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. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    It's not "On Golden Pond" by any stretch, but it is nice to have Fonda back in the fractious family way.
  2. Lola Versus
    Here that soul-baring, soul-searching is the centerpiece of the film. Unfortunately, not much else about Lola Versus matches that standard.
  3. Bel Ami
    Thurman, Meaney and Scott Thomas acquit themselves well, while Ricci's Clotilde is sweet yet posed. Pattinson, who has delivered some strong performances in non-"Twilight" fare, might be exploring the flip side of the Team Edward swoon factor but, finally, his Georges is merely vampiric.
  4. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    The animation artistry of Madagascar 3 is at its best under the big top, all cotton candy fluff and razzle dazzle. The character development of this edition is the best of the rest as well.
  5. Prometheus
    Prometheus, unlike its predecessors, does not wear its themes lightly. It pushes too hard for significance, which is dicey in and of itself for genre material and contrasts badly with the standard nature of some of the story's plotting.
  6. Oslo, August 31st
    Oslo is an example of strong, confident filmmaking in which nothing is miscalculated or out of place. Anchored by a devastating performance by Anders Danielsen Lie, this portrait of existential despair is beautifully made without being self-conscious about its art.
  7. Cellmates
    A near complete exercise in mirthlessness and atonal satire, Cellmates is a sentence, all right.
  8. Battlefield America
    There's likely an audience for the cloying and dizzying hip-hop dance flick Battlefield America, but even the most forgiving viewers may feel like they've been underestimated - and underserved.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Pink Ribbons, Inc.
    You can't cure what you don't understand is one of the film's sobering messages.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    U.N. Me
    The result is far from evenhanded, but capable of raising important questions.
  11. American Animal
    At first American Animal has a mysterious unreality to it, a strange diorama about easy leisure's emptiness. But when James admits he's taken a job - upending the roomies' slacker utopia - American Animal becomes a philosophically strident evening of speechifying local theater (topic: human evolution).
  12. Hide Away
    This quiet, atmospheric drama (originally titled "A Year in Mooring") feels padded even in its brief running time; it's a slight mood piece posing as a character study.
  13. High School
    Lacking real kick, High School winds up as irksome as a bag of ditch weed and as lame as the pun of the film's title.
  14. Crooked Arrows
    The result is a well-meaning checklist of a film that lacks sufficient charm or off-the-field vigor to fully score its intended goal.
  15. A Cat in Paris
    It's not your typical animated fare, but since the filmmakers can't quite decide whether its tale should be serious or silly, "Cat" trips and stumbles unsteadily between a bit of both.
  16. For Greater Glory
    The film is ultimately a stodgy, overblown and repetitive slog.
  17. Snow White and the Huntsman
    It is an absolute wonder to watch and creates a warrior princess for the ages. But what this revisionist fairy tale does not give us is a passionate love - its kisses are as chaste as the snow is white.
  18. Chernobyl Diaries
    The lack of suspense and surprise in this dispiritingly rote film becomes its own form of contamination.
  19. Mighty Fine
    It all makes for a family therapist's dream scenario, but an otherwise choppy and predictable memory piece.
  20. Elena
    The script, by Oleg Negin and Zvyagintsev, uses spare dialogue to quietly devastating effect. Performances are superb across the board, framed in elegant widescreen compositions that simmer with violence.
  21. Men in Black III
    Good trippy fun.
  22. The Intouchables
    In this sentimental feel-good saga of an ultra-wealthy quadriplegic and the petty criminal who becomes his caretaker, the chemistry between the two lead actors goes a considerable way toward elevating the broad-strokes culture clash. That's crucial to a film that is, in essence, a love story.
  23. Moonrise Kingdom
    Here the writer-director's tendency toward the allegorical casts a magical spell with Anderson finding a near perfect balance between the humanism and the surreal that imprints all of his work.
  24. Mansome
    Offers mostly skin-deep snapshots of various men and their grooming habits.
  25. Lovely Molly
    Common sense and basic logic are left at the door; there's a brief creature effect that is laughably, outlandishly awful.
  26. Indie Game: The Movie
    Fortunately, Pajot and Swirsky don't overdo the minutiae (this is a movie even non-gamers can enjoy), offering just enough insight into the creative process to feel enlightening.
  27. Polisse
    Inspired by a documentary, the film is shot with vérité immediacy and beautifully acted by an outstanding ensemble. If not every piece of the puzzle delivers its intended impact, the movie as a whole gets under your skin, and the central characters resonate long after the screen goes dark.
