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. 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.
  2. Caught in the Web
    Chen's grand opus about the perils of the Internet already feels obsolete.
  3. 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.
  4. UnHung Hero
    The film is often laugh-out-loud funny while remaining relatively discreet.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. Narco Cultura
    What this film does is reveal two very different societies — both exhibiting, each in its own way, unmistakable signs of collapse.
  10. Paradise: Hope
    The most hopeful — and the best — of this solid and unsettling series.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. The Unbelievers
    Unbelievers' is a high-minded love fest between two deeply committed atheistic intellectuals and their rock star-like fan base.
  16. These Birds Walk
    Deeply moving and devoid of melodrama, These Birds Walk is as pragmatic as its subjects.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
  19. Bettie Page Reveals All
    [A] highly watchable portrait.
  20. The Punk Singer
    The Punk Singer fascinatingly traces the evolution of a woman.
  21. 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.
  22. Homefront
    [A] contemporary B-movie Western with designs on stylistic flair.
  23. 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.
  24. Oldboy
    Oldboy suggests a filmmaker doing almost as much soul-searching as the main character. There is a brashness in the risks taken, the very imperfections revealing an artist finding new inspiration. For Lee, this weird, brutal film seems to have freed him.
  25. Gahan Wilson: Born Dead, Still Weird
    Jaffe deftly captures his subject's creative process, helpfully illuminating the method to Wilson's comic madness.
  26. Delivery Man
    Delivery Man, a heart-tugging new comedy about fatherhood and family, is warm as well as wry.
  27. Frozen
    Frozen is fabulous.
  28. The Great Beauty
    As its name promises, The Great Beauty is drop-dead gorgeous, a film that is luxuriously, seductively, stunningly cinematic. But more than intoxicating imagery is on director Paolo Sorrentino's mind, a lot more.
  29. Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury
    The mix of computer-generated imagery, hand-drawn simplicity in the humans and depth-conscious, textured backgrounds makes for a potent visual intelligence.
  30. Philomena
    Dench is not the only reason to see this unapologetic crowd-pleaser, but she is the best one.
  31. Sugar
    As a whole, the film's characters touchingly illustrate the tolls of living with unresolved trauma and chronic uncertainty, as well as the solidarity and relative freedom this community of outcasts enjoys.
  32. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    I don't know whether the tall man is happy, but I do know that Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy? is intellectually and visually groundbreaking, and most certainly a film.
  33. The Christmas Candle
    The Christmas Candle" seems destined to be a Hallmark movie of the week. But in spite of the hammy histrionics requisite for the genre, it is not at all a turkey.
  34. Following the Ninth: In the Footsteps of Beethoven's Final Symphony
    Despite the good intentions, structurally it's all over the place with an excess of montages, archival footage, interviews and information practically drowning out any chance to appreciate the richness of the German composer's beloved achievement.
  35. Geography Club
    Sweet, slight and frequently familiar, Geography Club, based on Brent Hartinger's novel about sexual identity among suburban teens, often feels as if it's circling its expiration date.
  36. Home
    The great achievement in writer-director Jono Oliver's poignant, superb debut, Home, lies in the balance between the film's empathy for those like Jack who seek independence and its compassion for others who may need care indefinitely.
  37. All God's Children
    Between the heavy-handed lines, director Adrian Popovici provides telling glimpses of a provincial, aggressively retrograde attitude toward women and the seedy nightclubs where they're preyed on. He elicits uneven performances from a cast working in several languages.
  38. Contracted
    Although this horror flick is somewhat absurd and seemingly forgettable when viewed in a vacuum, its coincidentally contemporaneous release with "Blue Is the Warmest Color" urges immediate reconsideration.
  39. Approved for Adoption
    A vibrant example of hybrid nonfiction filmmaking, using hand-drawn animation, live action, home movies and newsreels in a rich synthesis of personal and historical memory.
  40. Faust
    Alexander Sokurov's Faust is a grueling side show of a film, a morbid, mightily uninvolving piece.
  41. JFK: A President Betrayed
    The information comes fast from talking heads who, let's face it, can get a bit dry. Lose focus, and you risk missing the significance of what's being conveyed.
  42. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    An effective piece of melodramatic popular entertainment that savvily builds on the foundation established by the first Hunger Games movie.
  43. Nebraska
    Nebraska offers something deeper and more mature, the ability to make us care about its characters and their story on a different level than Payne has given us before.
  44. At Berkeley
    An involving portrait of what's called "one of the world's most powerful knowledge-producing institutions" and an examination on how that institution is coping with a significant financial crisis.
