Los Angeles Times' Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Lean on Pete
    What happens to Charley, the film posits, the bad and the good, is not so much the fault of specific individuals but of the indifferent dead ends built into America's despairing culture of the underclass. Your heart goes out to this striving, yearning young man, and that's a tribute to the fine filmmaking on display.
  2. The Workshop
    The trappings are thriller-ish, but the playing field is recognizably timely: a fast-changing economic/cultural world in which some youth are up for the challenge to reconcile a vanished past with a roiling present — France's terrorism woes are explicitly referenced — while others are dangerously indifferent to it.
  3. Seven Years of Night
    This is a long, miserable wallow, making audiences feel every dark minute of its title.
  4. Blockers
    What derails Blockers in the end is a curious lack of imagination, an inability to think beyond the raunch-com genre's most sentimental clichés.
  5. Ismael's Ghosts
    The movie before us may be far from perfect, but with some crucial narrative and thematic tissue restored, it plays much more clearly, and satisfyingly, as an evocation of Ismael's emotional and psychological rupture, in his life as well as his art.
  6. Shelter
    The dissipating focus and the turgidly explanatory dialogue ultimately affects the legitimately surprising twist at the end, one in keeping with espionage's great theme — the intertwining of loyalty and betrayal — but that lacks oomph after so awkwardly uninvolving a buildup.
  7. Sweet Country
    While many familiar tropes are present, including murder, mayhem, a tough lawman and a tentative posse, Thornton uses them to tell a 20th century outback story and offer sharp, pointed commentary on relations between whites and indigenous peoples.
  8. Lowlife
    The tangled plot is ultimately too simple, and the film's sociopolitical commentary too paltry. But Lowlife does have a refreshingly varied and up-to-date cast of characters. With seedy B-movies, just a little bit of ambition elevates the generic.
  9. You Were Never Really Here
    There is more to admire here than a simple economy of form and content, and the spareness of Ramsay's approach is no mere approximation of Ames' hard-boiled prose. The texture is as gritty as the filmmaking is exquisite.
  10. Mrs. Fang
    It's a simple, cumulatively shattering record of life as we rarely see it captured in narrative or documentary cinema.
  11. Rogers Park
    Rogers Park is populated by real people with real problems, though the dialogue in Carlos Treviño's script doesn't always serve them well. The lines sometimes feel manufactured, but there's real warmth — or frustration or anger, depending on the scene — present in these authentic performances.
  12. Big Fish & Begonia
    It's all strangely wonderful, and it will take your breath away if you give it the chance.
  13. A Quiet Place
    The pleasures of this story are the pleasures of watching people think, quickly but methodically, through a situation. To the very end, where a different picture might have devolved into a routine bloodbath, the movie clings to its intelligence like a protective amulet; it keeps the viewer in a state of heightened alertness throughout.
  14. 6 Balloons
    Anchored by Jacobson's touchingly layered turn as a dutiful enabler, this risk-taking piece has an effectively anxious, naturalistic feel (it was inspired by producer Samantha Housman's own experience), with Franco bringing credible charm and desperation to the messed-up Seth.
  15. Love After Love
    It's a viewing experience that's challenging, unflinching and deeply honest.
  16. Spinning Man
    Director-editor Simon Kaijser takes an often choppy approach to the narrative, the catch-a-mouse symbolism is a bit heavy-handed and the ending could use more oomph.
  17. Tales of the American
    It's a prodigiously researched buzz saw of archival material, facts, feelings, testimonials, and nostalgia.
  18. Birthmarked
    The old debate over nature versus nurture is played for (sporadic) laughs in Birthmarked, a satire that's unable to deliver on a promising hypothesis.
  19. Outside In
    Duplass' puppy-dog affect may seem softer than you'd expect for a character who spent 20 years behind bars, but the actor's quietly wrenching performance gives the lie to any easy assumptions about the experience of the incarcerated. And Falco...gives a performance of aching depth and subtlety.
  20. Fourplay
    The actors gamely strive for conversational naturalism, but what they say matters little because you never sense anything other than an environment rigged to explode, rather than nurtured into emotional relevance.
  21. King in the Wilderness
    Though this film is simple to summarize, to understand and experience the powerful emotional charge King in the Wilderness conveys, it simply must be seen.
  22. God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness
    God's Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, directed by Michael Mason, is less strident than the two surprise hits that preceded it, but it still tells a programmatic story, rooted in presumptions.
  23. Status Update
    Its bubbly tone is often at odds with the casual cruelty present. Status Update layers in a message about social media's filters and fakery, but it isn't enough to make this a movie worth sharing
  24. Back to Burgundy
    Warm without sacrificing integrity, pleasant but not to a fault, Back to Burgundy is satisfying rather than earth-shaking.
  25. The Last Movie Star
    Thanks to its star's all-in commitment, the overtly maudlin film works better than it should, particularly sequences in which octogenarian Reynolds is dropped into "Smokey and the Bandit" and "Deliverance" and converses philosophically with his younger self.
  26. Claire's Camera
    For Huppert, most celebrated for her uncompromising severity in films like "Elle" and "The Piano Teacher," the movie is an opportunity to cut gloriously loose; no less than Claire herself, she seems to be enjoying her holiday.
  27. Wilde Salomé
    Pacino bites off an awful lot here, yet, as our puckish, ebullient and, later, prickly guide on this kaleidoscopic journey, he manages to present an intriguing and passionate view of artistic risk and reward.
  28. Salomé
    The feature's visual simplicity ends up countering the play's more florid, flamboyant elements, keeping the lean but intense story more centered and accessible.
  29. Caught
    Caught hits the usual beats, but with an unusually strong cast and original characters.
  30. First Match
    While First Match is more ambitious than most films in the genre, it still provides moments to cheer our complicated heroine, whether she's on the mat or off.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »