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. Stonewalling
    When the movie goes in for an infrequent closeup — a shot of ultrasound gel being smeared on Lynn’s belly or of Lynn’s face as she puts on a surgical mask in the immediate wake of the COVID-19 outbreak — the intimacy is startling, and instructive.
  2. In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis
    It is enlightening, though, to see Pope Francis in so many different contexts. Whether he’s comforting the suffering masses or chastising the powerful for spreading inequality, he models the many ways that rhetoric can work.
  3. The Unheard
    Watson’s fine performance and Brown’s thoughtful stylish touches (especially in the sound design) make the slice-of-life scenes special. The rest of the picture is more sketched-in.
  4. Kill Boksoon
    Some of that professional lingo (like calling contracts “shows” and first assignments “debuts”) makes the story function as a sly metaphor for the entertainment business; and Byun’s stylish action sequences juice up the film’s second half.
  5. Smoking Causes Coughing
    It’s not a criticism to say that Smoking Causes Coughing doesn’t hold together, because cohesion isn’t what Dupieux is going for. He’s more about surprise and delight.
  6. Rye Lane
    This is a rom-com with heart, wit and style. But it also shows a clear-eyed understanding that one dreamy day — no matter how epic — is really just a good start.
  7. What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?
    Scheinfeld (“The U.S. vs. John Lennon”) pieces together an evocative time capsule. Somewhat less convincing is the film’s implication that the contentious tour ultimately led to the group’s demise.
  8. Murder Mystery 2
    The primary assets here though are Aniston and Sandler, who are totally present in every scene, playing off each other like old comedy pros and coming up with little bits of improvisatory business that make Nick and Audrey feel like a real and loving married couple.
  9. A Thousand and One
    The film is utterly absorbing, anchored by the unpredictable performance of Taylor, playing a hopelessly complicated, but deeply caring woman.
  10. Walk Up
    Walk Up flows as absorbingly as a dream and is no less pleasurable to puzzle over afterward.
  11. Spinning Gold
    The filmmaking lacks the style to pull off its willful blending of fact and fantasy. At least there are the songs to enjoy.
  12. Rimini
    It’s worth your time, your discomfort, your possible scorn and your weirdly grudging affection, maybe all at once.
  13. Enys Men
    Nature nurtured into an eerie consciousness by a celluloid craftsman, it feels like a throwback to “Wicker Man”-era folk-tinged freakouts — confounding enough to not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those ready for a pot of its brew, plenty transporting and tingling.
  14. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    The film’s affable nature and the sheer charisma oozing off Pine and Grant is intoxicating, but overall, there’s a sense that it doesn’t quite gel, the engine revving but never hitting the speed of which it seems capable.
  15. Tetris
    The mix of busy comic exaggeration, affectionate ’80s nostalgia trip and gloomy mid-perestroika history lesson never comes together.
  16. Refuge
    The best thing about this film is that it doesn’t reduce either man to a stereotype — or even to a pat story of redemption. Bernhardt and Blankenship do what they want the people who watch the movie to do: They observe, they listen and they stay open to accepting people, no matter who they are.
  17. Last Sentinel
    Last Sentinel is more geared toward delivering a message about humanity’s bent toward paranoia and self-destruction than in producing any tension or thrills. It’s a very heavy film — really too heavy to move.
  18. Kubrick by Kubrick
    What emerges won’t be revelatory for anyone who has spent time studying the Kubrick filmography. But it’s still such a rare treat to hear the man himself say anything at all — let alone to hear him talk about why the ideas in his work and the challenges of bringing them to the screen excited him as much as they did his fans.
  19. Reggie
    There are times, though, when Stapleton’s disjointed structure is distracting. Also, by centering so much of the narrative on Jackson’s voice rather than on the people who worked alongside him over the years, the film’s perspective can feel limited.
  20. Wildflower
    While director Matt Smukler and screenwriter Jana Savage deliver moments throughout the film that feel vividly real, too often they veer into the maudlin or cutesy, as though trying to soften this material for the broadest possible audience.
