Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,523 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 16523
  2. Mixed: 5,808 out of 16523
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16523
16523 movie reviews
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  1. The Purge: Election Year
    At times the experience of watching Election Year is a bit like scanning a few years’ worth of alarming headlines while someone sets off firecrackers under your desk. Black Lives Matter, drone warfare, local protests, home-grown militias, predatory capitalism, the Florida electorate, pop pop, bang bang.
  2. Effie Gray
    Effie Gray is fortunate to have enough strong performances by Fanning, Thompson and top-flight costars (including cameos by James Fox, Robbie Coltrane, Derek Jacobi and even Claudia Cardinale) to eventually overcome the doldrums of decorum and create the feeling we've been needing.
  3. The Wrecking Crew
    Once the singer-songwriter model became the norm for the rock business, the Wrecking Crew's star began to wane, but seeing this film makes it clear what its members accomplished in their prime.
  4. Ghost in the Shell
    Your head might not be spinning as you exit the theater, but your senses will be deeply and thoroughly ravished.
  5. Avatar: The Way of Water
    In Avatar: The Way of Water, the director James Cameron pulls you down so deep, and sets you so gently adrift, that at times you don’t feel like you’re watching a movie so much as floating in one.
  6. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    The film is enough to prompt soul-searching among parents, educators and the LGBT community on how to provide adequate guidance and support for LGBT youths.
  7. Nasty Baby
    In much the way "Crystal Fairy" blossomed when we were snapped out of our chuckling repulsion, Nasty Baby rights itself intriguingly when Silva pushes his characters into unknown territory and lifestyle is imposed upon by life.
  8. The Overnight
    This engaging, funny and frank new film also proves something of a cop-out, especially given the bullet train of a narrative concocted by writer-director Patrick Brice.
  9. Entertainment
    There's a chic emptiness to Entertainment, undoubtedly, and anti-comedy constructs that may rub the wrong way, but there's also a spiky intelligence at work too, one that engages through the artifice of disengagement and the illusion of "performance."
  10. Grandma
    Weitz's film moves from clunky domestic dramedy to genuine feminist odyssey.
  11. 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.
  12. Slow West
    Between the gorgeous locations (New Zealand subs for Colorado), a credible emotional core, some effectively droll dialogue and a well-staged finale, Slow West is worth a look.
  13. Take Me to the River
    Take Me to the River reaches its end sadder and wiser if not satisfactorily complete as a psychodrama. But Sobel thrives on the unevenness, and it gives his admirably off-putting wade into fractured-family waters its own specialized charge.
  14. Buen Día, Ramón
    That Ferrer and Schöner play their roles with such understated grace and charisma goes far to bolster the credibility factor.
  15. Mad As Hell
    Unexpectedly, the film best serves as a cautionary anecdote that epitomizes the mutual apprehension between Internet-age start-ups and establishment media.
  16. On the Way to School
    [A] stirring, tenderly observed French documentary
  17. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    The Roache-Turners prove to have the right mix of micro-budget filmmaking ingenuity, action sass and undead splatter to make "Wyrmwood" a tastier than usual exploitation nosh.
  18. These Final Hours
    Writer-director Zak Hilditch, with a strong assist from cinematographer Bonnie Elliott (who's bathed her frames in a kind of eerie sulfuric yellow), has crafted an urgent yet strangely simple and humanistic doomsday scenario.
  19. 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.
  20. Welcome to Me
    Though some of the jabs "Me" takes at reality TV are clever, the film, like Alice, tends to fracture at key moments. What makes it worth watching is Wiig.
  21. The Last: Naruto the Movie
    If "The Last" lacks some of the emotional punch of the previous feature, "The Road to Ninja," Kobayashi compensates with flamboyant visuals that mix CG, drawn animation and elegant calligraphic figures.
  22. Eastern Boys
    Bold and unsettling, Eastern Boys is a long, strange trip of a film that touches on myriad social, economic and sexual themes.
  23. Backcountry
    Backcountry inevitably brings on the bloody, but it finds atmospheric ways to depict how the bucolic hush of a nature getaway can morph into a survival nightmare for the unprepared.
