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. Pillion
    Lighton’s biker BDSM rom-com might sound niche, but free yourself to see it and you’ll discover it’s a universal romance.
  2. Black Bag
    It’s a pleasure to enjoy something that’s both straight-faced and freewheeling, like a jazz pedagogue who also knows how to get a crowd dancing.
  3. One Child Nation
    The individual stories that make up One Child Nation, the worthy winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s grand jury prize for U.S. documentaries, illuminate an entire history of institutional corruption, medical brutality and pervasive misogyny — a history that was both masked and advanced by a national propaganda campaign of near-Orwellian absurdity.
  4. 24 Hour Party People
    Amazing, rich in authentic period atmosphere and detail, an ever-changing cyclorama of a movie.
  5. Summer Solstice
    Schamus’ sensitive and funny debut brings its anxieties and pleasures to full bloom so they can be properly considered and found suitably fleeting.
  6. Identifying Features
    Hypnotic and heartbreaking, Identifying Features is a feature debut to marvel at, but only once you’re able to shake off the bone-deep chills emanating from Mexican filmmaker Fernanda Valadez’s disorienting tale of a mother’s search for her missing son.
  7. The Sacrifice
    By the time “The Sacrifice” comes full circle it emerges itself as a symbolic gesture of great emotional impact. We may share Alexander’s sense of impotence, but Tarkovsky turns such feelings into a work of art.
  8. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
    [Anderson’s] movies have always proposed — sometimes ingeniously, sometimes exhaustingly, always sincerely — that we might benefit from looking at the world from a fresh vantage. And so it is with The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, in which a revolutionary new way of seeing holds the key to an altogether deeper transformation.
  9. Atonement
    This is one of the few adaptations that gives a splendid novel the film it deserves.
  10. The Tree of Life
    While Malick's great ability holds us for a time, it is finally not enough to compensate for a lack of dramatic involvement - those eschatological quandaries tend to overwhelm the story. The Tree of Life, its enormous advantages notwithstanding, ends up a film that demands to be admired but cannot be easily embraced.
  11. Decision to Leave
    A love story by turns sprawling, despairing and invigorating.
  12. Alexandra
    The luminous humanity that characterizes the films of Alexander Sokurov is in full force in Alexandra. On the surface, it is a work of the utmost simplicity but is charged with the eternal complexities and contradictions of both love and war.
  13. Daughters
    While the dance is clearly intended to be positive and inspiring (we’re told 95% of the fathers who participate never go back to jail), the movie isn’t afraid to show just how much fragility and uncertainty goes into the buildup and its aftermath.
  14. The Fabelmans
    Like all great storytellers, Spielberg knows the value — the beauty — of artifice and embellishment, as well as the permeability of truth and fiction. The Fabelmans is as slick, transporting and painstakingly orchestrated as anything in his filmography, and also as funny, stirring and implacably sad.
  15. Naked
    Naked is a mesmerizing character study, an attempt to stretch the emotional boundaries of truth on film as far as they will go. For once we think we've seen as much of Johnny as we can take, like an etching by Escher we start to see something else, a glimpse of another person easily missed.
  16. 'Round Midnight
    Despite the compelling plot, the narrative glides along a muted path, not unlike a good jazz number that takes delicately unexpected turns.
  17. The Host
    With a subversive streak as wide as the Han and a title open to interpretation, The Host confounds our expectations while providing top-notch entertainment. For Bong, the monster movie is an ample vessel, one that he can fill with social criticism while discovering exuberant amusement in the process.
  18. Grisbi (re-release)
    A wonderful treasure from the seemingly inexhaustible cornucopia of crackling French crime dramas.
  19. Das Boot
    The most convincing war movie ever made.
    • Los Angeles Times
  20. Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
    The smiles don't fade until the finish of Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown when we witness Pepa's realization that she has, in fact, come into her own and taken charge of her own destiny. [20 Dec 1988, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  21. Restrepo
    What Restrepo does so dramatically, so convincingly, is make the abstract concrete, giving the soldiers on the front lines faces and voices.
  22. The Departure
    Unfailingly sensitive about issues of selflessness and suffering, The Departure is in a way its own work of meditation, on the pressures of living up to the turbulent promise of life’s expected length.
  23. Beyond Utopia
    Documentaries with life-or-death stakes, not to mention wider resonance in our increasingly unsettled geopolitical world, don’t get much more nerve-racking or heartbreaking than “Beyond Utopia.” At the same time, the film is inspiring about the lengths people will go to for a better life.
  24. Stalker
    The film has a hypnotic pull, drawing the viewer deeper and deeper into its enigmatic adventure by crafting a world all its own.
  25. The Iron Giant
    Both a step back and a step forward from the trends of modern animation, it feels like a classic even though it's just out of the box.
  26. Beanpole
    The brilliance of Beanpole is that it begins as the story of a collective horror, then becomes utterly, fascinatingly specific.
  27. 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.
  28. Meek's Cutoff
    A lyrical poem for some, like watching paint dry for others. I'd argue for embracing the poetic, a rare commodity in American films these days.
  29. The Long Day Closes
    Nothing that Davies does is ordinary or artless but his craftsmanship has its suffocating side too.
  30. Fruitvale Station
    Made with assurance and deep emotion, Fruitvale Station is more than a remarkable directing debut for 26-year-old Ryan Coogler. It's an outstanding film by any standard.
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