Los Angeles Times' Scores

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 2.4 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:
16520 movie reviews
  1. “My Undesirable Friends” captures dark times with some of the funniest people you’d ever hope to have as sisters-in-arms. Defiant, emotional and life-affirming, the film presents us with endearing patriots who love their country but hate its leaders, sucking us into a riveting tale with a powerful undertow.
  2. As good as Teller is as a husband in crisis, the Oscar-winning Randolph is her own commanding source of light, enough to sell this movie’s feel-good abstracts and wry commentaries on her own.
  3. Rian Johnson’s darkest, funniest and best installment yet in his three-film detective series.
  4. Hamnet’s sweetest note is 12-year-old Jacobi Jupe playing the actual Hamnet. The script hangs on our immediate devotion to the boy and he stands up to the challenge.
  5. While Walker-Silverman couldn’t have imagined his movie’s jarring real-world parallels, Rebuilding is as much a character study as it is a warning about our increasingly fragile planet and the beloved places we call home.
  6. After several haphazard attempts with the Frozen and Moana franchises, Zootopia 2 can take the title as Disney’s most effective animated sequel yet.
  7. Jackson and Caine wear their years proudly; there’s no vanity in their performance or their appearance. The couple’s eventual reunion is deep and real and, like their whole relationship, gorgeously ordinary.
  8. Directed by Zackary Canepari and Jessica Dimmock, it’s a sad black comedy, an Errol Morris sort of subject, shot in an Errol Morris sort of way — formal, neutral. The cinematography, by Jarred Alterman, is quite handsome and composed, amplifying the seriousness and eeriness, but also the banality and absurdity of the matter.
  9. Helander and editor Juho Virolainen pace the carnage like slapstick. They have a nimble rhythm for how many times a victim can dodge disaster before splattering. The violence is so big that it becomes comedy, even getting us laughing at a severed head, twice.
  10. Baumbach and Clooney have crafted a character who comes to realize his mistakes, many of which simply can’t be undone. Jay Kelly, the movie star, may be in the process of figuring himself out, but “Jay Kelly” the movie arrives as a fully-formed knockout.
  11. With its flat location visuals, B-movie gore (snakes pulled from mouths) and colorless score, The Carpenter’s Son is the uninspired origin story you never prayed for.
  12. What’s quietly miraculous about Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, considering its added tragic weight, is what the force of Hassona’s personality and Farsi’s filmmaking choices still manage to do: speak to what’s ineffably beautiful about our human capacity for hope and connection.
  13. “For Good” is a worthwhile return to Oz. The extra scenes and rejiggered duets justify the running time (even if the 160-minute length of the first film remains unforgivable).
  14. Ultimately, one suspects Perkins views Liz’s dilemma as little more than an excuse to construct a fun exercise in nightmare inducement that possesses the same craftsmanship that Malcolm clearly put into his swanky cabin. Each is a sight to see and neither is worth visiting for too long.
  15. Unfortunately, this heartfelt film resonates most strongly through those majestic landscapes, not via the story that unfolds.
  16. There’s little urgency or outrage. Instead of a funhouse mirror of what could be, it’s merely a smudged reflection of what is.
  17. There isn’t much of an original signature here. Returning director Dan Trachtenberg hits the beats competently but not too stridently, like a good superfan should.
  18. Sirāt is taut and riveting and nearly all mood. You feel the exhilaration of veering off the path, the self-exile of speeding toward nowhere, the dread that this caravan has veered too far for its own safety.
  19. Peter Hujar’s Day captures something beautifully distilled about human experience and the comfort of others.
  20. It’s all highlights and lowlights, rarely interested in the in-between stuff that makes watching all the rounds of a bout so necessary to appreciating what it means to survive on the canvas.
  21. The gently transcendent, tear-inducing conclusion that “Little Amélie” reaches suggests that memory serves as our only remedy for loss. As long as we don’t forget, what we cherish won’t become ephemeral.
  22. There’s a crack running through “Sentimental Value” too. A third of it wants to be a feisty industry satire, but the rest believes there’s prestige value in tugging on the heartstrings. The title seems to be as much about that as anything.
  23. Hurling herself into every scene, Lawrence puts her full faith in Ramsay. It’s not a trust fall so much as a trust cannonball. As good and committed as Lawrence is, there were times I wanted to rescue her from her own movie, to protect her from the fate of Faye Dunaway when “Mommie Dearest” turned another blond Oscar winner into a joke.
  24. Told with an unassuming, gentle simplicity that grows into an accumulating emotional power, the film manages to feel very small and specific while also vast and expansive.
  25. As often as you may be tickled by its fanged silliness, you’ll also be drained.
  26. Now that Linklater has ascended to the establishment, he’s encouraging cinema’s future by turning to its inspirational past with Nouvelle Vague, the lively story of how Godard (Guillaume Marbeck) directed Breathless with a tiny bit of cash and a ton of ego. It’s the origin story of Godard, and, in a way, of himself. Even more importantly, it’s a manual for what Linklater hopes will be a fresh wave of talent storming the shore any minute. (I’m counting on it.)
  27. A film this well-made and cut (the pacy editing by Aden Hakimi calls back to the elder Romero’s own cutting of his major titles) shouldn’t be relegated to just one kind of audience. Anyone who appreciates horror should find something to smile at here.
  28. Stiller’s approach is musical; his assembly of clips and photos is musical — poetic, not prosaic
  29. Stuckmann grabbing aimlessly in the last third for the kind of sickly visual elegance that is Flanagan’s deliberative style. But it only ever feels like homage, not anything organic — Stuckmann doesn’t have his mentor’s storytelling smarts, nor his flair for the underpinnings of normality that ground horror.
  30. Bugonia is a hilarious movie with no hope for the future of humanity. What optimism there is lies only in the title, an ancient Greek word for the science of transforming dead cows into hives, of turning death into life.

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