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. A Separation
    A Separation is totally foreign and achingly familiar. It's a thrilling domestic drama that offers acute insights into human motivations and behavior as well as a compelling look at what goes on behind a particular curtain that almost never gets raised.
  2. The Iron Lady
    The film catches her long after she's left the public eye, and rather than an examination, or an assessment, of her politics, it instead offers up an affecting if not always satisfying portrait of the strong-willed leader humbled by age.
  3. Pariah
    At its soulful heart, Pariah is a stinging street-smart story of an African American teen's struggle to come of age and come out - to the father who still calls her "daddy's little girl" and the mother who quotes the Bible and buys her pink frills.
  4. The Flowers of War
    Flowers abounds with well-worn movie archetypes and slathers on schmaltz.
  5. Don 2
    Fitfully enjoyable, the film's leaden pacing and drawn-out running time make the twists of the plot less hairpin turns and more like bends in a river - moving so slowly you can see everything coming from the distance.
  6. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    Director Stephen Daldry has taken great care in looking at it through the eyes of a precocious New York City boy in a film filled with both sentiment and substance.
  7. The Darkest Hour
    Capable and compelling performers like Hirsch and Thirlby seem left to their own devices to make some connection with the material. The idea of semi-invisible aliens, an unseen enemy, should mean the film has a lingering sense of paranoid abstraction (not unlike "Right at Your Door"), but Darkest Hour never gets beyond rote efficiency.
  8. War Horse
    Has the sweep of a classic John Ford movie, the sentiment of Frank Capra and a spirited steed named Joey who will steal your heart. The film itself is more difficult to love.
  9. We Bought a Zoo
    An intelligent family film, a rarity, and while not quite Crowe at his absolute best, it carries his humanistic imprint and benefits from a strong acting ensemble that keep emotions in check.
  10. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    Unfortunately, "Blood and Honey" has script problems: Its core story is less compelling than its overall atmosphere.
  11. Albert Nobbs
    When the filmmakers move into Nobbs' isolation, though, the movie flags - a surprise given Garcia's excellent work on HBO's minimalist personality study "In Treatment," on which he wrote and directed extensively.
  12. The Artist
    It combines delightful humor and charm with what movies at their best have always conveyed: the honest power of pure emotion. It is a movie love story and a love note to the movies, all at the same time.
  13. The Adventures of Tintin
    Think of The Adventures of Tintin as a song of innocence and experience, able to combine a sweet sense of childlike wonder and pureness of heart with the most worldly and sophisticated of modern technology. More than anything, it's just a whole lot of fun.
  14. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    This film's cold, almost robotic conception of Salander as a twitchy, anorexic waif feels more like a stunt than a complete character, and so the best part of the reason we care enough to endure all that mayhem has gone away.
  15. Carnage
    Not only is Polanski very much in his comfort zone with this material, he also has cast it impressively, staying away from any of the actors who played the parts in either its London or New York productions and finding players who match up well with Carnage's juicy dialogue.
  16. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    A few shades brighter than its predecessor, and the action bits certainly closer to the full-throttle "Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels" mode director Guy Ritchie didn't quite capture the first time.
  17. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    I fear the furry singing sensations may have finally run completely aground. If only they were truly stranded on that desert island…
  18. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    Bird has done a stylish and involving job here, turning in an entertaining production that's got considerable visual flair, especially in its action-heavy Imax sections.
  19. Ladies vs. Ricky Bahl
    One's diminishing interest in the nuts and bolts of cheating a cheat can be forgiven when the sheer star wattage of the peppy cast is in close-up overdrive.
  20. Sleeping Beauty
    As repellent as Lucy's story can be, its mystery has a seductive sway, and it does add up to more than the sum of its insistently elliptical parts.
  21. The Sitter
    I'm going with the filmmakers as the folks most responsible for perpetrating this terribly unfunny and overwhelmingly raunchy film that stars the normally likable, or at least comically forgivable, Jonah Hill. He is neither here.
  22. I Melt with You
    I Melt With You assuredly marks itself as one of 2011's most ludicrous releases.
  23. We Need to Talk About Kevin
    It's a domestic horror story that literally gets to us where we live, a disturbing tale told with uncompromising emotionality and great skill by filmmaker Lynne Ramsay.
  24. W.E.
    W.E., Madonna's second go at directing a feature film, leaves one wishing she'd find other creative outlets for those times when she's bored with the pop-star life.
  25. Knuckle
    The film is very much like a home movie in trying to tell its story of families and feuds complete with the bad lighting, bad camera angles and meandering observations. Though you will wish for more polish and insight, its unruly action is hard to resist.