  45. The Best Man Holiday
    A joyous, raucous, righteous film but also a frustrating and disappointing one.
  46. Aftermath
    Aftermath is a bombshell disguised as a thriller.
  47. The Ghosts in Our Machine
    The Ghosts in Our Machine, a heartfelt meditation on animal rights, comes at you as a whisper. It depends on the persuasive powers of creatures great and small — in their natural habitat or in cages — to argue that we stop using them for food, clothing, research and entertainment.
  48. Sunlight Jr.
    Though this is an emotionally driven movie, it never drifts into melodrama. Collyer is as pragmatic in her approach as her characters. But it is Dillon and Watts' nuanced portrayals that make "Sunlight's" darkness so appealing.
  49. Brave Miss World
    Peck celebrates Abargil as an impassioned and inspiring advocate while making clear the emotional complexities of her single-mindedness.
  50. 12-12-12
    Busy, but not exactly invigorating.
  51. Charlie Countryman
    Pulpy dross of surpassing dumbness, Charlie Countryman takes the blender approach to mixing dark adventure, doofus comedy and pie-eyed romance, but forgets to put the lid on when pulsed.
  52. Dear Mr. Watterson
    The film, named for "Calvin" creator Bill Watterson, offers not only an in-depth look at the comic strip's unique influence but also a concise snapshot of the dwindling state of newspapers and their "funny pages."
  53. Go for Sisters
    It's a plot that never takes hold, a mystery devoid of suspense... But the actors' unforced chemistry defies the artifice.
  54. In the Name Of
    Despite some diffused messaging and oddly elliptical storytelling, "In the Name Of" proves an absorbing, at times hypnotic drama about religion, repression and sexuality.
  55. Lion Ark
    The lions are majestic yet adorable; too bad the humans are such a sorry sight.
  56. Pad Yatra: A Green Odyssey
    Director Wendy J.N. Lee, who made the grueling trek with a solar-powered camera operated by a monk, provides plenty of breathtaking footage and a strong sense of both the journey's illuminative highs and treacherous (as in altitude and terrain) lows.
  57. The Falls: Testament of Love
    Apart from Farmer's effectively stricken portrayal of a singularly conflicted man, The Falls: Testament of Love is too earnest a slog to have any impact.
  58. The Book Thief
    As a showcase for accomplished performers tugging heart strings in a holiday awards season, it's perfectly serviceable.
  59. The Armstrong Lie
    The whole truth about the complicated, charismatic man may never come out, but The Armstrong Lie is closer than we ever thought we'd get.
  60. Finding Mr. Right
    Its depiction of esoteric facets of immigrant life lends an air of credibility seldom seen in rom-coms.
  61. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    "Breakdown" gets the music right and has the benefit of strong acting, but its unapologetically melodramatic plot has a tendency to throw everything at you but the kitchen sink.
  62. Out Loud
    It's shame that the first film to come out of Lebanon featuring a gay theme turns out to be such a head-scratching jumble.
  63. Remington and the Curse of the Zombadings
    All of this is ridiculously silly, of course, with low-rent special effects to boot. But you may laugh despite yourself.
  64. Running from Crazy
    At once short on details and incredibly forthcoming, Barbara Kopple's documentary doesn't dig into specifics about Mariel's personal struggles with mental illness nor the WillingWay lifestyle that she and her boyfriend Bobby Williams espouse.
  65. Symphony of the Soil
    It does have a point of view, but the intended conclusion ripens for the picking in a roundabout way.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Speciesism: The Movie
    The film is more polarizing than persuasive.
  67. The Motel Life
    The feature spikes its lonesome mood with shots of dry humor, animated sequences and flashbacks — at times overplaying its hand, even as Emile Hirsch and Stephen Dorff wordlessly convey all that needs to be said.
  68. Medora
    Honest and unadorned though the film may be, it's ultimately just not that involving.
  69. Paris Countdown
    If Michael Mann, Luc Besson and Quentin Tarantino all ate the same bad sushi together, the unfortunate end result might just resemble the pre-digested pap that is the French thriller Paris Countdown.
  70. CinemAbility
    The film's overall narrative is one of rocky but steady progress.
  71. Billy & Buddy
    Billy and Buddy manages to maintain the kind of brisk giddiness that many animated films struggle to achieve. But as family fare with a few unsettling Gallic touches, the boy-and-his-dog escapade is an odd fit.
