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. Welcome to Sarajevo
    But bearing witness can be a complex thing and in its concern to illuminate Sarajevo is prone to overkill, to trying too hard to squeeze in every troubling wartime incident.
  2. Being Evel
    The rise-and-fall trajectory of Knievel's career is colorfully captured in Daniel Junge's Being Evel, a savvy documentary that gives the granddaddy of extreme sports his due while gauging the national climate that welcomed his shrewdly timed arrival.
  3. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    Whether Aaron Swartz is a personal hero or someone you've never heard of until now, his story cannot help but touch you.
  4. Extra Ordinary
    Like those cheeky genre-splicing comedies that came before it, the Ahern-Loughman collaboration doesn’t merely goose the boundary between charming and outrageous, it gleefully tramples it into oblivion.
  5. Only the Brave
    While Only the Brave is consistently involving and entertaining, that desire to be accurate about a heroic reality proves to be an at times awkward fit with the conventions of this kind of earnest and old-fashioned Hollywood film.
  6. The Tunnel
    It is the kind of superbly crafted, intelligent entertainment — a classic suspense thriller — that nowadays is as welcome as it is rare.
  7. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    Ever mindful of the line he straddled between thinker and flamethrower, this "Gore Vidal" is nevertheless a lovingly packaged greatest hits from a legendary rebel of letters.
  8. The Search for General Tso
    Like any well-researched piece worth its weight in MSG, the documentary uses food as an angle to something else: a look at immigration and at a melting pot stirred by prejudice and persecution, later seasoned with adaptation, innovation and acceptance.
  9. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    Fascinating stuff is at play here amid the heady theorizing and arcane references (panspermia, anyone?). But it’s blunted by Herzog’s clipped, Bavarian-tinged narration that’s by turns logy, deadpan and florid. Maybe his trademark voice-overs have simply worked better in the past.
  10. Breaking a Monster
    Just when you thought you had seen every permutation of the “making of a band” documentary, along comes Breaking a Monster, a thoroughly engaging portrait of Unlocking the Truth, a heavy metal outfit composed of African American middle schoolers.
  11. Dark Money
    No one has to see a documentary to understand that large sums of untraceable political campaign contributions are a bad thing. But Dark Money does need to be seen because it reveals with fascinating specificity how that crooked system works and details how one state decided to take it on.
  12. Tell Them Who You Are
    A remarkable work -- lively, painful, humorous, deeply revealing of both father and son -- that is worthy of one of Hollywood's finest directors of photography.
  13. Hellboy
    An enjoyable if somewhat neutered defender of the free world. Make no mistake: Hellboy still has a hide as hard-boiled as Lee Marvin in "The Dirty Dozen," but now he's also wearing a smile.
  14. Goldie
    Treading topical waters with an incisive flair, de Jong offers no didactic salvation or pessimistic prospects. Goldie’s sole assurance is to trudge one rocky step at a time, and that’s all any of us can do.
  15. Sleepless in Seattle
    We don't make those kind of Lubitsch-Wilder-Capra movies anymore, because it's hard to kid about what goes on behind bedroom walls when the bedroom doors have long since been flung open. So Ephron invents strategies to keep us, teased, outside the boudoir. [25 Jun 1993 Pg.F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  16. Violette
    Director Martin Provost's epic portrait of novelist Violette Leduc is so compelling, even thrilling, in its frank depictions of female sexual voracity, professional egotism and twisted variants on the Electra complex that it's easy to overlook his film's shaggy, uneven plotting.
  17. Betting on Zero
    It all adds up to a timely, provocative and absorbing tale of money, power and a search for the truth.
  18. America America
    Elia Kazan drew from the experiences of his own uncle in this profound and exhilharating 19th-Century immigrant saga, made in 1963 and expressing passionately a love of this country. [27 Feb 1994, p.6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  19. The Outwaters
    Some may find all this tedious or confusing, but there’s an admirable integrity to Banfitch’s approach. The Outwaters genuinely feels like a first-person perspective on the end of the world.
  20. Hail, Caesar!
    The great thing about Hail, Caesar! is that it is fun whether you get all its references or not.
  21. Candy Mountain
    It's an '80s "road" film -- in the '70s vein of "Five Easy Pieces" or "Two Lane Blacktop" (which Wurlitzer wrote) -- and it's almost a little masterpiece: morally brave, beautifully measured, funny, sad and powerful. With quiet skill, it tears open and subverts some glittery fantasies of the American dream. [11 Mar 1988, p.27]
    • Los Angeles Times
  22. The Painted Bird
    The pummeling, totalizing horror of The Painted Bird ultimately proves its undoing.
  23. 4
    But most important, for the adventurous moviegoer, it's more than apparent throughout this inventive, hypnotic and queasily funny portrayal of socioeconomic chaos that this director is a talent to watch.
  24. Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
    An exciting, upbeat film, but not a very impressive example of the animator's art. [01 Feb 1989, p.8]
    • Los Angeles Times
  25. The Color Purple
    The craft is gorgeous, but The Color Purple would be nothing without its star turns, and Bazawule’s cast takes your breath away.
  26. The Lure
    The Lure may not be everybody’s siren song, but as debut features go, it counts as a splash.
  27. Mistaken for Strangers
    A documentary that's insightful, sweet and often hilarious.
  28. Planes, Trains & Automobiles
    There is no denying the craft of either Martin or Candy, however, and since they are the film, it will undoubtedly find its audience faster than any one of us can get from New York to Chicago.
  29. Igby Goes Down
    Writer-director Steers has chosen to overload "Igby" with phony archness and forced black humor, making it not the place to look for satisfying acting.
  30. Earth
    Approaching the world in his own specific visual way, Geyrhalter also gravitates toward exploring big ideas, and here he takes on one of the biggest, an exploration of, as he puts it, “the wounds we are inflicting on the Earth.”
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