  26. In Darkness
    In a world where everyone was looking for an angle, hoping to survive the nightmare and maybe even turn other people's misery into a tidy profit, the fact that a fragile humanity survived at all is little short of a miracle.
  27. Young Adult
    When it's done right, as it is in Young Adult, there is something absolutely mesmerizing about watching a train wreck unfold on screen. When the wreck in question is a narcissistic beauty played to scheming, sour, downward-spiraling perfection by Charlize Theron, cringing is definitely called for, but so is laughter.
  28. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is an enormously impressive piece of work.
  29. I Am Singh
    What unfolds instead is a deadly dull trial and boatloads of speechifying about religious dignity, hate crimes and prejudice.
  30. London River
    Blethyn brings tremendous empathy to the introspective, determined Elisabeth, while the tall, gaunt and dreadlocked Ousmane fleshes out his less-dimensional role with a haunting sadness that speaks volumes.
  31. Outrage
    Though it may at times seem like just another Japanese gangster picture, in Outrage, Kitano's sense of pacing is so precise, at once restrained and relentless, that the film becomes a vortex, pulling audiences in deeper and deeper.
  32. The Yellow Sea
    Na captures at once the fragility of the human body and the deep-rooted darkness of the human soul. The Yellow Sea is easily one of the films of the year for underserved action-heads.
  33. Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
    Director Johanna Demetrakas has decided to simply present the man in all his demanding complexities and let him and his encounters with associates speak for themselves. Her only rubric is the one visible in her title: "Crazy Wisdom."
  34. The Lady
    We have a fumbling and fawning - if sincere - tribute to the living legend and a director who has never seemed more out of his element.
  35. Coriolanus
    If you give yourself over to that clash of style and sensibility, something magical happens as the power, the prescience and the precision of Shakespeare's words take hold of modern problems.
  36. Shame
    It is Mulligan and most especially Fassbender that give the film its power. The desperation, hostility and despair he conveys through the act of sex make Shame a film that is difficult to watch but even harder to turn away from.
  37. Tomboy
    Tomboy stands out as an especially affecting delicacy about the thrills and pitfalls of exploring who one is.
  38. Garbo: The Spy
    Takes a fittingly inventive approach to the story of an operative whose MI5 code name reflected his supreme talents as an actor.
  39. An African Election
    What is finally most compelling about this film is the sense it gives of how passionately the citizens of Ghana believe in democracy, how much it means to them.
  40. A Journey in My Mother's Footsteps
    (A) stirring, if inconclusive documentary.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Big Fix
    The Big Fix presents a compelling array of damning testimony from EPA officials, journalists, scientists and politicians as well as emotional scenes of distraught residents.
  42. My Week with Marilyn
    It's lush and vibrant when Williams is onscreen, mostly fussy British discontent when she's not.
  43. Hugo
    The director's visually thrilling Hugo has real moments of 3-D magic. Sadly, they aren't quite enough to make this adaptation of Brian Selznick's celebrated novel, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a wholly satisfying experience.
  44. A Dangerous Method
    It's fascinating to see the exceptionally charismatic Fassbender squeeze himself into the role of the aristocratic, restrained Jung, and it's just as enjoyable to see Mortensen bring an unexpected virility to his sybaritic, cigar-chomping Freud.
  45. The Muppets
    For all its sharpness, the movie has a very sweet streak.
  46. Rampart
    For all of its punishing pathos, the movie does not have the clean lines and elegance of another cut at crime in this city, "L.A. Confidential" (based on an Ellroy novel). As the day of reckoning approaches, the film spins out of control, careening between convoluted subplots, with the emotional pitch of the piece swinging too wildly.
  47. Another Happy Day
    If this low-budget indie is any indication, the younger Levinson's creative sensibilities appear to be darker than his dad's, the voice clearly his own.
  48. Happy Feet Two
    Dazzling panoramas, no matter how impressive, are no substitute for the involving story Happy Feet Two has had to do without.
  49. The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
    It's handsome, large-scale escapist fare - and has as its costar the formidable, versatile Kristin Scott Thomas.
  50. Dog Sweat
    Whatever personal risks first-time director Hossein Keshavarz took to make the film, there's little sense of danger in the finished product, which offers snapshots of middle-class Iran but falls flat on the dramatic front.
  51. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    The rest is an adrenaline ride, but one more wearying than eye-opening.
  52. Tyrannosaur
    It is the kind of film that leaves you limp, exhausted and feeling battered by the end. But its wrenching performances make the beating worth weathering.
