Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,524 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 16524
  2. Mixed: 5,809 out of 16524
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16524
16524 movie reviews
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  1. Flatliners
    If Flatliners is anything at all, it's watchable: aflame with Jan de Bont cinematography, deep-focus decor, an attractive cast. The movie's problem, like many others recently, is that it isn't any deeper, dramatically or psychologically, than its own trailer. It is the trailer: the long version.
  2. Minamata
    Like Smith’s pictures, this movie is direct, compelling and hard to dismiss.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bra Boys
    The contrast between grainy videos of street fights and gorgeous scenes of the same boys conquering enormous waves is simultaneously inspiring and sad. Imagine a world in which gang members looked forward to singing in the Sunday choir.
  4. Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's
    A lively, clever, fast-moving film that isn't overly reverential about its subject.
  5. The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s American Pie
    Somehow, the more McLean explains the song, the more wondrous it seems.
  6. Love and Other Drugs
    A love story that is actually worth falling for, with Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal excellent at steaming up the screen in Love & Other Drugs.
  7. Young Goethe in Love
    Instead of underplaying the story's escalating tempestuousness it pushes it over the top; time and again the film begins to catch fire only to be doused in silliness.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Clandestine Childhood
    Clandestine Childhood is a sincere effort but also rather sincerely a meager one too.
  9. Sky
    Though the first half of the film is far more interesting than the overwrought melodrama that it becomes, Sky remains a deeply compelling and optimistic valentine to the possibilities of the West.
  10. Zoom
    Is there a point to all these cheeky meta-shenanigans? Not really. Yet it’s hard not to share Morelli’s delight in the possibilities of an impossible story structure, and if the final work feels inevitably uneven, that’s less a flaw than a feature — a testament to the visual and tonal distinctiveness of the movie’s individual parts.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    The Black Scorpion
    Cheesy but entertaining 1957 thriller. [29 Oct 2003, p.E5]
    • Los Angeles Times
  12. Party Girl
    Party Girl has the courage of its own no-braininess.
  13. Sukiyaki Western Django
    Not even a brief appearance by Quentin Tarantino and a ton of references to other movies enlivens the proceedings much.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    When You're Strange
    Distressingly short on creative spark or historical illumination.
  15. The Gate
    The Gate, whatever minor triumphs it dredges up, is too hopelessly copycat. It's basically powdered Speilberg on Zwieback toast and Stephen King on a stick. [19 May 1987, p.3]
    • Los Angeles Times
  16. Rocky V
    In Rocky V, the fifth and presumably last episode of Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa saga, the writer-star once again contrives a way to make his hulking, sad-eyed gladiator the underdog. And we get whiffs of funkiness and humanity stirring around for the first time since the original Rocky. [16 Nov 1990, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  17. Bride & Prejudice
    Aside from the singing and dancing, it is the color and pageantry of India as filtered through the work of cinematographer Santosh Sivan that captivates us.
  18. Little Pink House
    It's confusing and inconsistent, and no amount of Keener can truly anchor it.
  19. Agnes Browne
    Huston is a sucker for sentiment, and Agnes Browne is a sap's holiday.
  20. 'R Xmas
    Few directors can put loneliness on screen as persuasively or capture the eerie quiet of people waiting for something, anything to happen. It's in moments such as these, when all sense of time disappears and all that remains are bodies in motion and Ken Kelsch's limpid cinematography, that you remember just how good Ferrara can be.
  21. Forsaken
    It's a treat to see Kiefer and Donald side by side, and both give fine performances. But a pairing this special deserved a story more unique than "reluctant killer reaches for his guns."
  22. The Current War: Director's Cut
    The Current War: Director’s Cut is an interesting yarn. But one just can’t shake the feeling that it’s just a Wikipedia article jazzed up with a lot of fun camera tricks and some cinematic wizardry, though Westinghouse and Edison would have to be proud of the amazing movie magic.
  23. Bitch
    For a film that’s incredibly angry and blackly comic, it finally, and surprisingly, makes a case for compassion and understanding.
  24. Someone to Watch Over Me
    The movie is exciting, richly textured. But, despite its high quality, there’s something unformed about it, like a poem that doesn’t quite sing, a painting with a color missing...Even if Someone to Watch Over Me is flawed, it’s the kind of film that offers you many subsidiary pleasures.
  25. Wildcat
    It’s a soulful, pointed and unconventional grappling with the mysteries of the deeply Catholic, norm-shattering Georgia native’s life and work.
  26. Clouds
    At a distended two hours, the film becomes a bit of a slog as it deliberately tracks Sobiech’s senior year of high school as he bravely marches — with equal parts humor and sorrow — toward his demise.
  27. Star Trek: Generations
    Going boldly where no one has gone before is not what it used to be. Contentedly settled into a prosperous middle age, the "Star Trek" series now seems more comfortable retracing its own footsteps, carefully offering its horde of fans interludes that aspire to do no more than fit snugly into the patterns of the past.
  28. A Futile and Stupid Gesture
    Wry, head-shaking smiles at bad behavior are many — open laughter is lacking. Wain maintains a frenetic, near-vaudevillian pace, but this is a tribute flick that rejoices in anarchy and tastelessness without being exhilaratingly either thing itself.
  29. Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable
    Bethany Hamilton: Unstoppable doesn’t offer the technical details about the sport that might have made its subject’s feats even more inspiring, but even someone who knows nothing about surfing can’t help but sit mouth agape at Hamilton’s athleticism, optimism and determination.
  30. King of the Corner
    Warm and wise comedy of middle-age malaise.
  31. The Conspirator
    The resolution and strength of Wright's unimpeachable performance makes the whole story seem flesh-and-blood real in a way that it would not otherwise be.
  32. American: The Bill Hicks Story
    Posthumous albums and now this film are securing his legacy and enduring influence.
  33. The Fundamentals of Caring
    The Fundamentals of Caring is a strained, overly familiar tale of catharsis and redemption. Stars Paul Rudd and Craig Roberts work hard but are torpedoed by writer-director Rob Burnett’s wanting script (adapted from the novel by Jonathan Evison), thudding stabs at buoyancy and sluggish pacing.
  34. The First Time
    There is much to like here, a sense of nuance and nonjudgmental emotional openness, yet Kasdan's teenage miniaturism never quite blooms. The First Time is respectfully delicate, a little too polite.
  35. The Lion King
    But though the new ground it breaks is visual rather than dramatic or emotional, this is a polished, satisfying entertainment that just about dares you to look a gift lion in the mouth.
  36. MirrorMask
    The teenager's journey through a nightmarish reverie presents hallucinogenic imagery that simultaneously dulls the senses and hot-wires the imagination, but it never fully engages emotionally.
  37. Frankie
    Although it may initially seem like a fairly wispy story of family dynamics and romantic uncertainty, there’s a subtle depth to the proceedings that creeps up on you in resonant ways.
  38. The Astronaut Farmer
    Much of the credit for the movie succeeding goes to Thornton. In his able hands, Farmer is not so much someone who simply has faith in what he is doing but a man who believes with incontrovertible knowledge of what can be accomplished.
  39. Tusk
    This tonal mishmash is a misfire of literally gross proportions.
  40. Harry Brown
    It's a strong directing debut for Barber, who uses the poignant power of Harry's experience to take a universal cut at decaying communities and the poverty of soul as well as pocket.
  41. Screamers
    The piece is intelligently made, although the director often doesn't establish place or time, leaving the viewer unmoored.
  42. Invincible
    The period is evoked with care and imagination, and the film glows with Peter Zeitlinger's cinematography. It has some bravura images and surreal moments typical of Herzog, and composers Hans Zimmer and Klaus Badelt have contributed a lovely score.
  43. All the Pretty Horses
    In an odd way Pretty Horses has been too faithful to the spirit of this somber, fatalistic, melancholy romance, too much a stubborn ode to stoicism, to light any emotional fires.
  44. Evelyn
    Its heart is so much in the right place it is difficult to get really peeved at it.
  45. Hearts in Atlantis
    Assisted by a well-crafted script by the veteran William Goldman and a masterful performance by Anthony Hopkins, Hicks has turned two King short stories into a somber meditation on the dreams and frustrations of childhood and the ways the adult world makes its darker qualities known.
  46. Facing Windows
    Far from a simple, feel-good story of self-discovery, Facing Windows delivers a challenging examination of loneliness and human interaction.
  47. Cirque du Soleil: Journey of Man
    Unnecessary and silly.
    • Los Angeles Times
  48. Woman Thou Art Loosed
    There's a bedrock honesty in Woman, Thou Art Loosed in its grasp of human nature and behavior. This is one faith-based film that pulls no punches.
