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. Wadjda
    While the uniqueness of the film's Riyadh setting and the disturbing nature of Wadjda's depictions of life for women behind the Saudi curtain are thoroughly involving, the actual plotline of a 10-year-old girl's determination to own a bicycle can be as standard as it sounds.
  2. Sample This
    The film offers disappointingly little insight into the music itself.
  3. Fire in the Blood
    Unfortunately, Dylan Mohan Gray's slow and steady exposé never quite manages the propulsive gut punch its incendiary subject demands.
  4. Insidious: Chapter 2
    This busy-yet-dull sequel feels like Wan robotically flexing his manipulation of fright-film signposts, an exercise more silly than sinister.
  5. The Muslims Are Coming!
    The hint at disagreement among the performers about who can and cannot call themselves Muslim is particularly provocative — a debate that would have been better off played out on-screen rather than summarized after the fact.
  6. Chavez: Cage of Glory
    Good intentions go just so far when a movie is hobbled by such risible, place holder dialogue, contrived plot points, wildly uneven performances and awkward camera work.
  7. I Am Breathing
    "Breathing" takes its humorous, contemplative tonal cues from Neil himself.
  8. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
    At the film's heart is a fitful conversation that unfolds like a string of koans, epigrams, jokes and silences.
  9. And While We Were Here
    It's to Coiro's credit that no one emerges as a villain — and that, however painful, on the other side lies hope.
  10. You Will Be My Son
    A strongly acted, character-driven melodrama, concerned with the dynamics of family in general and father-son issues in particular, it presents situations so emotionally supercharged that the whole story could have come straight out of Balzac.
  11. Populaire
    The less seriously the genial French comedy Populaire takes itself, the more amusing it is. Fortunately, with small exceptions, this film doesn't take itself very seriously at all.
  12. TV Man: The Search for the Last Independent Dealer
    The real treasure in "TV Man" is Kosareff's impressive collection of old print and television ads, archival footage and big- and small-screen clips illustrating TV-set culture.
  13. Mission Park
    Though writer-director Bryan Anthony Ramirez keeps things moving apace, he trots out so many familiar tropes that it's often like watching a highlights reel from a lifetime's worth of urban crime dramas.
  14. Tio Papi
    Ray Ray's belated journey into manhood never feels sentimental or precious. But it also never strikes an emotional tone that's more than blandly agreeable.
  15. Salinger
    Salerno, as if he's unsure of what he's got, goes to great lengths to heighten the drama with crisp editing, a strong score, frequent sound effects and snappy visuals.
  16. Adore
    It's a challenging film, but maybe not as challenging as it should be.
  17. American Milkshake
    The script is short on details and insight, and when asked to comment on this condition — or the script's sketch of a culture on the cusp of the Internet revolution — the film, like its dirtbag protagonist, just shrugs.
  18. Things Never Said
    The earnest mash-up of spoken-word performance, domestic drama and soapy romance in Things Never Said is unwieldy, to be sure, and would have sunk a less charismatic cast.
  19. Best Kept Secret
    This is no sappy portrait of a saint: Mino is tenacious, critical and defensive, and in one memorable scene, a colleague tries to get her to face reality about what the real world holds for their students after graduation.
  20. Winnie Mandela
    Like many a biopic before it, Winnie Mandela shoehorns an exceptional life into the standard template of a highlights reel, lurching from one Important Moment to the next.
  21. My Father and The Man In Black
    In the end, despite the clunky mix of narrative formats, My Father and the Man in Black makes for an illuminating alternate history of sorts to the Hollywoodized version of Cash's ascendancy in "Walk the Line."
  22. 36 Saints
    The bloodletting is blandly demure and the identity of the malefactor telegraphed too early.
  23. American Made Movie
    An involving primer on the realities of homegrown versus global industrialization.
  24. 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
    This gripping, innovatively constructed flashback commands attention.
  25. Good Ol' Freda
    White's film is a love letter not just to Kelly and the Beatles, but also to postwar working-class Liverpool.
  26. Dead Before Dawn 3D
    There are zero thrills — 3-D or otherwise — and, for all the nutty mayhem, the pacing drags.