  53. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    The film doesn't have nearly the bite - ferocious or delicious - that any self-respecting vampire movie really should. It's as if all the life has drained away.
  54. The Greater Good
    These profiles are frank, absorbing and heartbreaking, if also a bit inconclusive.
  55. Dzi Croquettes
    Dzi Croquettes is both a tribute and a terrific entertainment.
  56. City of Life and Death
    Harrowing and unflinching, a savage nightmare so consuming and claustrophobic you will want to leave but fear to go, City of Life and Death is a cinematic experience unlike any you've had before. It's a film strong enough to change your life, if you can bear to watch it at all.
  57. The Descendants
    It makes The Descendants a tragedy infused with comedy and calls for a balancing act from filmmaker and star alike, a tightrope they navigate with nary a wobble.
  58. Limelight
    If all you know about Peter Gatien going in to Limelight is that he is a nightclub owner with legal issues, that's about all you'll know coming out.
  59. Killing Bono
    Killing Bono whips up a frenzied mix of musical jealousy, wishful stardom and farcical lucklessness into a movie too slippery to hold onto.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dragonslayer
    A youth culture backdropped by the crumbling edge of California is rendered with punk rock energy and grace.
  61. London Boulevard
    That the plot is the problem comes as something of a surprise given Monahan's pedigree. The well-regarded screenwriter ("Body of Lies," "Kingdom of Heaven") won an Oscar for the deliciously conflicted cops and crime twister of 2006's "The Departed."
  62. 11-11-11
    If only 11-11-11 had arrived a little closer to Thanksgiving - the turkey connection would have been entirely appropriate.
  63. The Conquest
    A smart, involving and strikingly adult drama about Sarkozy's rise to power.
  64. The Greening of Whitney Brown
    After a grating start, the movie, directed by Peter Odiorne from a script by Gail Gilchriest ("My Dog Skip"), finds its way into warmer, more likable territory. That is, until it flies off the rails in a third act so devoid of logic it could have been concocted on the moon.
  65. Jack and Jill
    In the wake of "Bridesmaids," Sandler's lipsticked tomfoolery - and inability to share the screen with genuinely funny women - feels particularly regressive and stale. Both movies have diarrhea gags, but only one feels defined by such humor.
  66. Immortals
    I realize that making Immortals immortal was way too much to ask, but frankly, just a shade more plausible, not to mention pleasurable, would have been nice.
  67. Melancholia
    Firmly rooted in the filmmaker's esoteric, frustrating, provoking, demanding narrative style, the movie is also amazingly romantic - lush, ripe, rich, delicious.
  68. Into the Abyss
    What is missing is something new - clarity, insight, outrage. Instead, its understatement is ultimately its undoing.
  69. J. Edgar
    J. Edgar is a somber, enigmatic, darkly fascinating tale, and how could it be otherwise?
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    To Be Heard
    For how well this finely crafted work captures the pressures of inner-city poverty, single-parent families and abusive relationships, one of its strengths lies in its ability to also gracefully locate the drama in filling out a college application.
  71. Janie Jones
    Janie Jones is ultimately its own uneven tune, a mixture of discordant notes and way-too-familiar chords.
  72. The Other F Word
    Winds up feeling scattershot and unfocused. Rather than capturing punk brattiness maturing into wary adulthood, director Andrea Blaugrund Nevins might have been better off simply making a film solely about Lindberg.
  73. 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.
  74. Elevate
    It's all presented with equal parts humor and sensitivity, though Buford doesn't much delve into the potential landmines here - racism, classism, exploitation - allowing the power of assimilation and opportunity to carry the day.
  75. The Catechism Cataclysm
    A grating and witless would-be spoof of religion, male-bonding and, it seems, horror movies.
  76. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    A documentary as gentle as its subject: the story of a boy who realized his dream and, on the film's evidence, received a lot of encouragement and support along the way.
  77. Pianomania
    As Pianomania gradually reveals, Knüpfer is able to do this so well because he is as much of a crazed perfectionist as the pianists themselves, maybe even more so.
  78. Tower Heist
    Tower Heist might not be a classic (it's not), but at least for a little while it will make you laugh instead of cry about the current state of affairs, which is more than you can say about a lot of things.
  79. 5 Star Day
    Frankly, it's hard to imagine even George Clooney making such ill-used screen minutes interesting. But the movie around those moments is even worse.