  21. Rodeo
    Rodeo takes its blind corners and open roads with plenty of ferocity, but also a necessary compassion for the searching force of nature at its center.
  22. Una Vita Difficile
    Cinema doesn’t suffer for shoutouts to the great Italian stylists of the grotesque and/or bleak, but we could also use more descendants of Risi’s sturdy faith in the alchemy of well-timed long shots, middle shots and close-ups in real-world settings to reveal simple, lasting, bittersweet truths about people.
  23. A Good Person
    A Good Person isn’t an easy ride but, like such disparate, if similarly themed, movies as “Rabbit Hole,” “Waves” and “Four Good Days,” it’s a haunting slice of real life that will make you think, feel and maybe even want to reach out to your loved ones.
  24. La Civil
    Rather than exploiting her sorrow-fueled mission for a “Taken”-like revenge spectacle, the verité social drama understands Cielo’s determination to find answers not as mere courageousness, but a tragic, nothing-left-to-lose lack of concern for her own safety.
  25. Unwelcome
    The movie always looks fun, even when it’s shredding the nerves of its characters and audience.
  26. Supercell
    If you can forgive the persistent corniness of “Supercell,” this modestly budgeted storm-chaser drama offers some surprising surface pleasures.
  27. Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game
    Anyone interested in gaming history will find a lot to enjoy here; and the general niceness helps make what is essentially a fun 15-minute anecdote tolerable for 90.
  28. Money Shot: The Pornhub Story
    This is a tricky topic, and Hillinger sometimes strays too far away from it, indulging in sexually explicit digressions that are more titillating than germane. For the most part, though, this is a thoughtful look at a controversy unlikely to fade away, so long as modern technology and prurient interests continue to exist.
  29. Boston Strangler
    The more powerful parts of this picture have to do with their realization that people may be too eager to hear tidy stories with clear villains and conclusions — even if they’re not entirely true.
  30. The Lost King
    It’s a film that calls into question our own biases and accepted notions and encourages one to get out there and find the truth — it could be an adventure after all.
  31. John Wick: Chapter 4
    Even by series standards, it’s an astonishingly staged and sustained panorama of violence, much of it mediated (and attenuated) by the usual inventive weaponry and bulletproof menswear, and meted out by international action stars including Donnie Yen and Hiroyuki Sanada.
  32. Full River Red
    Zhang’s own authorial touch is unmistakable in the mazelike palace intrigues, the phalanxes of armed soldiers and the ferocious bursts of action, plus the climactic nationalist overtones of a story that pits the will of several individuals against the fate of an empire.
  33. Inside
    Katsoupis poses these probing and provocative questions about humanity but doesn’t offer any clear answers or messages. Rather, he lets his muse, Dafoe, simply inhabit this harrowing journey with his strange magnetism and sense of timelessness, in a performance that is simultaneously primitive and transcendent.
  34. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    It may be a shoddily made Skittles ad masquerading as a superhero riff, but it’s Levi’s performance that sends it into the stratosphere of cringe.
  35. Moving On
    If “lovely” is not the first word you’d think would be used to describe a movie about attempted murder, then you haven’t seen Moving On, an amusing and bittersweet little tale of love, friendship and, yes, retribution.
  36. Punch
    The plot of Punch follows a fairly predictable path, and it lurches into overheated melodrama in its second half. But Ings does a fine job of capturing the instant connection between these two young men.
  37. Sound of Silence
    If nothing else, this movie is an effective demonstration of the directors’ ability to lull the audience into a relaxed state before knocking them around.
  38. I Got a Monster
    The documentary can feel a little scattered due to its multiple angles, but it remains a fascinating and relevant tale, examining how any criminal justice system built around the idea that cops never lie is ripe for abuse.
  39. Luther: The Fallen Sun
    "Fallen Sun” is best described as a movie-size version of a “Luther” season — which, for longtime fans, is better than no “Luther” at all.
