Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,520 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: 8,697 out of 16520
  2. Mixed: 5,806 out of 16520
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16520
16520 movie reviews
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  1. Avatar
    Avatar's shock and awe demand to be seen. You've never experienced anything like it, and neither has anyone else.
  2. Up in the Air
    Up in the Air makes it look easy. Not just in its casual and apparently effortless excellence, but in its ability to blend entertainment and insight, comedy and poignancy, even drama and reality, things that are difficult by themselves but a whole lot harder in combination. This film does all that and never seems to break a sweat.
  3. An Education
    This is a performance, and a film, to cherish for this year and always.
  4. Frozen River
    As the summer heats up, let Frozen River wash over you; let its bracing drama and the intensity of its acting restore your spirits as well as your faith in American independent film.
  5. The Hurt Locker
    Overwhelmingly tense, overflowing with crackling verisimilitude, it's both the film about the war in Iraq that we've been waiting for and the kind of unqualified triumph that's been long expected from director Kathryn Bigelow.
  6. The White Ribbon
    We don't go to Michael Haneke films for comfort, but to gaze through a glass darkly. That vision -- tense, provocative and unnerving -- is on full display in The White Ribbon, which could be considered a culmination of this difficult director's brilliant career.
  7. A Serious Man
    Writer-directors Joel and Ethan have seized the opportunity afforded by the Oscar-winning success of "No Country for Old Men," to make their most personal, most intensely Jewish film, a pitch-perfect comedy of despair that, against some odds, turns out to be one of their most universal as well.
  8. District 9
    District 9 is very smart sci-fi, but that's just the beginning; it's also a scathing social satire hidden inside a terrific action thriller teeming with gross aliens and regrettable inter-species conflict. And it's a blast. . . .
  9. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    This is a film with a commitment to reality unlike any we're used to seeing.
  10. Killer of Sheep
    Many small things happen in Killer of Sheep, nothing of much consequence. But the enlargement of life itself is profound.
  11. Up
    Rarely has any film, let alone an animated one powered by the logic of dream and fantasy, been able to move so successfully -- and so effortlessly -- through so many different kinds of cinematic territory.
  12. The Damned United
    There's barely any on-field footage in The Damned United. What we get instead is fine acting and directing, splendid dialogue and a story too outrageous to be made up.
  13. Ponyo
    You'll be planning to see Ponyo twice before you've finished seeing it once. Five minutes into this magical film you'll be making lists of the individuals of every age you can expose to the very special mixture of fantasy and folklore, adventure and affection.
  14. Sideways
    Exactly written, directed with a surgeon's precision and transcendently acted, Sideways brings emotional reality to a consistently amusing character comedy, making it something to be cherished like the delicate Santa Ynez Valley wines that are the story's vivid backdrop.
  15. The Dark Knight
    May be the most hopeless, despairing comic-book movie in memory. It creates a world where being a superhero is at best a double-edged sword and no triumph is likely to be anything but short-lived.
  16. No Country for Old Men
    An intense, nihilistic thriller as well as a model of implacable storytelling, this is a film you can't stop watching even though you very much wish you could. That's because No Country escorts you through a world so pitilessly bleak, "you put your soul at hazard," as one character says, to be part of it.
  17. Bright Star
    Masterfully put-together, made with confidence, intelligence and command.
  18. Drag Me to Hell
    With that fire in his belly, Raimi's Drag Me to Hell does everything we want a horror film to do: It is fearsomely scary, wickedly funny and diabolically gross.
  19. Gomorrah
    The fingerprints of the Camorra are everywhere, this film wants us to know, and its grip is lethal.
  20. Séraphine
    What makes Seraphine, directed and co-written by Martin Provost, so exceptional is that it neither condescends to nor romanticizes its subject.
  21. Coraline
    A remarkable feat of imagination, a magical tale with a genuinely sinister edge.
  22. The Best of Youth
    Those who see it will, quite frankly, not believe their luck. It is that satisfying, that engrossing, that good.
  23. WALL-E
    Daring and traditional, groundbreaking and familiar, apocalyptic and sentimental, Wall-E gains strength from embracing contradictions that would destroy other films.
  24. Food, Inc.
    Essential viewing.
  25. Children of Men
    Made with palpable energy, intensity and excitement, it compellingly creates a world gone mad that is uncomfortably close to the one we live in. It is a "Blade Runner" for the 21st century, a worthy successor to that epic of dystopian decay
  26. Waltz with Bashir
    Provocative, hallucinatory, incendiary, this devastating animated documentary is unlike any Israeli film you've seen. More than that, in its seamless mixing of the real and the surreal, the personal and the political, animation and live action, it's unlike any film you've seen, period.
