Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,526 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: 8,699 out of 16526
  2. Mixed: 5,810 out of 16526
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16526
16526 movie reviews
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  1. One Direction: This Is Us
    One Direction: This Is Us is not the raw confessional that title might imply but rather both a primer and new product presentation.
  2. Closed Circuit
    Trim and effective though Closed Circuit mostly is, it does fall prey to excessive contrivance from time to time, as most thrillers do. But the fact that its fictional premise dovetails nicely with what we've come to know is true is enough to hold us in our seats.
  3. The Grandmaster
    An exercise in pure cinematic style filled with the most ravishing images, The Grandmaster finds director Wong Kar-wai applying his impeccable visual style to the mass-market martial arts genre with potent results.
  4. Short Term 12
    Short Term 12 is a small wonder, a film of exceptional naturalness and empathy that takes material about troubled teenagers and young adults that could have been generic and turns it into something moving and intimate.
  5. Wampler's Ascent
    Focused on the task at hand and exhausted from the effort, Stephen is often authentically moving, but on the ground, a manufactured awareness that this is all being filmed — along with a treacly score — mars the feel-good atmosphere.
  6. Go Grandriders
    Tian-Hao Hua's documentary distinguishes itself not with false suspense but tremendous poignancy and humor, much of which come from the riders' varied histories and motivations for revving up their bikes.
  7. Dark Tourist
    Dark Tourist gets bogged down in insufferably slow-moving scenes — interestingly, when Jim is interacting with others, despite consummate performances from Cudlitz and Griffith.
  8. The United States of Football
    A structural, chronological mess of information and emotion, so chaotically shot and edited to move from stat to image to sound bite that it suffers from its own concentration issues.
  9. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    Unfortunately, there's a lack of structure, context and point of view to the largely gray, grim, hardscrabble world presented here.
  10. Inch'Allah
    Director Anais Barbeau-Lavalette builds a persuasive sensory immediacy in Inch'Allah, even as her story grows increasingly contrived.
  11. Paradise: Faith
    With little room to feel for or even understand Anna Maria, Paradise: Faith rarely seems more than high art with low intentions.
  12. The Frozen Ground
    Although writer-director Scott Walker seems committed to not overly exploiting his lurid subject matter, the movie is just too dreary, disjointed and generically creepy to be persuasive.
  13. Thérèse
    Even given the character's extreme introspection and withdrawal, Tautou's performance is too often opaque.
  14. The World's End
    Audacious and witty, The World's End is a strange brew.
  15. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    The world's most successful ring of diamond thieves is inventively and insightfully explored in the documentary Smash and Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers.
  16. Scenic Route
    While the narrative spins in place, Kyle Killen's script throws out one uninspired gambit after another to extend the film to feature length, eventually climaxing with dual endings, both contrived.
  17. You're Next
    The surprisingly adept mixture of tones — naturalism, dysfunctional family satire, winking slasher nostalgia, twisty vengeance thriller — is offbeat enough to keep even hardened connoisseurs of body-count entertainment on their toes.
  18. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones is just a sloppy rag bag of ideas cobbled from other stories.
  19. Spark: A Burning Man Story
    For such a hippie-ish wingding originally designed to discourage the buying and selling of anything, "Spark" has decidedly bought into its subject and has no qualms hawking it to moviegoers.
  20. Abandoned Mine
    Abandoned Mine is all that its title promises: something generic and empty, with the sense that much has been left behind.
  21. Paranoia
    I'm not going to get into the acting, because there's not much of it, frankly. No one is embarrassingly bad; no one is exceptionally good.
  22. Cutie and the Boxer
    For all of the eccentricities that come in any telling of an artist's life, Cutie and the Boxer's real magic is in so beautifully telling a familiar story of husbands and wives.
  23. When Comedy Went to School
    For a disorganized film that has trouble deciding what it's about, When Comedy Went to School can be a lot of fun.
  24. Museum Hours
    It's a film whose pleasures are much more visual than dramatic, but that doesn't mean there aren't serious things on its mind.
  25. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    Mara is the captivating center of the film, all the emotions of the men and the child hinge on her moods. She continues to be one of those actresses able to shape-shift into different places, times and characters.
  26. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Daniels' pulp instincts do lead to vivid sequences...but this is one significant film where less would have been a whole lot more.
  27. We the Parents
    Concerned mainly with the mechanics of the undertaking, the movie is less an incisive chronicle than a galvanizing tool for parents who are, understandably, frustrated with the system.
  28. Standing Up
    It's unclear who this blandly titled drama is aimed at — devoid as it is of humor or any real hazard and lacking the provocative undertones of its source material.
  29. The United States of Autism
    Although it favors breadth over depth, the documentary The United States of Autism offers a tender look at an eclectic array of children, their parents and other individuals affected by this ever-increasing developmental disability.
  30. Herblock: The Black & the White
    Block's work, so often ahead of the curve (Woodward and Bernstein marvel at how he understood Watergate before them), always comes shining through, revealing an artist who made it his mission to champion the "little guy" and speak truth to power.
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