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. Room
    Larson has done exceptional work before... but the way she has taken the deepest of dives into this complex, difficult material is little short of astonishing. The reality and preternatural commitment she brings to Ma is piercingly honest from start to finish, as scaldingly emotional a performance as anyone could wish for.
  2. Spotlight
    Spotlight doesn't call attention to itself. Its screenplay is self-effacing, its accomplished direction is intentionally low key, and it encourages its fistful of top actors to blend into an eloquent ensemble.
  3. Welcome to Leith
    This cautionary tale couldn't be more timely or essential.
  4. Guidance
    Mills peppers his fresh script with an assortment of throwaway lines, kooky character beats and off-kilter emotional truths. That he packs so much memorable silliness into one 80-minute film is quite the feat. Sequel, please.
  5. Heart of a Dog
    Heart of a Dog is that rarest of pieces, an unabashedly experimental work that's as inviting as a visit with an old friend, one who may not always make sense, who's sometimes goofy, but has been through a lot lately and treasures the opportunity to artfully unload.
  6. Mustang
    It's a moving portrait of sisterhood, a celebration of a fierce femininity and a damning indictment of patriarchal systems that seek to destroy and control this spirit.
  7. Sherpa
    A documentary whose visual magnificence is more than matched by unforgettable characters and political urgency.
  8. A War
    A War is a film done exactly right about a situation gone horribly wrong.
  9. The Pearl Button
    By turns lyrical, impressionistic and profound, the documentary The Pearl Button requires patience but offers stirring rewards.
  10. The Emperor's New Clothes
    Advocacy documentaries simply don't get better or more compelling than this.
  11. Safe
    Insidious and provocative, Safe refuses to lend a hand, avoids taking sides or pointing the way. Everything that happens in this beautifully controlled enigma is open to multiple interpretations, and that extends finally to the title's meaning as well.
  12. Dunkirk
    The surpassing accomplishment of Dunkirk is to make us feel an almost literal fusion with its story. It's not so much that we've seen a splendid movie, though we have, but as if we've been taken inside a historic event, become wholly immersed in something real and alive.
  13. No Home Movie
    With its focus on domestic interiors (and interior lives), the movie doesn't simply recall Akerman's past efforts; it reveals their roots.
  14. Closet Monster
    Dunn juggles the story’s vital, at times fantastical narrative, eclectic imagery, and wellspring of human fears, flaws and desires with vision and confidence. But Jessup’s powerfully empathetic performance really seals the deal.
  15. Certain Women
    Reichardt has never been one to reduce her characters to an easy emotional or dramatic equation, and here the everyday challenge of being female in a male-dominated profession is just one element on an extraordinarily fine-grained human canvas.
  16. Manchester by the Sea
    Powerful, emotional filmmaking that leaves a scar, Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By the Sea is heartbreaking yet somehow heartening, a film that just wallops you with its honesty, its authenticity and its access to despair.
  17. Indignation
    Indignation tells a very particular story, one that’s bittersweet, heartbreaking and bleakly comic all at once, and it gets it right.
  18. The Fits
    Made by a first-time feature director working with a microscopic budget and a tiny, 11-year-old protagonist, it’s a 72-minute wonder, a self-assured, gently mysterious little film that is hypnotic in unexpected ways.
  19. Other People
    Emotions run deep and wide here; anyone who’s ever lost a parent, longed for love and acceptance, or tried to find his or her true self should easily relate. It’s a terrific film.
  20. Under the Shadow
    The movie is first fascinating, then terrifying.
  21. Things to Come
    Things to Come holds us completely. A life is unfolding here, under our eyes, and we never lose sight of how special that is.
  22. A Quiet Passion
    The stately rhythms of the dialogue — drawn out by the particulars of Davies’ blocking, framing and editing — become a kind of music. The effect is bewildering at first, then absorbing, then transfixing. Its purpose, in line with the loftiest ideals of poetry itself, is to clear the mind and stir the soul.
  23. Fire at Sea
    What Fire at Sea appears to be and what it is are not the same thing, and it's that difference that makes it a masterful documentary.
  24. After the Storm
    Kore-eda is too scrupulous a filmmaker to prescribe Ryota an easy redemptive arc or happy ending. Nonetheless, the lingering optimism that suffuses After the Storm’s closing scenes is honestly achieved; nothing on the surface has changed, but on a deeper level something has.
  25. Don't Think Twice
    For a movie that involves creating laughs on the fly, the story is tightly told and acted, which adds to its buoyant pacing, astute observations and well-judged poignancy.
  26. Be Here Now
    An extraordinarily moving, deeply personal, filmed diary
  27. Dragon Inn (1967)
    A director in command of everything from the watchful eyes of his actors, to the beauty of a misty morning light, to the heart-stopping vectors of arrows and swords bursting across a widescreen frame, Hu creates cinema that's the definition of kineticism.
  28. The Innocents
    A gripping psychological drama based on events more than half a century old, it has inescapable contemporary echoes. Laced with intensely emotional situations, it refuses to force the issue by pushing too hard. And it proves, yet again, that though moral and spiritual questions may not sound spellbinding they often provide the most absorbing movie experiences.
  29. Aquarius
    Some might well accuse this stubbornly singular woman of living in the past, but to watch Aquarius is to see her surrendering again and again to the bliss of the present moment — never more so than in a final scene of thrilling, annihilating ferocity.
  30. Elle
    Elle is a gripping whodunit, a tour de force of psychological suspense and a wickedly droll comedy of manners.
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