Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,522 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 16522
  2. Mixed: 5,808 out of 16522
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16522
16522 movie reviews
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  1. Boyhood
    An extraordinarily intimate portrait of a life unfolding and an exceptional, unconventional film.
  2. Carol
    Haynes understands that swooningly beautiful traditional technique bolstered by thrilling performances creates the greatest impact. He has made a serious melodrama about the geometry of desire, a dreamy example of heightened reality that fully engages emotions despite the exact calculations with which it's been made.
  3. Midnight Special
    Midnight Special announces the arrival of a filmmaker in total control of his technique as well as our emotions. A bravura science-fiction thriller that explores emotional areas like parenthood and the nature of belief, it's a riveting genre exercise as well as something more.
  4. A Most Wanted Man
    [A] crackerjack thriller, at once brooding, claustrophobic and unbearably tense.
  5. Clouds of Sils Maria
    Stewart does exactly what Valentine describes as Jo-Ann's great gift — she becomes the character, completing disappearing inside Valentine. It makes the interplay between Binoche, a master of that sort of disappearing act as well, and Stewart mesmerizing to watch.
  6. Two Days, One Night
    That Two Days, One Night retains such an organic sensibility, even with a major star in the lead, is credit to both filmmakers and actress.
  7. Mr. Turner
    Just as Turner's expressive, enthralling work changed the nature of painting, Mr. Turner, anchored in the rock of Timothy Spall's astonishing, Cannes prize-winning performance, pushes hard against the strictures of conventional narrative and ends up pulling us into its world and capturing us completely.
  8. The Skeleton Twins
    One of the better movies to come along this year.
  9. Love Is Strange
    In the hands of two of the craft's best, the most ordinary of moments become illuminating, penetrating.
  10. Calvary
    The film is then not so much a meditation but a reverie, a swirl of emotions and ideas, managing to be both calmly reflective and skittishly anxious at the same time. Calvary is a serious comedy, a funny drama, a ruminative film about life and a lively film about death.
  11. Whiplash
    It is one of those scorching films that burns through emotions, uses up actors, wrings out audiences. And the jazz, well, it has its own moments of brutal, breathtaking fusion.
  12. Low Down
    Low Down is one from the heart. It's a melancholy, evocative, beautifully made memory piece, unblinking and unromanticized, a lovely film that brings great emotion and a dead-on feeling for time, place and recaptured mood to a story that is as universal as it is personal.
  13. Ilo Ilo
    Ilo Ilo is writer-director Anthony Chen's first film, but breathtaking intimacy in storytelling is already second nature to him.
  14. Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
    Aatsinki is a work of cinéma vérité of the highest order: vivid, immersive and unflinching.
  15. Alphaville
    Alphaville is more than quintessential Godard. Despite its age it's that rare science fiction film that doesn't seem to have dated at all.
  16. Foreign Correspondent
    It's one of Hitchcock's most inventive works, a great favorite of French director Jean Renoir. [24 Sep 1995, p.71]
    • Los Angeles Times
  17. It Felt Like Love
    Hittman's debut isn't just a brilliantly tactile study of the mounting sexual curiosity and frustration of 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti); it's also an important landmark in the oft-ignored subgenre of realistic movies about female adolescence.
  18. Ida
    Spare, haunting, uncompromising, Ida is a film of exceptional artistry whose emotions are as potent and persuasive as its images are indelibly beautiful.
  19. Girlhood
    Beautifully observed, precisely directed and acted with wonderful conviction, it pulls us into the life of its protagonist in a deeply involving way.
  20. Hoop Dreams
    By focusing on the personal side of the city game, Hoop Dreams tells us more about what works and what doesn't in our society than the proverbial shelf of sociological studies. And it is thoroughly entertaining in the bargain.
  21. White God
    By turns Dickensian, Marxist and dystopian, it's a movie as deliriously unclassifiable as it is expertly focused in its desire to provoke and entertain.
  22. Silence
    Building implacable dread and tension from scene to scene, the story is as simple as its underlying ideas are endlessly complex.
  23. Level Five
    It humanely, intelligently questions the very nature of our desire to make sense of the past with the tools of the present, when the human mind remains the most aggressively obliterating battlefield of all.
  24. Wetlands
    Director and co-writer David Wnendt is after serious comedy here, a character study of psychic pain, wounds hereditary and self-inflicted, and body-conscious absurdity that treats the human condition with wry intelligence, not empty prurience.
  25. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is a marvel of Japanese animation, a hand-drawn, painterly epic that submerges us in a world of beauty.
  26. Last Days in Vietnam
    These stranger-than-fiction tales, piled one on top of the other in the most gripping way, not only mesmerize us, they also point up another of Last Days in Vietnam's provocative points, that the chaos surrounding the evacuation was, in effect, the entire war in microcosm.
  27. Phoenix
    Phoenix is an intoxicating witches' brew, equal parts melodrama and moral parable, that audaciously mixes diverse elements to compelling, disturbing effect.
  28. Top Five
    Top Five is fully loaded. The laughs are earned, the intelligence never disappears, all the performers shine. But Rock is the diamond — raw, rough and rare.
  29. While We're Young
    This delicious satire about aging hipsters and their discontents is everything we've come to expect from the best of Noah Baumbach, as well as several things more.
  30. A Most Violent Year
    A vibrant crime story filled to overflowing with crackling situations, taut dialogue and a heightened, even operatic sense of reality, A Most Violent Year captures us and doesn't let go.
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