  24. The Widowmaker
    Despite confusing information about the role of diet and lifestyle, The Widowmaker is a lucid and important work of advocacy journalism. It illuminates yet another way that mainstream medicine thrives on crisis rather than health.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    La Sapienza
    The pace can feel plodding, but the observations on human frailty and redemption more than make up for it. Despite forays into the head, it's the movie's heart that makes it special.
  26. Cupcakes
    Though the comic confection's clunky moments keep it from achieving soufflé delicacy, its bright zingers and seamless fantasy sequences amp the playfulness, and the mostly unforced performances complement the production's cartoonish exuberance.
  27. Marfa Girl
    For all its meanderings and indulgences — verbal and visual — this free-form snapshot of a circle of townsfolk in tiny Marfa, Texas, proves a sneakily immersive, weirdly memorable affair.
  28. Hyena
    Writer-director Gerard Johnson resists all impulses to please the crowd. The graphic sex and violence never feel gratuitous, and there's something interesting in the way he deliberately denies his characters and the viewers any reprieve.
  29. Big Game
    Gleefully dumb but eager to entertain, this is cheeseball stuff baked with deliciously outsized performances and low comedy and photographed across mighty beautiful landscapes.
  30. Court
    Court invites comparisons with the 2011 Iranian film "A Separation," even if Court director Chaitanya Tamhane hasn't achieved the same level of mastery with his feature debut.
  31. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    A swiftly paced, rough-and-ready entertainment that, in anticipating the canonical events of “A New Hope,” manages the tricky feat of seeming at once casually diverting and hugely consequential.
  32. Trumbo
    Trumbo is timely in its portrayal of a moment when political speech is dangerously charged, yet unabashedly old-fashioned in the sincerity of its storytelling.
  33. Central Intelligence
    Central Intelligence is dumb in all the right ways, and also a bit smarter than you might expect.
  34. 1915
    Amid thespian antics, it contemplates weightier ethical dilemmas such as personal tragedy versus collective grief, artistic license versus historical responsibility, revisionist history versus corrective narrative, forgetting versus moving on. It's one creative way to do justice to such a monumental topic when full-blown reenactments aren't within the budget.
  35. Laugh Killer Laugh
    Self-discovery through artistic expression is often trite, but Frank's rehabilitation and transformation readily win us over when we're least expecting it.
  36. Adult Beginners
    The kind of comedy that goes down easy even as it looks at the hard stuff.
  37. Kung Fu Killer
    The plot is predictable, but the inevitable showdown is, appropriately, the movie's highlight, a ferocious hands-on battle — save for the balletic bamboo pole interlude — on a busy, night-lit expressway, with semis and cars roaring past. It's a climax worthy of the tribute thread running through Kung Fu Killer.
  38. Captive
    Oyelowo and Mara's riveting, embodied performances rise above the material.
  39. 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.
  40. Dior and I
    Since Dior and I was made with the house's cooperation, the film is not exactly a slashing piece of investigative journalism, but it does give us glimpses of the reality of this kind of business.
  41. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made
    Though indulgently overlong, “Raiders!” manages to unearth the inner geek in all of us.
  42. The Harvest
    McNaughton shows some signs of directing rust in pacing and tone, but in much the way "Henry" played out, he keeps sensationalism at bay and twisted character drama in his sights, which makes for a more pleasurably icky suspense.
  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. Antarctic Edge: 70° South
    The documentary is not so much a call to action as a moving portrait of individuals who devote their lives to understanding the environmental shifts that all too soon might manifest themselves on our own altered shorelines.
  45. Preggoland
    This treatise on what to expect when you're not expecting offers up biting cultural satire with a hearty dose of humanity and humor to boot.
  46. Below Dreams
    From bus stations to jazz concerts, Bradley finds epiphanies in public spaces, expressed visually, musically and, in the way the practical entwines with the philosophical, in dialogue spoken by friends and strangers alike.
  47. Soul Boys of the Western World
    When it plays to its strengths, the film, like the band, mines pure '80s gold.
  48. The Final Girls
    A playful deconstruction of the slasher film that ultimately packs a surprisingly affecting punch.
  49. 10,000 km
    Marques-Marcet, co-writer Clara Roquet and the actors are alert to something less obvious: the ways that they become self-conscious performers. Even though the characters aren't always likable, their pained awareness is poignant.