  27. Ratatouille
    Ratatouille is as audacious as they come. It takes risks and goes places other films wouldn't dare, and it ends up putting rival imaginations in the shade.
  28. Man on Wire
    This is a police procedural, if you will, about what's been called the artistic crime of the century.
  29. Once
    The music is so rich and completely satisfying and the characters so appealing Once makes us believe that this is all happening right in front of our eyes. We fall for each of these young people at the precise moment they are falling for each other, and what could be better than that?
  30. Brokeback Mountain
    Confidently directed by Ang Lee and featuring sensitive and powerful performances by Jake Gyllenhaal and a breathtaking Heath Ledger, this film is determined to involve us in the naturalness and even inevitability of its epic, complicated love story.
  31. Letters from Iwo Jima
    Letters From Iwo Jima, takes audiences to a place that would seem unimaginable for an American director. Daring and significant, it presents a picture from life's other side, not only showing what wartime was like for our Japanese adversaries on that island in the Pacific but also actually telling the story in their language. Which turns out to be no small thing.
  32. Million Dollar Baby
    Perhaps the director's most touching, most elegiac work yet, Million Dollar Baby is a film that does both the expected and the unexpected, that has the nerve and the will to be as pitiless as it is sentimental.
  33. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    As completely real on the psychological level as its up-to-the-moment visual effects have on the physical.
  34. Little Miss Sunshine
    As ambitious, honest and subversive as any American movie since "Election."
  35. The Savages
    A brutal encounter with mortality told with uncommon humanity, wit and humor.
  36. House of Flying Daggers
    House of Flying Daggers finds the great Chinese director at his most romantic in this thrilling martial arts epic that involves a conflict between love and duty carried out to its fullest expression.
  37. Atonement
    This is one of the few adaptations that gives a splendid novel the film it deserves.
  38. Head-On
    Impeccably made, uncompromising in its implacable vision of the deranging power of love, sex and controlled substances, this savage and staggering film knows how to take our breath away.
  39. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    It's hard to imagine many films surpassing or even equaling the effect of this supple, breathtakingly direct, small French film.
  40. Genesis
    As extraordinary as all of this imagery is, it is the film's sound design that takes it to another level. A quirky, electric mix of ambient sound, effects and music by composer Bruno Coulais and sound designer Laurent Quaglio gives the film its heart and its sense of humor.
  41. Howl's Moving Castle
    Parse it any way you like, Miyazaki's gifts as an animator place him in a category of his own. To see his latest film is to be somehow reminded of Italians who could hear Verdi's operas as soon as they were sung or English readers who could experience the novels of Dickens episode by episode.
  42. War of the Worlds
    Working in the spirit of his predecessors but with the kind of uncanny special effects they could barely dream of, Spielberg has come up with an impressive production that is disturbing in the way only provocative science fiction can be.
  43. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    What has resulted is a blistering film you feel in the pit of your stomach, a jumpy, edgy piece of work that thrusts us into a personal maelstrom so tortured and intense, the emotions could be spread with a knife.
  44. Elevator to the Gallows
    A consummate entertainment rich with the romantic atmosphere of Paris in the 1950s. Coming at a turning point in French cinematic history, it drew upon several major talents - director Louis Malle, star Jeanne Moreau, cinematographer Henri Decaë, musician Miles Davis - and achieved near-legendary results with all of them.
  45. Saraband
    Bergman has never been an ordinary filmmaker, and what he's given us is no genial last hurrah but rather an intensely dramatic, at times lacerating examination of life's conundrums that is exhilarating in its fearlessness and its command.
  46. Tony Takitani
    An exquisite film, as elegant and precise as an impeccably cut diamond. It's small in scale but wholly mesmerizing, holding us captive as it demonstrates how much enveloping richness can be conveyed with a minimalist style.
  47. The Conformist
    Seems every bit the masterpiece it was when first released by Paramount. In this dazzling film, Bertolucci manages to combine the bravura style of Fellini, the acute sense of period of Visconti and the fervent political commitment of Elio Petri -- and, better still, a lack of self-indulgence.
  48. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    Incisive yet supple, wrenching yet deeply pleasurable, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada easily ranks among the year's best pictures.