  49. Snatch.
    Even if it's not quite as lighter than air as its predecessor, Snatch remains a lethal diversion.
  50. Secret Things
    The result is both merciless and darkly funny.
  51. Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    With its gorgeous big-sky vistas, stirring shots of the majestic mustangs and intimate bits between trainers and trainees, Wild Horse proves a warm and memorable ride.
  52. The Decent One
    At its most effective, though, The Decent One reveals a psychological portrait of a man devoted to his family yet consumed by a soul-blackening and horrifically destructive cause.
  53. The Midnight Swim
    The film reveals frustratingly little about the sisters themselves.
  54. A Ballerina's Tale
    Copeland's victories are shortchanged by the film's prevailing sense of detachment from its main subject.
  55. Hard Labor
    At its best, the film has the quality of a nightmare, one that keeps happening whether the characters are asleep or awake.
  56. Dreamland
    A terrific cast...helps create a vivid world, on the fringes of showbiz. But Schwartzman’s observations about music and money mostly stay locked in his head. Dreamland isn’t hard to understand by any means, but it does seem fairly negligible from moment to moment. Neither the situation nor the stakes are exactly life or death.
  57. The Osiris Child
    While the storytelling, by Abbess and co-writer Brian Cachia, might lack novelty and, occasionally, coherence, visually the film consistently impresses with creative art direction and costume choices.
  58. After Midnight
    For the most part Hank’s heartbreak resonates. By the end of After Midnight, he and the audience both may wonder whether the bogeyman and true love are equally mythical.
  59. Crossroads
    Crossroads needs a leap of faith to swallow it whole, to buy its Faust-like premise of a musician's pact with the devil played against the realism of a contemporary road movie, but director Walter Hill lays out reasons enough to make us want to make that leap.
  60. 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.
  61. Godard Mon Amour
    The kind of curiously inconsequential homage that neither stokes your interest in cinema/Godard nor illuminates a turbulent love story between artists.
  62. The Missing
    The combined intensity of these two performances (Jones and Blanchett) obliterates objections and raises the stakes in what might otherwise have been a standard western.
  63. Romance & Cigarettes
    Enthusiastically smutty and lyrical, the movie attempts to capture the way we unconsciously set the emotional moments of our lives to pop music, turning fits of passion, anger and righteous indignation into elaborate musical numbers in our heads.
  64. Liberal Arts
    The bookish group at the heart of this talky film is having such a grand time trading tart exchanges their mood proves infectious. The sparring helps offset some of the contrivances that make Liberal Arts less buttoned up than it should be - so an A for effort and a C for execution.
  65. The Good Liar
    Perhaps the biggest bit of fakery involved is that for all its twistiness, The Good Liar’s plot, which can be more than a little frustrating, is as much of a liability as a benefit in a production where the characters turn out to be more involving than their story.
  66. 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.
  67. The Last Samurai
    Taken on the level of spectacle rather than of sense, The Last Samurai affords the sort of fizzy enjoyment that can come with epic movie endeavors, including a meticulously detailed world unlike our own, an excellent supporting cast and some pulse-pounding fights.
  68. Baby Mama
    The movie hardly allows itself any sharp moments at all -- it's much too sweet-natured to be cruel, and much too cheerful to be angry. It probably could have pushed a few more buttons, but Baby Mama aims to please and succeeds.
  69. Hostel
    Seems to have been tailored to its designated R "for brutal scenes of torture and violence, strong sexual content, language and drug use."
  70. The Duelist
    The sumptuously shot, costumed, designed and scored Russian import The Duelist dazzles and provokes as it makes little real sense beyond the confines of its hermetic milieu.
  71. 5 Flights Up
    What a pleasure to see a simple, finely tuned dramedy about real adults with real emotions in a real-life situation.
  72. Anesthesia
    The all-star cast is uniformly good, but the script lacks any sort of nuance to temper the pandering lecture.
  73. Song to Song
    Stick with Song to Song, and Malick’s elusiveness becomes surprisingly direct. Long, tense conversations are reduced to a few piercing exchanges. Difficult questions and answers are distilled to their philosophical essence. People clash, break apart, fall down, get back up and slowly, tentatively reunite.
  74. Noise
    Robbins plays David with the self-assurance that there's no combination sexier than smart, funny and self-righteously angry.