  72. Ass Backwards
    The scenarios in Ass Backwards, which director Chris Nelson contributed to by filming in focus, feel arbitrary rather than organic, as if the creators' list of humor targets — lesbian bikers, trailer trash, drug-addicted reality TV stars, pageant world denizens — were picked out of a hat.
  73. The Wind Rises
    To see The Wind Rises is to simultaneously marvel at the work of a master and regret that this film is likely his last.
  74. The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers
    The film's main misstep, however, is its unconvincing use of celebrity voices to re-create various speeches and letters... Though well-intended, their inclusion proves a needless distraction in an otherwise smart and dignified presentation.
  75. A Case of You
    A Case of You is perfectly enjoyable as far as indie rom coms go — just not particularly original.
  76. Blood and Ties
    Director Dong-Suk Kuk ratchets up the tension, effectively toggling back and forth in time to reveal the picture's various puzzle pieces.
  77. Nosotros los Nobles
    The performances are genuine and the narrative beats land solidly for a perfectly enjoyable feel-good dramedy.
  78. Sake-Bomb
    Director Junya Sakino's debut would have been stronger if the comic barbs in Jeff Mizushima's script hadn't been dulled by Mizushima's editing, which bungles the timing of the jokes.
  79. Sal
    Franco seems torn, on the one hand presenting his subject as a likably ordinary, self-involved actor and on the other sanctifying him as a would-be gay icon in a conformist industry.
  80. Last Love
    This somber work about the worthiness of living has little life in it.
  81. Capital
    There's plenty of pacing verve in Costa-Gavras' technique, and the residue from that first thrilling peek inside the hermetic world of big-time money-moving never goes away. What's lacking is most surprising from this dissident filmmaker: the emotional outrage.
  82. The New Black
    Director Yoruba Richen has refreshingly avoided making this polemic into propaganda, a temptation many lesser documentarians could not resist.
  83. Man of Tai Chi
    The brutally efficient shooting style Reeves employs to film master choreographer Yuen Woo Ping's breathtaking fights...is refreshingly grounded and old-school kinetic.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    I Am Divine
    On the evidence of the documentary I Am Divine, to know the drag star Divine was to love him.
  85. Big Sur
    Although no less fawning and indulgent about its self-centered subject, played by Jean-Marc Barr (who also narrates, run-on style), the muted emptiness of the ill-fated sojourn wills its way toward something like existential meaningfulness.
  86. Not Yet Begun to Fight
    Not Yet Begun to Fight is barely an hour long, but it justifies a theatrical release with a lyrical meditation on nature and war.
  87. Why We Ride
    An unabashed love letter to all things motorcycle, the documentary "Why We Ride" will surely warm the souls of bike enthusiasts while prompting many nonriders to join the fold.
  88. Diana
    Flawed yet intimate, Diana respects its subject's hopes, strengths, weaknesses and legacy and, in the extraordinary Watts, boasts a formidably empathetic advocate.
  89. The Human Scale
    writer-director Andreas M. Dalsgaard takes such a low-key approach to presenting the film's vital, potentially involving topic that viewers may find themselves more inspired to take a snooze than a stroll.
  90. Ender's Game
    Its strong special effects make its simulated battles effective and, echoing the book, its story line touches on a number of intriguing issues.
  91. When I Walk
    When I Walk is extraordinarily accomplished, poignant, and wise.
  92. Free Birds
    With its flat punch lines, formulaic action and undercooked mélange of messages — touching on everything from factory farming to genocide — the film waddles awkwardly.
  93. The Square
    The Square bears witness to history in an articulate, thoughtful and intensely dramatic way.
  94. Bastards
    Bastards is a thriller truly etched in darkness, pools of black broken mostly by the stricken yet soldiering faces of her main characters, like ships in a sea of stormy nights.
  95. Dallas Buyers Club
    Even with some flaws and flailing, Dallas Buyers Club is a rough, raw, ragged and exhilarating ride.
  96. The Impaler
    Director Derek Hockenbrough's vision is bigger than his budget, and it shows.
  97. Marwencol
    Watching Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg's probing documentary on Hogancamp's undertaking, is an exhilarating, utterly unique experience.
  98. Haunter
    Haunter offers a freaky, visceral experience — without a hint of gore.
  99. American Promise
    Because the stories are so specific, and because they play out over such a long period of time, it is hard not to be fascinated by this intimate look at how particular families deal with the great parental challenge of shepherding their children through the all-important educational experience.
  100. Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    In Enzo Avitabile Music Life, Demme has not given us an expansive film, and there are spots you wish he'd dug deeper. But there is such a well of emotion that the music alone is almost enough.
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