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. Newtown
    It's heartbreaking stuff, and Newtown handles it all with a gentle grace.
  2. If Beale Street Could Talk
    In cutting against the aesthetic grain, Jenkins gently and wisely corrects our vision. The passionate glow of this filmmaker’s embrace belongs, quite rightly, to his characters. He is generous enough to also extend that embrace to us.
  3. Restless Creature: Wendy Whelan
    The film captures the intense emotion of the October 2014 performance that capped Whelan’s 30-year career. But more crucial is the way it shows her creating new challenges for herself, turning the terrifying prospect of irrelevance into a shot at reinvention.
  4. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    The director's surrealist portrait of modern times and the cult of celebrity is brilliant on so many levels that even the occasional downdraft can't keep Birdman from soaring.
  5. Little Women
    Armstrong, screenplay adapter/co-producer Robin Swicord and their colleagues have got everything just right. [23 Dec 1994]
    • Los Angeles Times
  6. Tokyo Twilight
    Ozu cherishes tradition but accepts the inevitability of loss and change, and is as all-embracing as Jean Renoir. His people may judge and not forgive, often understandably, but as one of the greatest filmmakers he does not do so. [04 Oct 2007, p.E13]
    • Los Angeles Times
  7. Shine
    Popular filmmaking at its smartest and most persuasive.
  8. Aftershock
    Eiselt and Lee cover how these families — and in particular the fathers left behind by their partners’ passing — are still coping with unexpected loss. The film also provides some history lessons on how Black women have been either exploited or ignored by the medical establishment.
  9. The Awful Truth
    McCarey and his team of Dunne and Grant bring a patina of slapstick to this high-society story based on Arthur Richman's play and adapted for the screen by Vina Delmar. [03 Oct 1991, p.12]
    • Los Angeles Times
  10. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    Can You Ever Forgive Me? demands not our love for this supremely difficult person but rather our respect for her defiance of an unsympathetic world. With such an impeccable presentation of such an intransigent personality, it is hard to deny her that.
  11. Wolfwalkers
    It is the type of stirring entertainment that delivers both the thrill of the moment and the kind of sophisticated ideas that can lead to discussion and even debate long after viewing.
  12. My Neighbor Totoro
    My Neighbor Totoro is a gentle and affirming film. It's certain to delight smaller children, although boys accustomed to the slam-bang violence of super-hero cartoon features and TV shows may chafe at its leisurely pace.
  13. The Missing Picture
    The Missing Picture is personal and unexpected, a documentary that mixes media in an unusual way to very potent effect.
  14. The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open
    Don’t let its florid, mouthful of a title mislead you: The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open is a film that’s as urgent and unpretentious as it is remarkable. It’s safe to say you haven’t seen too many movies quite like it.
  15. Our Father, the Devil
    Our Father, the Devil is the type of movie for which a satisfying ending is less about tidy resolution than potent insight, and in that respect, Foumbi delivers something befitting her grueling, clenched character study.
  16. Of Men and War
    The access that Bécue-Renard got, reportedly after five months of being there without a camera, is remarkable.
  17. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
    As splendid as John Wayne is in these films, the elegiac She Wore a Yellow Ribbon provides him with one of his finest roles. [19 May 1996, p.72]
    • Los Angeles Times
  18. Pain and Glory
    But if the tone is more restrained, more elegiac, and lacking that signature Almodóvar outrageousness, the emotional force still knocks you sideways.
  19. Russian Ark
    An astonishing technological feat, but what is even more remarkable is that the technology does not overwhelm the artistry.
  20. The Farthest
    The film is a stirring salute to human ingenuity.
  21. Genèse (Genesis)
    Genèse concludes as a sober reminder that the young always feel intensely, but that the years between the crush that shines and the ardor that confounds are short ones, indeed.
  22. Gomorrah
    The fingerprints of the Camorra are everywhere, this film wants us to know, and its grip is lethal.
  23. Familiar Touch
    Friedland’s acute debut feature, drawn from her experience in the memory-care field, is a small miracle of realigned empathy, turning away from the condescension and easy sentiment of so many narratives about late-in-life adaptation.
  24. To Be and to Have
    Part of what makes a great documentary great is the subject, and though the film never scrapes below the surface of the schoolteacher -- we never find out if he lives alone or has children of his own -- Lopez pulls as hard on the imagination as a fictional character.
  25. Withnail and I
    For all the laughter it generates in its confrontations between city and country folk and their ways, Withnail and I has a decidedly dark and subtle undertow. One hilarious incident after another may keep the semiautobiographical Withnail and I perking along, but it is at the same time a ‘60s joy ride about to tailspin into the sobering ‘70s.
  26. Return to Seoul
    A staggering masterwork that reveals itself unhurriedly, one permutation at a time, Chou’s third feature is perhaps the only film this year in which every single scene and every line of dialogue within them feel absolutely indispensable. The richness in every detail, and their unexpected ramifications over time, make for a one-of-a-kind character study.
  27. The Velvet Underground
    The spiritual truth of Haynes’ spellbinding The Velvet Underground is that ultimately it’s about the thing that can’t be described, that defies parsing when gifted outcasts make great art — it’s to be experienced.
  28. All That Breathes
    As deliberate as the image-making often is, it’s always to train us in looking as the brothers do, to consider the breadth of life and interconnectedness in our world: Wherever you are, All That Breathes is asking, can you see what’s there, what needs your attention?
  29. I Vitelloni [re-release]
    It was this ineffably poignant semiautobiographical reverie that unleashed fully Fellini's shimmering, flowing poetic style, echoed perfectly in a plaintive score by Fellini's potently evocative collaborator, Nino Rota.
  30. Attica
    Attica is a jarring, engrossing, and enraging reminder of how those in power will lie, humiliate, kill and cover up to retain it, and the documentary is one of the year’s best.
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