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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    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
    Mumia Abu-Jamal would be the perfect subject for an investigative documentary that explored his life and thought with a calm and even hand. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary is not that film.
  2. A Place at the Table
    The filmmakers vividly illustrate the power and depth of the long-spiraling problem of "food insecurity" by immersing us in the hardscrabble lives of a cross section of our nation's poor.
  3. Phantom
    Phantom is a relatively tight, gripping story told with efficiency that makes room for its fine roster of actors to explore old-fashioned ideas on honor and loyalty.
  4. Stoker
    The new thriller from South Korean director Park Chan-Wook is a bizarrely perverse, beautifully rendered mystery that you may or may not care to solve.
  5. The Sweeney
    Don't look for The Sweeney to win any awards. It's not going to, not even close. But that doesn't stop it from being a briskly involving British crime entertainment of the old school. You've seen the type, and more than once, but the genre still has enough juice to take us for a ride.
  6. 21 and Over
    This is a movie that celebrates selfishness, stupidity and the mean-spirited insensitivity that goes along with it. We're better than this, America.
  7. Jack the Giant Slayer
    With some momentary exceptions, Jack the Giant Slayer simply isn't any fun.
  8. Mama
    Beautifully envisioned, badly constructed, the only truly terrifying things in the new horror movie Mama are the fake tattoos, short black hair and black T-shirts meant to turn "Zero Dark Thirty" star Jessica Chastain into a guitar-shredding, punk rocker chick.
  9. Dark Skies
    Really the biggest problem with Dark Skies is that Stewart can never quite decide just what story he is telling — a slow-burn horror parable or paranoid invasion flick — or whether to focus on this character or that, instead struggling to string together scares regardless of how they fit together overall.
  10. One Life
    The wildlife documentary One Life is a visually gorgeous, at times astonishing screen experience.
  11. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
    Far from closing the case, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files opens up a whole new perspective, acknowledging the banal and the baffling.
  12. The Power of Few
    Writer-director Leone Marucci has a scratch-worthy itch for plump visuals and flashy camera moves, but a limp way with dialogue and story, and — despite his cast — no grip on directing actors.
  13. Camp
    The film, though nicely performed, rarely builds into the kind of gripping emotional journey it clearly intended.
  14. Stuck
    A seeming lack of conclusive answers or solutions to a complex global problem makes Stuck feel more like a work in progress than a completely baked depiction.
  15. Tristana (re-release)
    The film, which came out in 1970 after a censorship battle with the Franco regime, catches — and releases — all the tension of shifting sexual mores. You can almost sense the director's pleasure in taking apart the duplicities of a patriarchal Spanish society. [21 Feb. 2013]
  16. Kai po che!
    Kai Po Che packs a lot into its two hours, with not a lot of subtlety -- and in some cases, bracing grimness. But its performances are enjoyably boisterous, and director Abhishek Kapoor refuses to linger on clichés for too long...before hurling his trio into their next complication or moment of triumph.
  17. Inescapable
    Inescapable is like "Taken" without the tension.
  18. Caesar Must Die
    Caesar Must Die shows us in the starkest possible terms the electric power of drama to move and touch not only audiences but the actors who bring so much of themselves to their performances.
  19. Bless Me, Ultima
    A deeply satisfying feat of storytelling, Bless Me, Ultima makes a difficult task look easy. It combines innocence and experience, the darkness and wonder of life, in a way that is not easy to categorize but a rich pleasure to watch.
  20. Snitch
    All the talking would be fine, but the dialogue is preachy, the drama too earnest and the action kind of sluggish, though it's hard not to get a jolt when Johnson jumps behind the wheel.
  21. Bestiaire
    The film has a meditative calm about it — there are only a few murmured words of French but nothing that could be called dialogue — with also some underlying tension, because as you look at the animals, they so often look back, their inscrutable consciousness both placid and unyielding.
  22. Saving Lincoln
    Saving Lincoln feels amateurish, strange and beyond redress.
  23. The Package
    The Package is uncomplicated guy's guy movie time, the screen version of the starchy passing pleasures of bar food.
  24. Escape from Planet Earth
    Feel-good but not cloying, zippy but not frenetic, and refreshingly free of snark, the default setting for a lot of kids' fare these days, the feature takes a pleasingly retro-futuristic stance on matters of décor and attitude.
  25. Hitler's Children
    Though Ze'evi's creative choices don't always serve the material — he unwisely attempts to pump up the emotional volume with an intrusive music score — his compassion for his subjects is clear, and their straightforward testimony is provocative.