  27. Bounty Killer
    Flat jokes, uneven performances, and a predictable romance help make Bounty Killer a lot less fun than it should be — a killer shame, given its boldly gonzo premise.
  28. A Teacher
    A flimsy episodic feature.
  29. Hell Baby
    Its modest (if occasionally gross-out) stabs at genre parody rarely insult our intelligence and even allow for the kind of retro deadpan silliness Mel Brooks used to underline his louder punch lines.
  30. Instructions Not Included
    There's a lot of movie here with unexpected developments, held together by the irresistible chemistry between Derbez and his adorable pint-sized co-star.
  31. Passion
    Passion will only rekindle your love affair with De Palma to the extent that his luridly artisan chiller classics are readily available afterward for another viewing.
  32. Drinking Buddies
    Swanberg achieves an occasionally heady aura of improvisational flirtatiousness mixed with a churning will-they-or-won't-they suspense.
  33. The Lifeguard
    The Lifeguard is a watchable, emotionally redolent trip down one woman's memory lane.
  34. Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    Documentarian Amy Nicholson puts a human face on the deterioration of the iconic New York amusement park by focusing on the fate of her favorite ride.
  35. Getaway
    But unless you're a demolition-derby fetishist or a connoisseur of vehicular mayhem, none of that will buy you a thrill in this video game posing as a movie.
  36. I Declare War
    An entertaining and insightful portrait of boyhood.
  37. Afternoon Delight
    Aiming to discomfort, the film ends up retreating.
  38. One Direction: This Is Us
    One Direction: This Is Us is not the raw confessional that title might imply but rather both a primer and new product presentation.
  39. Closed Circuit
    Trim and effective though Closed Circuit mostly is, it does fall prey to excessive contrivance from time to time, as most thrillers do. But the fact that its fictional premise dovetails nicely with what we've come to know is true is enough to hold us in our seats.
  40. The Grandmaster
    An exercise in pure cinematic style filled with the most ravishing images, The Grandmaster finds director Wong Kar-wai applying his impeccable visual style to the mass-market martial arts genre with potent results.
  41. Short Term 12
    Short Term 12 is a small wonder, a film of exceptional naturalness and empathy that takes material about troubled teenagers and young adults that could have been generic and turns it into something moving and intimate.
  42. Wampler's Ascent
    Focused on the task at hand and exhausted from the effort, Stephen is often authentically moving, but on the ground, a manufactured awareness that this is all being filmed — along with a treacly score — mars the feel-good atmosphere.
  43. Go Grandriders
    Tian-Hao Hua's documentary distinguishes itself not with false suspense but tremendous poignancy and humor, much of which come from the riders' varied histories and motivations for revving up their bikes.
  44. Dark Tourist
    Dark Tourist gets bogged down in insufferably slow-moving scenes — interestingly, when Jim is interacting with others, despite consummate performances from Cudlitz and Griffith.
  45. The United States of Football
    A structural, chronological mess of information and emotion, so chaotically shot and edited to move from stat to image to sound bite that it suffers from its own concentration issues.
  46. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    Unfortunately, there's a lack of structure, context and point of view to the largely gray, grim, hardscrabble world presented here.
  47. Inch'Allah
    Director Anais Barbeau-Lavalette builds a persuasive sensory immediacy in Inch'Allah, even as her story grows increasingly contrived.
  48. Paradise: Faith
    With little room to feel for or even understand Anna Maria, Paradise: Faith rarely seems more than high art with low intentions.
  49. The Frozen Ground
    Although writer-director Scott Walker seems committed to not overly exploiting his lurid subject matter, the movie is just too dreary, disjointed and generically creepy to be persuasive.
  50. Thérèse
    Even given the character's extreme introspection and withdrawal, Tautou's performance is too often opaque.
  51. The World's End
    Audacious and witty, The World's End is a strange brew.
  52. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    The world's most successful ring of diamond thieves is inventively and insightfully explored in the documentary Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers.
  53. Scenic Route
    While the narrative spins in place, Kyle Killen's script throws out one uninspired gambit after another to extend the film to feature length, eventually climaxing with dual endings, both contrived.