  49. The Intruder
    Never has Denis demanded so much from audiences as with this shimmering enigma, at once intimate and epic, but it's worth the effort and then some.
  50. The New World
    A work of breathtaking imagination, less a movie than a mode of transport, and in every sense a masterpiece.
  51. The Devil's Miner
    15 minutes into it, you are spellbound, heartbroken and unaccountably cheered -- your faith and admiration in humanity restored.
  52. L'Enfant (The Child)
    The Belgian directing brothers deal with themes they have made their own: the difficulty of being moral in an amoral world and the grinding, unforgiving nature of reality for those forced by poverty to live on the margins of society. These are not easy films to experience, but they are uncompromising and unforgettable.
  53. Army of Shadows
    As someone who was part of the Resistance, Melville knew enough to neither melodramatically glorify nor cynically devalue the heroism he presents. This is people doing what needed to be done, Army of Shadows says, this is the way it was.
  54. Gabrielle
    A period chamber drama drawn from a Joseph Conrad short story and of such intensity and passion that it transcends a specificity of time and place to achieve timelessness and universality.
  55. Half Nelson
    What is different about Half Nelson is the execution, the kind of subtlety in writing, directing and acting (by costars Shareeka Epps and Anthony Mackie as well as Gosling) you seldom see.
  56. Little Children
    The movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.
  57. Flags of Our Fathers
    As he did in "Unforgiven," "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby," Eastwood handles this nuanced material with aplomb, giving every element of this complex story just the weight it deserves. The director's lean dispassion, his increased willingness to be strongly emotional while retaining an instinctive restraint, continues to astonish.
  58. Iraq in Fragments
    Langley's impeccably nonjudgmental camera knows exactly what details to record. Drawn from more than 300 hours of footage, the film's all too brief 94 minutes mesmerizes with its insight and, rarer still, its beauty.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The PianoTuner of EarthQuakes
    Those who can surrender to the Quays' poetic logic will find The Piano Tuner to be nothing short of a masterpiece.
  60. Venus
    Told with wit, genuine poignancy and all kinds of humor, Venus charts the unlikely relationship between a man in his 70s and a young woman more than half a century his junior.
  61. Mafioso [re-release]
    A magnificent film almost no one knows about, this hidden classic offers a wider variety of pleasures than most contemporary works can even aspire to.
  62. Starting Out in the Evening
    Intelligent, involving and conspicuously adult, Starting Out in the Evening is almost shocking in its distinctiveness, its ability to create high drama from an unlikely source.
  63. Paranoid Park
    Youth and death meet again in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, a gorgeously stark, mesmerizingly elliptical story told in the same lyrical-prosaic style that has characterized his latest films.
  64. Hellboy II: The Golden Army
    Del Toro is almost alone in his ability to re-create on screen the wide-eyed exhilaration and disturbing grotesqueness that is the legacy of reading comics on the page.
  65. A Christmas Tale
    What results is a captivating portrait of the most gorgeously fractious dysfunctional family.
  66. Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land
    Filmmaking at its most fearless, with Ostergaard creating a suspenseful, harrowing account of his original key subject, known only as "Joshua."
  67. A Woman in Berlin
    It's intelligent, provocative and intensely dramatic. Its subject matter may be tough but it is as powerfully authentic as anyone could want.
  68. Lorna's Silence
    A gritty, deceptively low-key, no-fuss, no-frills movie of consistent originality and surprise in which suspense arises straight up from the heroine's evolving character.
  69. The Burning Plain
    Powerful, profound and beautifully rendered.
  70. Trucker
    There are so many wonderfully unconventional things to like about this tiny independent film, Monaghan's earthy and uncompromising performance chief among them, its depth surprising you at every turn.
  71. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    Part avant-garde art film, part amusing but morbid fairy tale, it is a delightfully ghoulish holiday musical that displays more inventiveness in its brief 75 minutes than some studios can manage in an entire year.
  72. Red Riding Trilogy
    The powerfully disturbing Red Riding trilogy will haunt you waking and sleeping, night and day. If you survive the watching of it, that is, which is no easy thing.
  73. A Prophet
    To borrow a marketing phrase from another, very different film, A Prophet really is the movie that reminds you why you love the movies. Especially movies like this one.
  74. Taxidermia
    A brilliant, often grotesquely bizarre allegory on life in Hungary from World War II to the present.