  26. The Bitter Buddha
    [An] amusing, freewheeling documentary.
  27. Would You Rather
    Though assured in execution and not without a few moments of genuine tension — mainly emanating from Combs' flinty weirdness — Would You Rather is hardly a most dangerous game night at the movies.
  28. The Berlin File
    There is something sharp, exciting and more original tucked within The Berlin File — and it is in moments a sleek, crackling film — but it all feels somehow misshapen.
  29. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    Herzog has become a master of the understatement — knowing just how long the images can sustain you without a word being said. Vasyukov and his team of cameramen gave him a stunning range to work with, so the filmmaker keeps his own narration to a minimum.
  30. No
    Even if No is not the whole truth — and no film is — its pungent dialogue and involving characters tell a delicious and very pertinent tale. And the messages it delivers, its thoughts on the workings of democracy and the intricacies of personality, are just as valuable and entertaining — maybe even more so.
  31. Shanghai Calling
    Hsia has an appealingly slick visual style for the fast-paced if predictable turns in Sam's story, shooting the gleaming, bustling Shanghai as if it had finally earned its big-Hollywood-romantic-comedy stripes as a setting for the usual fish-out-of-water jokes, broad humor, meet-cutes, silly coincidences and happy endings.
  32. Like Someone in Love
    From moment to moment the low-key intrigue threatens to slip into Hitchcock territory; when it does, it's not in the form of high-wire suspense but in a burst of understated playfulness.
  33. Beautiful Creatures
    Maybe there really are supernatural forces at work in this world. How else to explain Beautiful Creatures? The movie is an intriguing, intelligent enigma — three words not typically associated with teen romances.
  34. Safe Haven
    This sloppy sentimental journey is long on beauty shots, short on depth and seriously intent on tugging your heartstrings. Indeed, it demands you reach for those tissues. Sob.
  35. A Good Day to Die Hard
    A Good Day to Die Hard plays like an extended victory lap for star Bruce Willis and the entire "Die Hard" franchise. Not surprising, but not overwhelmingly entertaining either.
  36. Lost in Thailand
    By our quote-unquote standards of contemporary comedy, it plays as uneven at best and often just flattens out for long jokeless stretches.
  37. Room 237
    Room 237 becomes not a film about "The Shining" or even a film about film. Rather, it is an examination of the nature of obsession, about how we are capable of convincing ourselves — and possibly others — that just about anything might be true.
  38. The Playroom
    The drama often feels posed and inert. Even so, it strikes more than a few chords as it digs deeper than period cliché.
  39. Yossi
    Predictable if measured uplift aside, Fox keeps Yossi effortlessly affecting, graced with deadpan humor and a knowingness about lonely lives.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Clandestine Childhood
    Clandestine Childhood is a sincere effort but also rather sincerely a meager one too.
  41. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    The earnest passages mostly just lie there; the film works best on its frilly, exuberant surface, as a valentine to Streamline Moderne, Pop Art and L.A.
  42. Lore
    At its heart Lore qualifies as a coming-of-age story, but it is far from the ones we usually see.
  43. Side Effects
    This clever bag of tricks is made with so much cinematic skill it makes implausibility irrelevant. What happens on screen is unapologetically far-fetched, but it unfolds with enough panache to make turning away out of the question.
  44. Young Turks
    A snapshot of Los Angeles artists during a cultural pivot point, the documentary Young Turks sparks fascination and frustration in equal measure.
  45. Identity Thief
    The heart of this film is on the road with Bateman and McCarthy. If not for their brilliance, Identity Thief would be running on empty.
  46. The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia
    The storytelling, from a script by David Coggeshall, is at times nearly incoherent and relies too often on random scares.
  47. Bullet to the Head
    Bullet to the Head is an adrenaline shot to your movie memory if the blunt, gleefully dumb, no-nonsense ways of '80s-style action flicks are your nostalgia drug of choice.
  48. Girls Against Boys
    Girls Against Boys is some odd male fantasy of what female revenge might be like, sexy and enigmatically charged rather than haunting or scary or even just weird.
  49. Warm Bodies
    In doing a little genre bending of romantic schmaltz and horror cheese - some fundamental zombie mythology is turned on its head - the film breathes amusing new life into both.
  50. Sound City
    High-spirited, emotional and funny, Sound City is, of all things, a mash note to a machine. Not just any machine, however, but one that helped change the face of rock 'n' roll.