  54. You're Next
    The surprisingly adept mixture of tones — naturalism, dysfunctional family satire, winking slasher nostalgia, twisty vengeance thriller — is offbeat enough to keep even hardened connoisseurs of body-count entertainment on their toes.
  55. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones is just a sloppy rag bag of ideas cobbled from other stories.
  56. Spark: A Burning Man Story
    For such a hippie-ish wingding originally designed to discourage the buying and selling of anything, "Spark" has decidedly bought into its subject and has no qualms hawking it to moviegoers.
  57. Abandoned Mine
    Abandoned Mine is all that its title promises: something generic and empty, with the sense that much has been left behind.
  58. Paranoia
    I'm not going to get into the acting, because there's not much of it, frankly. No one is embarrassingly bad; no one is exceptionally good.
  59. Cutie and the Boxer
    For all of the eccentricities that come in any telling of an artist's life, Cutie and the Boxer's real magic is in so beautifully telling a familiar story of husbands and wives.
  60. When Comedy Went to School
    For a disorganized film that has trouble deciding what it's about, When Comedy Went to School can be a lot of fun.
  61. Museum Hours
    It's a film whose pleasures are much more visual than dramatic, but that doesn't mean there aren't serious things on its mind.
  62. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    Mara is the captivating center of the film, all the emotions of the men and the child hinge on her moods. She continues to be one of those actresses able to shape-shift into different places, times and characters.
  63. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Daniels' pulp instincts do lead to vivid sequences...but this is one significant film where less would have been a whole lot more.
  64. We the Parents
    Concerned mainly with the mechanics of the undertaking, the movie is less an incisive chronicle than a galvanizing tool for parents who are, understandably, frustrated with the system.
  65. Standing Up
    It's unclear who this blandly titled drama is aimed at — devoid as it is of humor or any real hazard and lacking the provocative undertones of its source material.
  66. The United States of Autism
    Although it favors breadth over depth, the documentary The United States of Autism offers a tender look at an eclectic array of children, their parents and other individuals affected by this ever-increasing developmental disability.
  67. Herblock: The Black & the White
    Block's work, so often ahead of the curve (Woodward and Bernstein marvel at how he understood Watergate before them), always comes shining through, revealing an artist who made it his mission to champion the "little guy" and speak truth to power.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    This Is Martin Bonner
    This Is Martin Bonner, wonderfully acted and something of a minimalist masterpiece, is a striking, moving ode to lives lived day to day, even hour to hour, in which the smallest gesture has the power to make one hopeful for the next, like a small fire gently stoked.
  69. The Patience Stone
    It's the flesh-and-blood lead performance by Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani as a profoundly conflicted Muslim wife and mother that seals this cinematic deal. She's superb.
  70. The Happy Sad
    Aside from a few missing transitional beats and one too many coincidental encounters, the picture's fluid, zigzagging sexuality and emotional high-diving prove largely credible and diverting.
  71. Tiny Times 2.0
    [Guo's] film, which at first hints at a wry critique of materialism but ends up reveling in it, is a timely snapshot of aspirational glitz in the big city.
  72. Jobs
    There was a time when the slack storytelling, stock characterizations and general by-the-numbers feeling of the film could be put into perspective by saying it seemed like a TV biopic. But even TV movies are done with more verve than this these days.
  73. Kick-Ass 2
    Kick-Ass 2 is a lesser version of what it appears to be, an uncertain jumble rather than a true exploration of outrage, violence and identity.
  74. Prince Avalanche
    As intriguing as Prince Avalanche can be in its contemplations, and as glad as I am to see Green cozying up to his more elemental and esoteric side, the film ultimately plays like an unfinished thought. It's a good thought, mind you, but like the road, it seems to go nowhere.
  75. The Canyons
    The Canyons is a bad accident everyone saw coming, and now it is here.
  76. Elysium
    Although the pulp energy that Blomkamp brings to this material makes it consistently watchable, the film doesn't feel as singular as we would have hoped.
  77. In a World...
    In a World… stands as a very entertaining first crack at what one can only hope will be a long career behind the camera. That is where it seems the actress can truly make her mark.