  75. Cinema Paradiso
    It's a shining valentine to the movies--full of homages, collages and swooningly romantic Ennio Morricone music--and it gets right at the messy, impure, wondrous way they capture and enrapture us. [16 February 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 97 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Night of the Hunter
    A powerfully cinematic modern allegory of love and fear. [20 Oct 1987, p.3]
    • Los Angeles Times
  77. The Guys
    Anthony LaPaglia and Sigourney Weaver are superb in this moving adaptation of the post-Sept. 11 play.
  78. Baran
    A superlative work, offering a rich emotional experience that at the same time calls attention to the seemingly endless suffering of the Afghan people.
  79. The Tao of Steve
    A constant, idiosyncratic pleasure that leaves us eager to see what the Goodmans and Logue will do next.
  80. Les Destinées
    Assayas has made a great film from Jacques Chardonne's classic novel. Although far different in tone, time, place and temperament, it brings to mind "Gone With the Wind" in its depth and scope and in its love story, which unfolds over a turbulent era.
  81. Pépé le Moko (re-release)
    Beautifully crafted, movingly acted, still involving and entertaining, this is just the kind of film people are talking about when they say they don't make them like this anymore.
  82. Rififi (re-release)
    One of the great crime thrillers, the benchmark all succeeding heist films have been measured against, it's no musty museum piece but a driving, compelling piece of work, redolent of the air of human frailty and fatalistic doom.
  83. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
    May well be Imamura's funniest film; it is also one of his most accomplished. It is the work of a mature artist who has kept his adventurous spirit alive, which he has expressed in a complex and risky work carried off with an effortlessness that comes only from wisdom and experience.
  84. Late Marriage
    Late Marriage will assuredly rank as one of the cleverest, most deceptively amusing comedies of the year.
  85. Grisbi (re-release)
    A wonderful treasure from the seemingly inexhaustible cornucopia of crackling French crime dramas.
  86. Cookie's Fortune
    Cookie's Fortune, which knows how to treat serious matters with humor, is to be treasured as an utterly distinctive work by one of America's finest filmmakers. [2 April 1999, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  87. AKA
    Among the most sophisticated, fully realized and satisfying films of the year.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    Surely one of the most exciting -- and brutal -- movies ever made...This is slam-bang, suspenseful, sardonically funny, furious-paced melodrama culminating in the justly famous chase sequence. [21 July 1985, p.5]
    • Los Angeles Times
  89. Shine
    Popular filmmaking at its smartest and most persuasive.
  90. Hoosiers
    It's as engaging, as modest, as utterly American and as thrilling as the true-life story it's based on. [11 Dec 1986, Calendar, p.6-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  91. Moonstruck
    Such nourishing comedy. It satisfies every hunger, especially the irrational ones that seem to hit hardest at holidays: hunger for impetuous romance and for the reassuring warmth of family, for reckless abandon, and for knowing who we are and what we want. [16 Dec 1987]
    • Los Angeles Times
  92. The Accidental Tourist
    Irresistibly funny… Just about the best holiday gift imaginable. [23 Dec 1988, Calendar, p.6-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  93. Dead Ringers
    To think of a film this assured, this unified and this dizzyingly potent, you have to go back to "Blue Velvet." [22 Sept 1988]
    • Los Angeles Times
  94. The Deep End
    Exquisitely made with a mesmerizing sense of style, it shows the wonderful things that can happen when traditional material is both handled with care and adroitly updated.
  95. The Crying Game
    This offbeat emotional thriller is an unusually satisfying film, intricately constructed, surely directed and splendidly acted. [25 Nov 1992]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 69 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Opposite of Sex
    A brilliantly written black comedy in the tradition of "To Die For" and "Flirting With Disaster," The Opposite of Sex was worth the wait.
  97. Out of Sight
    Engaging and consummately entertaining.
  98. Reversal of Fortune
    The performances of Close and Silver are flawless, but it is Irons' portrait that remains behind, an enigmatic after-image… Reversal of Fortune is a delectable tour through facets of the lives of the rich and famous that Robin Leach wouldn't touch with a forked stick. [17 Oct 1990]
    • Los Angeles Times
  99. When Harry Met Sally...
    The summer's uncorseted, unqualified delight. [14 July 1989, Calendar, p.6-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  100. Northfork
    A thoroughly original accomplishment of a high artistic order, Northfork features flawless, spare production design by Ichelle Spitzig and the Polish brothers' father, Del, and cinematographer M. David Mullen's striking images slide effortlessly into Dalí-like Surrealism.
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