  51. Movie 43
    How many directors does it take to screw in a star-studded piece of aggressive stupidity and call it a movie? An even dozen, and there is no punch line.
  52. Smiley
    A surprisingly effective low-budget horror film that takes as its true villain the casual cynicism and nihilistic misanthropy that so often go along with online culture.
  53. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    What galls is that for all the perspiration in jazzing up an old yarn, there's not a whiff of originality in how Wirkola engages with the perverse pleasures enshrined by the Grimm brothers, two of their era's shrewdest storytellers.
  54. Let Fury Have the Hour
    Kudos to writer-director Antonino D'Ambrosio for taking such an eclectic and disparate number of aims, thoughts, subjects and mediums and creating the smart and inspiring - and uniquely whole -documentary that is Let Fury Have the Hour.
  55. Parker
    If you're going to saturate a film with so much violence, at least it's nice to see an action hero - or antihero - actually feeling the pain.
  56. Resolution
    In its gently atmospheric camerawork and nicely underplayed moments between Mike and Chris, Resolution manages to keep its eerier moments surprising and its emotional life arresting.
  57. John Dies at the End
    Flaked with offbeat witticisms, cheese ball effects and fanboy splatter gore, the surreal John Dies at the End has the vibe of a shaggy dog story, which works both for and against it.
  58. Knife Fight
    The underwhelming, would-be political satire Knife Fight plays more like a failed network TV pilot than the savvy feature it clearly set out to be. Think: Aaron Sorkin-lite, uh, really, really lite.
  59. Beware of Mr. Baker
    Writer-director Jay Bulger combines warts-heavy interview footage of Baker with vivid archival bits, concert clips, jaunty animation and chats with various musical greats to paint a lively portrait of yet another brilliant but wildly self-destructive artist.
  60. Tabu
    At first Tabu is intriguing. But the enigma gets wearing as the director's attention is divided between the homage to the silent film era and the film's underlying exploration of the regret of old age.
  61. Brief Reunion
    Efficiently told and features solid performances, but without the juicy character detail, vise-grip suspense or black comic intensity of its memorable forerunners, it unwinds as a boilerplate genre item.
  62. Officer Down
    It's really just an overstuffed story that comes off not as layered but rather as an unfocused jumble.
  63. LUV
    What begins as a promising peek into the tragic cycle of waylaid promise that's crippling broken inner-city families is itself dispiritingly pulled sideways in the Baltimore-set indie LUV.
  64. Let My People Go!
    The road to the inevitable slapsticky Seder is paved with more sweetness than bite, a good deal of frantic foolishness and progressively thinner laughs, all wrapped in a message of acceptance and inclusiveness.
  65. The Rabbi's Cat
    It's a wild and vivid ride and a spirited reminder of the kinship between Jewish and Arab cultural traditions.
  66. Broken City
    Nothing clicks, nothing resonates, everything's broken.
  67. The Last Stand
    Johnny Knoxville offers comic relief as the goofball proprietor of a back-road gun museum, which conveniently allows for an odd assortment of weapons to be used in the climactic battle. It's that kind of movie.
  68. Matru ki Bijlee ka Mandola
    For the most part "Matru" is neatly energetic, a mix of screwball whimsy and softball seriousness.
  69. Birders: The Central Park Effect
    I found myself repeatedly on the edge of tears over its course. It is a relatively short but luxurious film.
  70. A Haunted House
    No-holds-barred comedy is one thing, hurtful thoughtlessness is something else entirely. An ostensible comedy shouldn't have so many moments that feel so ugly.
  71. I Am Not a Hipster
    I Am Not a Hipster is the kind of lovingly crafted, deeply affecting drama that gives small indie films a good name. It's also a terrific showcase for first-time feature writer-director Destin Daniel Cretton and his superb leading man, Dominic Bogart.
  72. Uprising (2013)
    Ultimately, more than 800 demonstrators died amid countless displays of bravery and commitment. Uprising is a vital and valuable tribute to these courageous men and women - and to love of country.
  73. $ellebrity
    It's an enjoyable snapshot that effectively explores the colliding - often complicit - worlds of fame, entertainment publicity, the public's infatuation with gossip and the dogged paparazzi at the epicenter of it all.
  74. FrackNation
    A one-sided attack piece like FrackNation doesn't add much to the conversation.
  75. Struck by Lightning
    Genial and heartfelt but essentially toothless, lacking in either snark or spark.
