Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,539 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: 8,706 out of 16539
  2. Mixed: 5,816 out of 16539
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16539
16539 movie reviews
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  1. Caesar Must Die
    Caesar Must Die shows us in the starkest possible terms the electric power of drama to move and touch not only audiences but the actors who bring so much of themselves to their performances.
  2. Bless Me, Ultima
    A deeply satisfying feat of storytelling, Bless Me, Ultima makes a difficult task look easy. It combines innocence and experience, the darkness and wonder of life, in a way that is not easy to categorize but a rich pleasure to watch.
  3. Snitch
    All the talking would be fine, but the dialogue is preachy, the drama too earnest and the action kind of sluggish, though it's hard not to get a jolt when Johnson jumps behind the wheel.
  4. Bestiaire
    The film has a meditative calm about it — there are only a few murmured words of French but nothing that could be called dialogue — with also some underlying tension, because as you look at the animals, they so often look back, their inscrutable consciousness both placid and unyielding.
  5. Saving Lincoln
    Saving Lincoln feels amateurish, strange and beyond redress.
  6. The Package
    The Package is uncomplicated guy's guy movie time, the screen version of the starchy passing pleasures of bar food.
  7. Escape from Planet Earth
    Feel-good but not cloying, zippy but not frenetic, and refreshingly free of snark, the default setting for a lot of kids' fare these days, the feature takes a pleasingly retro-futuristic stance on matters of décor and attitude.
  8. Hitler's Children
    Though Ze'evi's creative choices don't always serve the material — he unwisely attempts to pump up the emotional volume with an intrusive music score — his compassion for his subjects is clear, and their straightforward testimony is provocative.
  9. The Bitter Buddha
    [An] amusing, freewheeling documentary.
  10. Would You Rather
    Though assured in execution and not without a few moments of genuine tension — mainly emanating from Combs' flinty weirdness — Would You Rather is hardly a most dangerous game night at the movies.
  11. The Berlin File
    There is something sharp, exciting and more original tucked within The Berlin File — and it is in moments a sleek, crackling film — but it all feels somehow misshapen.
  12. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    Herzog has become a master of the understatement — knowing just how long the images can sustain you without a word being said. Vasyukov and his team of cameramen gave him a stunning range to work with, so the filmmaker keeps his own narration to a minimum.
  13. No
    Even if No is not the whole truth — and no film is — its pungent dialogue and involving characters tell a delicious and very pertinent tale. And the messages it delivers, its thoughts on the workings of democracy and the intricacies of personality, are just as valuable and entertaining — maybe even more so.
  14. Shanghai Calling
    Hsia has an appealingly slick visual style for the fast-paced if predictable turns in Sam's story, shooting the gleaming, bustling Shanghai as if it had finally earned its big-Hollywood-romantic-comedy stripes as a setting for the usual fish-out-of-water jokes, broad humor, meet-cutes, silly coincidences and happy endings.
  15. Like Someone in Love
    From moment to moment the low-key intrigue threatens to slip into Hitchcock territory; when it does, it's not in the form of high-wire suspense but in a burst of understated playfulness.
  16. Beautiful Creatures
    Maybe there really are supernatural forces at work in this world. How else to explain Beautiful Creatures? The movie is an intriguing, intelligent enigma — three words not typically associated with teen romances.
  17. Safe Haven
    This sloppy sentimental journey is long on beauty shots, short on depth and seriously intent on tugging your heartstrings. Indeed, it demands you reach for those tissues. Sob.
  18. A Good Day to Die Hard
    A Good Day to Die Hard plays like an extended victory lap for star Bruce Willis and the entire "Die Hard" franchise. Not surprising, but not overwhelmingly entertaining either.
  19. Lost in Thailand
    By our quote-unquote standards of contemporary comedy, it plays as uneven at best and often just flattens out for long jokeless stretches.
  20. Room 237
    Room 237 becomes not a film about "The Shining" or even a film about film. Rather, it is an examination of the nature of obsession, about how we are capable of convincing ourselves — and possibly others — that just about anything might be true.
  21. The Playroom
    The drama often feels posed and inert. Even so, it strikes more than a few chords as it digs deeper than period cliché.
  22. Yossi
    Predictable if measured uplift aside, Fox keeps Yossi effortlessly affecting, graced with deadpan humor and a knowingness about lonely lives.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Clandestine Childhood
    Clandestine Childhood is a sincere effort but also rather sincerely a meager one too.
  24. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    The earnest passages mostly just lie there; the film works best on its frilly, exuberant surface, as a valentine to Streamline Moderne, Pop Art and L.A.
  25. Lore
    At its heart Lore qualifies as a coming-of-age story, but it is far from the ones we usually see.
  26. Side Effects
    This clever bag of tricks is made with so much cinematic skill it makes implausibility irrelevant. What happens on screen is unapologetically far-fetched, but it unfolds with enough panache to make turning away out of the question.
  27. Young Turks
    A snapshot of Los Angeles artists during a cultural pivot point, the documentary Young Turks sparks fascination and frustration in equal measure.
  28. Identity Thief
    The heart of this film is on the road with Bateman and McCarthy. If not for their brilliance, Identity Thief would be running on empty.
  29. The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia
    The storytelling, from a script by David Coggeshall, is at times nearly incoherent and relies too often on random scares.
  30. Bullet to the Head
    Bullet to the Head is an adrenaline shot to your movie memory if the blunt, gleefully dumb, no-nonsense ways of '80s-style action flicks are your nostalgia drug of choice.
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