  40. Unseen
    The cast and the crew work well together in Unseen, delivering a taut, inventive picture about two young Asian American women helping each other survive one terrible day.
  41. Unicorn Wars
    An inspired antiwar epic that recently won the Goya Award (Spain’s equivalent to an Oscar) for animated film, Vazquez’s sophomore nightmarish fairy tale culminates with frighteningly revelatory imagery signaling the pattern of destruction that has characterized human history.
  42. Chang Can Dunk
    Chang Can Dunk gets that the pursuit of fun, seemingly frivolous goals can be meaningful in itself, especially when undertaken with the loving encouragement of friends and family.
  43. The Magic Flute
    This Magic Flute has much to recommend and is a worthy, well-performed, often stirring and dazzling take on an enduring masterwork.
  44. Champions
    For the most part, it is warmly amusing without diving too far into the realm of the maudlin or treacly; and it side-steps anything insensitive while still enjoying some bawdy humor.
  45. 65
    Is 65 a hall-of-fame bad movie? No, and that may be its problem. It’s just pedestrian dumb and dull.
  46. The Creeping
    Writer-director Jamie Hooper’s debut feature, The Creeping, is hampered a bit by following the modern supernatural thriller trend toward tying every jump-scare and creep-out to some profound personal trauma. Despite that, the film works quite well, thanks to Hooper’s command of retro horror style
  47. Wolf Garden
    Despite some nice mood-setting, too much of Wolf Garden is spent talking around the story rather than just telling it.
  48. Spoonful of Sugar
    The film gets too mired in shock for shock’s sake in its final half-hour; but for a good stretch it’s a wild and unpredictable ride.
  49. Transfusion
    The movie’s handful of action sequences are good, but they’re too sparsely deployed and overwhelmed by lots of slow-paced scenes of characters stewing in self-pity.
  50. Free Skate
    The film is visually sharp and quietly absorbing, and Olenius and Vilo sensitively capture the isolation and self-doubt that can make an athlete’s life so lonely.
  51. Please Baby Please
    The movie is in some ways an exaggerated spoof of mid-20th century pop culture — and, in more profound ways, an explication of how greaser fashion, jazz clubs, beatnik poetry and complicated hairdos once gave repressed Americans a vent for their unspoken desires.
  52. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
    OF: RDG is classic recent Ritchie: star-studded, snarky, and ultimately grating, lousy with weird glasses and bad accents. This thing is so slight, a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a “Mission: Impossible” that it’s barely a movie.
  53. Scream VI
    Writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick keep the blade sharp, while directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett bring a brawny, bruising and bloody style to this “requel sequel.”
  54. Palm Trees and Power Lines
    The filmmaking maintains its discretion and unblinking restraint even in its most terrifying passage, shot with an implacable calm that renders it all the more unbearable.
  55. Blueback
    The lovely and lyrical Blueback is a transporting mother-daughter (and fish) drama as well as a beautifully shot memory piece that will reward patient viewers able to settle in and enjoy the film’s accessibly low-key vibe.
  56. Ithaka
    Ithaka isn’t as effective an advocacy doc as it could be, sometimes feeling trapped between wanting to intellectualize with onscreen text and contextualized history and looking for observational moments that crystallize the pain and concern for the Assange family.
  57. What We Do Next
    While it doesn’t venture far from its evident stage roots, neither does “What We Do Next,” a sinewy, tautly calibrated morality play, ever stray from the decidedly contemporary issues at its complex core.
  58. Pacifiction
    In scene after scene, Serra holds beauty and menace in a kind of uneasy equilibrium. He’s made a trouble-in-paradise movie where the trouble doesn’t overwhelm the paradise so much as poison it, at an almost imperceptible slow drip, from the inside.
  59. Creed III
    Coogler and Baylin’s screenplay isn’t all that innovative with the sports movie formula, and it unfortunately tends to rely on characters plainly spelling out their inner monologues, rather than leaving it to subtext. But Jordan’s steady direction elevates the material, keeping a strong hand on the tone and emotional tenor.