  28. Natural Selection
    An intriguing and intelligent first effort from indie filmmaker Robbie Pickering, digs deep into the heart of Texas for its soulful tale of small town saints and sinners and a road trip to redemption.
  29. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    Rather than the engaging enlightenment of the source, the film becomes bloated by confusion.
  30. Virginia
    With its soft jabs at hypocrisy and band-aid use of voiceover narration, Virginia is an excruciatingly slow train wreck.
  31. The Samaritan
    The Samaritan doesn't wind up feeling like a con, exactly, but it has just enough promise to leave viewers feeling ripped off when it comes up short.
  32. Battleship
    This may sound thrilling, but it's not. Battleship plays ordinary and pedestrian because it's always been a job for hire, never anyone's passion.
  33. A Bag of Hammers
    Thin, neatly folded, paper-airplane of a movie threatens to nose dive into tweeville.
  34. Bill W.
    Laudatory but never simplistic, Bill W. is a thoroughly engrossing portrait of Wilson, his times and the visionary fellowship that is his legacy.
  35. The Dictator
    By turns hysterical, heretical, guilty, innocent, silly, sophisticated, teasing and tedious.
  36. The Cup
    Given all the impossible choices the young jockey had to face, The Cup should have been a weepie if ever there was one - but the filmmakers stumble on their way to the finish line.
  37. God Bless America
    This funny, sick twist of social satire is certainly locked and loaded, even if its aim is sometimes off.
  38. Girl in Progress
    Mendes is charismatic and likable as Grace - perhaps too likable. Conveying Grace's parental blind spots, she doesn't turn her character's single motherhood into an argument for sainthood. Yet she avoids any darker glimpses that would lend a more satisfying complexity to the mother-daughter tension and to the movie's too-neat ending.
  39. Tonight You're Mine
    If only the falling-in-love machinations and character details weren't so wispy, Tonight You're Mine might have had more resonance. That said, the film has its moments.
  40. Hick
    Part road movie and part coming-of-age story but mostly plays like some creepy-perv fantasia looking for mileage from the mature-beyond-her-years presence of young star Chloë Grace Moretz.
  41. The Road
    The film's three-pronged narrative does a fair job of laying a spooky groundwork for the revelatory emotional sadism that lies behind most acts of evil; it just takes a bit of clunky exposition to get there.
  42. I Wish
    There is a lot of hope in the air in I Wish, but the film never feels sappy. The very appealing score by the Japanese indie-rock group Quruli brings a kind of upbeat energy that matches the clean, open style of director of photography Yutaka Yamazaki, a frequent Kore-eda collaborator.
  43. Where Do We Go Now?
    The film aims to be a gentle comedy (there are even some songs approaching musical numbers) with serious undercurrents. It stumbles most when reaching for its bigger themes.
  44. Nesting
    Writer-director John Chuldenko stretches a sitcom episode premise to feature-length breaking point in Nesting.
  45. The Perfect Family
    The film's single saving grace is Turner, who channels that legendary Catholic guilt like there is no tomorrow.
  46. Dark Shadows
    This film has much more to do with what goes on inside director Tim Burton's head than with any TV show, no matter how beloved. In fact, Dark Shadows is as good an example as any of what might be called the Way of Tim, a style of making films that, like the drinking of blood, is very much an acquired taste and, unless you're a vampire, not worth the effort.
  47. A Little Bit of Heaven
    The movie perks up during Dinklage's scene as an escort, and screeches to a painful halt for a few conversations with God, who's played by a cloud-roosting Whoopi Goldberg. In a sophomore letdown from "The Woodsman," director Nicole Kassell gives the film no energy or rhythm, while the script pushes all the pre-set buttons.
  48. Citizen Gangster
    To his credit, writer-director Nathan Morlando has crafted a stylishly shot and evocatively designed period piece. But it's the dashing, quietly charismatic Speedman who proves the main draw, holding our attention even when the movie doesn't.
  49. First Position
    These performers are so young, so serious, so full of dreams and so hard on themselves that it is difficult not to be moved by their striving.
  50. Mother's Day
    When Rebecca De Mornay shows up as the criminals' fiercely doting matriarch, the ready crackle of her studiously demonic performance brings welcome distraction from this otherwise crude litany of torture and wretched death.
  51. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    It all makes for a movie whose infectious charm outweighs some of the predictability that slips in around the edges.