  50. Break Point
    This light comedy stretches beyond sports to find emotion at its core, without sacrificing laughs.
  51. 7 Chinese Brothers
    An intelligent actor whose sad sack demeanor has often been put to good use by director Wes Anderson, most effectively in "Rushmore," Schwartzman does similarly well by Byington, whose slight portrait (taking its name from the title of an R.E.M. song) might not otherwise sustained its quirky charm without him.
  52. All Things Must Pass
    Supplementing the interviews with well-chosen archival material, Hanks assembles a capsule history of the music biz and youth culture.
  53. Winning: The Racing Life of Paul Newman
    This energetic film satisfyingly brings viewers up to speed on Newman's remarkably enduring career detour.
  54. El Niño
    Director Daniel Monzón delivers a conventional genre exercise — albeit a very effective one, with twists and turns that manage to surprise.
  55. Don't Think I've Forgotten: Cambodia's Lost Rock and Roll
    The film proves much more valuable as a historical allegory than as a musical survey.
  56. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
    There is a great deal of silliness about Allan's journey from start to finish and no real message other than to never stop taking life as it comes. But there is also a great deal of fun in watching a 100-year-old man climb out a window and disappear.
  57. Just Before I Go
    Anchored by a nicely understated performance by Seann William Scott, Just Before I Go effectively juggles a wealth of genuine, at times profound, emotion with quite a bit of nutty-raunchy humor.
  58. Mojave
    Prickly, suspenseful, even coolly humorous, Mojave finds noirish fun in the existential woes of a successful artist and old-fashioned movie pleasure in the parry and thrust of sharp dialogue.
  59. Storks
    Like any pleasant surprise, this funny, frenetic, cheerfully nonsensical movie makes its own rules and gives you a few things that you weren’t, well, expecting.
  60. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    From the beginning, the filmmakers promise an affectionate look at the man, and in that they deliver.
  61. The Seven Five
    It would be hard to imagine a more entertaining corrupt-cop documentary than The Seven Five, a slick and fascinating portrait of disgraced New York policeman Michael Dowd.
  62. Know How
    The musical numbers are inconsistent, ranging from radio-ready to after-school-special quality. Some story lines pale compared with the others. But overall, this is an immense achievement.
  63. That Sugar Film
    Many of Gameau's findings won't come as earth-shattering revelations, but he takes a resourceful approach to presenting the material, coating all the inconvenient truths in kid-friendly, brightly colored graphics and zippy animations.
  64. Barbershop: The Next Cut
    "The Next Cut" manages to be entertaining and thoughtful, harmless fun but just serious enough not to seem frivolous.
  65. (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    [An] enjoyable, relatable documentary.
  66. The Outcasts
    Frequently fun and generally harmless, The Outcasts doesn’t bring anything new to the teen comedy, but that’s the nice thing about the sub-genre for its viewers.
  67. Bone Tomahawk
    Zahler's still starkness, enhanced by a fondness for long shots and dark spaces, is refreshing in this shaky-cam era, and his ear for Old West sensibilities — from the mythically polite to the realistically xenophobic — is clinically effective.
  68. Seeds of Time
    Although it may not be the most vivid or exciting subject for cinematic exploration, the documentary Seeds of Time offers a vital, clear-headed look at the effects of climate change on global food security.
  69. 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.
  70. 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.
  71. Marguerite & Julien
    The operatic tragedy of Marguerite and Julien's plight proves an effectively creepy dramatic engine.
  72. My King
    The actors wrestle passionately with compelling questions about attraction and love.
  73. 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.
  74. I Believe in Unicorns
    In spite of its fanciful tendencies, the film nails the growing pains that result from love and loss.
  75. 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.
  76. Every Last Child
    The film couldn't be more timely and germane for the American audience. If it weren't a documentary, it would seem like a post-apocalyptic allegory of our own vaccination debate.
  77. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    The faux press conferences and perverse inventions (SurvivaBall, anyone?) that are included here highlight corporate greed and governmental shortsightedness as shrewdly as ever.
  78. Felt
    With so much conversation these days about the effects of rape culture, Felt, with its atmospheric DIY aesthetics, enters the discussion as a corrective chiller that can best be described as compassionately perverse about one type of pushback.