  60. Cinema Sabaya
    A wonderfully unforced, lightly intimate experience existing in a dramatic arena between observational nonfiction and bare-bones theater’s nowhere-to-go focus.
  61. God's Time
    God’s Time has an endearingly scrappy vibe and a talented cast filled with unfamiliar faces. But it also feels cobbled together, as though Antebi had multiple ideas for how to approach this material.
  62. The Outwaters
    Some may find all this tedious or confusing, but there’s an admirable integrity to Banfitch’s approach. The Outwaters genuinely feels like a first-person perspective on the end of the world.
  63. Ambush
    Ambush has the structure of an old-fashioned two-fisted combat picture, but with too little actual combat.
  64. Devil's Peak
    The elements of a good, “Winter’s Bone”-like depiction of the rural social order are here. But they only really coalesce — and combust — when Thornton’s on the screen.
  65. Bruiser
    If this gently philosophical film has a lesson for Darious — and for us — it’s that life is long and things change. The choices made yesterday don’t always have to define who we are today.
  66. We Have a Ghost
    Landon gets a lot of help from Harbour, whose facial expressions alone capture this ghost’s wit, hopes, fears and heartbreak. He’s one lovable dead guy.
  67. My Happy Ending
    The premise of My Happy Ending is somewhat slight, but there’s nothing insubstantial about a woman coming to a profound realization about her life thanks to a surprising encounter with unexpected new allies.
  68. Linoleum
    West has a lot on his mind with this film; and he’s ultimately less interested in explaining everything happening onscreen than in free-associating about the complicated, lifelong relationship between children and their parents. But Gaffigan’s everyman presence and seeker’s soul make him a great vessel for big ideas.
  69. Juniper
    Saville too often skims the surfaces of his characters, substituting traumatic concepts and plot devices for narrative logic and truly authentic, compelling emotion.
  70. Cocaine Bear
    It’s hard to completely dismiss a mainstream horror-comedy that offers a nice supply of sharp and grisly, at least until it takes a disappointing turn for soft and cuddly.
  71. Jesus Revolution
    Unfortunately, despite the interesting history, the film itself is a dry, scattered slog, neutered of all the thorny, contradictory details of the real story.
  72. A Radiant Girl
    There are no false moves in Marder’s truly radiant lead performance.
  73. Swallowed
    Swallowed is slow-paced and often aggressively unpleasant — unless your idea of a good time is watching people moan in pain for minutes on end while clutching their stomachs. But it’s a memorably intense experience, with sharp points to make about how the lives of outsiders and outlaws can tip in an instant into sloppy chaos.
  74. The Civil Dead
    The movie’s premise is clever; but what really makes it work is that these two use this ghost schtick as a way to examine the ways that friendship can be a hassle.
  75. Jethica
    Indie filmmaker Pete Ohs and a small cast of committed actors ventured out into a barren New Mexico nowhere for “Jethica,” a horror-comedy that doesn’t offer much in the way of scares or laughs but is strangely fascinating regardless.
  76. The Integrity of Joseph Chambers
    For the most part, this is an absorbing and nuanced character sketch, with a well-deployed supporting cast.
  77. Sharper
    It’s stylish and well-acted, and it does keep viewers guessing. It does its job well. It’s a pretty-looking puzzle.
  78. 88
    Overall, the approach proves too cluttered and diffused, especially if the goal — as it should be here — is to build real dramatic tension.
  79. Emily
    Written and directed by the Australian actor Frances O’Connor, making a vibrant feature filmmaking debut, it will surely madden sticklers for accuracy, which is all to the good.
  80. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    The moments of wit and feeling that occasionally steal into the frame. . .feel like emotional outliers in a flat, inexpressive void.