  76. A Dark Truth
    For all the attempted intrigue and mayhem, the film is dullsville, mired by a poky script, unremarkable action and, the hard-working Garcia aside, uninspired performances.
  77. Gangster Squad
    The soul of the era is missing, and with it any reason to care. In Fleischer's hands, the high-stakes shootouts are as stylish as a GQ spread, but it's nearly impossible to figure out who's zoomin' who.
  78. Texas Chainsaw 3D
    The original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" leaves audiences feeling hollowed out, dispirited and dissolute. Texas Chainsaw 3D is simply a bummer for being a big nothing.
  79. Allegiance
    Allegiance is an intermittently compelling but ultimately disappointing drama that loses track of its own point of view in favor of more generic storytelling.
  80. Only the Young
    Only the Young rarely coalesces into anything more meaningful than a casual collection of moments. Maybe that's the point.
  81. Promised Land
    It's got a strong cast and an intriguing premise that has the added bonus of real-world relevance. But, good intentions and good work aside, the film flounders before it reaches its conclusion.
  82. Parental Guidance
    Lazy, smugly self-satisfied movie.
  83. Django Unchained
    In "Django," Tarantino is a man unchained, creating his most articulate, intriguing, provoking, appalling, hilarious, exhilarating, scathing and downright entertaining film yet.
  84. Les Miserables
    Despite its pitfalls, this movie musical is a clutch player that delivers an emotional wallop when it counts. You can walk into the theater as an agnostic, but you may just leave singing with the choir.
  85. Barbara
    It's one terrific film, as smart, thoughtful and emotionally involving as just about anything that's out there.
  86. The Impossible
    Bayona achieves a rare sense of balance between the big and the powerful as well as the small and the intimate in the family's survival against impossible odds, no doubt the inspiration for the title.
  87. This Is 40
    There will be many who won't be able to get past the language in This Is 40. There will be others who will worry that the king of callous has gone soft on them. I'm just happy to see one of this generation's most influential comic minds back on track - the laugh track.
  88. Not Fade Away
    A stirring snapshot of America from 1963 to 1968 and the many rock 'n' roll thrills, cultural and political watersheds, and whirling emotions that erupted in between. It's also deviously smart and darkly funny.
  89. Tchoupitoulas
    Tchoupitoulas is a jewel-bright whoosh of a ride through nighttime New Orleans.
  90. Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away
    If one is interested in seeing a Cirque du Soleil show, there are many to choose from. "Worlds Away" functions solely as some sort of bargain sampler platter appetizer, never proving it has a real reason of its own to exist.
  91. On the Road
    Salles has lovingly crafted a poetic, sensitive, achingly romantic version of the Kerouac book that captures the evanescence of its characters' existence and the purity of their rebellious hunger for the essence of life.
  92. Jack Reacher
    So thrill-less, so chill-less is Jack Reacher that it is unlikely to spark interest, much less controversy.
  93. The Guilt Trip
    There is something promising about the match-up of an old-school show-biz kid like Streisand with the modern, anxiously self-aware Rogen, but what could have been the multigenerational Thunderdome of Jewish Humor instead turns out bloodlessly disappointing.
  94. Zero Dark Thirty
    One reason Boal makes such a potent combination with Bigelow is that her directing style moves us right along. She is so good with both action and creating a convincing look and feel for the film that the time it takes to get up to speed with the complicated plot does not feel like a problem.
  95. Amour
    A perfect storm of a motion picture, with an icy, immaculate director unexpectedly taking on deeply emotional subject matter.
  96. Saving Grace B. Jones
    At its most straightforward, the film is an effective drama about a 10-year-old city girl's eye-opening summer in the rural Midwest.
  97. Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    There isn't much of anything here that hasn't been done elsewhere, but as the film rolls merrily along it reminds why wedding comedies are such ripe targets.
  98. Save the Date
    Charismatic performers Lizzy Caplan and Alison Brie lend the lightweight rom-com Save the Date more than its fair share of watchability. But the film is never truly interesting.
  99. The Girl
    There are moving moments as Cornish channels the slow self-enlightenment necessary for Ashley's character arc. And the actress is particularly good in the scenes with the promising young Hernandez.
  100. The Law in These Parts
    Directed by Ra'anan Alexandrowicz and winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, this is the second superb Israeli documentary (after "The Gatekeepers") to come to town in less than a month and deal fearlessly with an aspect of that country's legal and political system.
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