  52. In the Family
    Deliberate and marked by uncommon grace, In The Family manages to feel politically and culturally acute without ever resorting to melodrama, or having to wave banners for issues or causes, except perhaps in its quiet way for a renewed humanism in movies and a return to stories about everyday lives.
  53. The Avengers
    Whedon is the key reason why this $220-million behemoth of a movie is smartly thought out and executed with verve and precision. It may be overly long at two hours, 23 minutes, but so much is going on you might not even notice.
  54. The Raven
    rRegrettably falls prey to its grand and grisly ambitions - it's neither grand nor grisly enough to seriously satisfy Poe-ish cravings for murder, mystery and literary allusions.
  55. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    Warriors is a bruising, relentless experience, one more tiring than inspiring.
  56. Sound of My Voice
    With storytelling economy and dramatic precision often missing from today's independent films, Batmanglij augments the building blocks for a nifty paranoid thriller with sharp commentary on our faction-centered society and the pitfalls of reinvention.
  57. Restless City
    In its portrait of a Restless City the film is strangely inert and feels like the work of image-makers, not storytellers.
  58. 96 Minutes
    The film feels overstuffed and overcooked, as if the filmmaker were trying to get too much out all in one go.
  59. Mamitas
    Unbalanced storytelling aside, Ozeki wisely works to keep the film focused on his actors.
  60. Here
    It's hard to say if the two ever really mesh or if they were intended to. Here seems motivated by a tone of searching and yearning, not of finding a single way.
  61. Elles
    It's tempting to call Elles some kind of thinking-person's sex movie, but it's more about thinking and about sex (and thinking about sex) and is far more likely to encourage awkward, emphatic conversation than post-show friskiness.
  62. Bernie
    This is writer-director Richard Linklater at his wry, whimsical best, and considering he was the filmmaker behind 1993's "Dazed and Confused," that makes the movie something of a milestone.
  63. Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story
    The film, which plays like "The Help" minus the safety net of nostalgia, provides a powerful reminder that as we all carry history with us, it is still possible for each of us to change it.
  64. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    A well-researched and iconoclastic documentary that is both thoughtful and troubling, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is indeed a cautionary tale, but what it cautions against is the lure of easy judgments derived from prejudices and ignorance of the facts.
  65. Headhunters
    Headhunters is a dark adult entertainment, a wild and bloody adrenaline rush of a movie that deals in gleeful grotesqueness and over-the-top implausibilities.
  66. Safe
    There's nothing terribly original about Safe, but it's a suitably grimy playground for action cinema's reigning pit bull.
  67. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    A clever piece of business that is a complete pleasure to experience.
  68. The Five-Year Engagement
    In many ways, "Engagement" reflects both the best and worst of Stoller and Segel's creative collaborations.
  69. Goodbye First Love
    Nothing is rushed, everything is given its appropriate time and place. When we watch Hansen-Løve's films, we're not only experiencing a life unfolding before us, we're also realizing what a great privilege it is to be able to do that.
  70. Murder Capital of the World
    Minn, who often appears on camera, packs this grimly compelling, if slightly padded film with strong archival TV news footage, plus wrenching testimony from the relatives of several innocent bystanders gunned down around the El Paso-Juarez border.
  71. My Way
    The nonstop adversity lacks any real sense of danger. Or, for that matter, emotional punch. Why these two long-distance runners keep each other alive should be of front-and-center concern. Instead, My Way is mostly an endurance test.
  72. Jesus Henry Christ
    This time out Lee looks to bake a touch of twee-ness into the film in the hopes of keeping things light, though more often than not, the film's flourishes come off as Wes Anderson-lite.
  73. Hit So Hard
    Often the film pushes Schemel to the edge of what is intended to be her story, so in Hit So Hard she feels forced into the role of self-sacrificing side-player once again.
  74. Fightville
    By the end, Fightville feels authentic about this world, where success may be measured in wins, but the balance of unrelenting brutality and self-discipline needed for those wins is a trickier equation.
  75. Darling Companion
    Like Freeway, the lovable stray dog at the center of this very teary comedy, Darling Companion has lost its way. Even the marquee ensemble anchored by Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Kevin Kline and Richard Jenkins is not enough to rescue this motley mutt of a movie.
  76. Marley
    What Marley and its wonderful performance footage leave you with most of all is the joy the man took in the music that set him free and enchanted the world.
