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. Life is Strange
    Life Is Strange is unfocused yet intermittently effective as an illustrated oral history.
  2. 24 Exposures
    This brief, loosely-knit film never builds any empathy or tension.
  3. Gloria
    Between Lelio's ingenuity in staging the film, an extremely clever script co-written with his frequent collaborator, Gonzalo Maza, and the pumping disco that interjects its opinions and assessments of each situation, Gloria is one of the most enjoyable movies to come along in a while.
  4. Like Father, Like Son
    Powered by Kore-eda's innate restraint and natural empathy, Like Father, Like Son takes these characters to places they never expected to be. It's unnerving for them, of course, but watching so many hearts hanging in the balance is a rare privilege for us.
  5. Gimme Shelter
    Gimme Shelter, a ripped-from-real-life story of a pregnant teen's journey toward hope, is filled with very good intentions, very bad dialogue and a surprisingly affecting turn by its star Vanessa Hudgens.
  6. If You Build It
    The film proves not only a stirring look at education's potential to rally and invigorate but also a vital snapshot of contemporary rural America.
  7. Knights of Badassdom
    Knights of Badassdom actually delivers everything the 2011 Danny McBride-James Franco comedy "Your Highness" purported to be but fell short on. The film is "This Is the End" festooned with Middle Ages accouterments.
  8. Run & Jump
    Green's resolution is sensitive, expected, yet visionary. And, like the rest of the film, it is shot with a magnificent play of color and light that makes the characters' corner of the world seem like the cradle of compassion.
  9. Enemies Closer
    Enemies Closer suffers from wincingly bad dialogue delivered as if by jocks in a high-school play and action choreographed as if for a gymnasium stage.
  10. Devil's Due
    We're more than 45 years out from Roman Polanski's director-controlled masterpiece in gestating terror, and yet no gimmick in Devil's Due — no point-of-view shock cut or shaky-cam "realism" — is as dread-inducing as tracking the grim revelations on Mia Farrow's face.
  11. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    There is no shaking the feeling that Branagh and his cast are a kind of an espionage film B team, capable of mild diversion but nothing more.
  12. Ride Along
    The laughs here are lazy, and any sense of logic is definitely on the lam.
  13. Back in the Day
    Cloying and smug when it's not being unfunny and crass, the high school reunion comedy Back in the Day hits lows with a frequency that suggests a world-class sharp shooter or free-throw king.
  14. Reasonable Doubt
    Contrived and predictable yet fairly tense.
  15. The Nut Job
    The Nut Job features decent CG animation, especially of animals, but the writing isn't particularly clever, relying on obvious puns and slapstick humor.
  16. G.B.F.
    Until being young and gay is a nonissue for everyone everywhere, these kinds of stories will always have their place.
  17. Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1
    At Troma, puke-green is the warmest color.
  18. Jamesy Boy
    The screenplay by Lane Shadgett and director Trevor White relies far too much on telling rather than showing.
  19. The Rocket
    Australian writer-director Kim Mordaunt doesn't always succeed at balancing the sentimental, the political and the ethnographic, but at its strongest the story is a seamless melding of history's dark undertow and a child's indefatigable optimism.
  20. Hamlet
    A focused, if at times melodramatic, take on the play's beating heart.
  21. Freezer
    Freezer is a snappy action flick that makes good use of its close confines.
  22. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
    Chen's excessive propriety veers treacherously close to barely disguised repulsion.
  23. The Legend of Hercules
    If you admire Kellan Lutz's chiseled body, The Legend of Hercules does offer plenty of that in 3-D glory.
  24. The Truth About Emanuel
    Writer-director Francesca Gregorini builds unbearable tension into scenes that otherwise risk tilting toward melodrama and brings the eye of a fashion photographer to the film's hallucinatory dream sequences.
  25. Dumbbells
    With verbal jabs and sight gags in equal measure, the script proves serviceably funny. As the film progresses, though, the hilarity does not escalate along with the outrageousness.
  26. The Suspect
    The two stunning set pieces, both involving car chases, are so inspired and teeth-grittingly determined that they make the case for the possibility of individual heroism in a harrowingly venal world.