  81. The Blue Caftan
    An exquisitely tender tribute to love in its purest expression, The Blue Caftan doesn’t romanticize the complications and conflicts facing its two soulmates, and precisely because of that it feels like an utterly honest tale of romance.
  82. Full Time
    Gravel, in the heart-stopping vein of Belgium’s social-realism-minded Dardennes brothers, invests his protagonist’s one-challenge-at-a-time needs with the kind of visual intimacy and racing rhythm that makes us feel intensely close to Julie, from first sprint in her dehumanizing day to the exhaling bathtub soak she takes each night.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Consecration
    One of the film’s biggest weaknesses is that Smith and Cook withhold key information so they can spring a big twist. When the threat the characters are facing remains so vague for so long, it robs the story of tension.
  84. Seriously Red
    Even at its bluntest, Seriously Red draws a lot of heat and light from Boylan, whose Red enjoys embodying the casual confidence, folksy wisdom and bombshell bravura of one of the world’s most beloved entertainers.
  85. Nothing Lasts Forever
    Kohn’s talking heads are remarkably animated and, collectively, the interviews present a provocative debate about the meaning of “valuable.”
  86. Daughter
    The symbolism remains heavy, but it’s all in service of a powerful prisoner’s story, about the small ways people find freedom.
  87. Attachment
    When Attachment becomes more of a full-blown possession thriller in its final third, it loses the lighthearted charm and keen observation of its earlier sections. Still, that first hour is so sweet that the comparatively sour parts don’t spoil the picture.
  88. Somebody I Used to Know
    There are jokes here, and dramatic moments too; but everyone is so darn earnest all the time that nothing truly exciting happens. Instead, we just hang out with some pretty decent folks for a while, and then the credits roll.
  89. Your Place or Mine
    What saves the picture is McKenna’s knack for finding something real and relatable within quirky comic characters like a hyper-organized overprotective mother and a swaggering cool guy who makes a living telling other people how to succeed.
  90. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    The remarkable debut from writer-director Michelle Garza Cervera is as effectively blood-curdling as it is intellectually incisive.
  91. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    Admirably ambitious if conceptually muddled, it short-circuits a lot of those signature “Magic Mike” pleasures — including some of the lust, and a lot of the laughs — and signals its headier ambitions with a dramatic shift in scenery.
  92. Remember This
    Despite his perceived failings, Karski and “Remember This” serve as a crucial reminder of society’s duty to bear witness, especially whenever and wherever it would seem impossible to raise one’s voice above the din of indifference.
  93. Filmmakers for the Prosecution
    The movie is, like so many Nuremberg accounts, an alternately thrilling and chastening portrait of accountability in action. But it is also, as its title suggests, a thoughtful appraisal of the moral properties of the moving image.
  94. Body Parts
    The film works best when it gets into the nuts-and-bolts of the sex scenes themselves, past and present.
  95. A Lot of Nothing
    There’s an earnest, yearning passion here that makes the film feel vital even at its clumsiest.
  96. Blood
    Working from a Will Honley screenplay, Anderson here crafts a thorny horror film that’s unsettling even when Owen isn’t lunging at the necks of babies and old people — because, like King, Anderson and Honey are as interested in life’s everyday bruises as they are in gaping wounds.
  97. The Locksmith
    The Locksmith screenplay (credited to five people, none of whom are Harvard) doesn’t have the snappy dialogue of the best noirs; but its storytelling is efficient, with enough characters to make its world feel well-populated but not overstuffed.
  98. Pamela, a love story
    Anderson’s story becomes a tale of perseverance, about a passionate woman still searching for her happy ending.
  99. True Spirit
    Give credit to Spillane for making sure that this movie isn’t just about the heartwarming highs, but about the hard work it took to reach them.
  100. Let It Be Morning
    Although this well-acted film, which was Israel’s official submission for the 2022 international film Oscar, is a bit slow-going, it presents a timely, pointed, at times cleverly satirical snapshot of Israeli-Palestinian relations. It also offers an often poignant look at a dysfunctional family at the center of it all.
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