  75. The Mind's Eye
    Begos gets the texture and atmosphere right, but there’s nothing beneath his cool ’80s fog.
  76. Consequences
    For all its loaded potential to evolve into a gripping look at life in a correctional facility plus an atypical spin on gay longing, the film squanders much of its running time with thin, repetitive scenes of young men behaving badly.
  77. The New Romantic
    The New Romantic follows a very familiar arc, but the path is certainly a pleasant one, thanks to Barden’s naturally ebullient performance. Her enthusiasm in the fun parts is infectious, and she holds the camera during the moments of melancholy.
  78. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    Unfortunately, [Showalter] is often stymied by a pedestrian script by Abe Sylvia ( TV series “Dead to Me” and “Nurse Jackie”) that lurches from one defining life moment to the next and leans heavily on Chastain’s performance to establish a sense of emotional and psychological continuity.
  79. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    Iñárritu, rather than answering them or leaving them provocatively unanswered (either one would be fine), does what he seems to do with most of his stories and ideas nowadays: He flings them around, roughs them up and rearranges them into an imposing, finally insufferable monument to his own awesomeness.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pride
    Howard seems to be in an altogether different and substantially more idiosyncratic film. When the story calls for him to be Patton, he plays Kurtz.
  81. The Institute
    Because The Institute is largely framed as if the viewer were a co-player in Jejune's game, the film is an experience that's fun and frustrating in equal measure.
  82. Outrageous Fortune
    Long and Midler are so good they almost make us forget that Outrageous Fortune is yet another elaborate chase movie with the usual comic CIA and KGB stooges and vast, familiar stretches of Southwestern deserts.
  83. The D Train
    Where the story falters, though, the performers admirably hold one's attention.
  84. The Dolls
    One of the most ingenious, amusing and oddly affectionate horror movies of the year -- a bloody bonbon that you chew with relish. [22 May 1987, p.6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  85. Tammy's Always Dying
    Tammy’s Always Dying is a richly observed comedy-drama. Johnson’s direction is intelligent and restrained.
  86. CyberWorld
    Will delight video game fans in search of over-scaled eye candy.
  87. Baby Boy
    At once too neat and too messy, but films like this are too rare to leave it at that. Ragged but ambitious, it retains a core of genuine emotion -- this picture is doing the best it can, and although that may not be everything, it ought to count for something.
  88. Tigerland
    Consistently fresh, engrossing and unpredictable.
  89. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    Mean-spirited vulgarity and homosexual panic.
  90. Kindred
    In the end, what we’re left with is an exceptionally well-acted motion picture that mostly fails to move.
  91. The Joneses
    The ending feels a bit rushed and incongruous, but the film never leaves behind the humanity of its characters.
  92. The Adam Project
    The first half is the more intriguing as older and younger tussle with each other and ask the tough questions, figuring out their mission together. But it all falls apart in a hackneyed third act.
  93. They Live
    Has its share of underthought or overwrought moments. The tone keeps shifting radically. It has some silly lines, plot lapses and goofball action scenes. But you can forgive the movie everything because of the sheer nasty pizazz of its central concept. [4 Nov 1988]
    • Los Angeles Times
  94. Slanted
    We’re left with a nightmare of identity that feels slighter than it should, unsure of where to point its knife.
  95. Home
    Tension is one of Home's biggest issues. There just isn't nearly enough of it. Story is another.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Idlewild
    Patton and Benjamin can both hold the screen and are great in their musical sequences, but sorry, they aren't actors -- Terrence Howard, as the villain Trumpy, blows them into dust when he's on camera -- and their limited expressiveness detracts from the film's hallucinatory edge. The plot fails them too, as it takes turns we've seen in a dozen melodramas.
  97. Gun Hill Road
    The quietly commanding turn by newcomer Santana - whose outward embrace of an already well-internalized transformation leaps off the screen with equal parts joy, melancholia and bravery - is a standout.
  98. Hellraiser
    For all the flayed flesh and impaled skin in the picture, this Hellraiser isn’t sharp enough.
  99. Surviving Picasso
    Surviving Picasso is quite well made and easy enough to watch, but it's not noticeably challenging or involving.
  100. The People vs. George Lucas
    You don't have to be a "Star Wars" nut to enjoy this fast-paced film, though it's sure to resonate most with those whose childhoods - and beyond - were shaped by the 1977 phenomenon.
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