  27. The Saratov Approach
    Overall, writer-director Garrett Batty takes such a tempered approach, the film lacks the kind of gritty, visceral tension that life-and-death tales such as this normally demand.
  28. Raze
    Raze is a sweaty, queasy, bruising experience — and a superbly crafted film.
  29. Cold Comes the Night
    The noirishly titled Cold Comes the Night is a tense little thriller that provides juicy roles for its deft lead actors, Alice Eve and Bryan Cranston, as well as some well-played action and several neat twists.
  30. The Best Offer
    The film has several smart twists and surprises up its well-tailored sleeve.
  31. The Banshee Chapter
    The central drama never fully engages, but the jolts that Banshee delivers are check-the-locks scary.
  32. Free Ride
    The result, while sincere and nicely evoked, feels choppy, familiar and, despite the script's heavily stacked deck — and a few harrowing episodes — lacks sufficient momentum.
  33. Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo
    Desiccated by its pretensions, it's freeze-dried melodrama.
  34. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    The Marked Ones is refreshingly uncynical and straightforward in its desire to simply be a movie that makes the audience jump and be scared. It's a fun fright film and wants to be nothing more.
  35. Interior. Leather Bar.
    Unfocused lapses aside, though, the film is intriguing and discomforting in equal measure, using its brief running time to frame thoughtful, boundary-pushing questions.
  36. It's Better to Jump
    This brief film often feels like an extended gripe session instead of something more profound or game-changing.
  37. Expecting
    The movie's early promise fades, however, as an Apatowian crassness descends upon the comic situations, churlishness gets mistaken for rawness, and sweetness starts to feel manipulative instead of natural.
  38. Commitment
    Boilerplate shootouts and conflagrations get the better of the movie's second half, but for the most part, first-time director Park Hong-soo strikes the right balance between take-no-prisoners espionage and teenage angst.
  39. For No Good Reason
    The inventively shot and constructed documentary For No Good Reason is an absorbing look at the unique, surreal work of British cartoonist Ralph Steadman.
  40. Angels Sing
    The juxtaposition of such country-music icons with the story's cringe-worthy treacle has one siding with Michael's bah-humbug attitude.
  41. Twice Born
    The drama is undone by hyperventilating poetics and a busy time-hopping structure.
  42. Swerve
    As it zigs and zags, its plot unravels rather than tightens, and its curveball of an ending is bound to leave audiences feeling as double-crossed as some of the characters.
  43. A Journey to Planet Sanity
    It mostly plays like a slapdash mockumentary crossed with a bad reality TV show.
  44. Hollywood Seagull
    When a director merely goes through the motions, even Chekhov can be reduced to daytime soap.
  45. August: Osage County
    Despite the story's melodramatic contrivances the creation of characters we actually care about is beyond this film's capabilities.
  46. Wrong Cops
    This meandering lark about a corrupt, spiteful and hopelessly distracted police force in a decriminalized, sun-scorched city never quite finds the funny bone.
  47. The Selfish Giant
    The Selfish Giant is devastating social realism in the mode of Ken Loach's "Kes."
  48. Labor Day
    The film finds its footing as the weekend progresses and the temperature and tension — outside and in — rise.
  49. The Invisible Woman
    The Invisible Woman is an exceptional film about love, longing and regret. It's further proof, if proof were needed, that classic filmmaking done with passion, sensitivity and intelligence results in cinema fully capable of blowing you away.
  50. Grudge Match
    Grudge Match never settles on the movie it wants to be, wavering uncertainly between a jokey old-guys comedy and something more dramatic and heartfelt.
  51. Lone Survivor
    Berg, who wrote and directed, is more interested in how men deal with battle than the ideals or the politics that put them there. What the movie achieves, with a gruesome energy and a remarkable reality, is a firefight.
  52. 47 Ronin
    Rinsch, making his feature debut, shows the shortcoming of someone coming from the image-based world of commercials and advertising. There are moments of genuine beauty and a few terrifically eye-popping effects, but no feel yet for storytelling.
  53. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Stiller's sensibility creates a movie that's smarter than you think it will be.