  80. RA. One
    Anubhav Sinha's exhilarating fantasy Ra.One is Bollywood at its best. It has energy, spectacle and humor, song and dance, but razzle-dazzle special effects and action stunts never overwhelm its story of enduring love that unfolds amid an intricate and inspired sci-fi odyssey.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    My Reincarnation
    Languid and contemplative, the film is typical of the intimate, paired-down aspect of Fox's style, a documentary in which lives accumulate in small moments.
  82. The Double
    The movie's few pleasures, though, do belong to Gere, who makes the most of his preening caginess as a spook thrust back into the cold. Grace, though, comes off more whiny than tantalizingly adversarial.
  83. All's Faire in Love
    While there's regrettably nothing terribly witty or surprising about any of this as either love story or laugh machine, director Scott Marshall does manage a breezy, good-natured tone toward this oft-mocked cultural phenomenon that allows for eye-rolling and smiling in equal measure.
  84. Like Crazy
    If you are experienced enough to understand love's fragility but still romantic enough to embrace its power, Like Crazy will put you away.
  85. Puss in Boots
    A treat to experience visually (especially in lively 3-D) and verbally, Puss in Boots is a family film where the adventure and invention never flag and the tongue-in-cheek humor doesn't linger far behind.
  86. In Time
    What's missing are the kind of moments that actually matter, the ones that are so gripping that you want desperately for time to stop - to savor them, to feel the fear, the passion, the regret. Ah, well … maybe next time.
  87. Anonymous
    William Shakespeare - whoever he was - I think would probably be at least a little amused by Anonymous. For amusing it is - along with bawdy, brazen, politically outrageous, plausible enough and occasionally graced with something close to Shakespearean cleverness in an absurdist sort of way.
  88. The Rum Diary
    In every move, Depp makes you believe this was a passion project for the actor, one he dedicates to Thompson.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chalet Girl
    Cinderella stories don't come much more predictable than the happy-ending machine that is Chalet Girl. But the picturesque scenery, light touch of the cast - which includes Bill Nighy as Kim's dryly observant boss - and breezy zip of director Phil Traill's pacing appealingly pair with Jones' irrepressible charm.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Revenge of the Electric Car
    The resulting roller-coaster ride, well shot and sharply paced, is so friendly to the corporate types its predecessor targeted that Nissan is sponsoring screenings.
  91. The Reunion
    The "Midnight Run" meets "Bonanza" idea isn't exactly a terrible one, but writer-director Mike Pavone has only one point-and-shoot gear, whether the scene is light comedy, dysfunctional family drama or western-tinged gunplay. (Even television shows these days exhibit more directorial flair and editing variety.)
  92. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    As much as filmmakers Lev Anderson and Chris Metzler capture the energy and attitude of the band's early days, it is the more recent footage of Fishbone still making the most of it - despite years of personality conflicts, personnel changes and commercial disappointments - that has an emotional appeal.
  93. Daylight
    Replete with superior acting and visual splendor, the film is a fine instance of the overly familiar made fresh.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Snowmen
    It's a shame the film's first two acts are such a grind since there's actually a decently wrought resolution to it all. But by then, between the youngsters' more-is-less acting (Ray Liotta fares only slightly better as Billy's madcap dad), feeble stabs at humor and overreaching profundity, it's too little, too late.
  95. Norman
    The humor is sly and not overplayed either. Typical is the English class with Mr. Angelo (Adam Goldberg) trying to prod his bored students into parsing the difference between satire and irony, which is what the filmmakers are up to as well.
  96. Klitschko
    Articulate, thoughtful and funny - hearing Vitali talk about getting used to 100 kinds of cheese in the West is a real pleasure - the Klitschkos are a treat to spend conversational time with. Just don't think of joining them in the ring.
  97. Le Havre
    Buster Keaton isn't dead, he's alive and well in Finland, where under a new identity he pursues his own particular brand of deadpan absurdism to wonderful effect. If the name Aki Kaurismäki doesn't mean anything to you, it should, and Le Havre may be the film to make it happen.
  98. Margin Call
    This confident, crisply made piece of work does an expert job of bringing us inside the inner sanctum of a top Wall Street investment bank in extremis, giving us a convincing and coolly dramatic portrait of what it must have been like when titans trembled.
  99. Johnny English Reborn
    All that matters with efforts like this is whether the cookie-cutter plotting serves up enough situations for Atkinson to contort himself into and out of jams. After all, are the narratives what you remember from the "Pink Panther" movies? Or the silly things, like that Clouseau could so easily get his finger caught in a spinning globe?
  100. Oranges and Sunshine
    Sometimes the facts can get in the way of the drama, and that's the central problem here. That sense of needing to be true to the record is reflected in an overwhelmed screenplay.
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