Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,532 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: 8,702 out of 16532
  2. Mixed: 5,813 out of 16532
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16532
16532 movie reviews
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  1. 2036 Origin Unknown
    None of this is as deep as it intends to be, nor will it strike science-fiction devotees as especially novel. But Sackhoff’s Mack is such a vivid, well-rounded character that “2036” still works. It’s like a stage play, crossed with one of the more philosophical old pulp magazine short stories.
  2. The Workers Cup
    Not an exposé, and hardly a case of sports-as-uplift, The Workers Cup feels like a toe dip when the topic calls for at least a deep wade.
  3. Alex Strangelove
    Alex Strangelove is a deeply annoying failed experiment at melding a sensitive LGBTQ love story with the ethos of raunchy teen sex comedies.
  4. Nancy
    Rather than defaulting to either condemnation or absolution, Nancy instead holds out the fleeting possibility of love to someone who has never known it before — and asks why we should begrudge her the impulse to seize it.
  5. Hearts Beat Loud
    Energized by Offerman and Clemons, the effectiveness of the music and the emotional freshness of "Hearts Beat Loud" are finally triumphant. Sometimes wearing your heart on your sleeve is the only way to go.
  6. Hereditary
    The sensationally gifted writer-director Ari Aster may tip his hat to the horror canon (“Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Shining”), but he has no interest in making a coy, winking exercise in horror pastiche. With breathtaking deliberation and quiet, unshowy mastery, he spins a devastating portrait of an American family in sudden, inexplicable decline.
  7. The Texture of Falling
    The film looks amazing, but the writing is painfully pretentious and the acting beyond stiff and amateurish, so it’s impossible to gain a foothold into this story.
  8. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    Neville's goal here is not so much to tell the story of Rogers' personal life, though that does get some play, but rather to detail the how and why of his success, to show the way someone whose formidable task was, in his own words, "to make goodness attractive" was able to make it happen.
  9. A Kid Like Jake
    Though its vibe is often too meandering, A Kid Like Jake shows that even the most accepting of environments aren’t immune to the vulnerabilities and worries coursing through any well-intended parent’s soul.
  10. Breath
    Breath boasts no unique truths about maturing, but its serene roar under gray skies makes it a softly roiling, ultimately affecting gem.
  11. Maineland
    While it scratches an admittedly reflective surface, you keep hoping the nicely photographed Maineland would have dug a bit deeper.
  12. 211
    Cage gets exactly one meme-able meltdown scene, about two-thirds of the way through the picture. The rest is a waste of time, even for trash cinema connoisseurs.
  13. Believer
    Believer has a well-told, entertaining story sustaining a running time 20 minutes longer than “Drug War.” With the extra space, Lee explores the motivations of his two protagonists, working toward similar ends for different reasons.
  14. Bernard and Huey
    Like its developmentally-arrested, misbehaving man-children, the long-shelved source material hasn’t aged particularly well.
  15. The Valley
    The well-intentioned script from first-time writer-director Saila Kariat tries for emotional honesty but feels like a soap opera, and the cast doesn’t help it advance past dour melodrama.
  16. Ocean's 8
    What the movie refuses to do is dazzle, or resonate, or overstay its welcome, which is another way of saying it doesn’t really linger. As “8’s” go, it could stand to be a little crazier.
  17. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    It’s possible to watch this movie, in other words, and feel that the series is carving out a new direction, returning to its ancient stomping grounds and sticking to a familiar holding pattern, all at the same time. Such is the repetitive, rudderless nature of so much big-budget franchise filmmaking, even with a proven talent like Bayona behind the camera.
  18. Guilty Men
    Its plot can be opaque and its characters often too remote and inscrutable to embrace, but Guilty Men, Colombia’s official Oscar entry for 2018, remains an absorbing, visually gripping crime-thriller from writer-director Iván D. Gaona.
  19. Zoo
    It all plays out more convincingly than it may sound, with McIvor layering in depth, dimension and grace. Period re-creation is also first rate and, for animal fans, there’s eye candy aplenty in the form of giraffes, lions, chimps, flamingos and, of course, one soulful elephant.
  20. Action Point
    For all of the manic anti-authoritarian energy that Knoxville and pals generate in Action Point, it’s not directed at anything, which renders it meaningless and leaves the film to fizzle out like a deflated balloon.
  21. Strangers on the Earth
    A largely inspiring and transporting portrait.
  22. Funeral Day
    This dreadful indie comedy rarely replicates life, instead offering dialogue that someone thought was funny said by awful characters in the midst of inorganic situations.
  23. American Animals
    American Animals is not like other criminal stories and the differences make it one of the summer's freshest, most entertaining films.
  24. Upgrade
    If Upgrade ultimately plays like a genre exercise, it’s certainly a taut, engrossing one.
  25. Adrift
    What seems at first like an ingenious and surprising dramatic strategy feels, by the end, like an evasion on the movie’s part, a refusal to grant its subject the unflinching honesty it deserves. A true story it may be, but no one should mistake it for a truthful one.
  26. Rodin
    It’s a movie that already seems like a dust-gathered statue, rather than something vividly, imaginatively crafted to reflect the burning intensity of so passionate and forward-minded an artist.
  27. The Debt Collector
    Johnson tries too hard to make all his mayhem meaningful, to minimal effect. Still, this picture should entertain Adkins’ growing base of fans, who ought to appreciate that the star gets more freedom than usual to be delightful as well as dangerous.
  28. Social Animals
    Social Animals is far darker than its colorful, exhibitionist exterior lets on. As the film builds to a climax, it swings wildly in tone, each scene feeling disconnected from the one before.
  29. The Misandrists
    At times, it seems like a parody of itself but manages to beguile while it sermonizes.
  30. All Summers End
    Writer-director Kyle Wilamowski smothers his bid for nuanced emotion in the cardboard mechanics of bad-decision drama.
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