  79. Lila & Eve
    Lila & Eve is a standard-issue female vigilante thriller that's skillfully elevated by the performances of leads Viola Davis and Jennifer Lopez.
  80. The Equalizer 2
    Not everything in Equalizer 2 is successful, including a subplot about a Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivor played by Orson Bean that misses the mark. But the film is effective where it needs to be, and if there is an "Equalizer 3," in line to see it is where you'll find me.
  81. Daddy's Home
    In its best moments, it's a sly exposé of the frailties of the contemporary male self-image and in its lesser moments a simplistic slapstick. This being a Will Ferrell comedy, sometimes those moments are one and the same.
  82. A Borrowed Identity
    At its best, A Borrowed Identity concerns itself with the malleability of self, with who we are and how society and culture can force identity choices on us.
  83. Bound to Vengeance
    Even jaded viewers who have gathered vague ideas from clues planted by screenwriters Rock Shaink and Keith Kjornes about how things will ultimately play out might find a genuine surprise or two in store.
  84. Five Star
    The loose structure of Five Star lends to the realism and documentary feel of the film but can often make it a bit hard to hook into the narrative. However, it's eye-opening to see an indie approach to this genre.
  85. Unsullied
    It's almost inconceivable that this effective, nerve-racking thriller is the first feature from former NFL defensive end Simeon Rice. It requires the usual suspension of disbelief, and pacing problems are a sign of Rice's directorial inexperience. But the tension he creates is unrelenting.
  86. The Kindergarten Teacher
    Lapid confidently peppers the film with enough provocative beats, unsettling behaviors and bold camera moves to keep us intrigued — if not necessarily invested.
  87. When Animals Dream
    Though the careful mood is invariably dissipated when it comes time to kill, kill, kill, Arnby's ace in the hole remains Suhl, a young actress of Streep-ian intensity.
  88. Tales of Halloween
    The overall tone is more tongue-in-cheek than terrifying. Though some of the directors involved — like Lucky McKee ("May") and Neil Marshall ("The Descent") — have a hard horror pedigree, the emphasis here is on slickness.
  89. Frank the Bastard
    Despite the film's made-for-TV aesthetic and performances, Coley has saturated its backstory with vividly drawn details that make this convoluted saga wholly believable.
  90. Jack Strong
    With its solid performances, nice attention to period detail and a foreboding rumble of a symphonic score by Jan Duszynski, Jack Strong adds a unique Eastern Bloc POV to the enduring Cold War movie arsenal.
  91. Staten Island Summer
    Staten Island Summer is a refreshingly old school coming-of-age comedy with just enough raunchiness, stoner humor and otherwise dubious behavior to divert movie audiences weaned on violated pies and superbad high jinks.
  92. The Outrageous Sophie Tucker
    Though placing the cheerleading Eckers front and center as key interview subjects gives their film a self-congratulatory, gee-whiz quality, "Outrageous" compensates by giving you a good sense of who Tucker was and how she got where she did.
  93. Truth
    Truth is a movie curiously in conflict with itself. There is a constant shift between granular detail and big-picture sweep that the movie never fully resolves.
  94. Assassination
    The director nimbly orchestrates to entertaining effect this mass game of cat-and-mouse populated by paid and unpaid assassins, double agents and even the proverbial twins separated at birth.
  95. Rosenwald
    As revealed by writer-director Aviva Kempner, it's not just the amount of money he donated that makes Rosenwald special, it's the specifics of who he gave it to and how and why he did it that sets him apart.
  96. Tab Hunter Confidential
    Schwarz and Hunter never dig all that deep — in fact, it all seems pretty tame by today's reality TV standards — but the film remains an evocative, enjoyable ride.
  97. Brothers ... Blood Against Blood
    Bollywood veteran Jackie Shroff, assuming Nick Nolte's part as the recovering alcoholic father, delivers the kind of acting reel that would guarantee an Oscar nomination for some Hollywood actors. It's a pleasure to marvel at his performance alone.
  98. In My Father's House
    Filmmakers Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg bring a skilled and nuanced storytelling to the film, which never shies away from the harder moments.
  99. The Golden Dream
    The movie exists in a space beyond arguments about immigration policy and border security, and while sometimes a little too willfully pokey, it speaks to something indelibly human about dreams and their costs.
  100. 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.
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