Copy is that it allows us to revisit those classic ads, all of which are just as exciting now as they were when they first ran.
  79. Stander
    Crackles with forceful portrayals. Funny, violent, impassioned and inescapably poignant, Stander in no way sanctions Stander's turning to a life of crime yet has the courage to see him as a victim of apartheid himself.
  80. Stinking Heaven
    While the early going might bring to mind the Dogme 95 school of stripped-down filmmaking...the result, with its collective of uniformly unsympathetic characters, ultimately overdoses on all the unscripted bad vibes.
  81. Uncorked
    Writer-director Penny . . . has crafted a thoroughly workable and well-informed vehicle, providing a nurturing atmosphere for the unhurried dramatic developments and uniformly gracious performances.
  82. Julia
    As Julia struggles to survive her bad decisions, the film struggles to survive Julia. We never get a good look at her demons, just the havoc they wreak.
  83. Tequila Sunrise
    Written with his trademark artfulness, nicely acted and gorgeously pretty, Tequlia Sunrise finally blows away into slick unsubstantiality. [2 Dec 1988, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  84. After the Cup: Sons of Sakhnin United
    Cinematically, though, After the Cup lacks the intimacy and narrative focus needed for a more wholly involving experience.
  85. Farmageddon
    It's an eye-popping wake-up call revealing how the USDA and FDA have increasingly waged war on America's small farmers even when they can prove they are contributing healthful products to our food supply.
  86. 11/8/16
    Though smoothly edited and breezily humane, 11/8/16 is still little more than a depiction of parallel roller coasters, one of which many voters felt was headed into a shop of horrors.
  87. Hotel Mumbai
    A short-film director making his feature debut, Maras has settled on a strategy that combines harrowing re-creations with largely conventional character development to good effect.
  88. Anything's Possible
    Kelsa and Khal are a winning duo with dynamite chemistry. They move around each other with a palpable physical freedom that softly kindles romance. The twinkle in their eyes, flashing above their knowing smiles, is the kind of awkward, teenage swooning made for comfort viewing.
  89. Severance
    Along with lots of pitch-dark humor, James Moran's often clever script is peppered with winks and nudges about the war on terror that helps distinguish the film from the recent spate of torture flicks.
  90. Sugar Town
    Diverting and sometimes humorous but sticks to the superficial ...not distinctive enough to make much of an impression.
  91. Happy, Texas
    A hoot, a hilarious comedy that's smart and caring, yet sexy and ingenious enough that it just might stir up some of that elusive "Full Monty"-style box-office appeal.
  92. The Young Karl Marx
    Whatever else you think about Marx and his ideas, it's hard to imagine him as hot-blooded and young. Director and co-writer Raoul Peck, as it turns out, not only understands those contradictions, he is committed to embracing them, which is what makes The Young Karl Marx the audacious, engrossing film it is.
  93. V for Vendetta
    By the time you've gotten through it, you feel spent, loaded down and more than a little disoriented. Part of the problem is that the movie's big concepts - violence begets violence, absolute power corrupts absolutely, everything is connected, my terrorist is your freedom fighter, etc. - are pithy, brief and irrefutable enough to embroider on throw pillows.
  94. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Suffers slightly from that not-so-fresh feeling.
  95. Oh, Hi!
    Brooks can merely offer this flawed pair more kindness than they grant each other (or themselves). Which makes “Oh, Hi!” a pleasant if perilous date night film. Having spent an enjoyable evening with it myself, I have to admit: I like the movie fine, but I’m not in love.
  96. 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.
  97. Misbehaviour
    Good intentions, deft performances and vivid dollops of period style and sensibility go a long way to patch over the bumps.
  98. The Same River Twice
    Other documentaries have crisscrossed between time frames, but Moss' beguiling The Same River Twice represents one of the most effective uses of the device.
  99. Simon & the Oaks
    A two-hour theatrical feature that has the kind of emotional and storytelling reach regularly found these days only in cable TV miniseries. It's a warmly done family and personal drama that seems to cover familiar territory, but only up to a point and very much in its own way.
  100. The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    The film's pronounced split between violence and softness notwithstanding, Prince Caspian is finally a more polished effort than "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" and squarely in the tradition of the kind of teenage movies the Disney organization used to make before teens discovered horror and gore.
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