  54. The Wolf of Wall Street
    A very fast three hours, Wolf is a fascinating, revolting, outlandish, uproarious, exhilarating and exhausting master work on immorality.
  55. The Past
    As the secrets that almost everyone is hiding slowly but inexorably come to light, Farhadi's gifts as a very specific director, someone who knows exactly how he wants every scene to be played, come to the fore, adding honesty and involvement to a plot that might seem artificial in other hands.
  56. Walking with Dinosaurs
    A hyper-realistic-looking, character-driven story of survival with talking dinosaurs that can't decide whether to inform or entertain. The film and its featured creatures do a little of both but modestly.
  57. White Reindeer
    Writer-director Clark's commitment to a deadpan vibe of crisp comic kink amid eccentric, left-turn sorrow can sometimes feel condescending. But within this not-so-jolly trip into the detailed recesses of simmering suburban emptiness, Hollyman takes this woman's barely controlled dignity on a quietly brave, revealing ride.
  58. Coyote
    Writer-director Joe Eddy's debut is sincere but relies on obvious tropes.
  59. Breakfast with Curtis
    Beyond this general outline, plot and character development are afterthoughts, or maybe never-thoughts.
  60. Dancing on a Dry Salt Lake
    The film's lack of momentum makes the pace stultifyingly slow, but it's the script's reliance on the musty Wise Indian trope that makes "Dancing" dead on arrival.
  61. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    With so many sight gags and nearly every living comic in the world making an appearance at some point, the entire operation, like Ron's ego, feels a bit bloated.
  62. Her
    Acerbic, emotional, provocative, it's a risky high dive off the big board with a plot that sounds like a gimmick but ends up haunting, odd and a bit wonderful.
  63. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    Perry can now knock these films out in his sleep, and with “Madea Christmas” he certainly seems to be dozing at the wheel.
  64. Hours
    This drama, about an ordinary guy trying to keep his infant daughter alive in Hurricane Katrina's aftermath, is sincere but struggles as much as its hero.
  65. The Great Passage
    Director Yuya Ishii, working off a gentle, finely textured script by Kensaku Watanabe (adapted from the novel by Shiwon Miura) takes his time telling this warm story of the 15-year creation of a definitive print dictionary, but it's a worthy journey.
  66. Camille Claudel 1915
    In Binoche's masterfully contained performance, Camille's clouded eyes sometimes brighten. If we didn't know how her story will unfold, that spark might have been comforting.
  67. Sweet Talk
    Zea gives a natural performance amid a neighborhood of painful stereotypes (including a nosy Asian shopkeeper), but she doesn't adjust her cadence, let alone accent, for the historical flashbacks, bringing a modern sensibility that limits the effectiveness of these scenes.
  68. O Apóstolo (The Apostle)
    The movie isn't exactly scary, and it has a tendency to meander. But the crumbling, ornate sets are an atmospheric marvel.
  69. Re-emerging: The Jews of Nigeria
    [A] captivating documentary.
  70. Liv & Ingmar
    Although enjoyable, the movie is perhaps best suited to cinéastes already intimate with Bergman's venerated body of work as well as with Ullmann's many acclaimed screen roles.
  71. Lenny Cooke
    A compellingly unconventional, elliptical sports documentary that explores the mysterious realm of might-have-been.
  72. Here Comes the Devil
    Bogliano — who hit it big in indie horror with "Penumbra" and "Room for Tourists" — is a mood man, adept at unease and admirably judicious about shock moments, if not exactly skilled with storytelling or pacing.
  73. Friend 2: The Legacy
    Little parallelism or consequence can be gleaned from Kwak's narrative that crosscuts points between 1963 and 2010. Seeing as his surrogate in the first film is absent in the sequel, the shared cultural memory has also given way to genre exercise.
  74. Tim's Vermeer
    Like art itself, words can't fully capture what it is like to see the Vermeer emerge under Jenison's brush. Or to see Jenison's obsession with the idea run its course.
  75. American Hustle
    [Russell's] dizzying, outlandishly entertaining American Hustle is a 21-first century screwball farce about 20th-century con men, scam artists and those who dream of living large, a film that is big hearted and off the wall in equal measure.