  78. Planes
    For a movie about planes, a lot happens on the ground — those refueling stops can take forever. But the animators take advantage of the power of flight, packing the action sequences with daredevil runs. But it's a race, and a kind of sameness occasionally sets in.
  79. Our Children
    This is a taut psychological study, based on a true story, of the complexities of personal power relationships that begins with the kind of shattering revelation that would be the conclusion of most films.
  80. Pig Death Machine
    Anyone who longs for the old, weird films of John Waters or the psychotronic freak-outs of New York's Cinema of Transgression school should be able to get their fix from Pig Death Machine.
  81. Blood
    Blood feels perfunctory, needing something besides fussy plotting to jolt it to life.
  82. Terraferma
    A stirring commentary on our better angels.
  83. Jug Face
    Kinkle's debut refreshingly sacrifices gore showpieces (though it is bloody at times) for a steadily increasing dread tied to a young woman's desperation.
  84. Implanted
    In the regrettably amateurish hands of writer-director Thomas Verrette, Ethan's journey toward the truth feels more like watching someone wandering through one of those pharmaceutical commercials with a laundry list of side effects.
  85. I Give It a Year
    Instead of subversion, Mazer's first outing as a feature director offers only a tweak of genre conventions. He does achieve an above-average share of laugh-out-loud moments — welcome compensation in a romp that grows more forced with every turn.
  86. The Good Son: The Life of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini
    [A] colorful, absorbing documentary.
  87. Off Label
    With its focus on intimate detail, Off Label is not a conventional "issue film" reaching for conclusions. Palmieri and Mosher have taken on a huge and urgent topic, and their work's impact rests on their refusal to tell viewers how to feel.
  88. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    Skippable 3-D aside, it's a serviceable, limber follow-up to 2010's "Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief."
  89. More Than Honey
    Producer-director Markus Imhoof tackles a hugely vital subject, but the film's loose structure and lack of a specific through-line don't make for the clearest intake of its, well, swarm of information.
  90. We're the Millers
    We're the Millers is full of moments that feel as forced as the marriage of convenience — and contrivance — in the movie.
  91. Breaking the Girls
    Breaking the Girls isn't exactly a throwaway, but more an extended act of teasing foreplay, a movie that is fine for what it is but also never really shifts into something more.
  92. Europa Report
    While Europa Report does quite well dramatically without breaking any new ground, its great strength is how striking it is visually and the stratagems it employs to make itself memorable.
  93. Rising from Ashes
    As a filmmaker, [Johnston] doesn't always trust his audience as much as he should, opting for overly insistent music and voice-over and withholding information in key areas. But he knew a good story when he saw one, and we can all be grateful for that.
  94. Computer Chess
    Director Andrew Bujalski makes a serious play for his own place in the pantheon of hysterically pretentious pretend.
  95. Drug War
    To has a great mastery of timing; he knows just how long to let a look linger before cutting away, how little he can reveal without losing us. The director keeps you guessing until the very end whether Choi or Zhang, or someone else entirely, will be the last man standing.
  96. The Spectacular Now
    Miles Teller and Shailene Woodley, as high school seniors Sutter and Aimee, bring such an authentic face of confidence and questioning, indifference and need, pain and denial, friendship and first love, that it will take you back to that time if you're no longer there, and light a path if you are.
  97. 2 Guns
    Though individual set pieces are well done, the film inevitably leaves an empty taste behind it once it's done.
  98. The Gardener
    The elder Makhmalbaf, who wrote and directed, puts many spins on this ethereal mood piece — it is by turns poetic, impressionistic, metaphorical and even a bit trippy — without satisfying such genre basics as structure, depth and resolution.
  99. Drift
    When Drift sticks to the likable, gently humorous contours of occasionally fractious brotherly love, broken up by thrillingly shot surfing footage, it has plenty of charm, period flavor and breezy visual breadth... Where the movie routinely disappoints, though, is in pursuit of a perfect storm of conflict story lines.
  100. Cockneys vs Zombies
    There's little that feels fresh, freaky or funny about one more batch of eccentric reactions to hungry corpses, one more attempt to creatively splatter, one more metaphor for zombie invasion.
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