  77. The Lucky One
    The Sparks-styled romance has almost become its own movie genre - predictable, pure of heart, sentimental and never straying from the boy-meets-girl basics, or the surface, for that matter - and in that The Lucky One delivers.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Life, Love, Soul
    Writer-director Noel Calloway's debut Life, Love, Soul has its heart in the right place. Unfortunately, nothing else is.
  79. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    Though the film flirts with being in a sense too intimately drawn from Jaye and P-Orridge themselves - more context from those who knew P-Orridge before the couple got together would have been useful - the sense of intimacy created by Losier is remarkable.
  80. Detention
    Exhausting before its first few minutes of whip-pans, smash cuts, coarsely self-referential jokes and on-screen text visuals is over, the teen horror-spoof Detention is a patience-trying exercise first, energetic genre-jumble comedy second.
  81. Deadline
    Plodding, predictable, amateurishly staged and with wild swings in acting quality - sometimes within the same person (Roberts) - this is the kind of well-meaning, homemade concoction hopelessly enamored of the kind of clichéd potboilers that don't get made anymore. And with good reason.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Unraveled
    If Simon's hands-off approach precludes a thorough stock-taking of Dreier's misdeeds - numbers alone hardly tell the full story - the movie's subject obligingly avails himself of the ample rope.
  83. Blue Like Jazz
    As for the title, it's a nod to the jazz music that Don's off-the-grid dad shares with his more buttoned-up son. But, like most everything else here, it feels more contrived than authentic.
  84. Woman Thou Art Loosed: On the 7th Day
    "Woman" is in essence an earnestly competent, slightly overcooked B-movie potboiler, with ideas of faith occasionally added to frame the story as parable.
  85. Losing Control
    Losing Control has a vague cheerfulness but no real snap or insight, with Weiss apparently thinking that using scientific terminology to discuss relationships is witty rather than contrived. Perhaps investigating something new would have better served Weiss than simply looking to her own experiences, exploring rather than settling.
  86. Keyhole
    When Udo Kier is the sanest person around, you know you're in strangeville.
  87. A Simple Life
    Though overlong, Hui's valentine never milks the drama for tears, maintaining an unsentimental focus on the central duo's playful chemistry and the loving way Ah Tao's attention to detail is repaid.
  88. All In: The Poker Movie
    For poker fans only.
  89. The Hunter
    The film is at its best when Dafoe is simply going about the ritual tasks of his character's work, setting up a camp or laying traps in the wilderness.
  90. Life Happens
    Aided by a nimbly voluble script by Kat Coiro and Ritter, it emerges as an amusing kaleidoscope of contemporary urban angst and romantic aspirations.
  91. Scenes of a Crime
    A cool documentary that makes the blood boil, it examines how people can be psychologically manipulated into confessing. Not only to crimes they may not have committed but, even worse, to crimes that may never have happened.
  92. Monsieur Lazhar
    Artfully put together by writer-director Falardeau, Monsieur Lazhar shows us life in the round, illustrating the way humor, compassion and tragedy can all be elements of experience. Its emotional honesty is heartening, a lesson we are never too old to learn.
  93. Lockout
    Mostly Lockout is lost in space.
  94. The Three Stooges
    There is an appealing nyuk, nyuk nostalgic spirit to The Three Stooges. To fully appreciate this paean to slapstick and silly nonsense simply requires that cynicism be temporarily shelved and the thinking side of the brain shut down.
  95. The Cabin in the Woods
    The laughs come easily, the screams not so much. It's as if the filmmakers got so wrapped up in the satire they forgot to include the intense sensation of rising dread that creates all the thrills and chills that are part of the attraction.
  96. Shakespeare High
    It's impossible not to root for these driven, high-spirited participants - and for the longevity of this invaluable program.
  97. MIS Human Secret Weapon
    The accompanying trove of archival footage and photos, however, helps break the occasional monotony; the juxtaposition of these elderly vets with snapshots of their 1940s-era, uniformed selves is always affecting.
  98. Delicacy
    Delicacy isn't going to set anybody's psyche on fire with its insights into grieving and emotional recovery, but as a crepe-thin romantic snack, it has its moments.
  99. Attenberg
    From the gangly awkwardness of its opening scene - a pleasure-free lesson in kissing - it's clear that Attenberg aims to provoke. Its bored young characters and flat-affect performances recall another innovative Greek drama, "Dogtooth."
  100. ATM
    Screenwriter Chris Sparling worked in confined spaces to far better effect before with the minimalist Ryan Reynolds thriller "Buried." He must have used his best ideas there.
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