  76. Saving Mr. Banks
    Saving Mr. Banks does not strictly hew to the historical record where the eventual resolution of this conflict is concerned, but it is easy to accept this fictionalizing as part of the price to be paid for Thompson's engaging performance.
  77. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    Jackson's latest go at Tolkien's treasured "Hobbit" story gets closer to that rich alchemy of fantasy, adventure, imagination and emotion that made his "Lord of the Rings" trilogy such a triumph.
  78. Adventures of the Penguin King
    The inherent cinematic potential of one of nature's cutest animals rescues the film from being a total waste of time.
  79. Caught in the Web
    Chen's grand opus about the perils of the Internet already feels obsolete.
  80. Live at the Foxes Den
    Live at the Foxes Den comes off like some long-unproduced Broadway musical finally dusted off when someone raised enough money to mount it as a film production instead.
  81. UnHung Hero
    The film is often laugh-out-loud funny while remaining relatively discreet.
  82. One Chance
    Director David Frankel has crafted a sweet, funny, heartfelt film, and while we may know all along how it all turns out, Paul's signature performance still gives us chills.
  83. Jump
    When it becomes apparent that the seemingly linear narrative is in fact woven with several parallel story lines, one might even be inclined to excuse the plot's too many convenient coincidences.
  84. Puella Magi Madoka Magica the Movie Part III: Rebellion
    The more generalized confessionals on friendship and love are a lot simpler to grasp. But the real star is the riot collage of twisty, breakneck visuals underscoring these conversations and battles.
  85. Cooper and Hemingway: The True Gen
    The overall effect here is of parallel biographies juiced to feel important whenever they intersect, and an undercooked paean to lost masculinity.
  86. Narco Cultura
    What this film does is reveal two very different societies — both exhibiting, each in its own way, unmistakable signs of collapse.
  87. Paradise: Hope
    The most hopeful — and the best — of this solid and unsettling series.
  88. 11 A.M.
    Director Kim Hyun-seok, who until now has worked chiefly in romantic comedy, deploys visual effects and low-key performances in an efficiently told, character-driven exploration of immortality, hubris and human folly.
  89. The Last Days on Mars
    Lean, muscular and on the money, The Last Days on Mars takes a familiar story and tells it so tautly that we are pleased to be on board.
  90. Inside Llewyn Davis
    While the bleak, funny, exquisitely made Inside Llewyn Davis echoes familiar themes and narrative journeys, it also goes its own way and becomes a singular experience, one of their best films.
  91. Out of the Furnace
    Bale, Affleck and Harrelson are in their element as men battered by life, delivering exceptional performances that hold nothing back. Bale and Affleck are as nuanced as Harrelson is unhinged. It is among the finest work done by all three.
  92. The Unbelievers
    Unbelievers' is a high-minded love fest between two deeply committed atheistic intellectuals and their rock star-like fan base.
  93. These Birds Walk
    Deeply moving and devoid of melodrama, These Birds Walk is as pragmatic as its subjects.
  94. Sweet Dreams
    The most memorable thing about Sweet Dreams is that it allows us to experience the resilience, the capacity for happiness these women retain in spite of all they've been through. There's a lesson there for all of us.
  95. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    It is the incendiary work of British actors Idris Elba and Naomie Harris as the couple in question that elevates our involvement in this authorized film version of Nelson Mandela's autobiography.
  96. Bettie Page Reveals All
    [A] highly watchable portrait.
  97. The Punk Singer
    The Punk Singer fascinatingly traces the evolution of a woman.
  98. Reaching for the Moon
    Everything ultimately gives way to the stately, simplistic, inevitable pace of by-the-numbers biopics, from some woefully tinny, hit-and-run screenwriting to the usual difficulties surrounding the dramatization of an author's craft.
  99. Homefront
    [A] contemporary B-movie Western with designs on stylistic flair.
  100. Black Nativity
    Many of the transitions between narrative and music are rough. The temptations of the street, all too real in the real world, feel forced. Confrontations become clichés. The substance of human motivation is missing. And thus the heart never beats as it should.
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