Los Angeles Times' Scores

For 16,536 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:
16536 movie reviews
  1. Laudatory but never simplistic, Bill W. is a thoroughly engrossing portrait of Wilson, his times and the visionary fellowship that is his legacy.
  2. By turns hysterical, heretical, guilty, innocent, silly, sophisticated, teasing and tedious.
  3. Given all the impossible choices the young jockey had to face, The Cup should have been a weepie if ever there was one - but the filmmakers stumble on their way to the finish line.
  4. This funny, sick twist of social satire is certainly locked and loaded, even if its aim is sometimes off.
  5. Mendes is charismatic and likable as Grace - perhaps too likable. Conveying Grace's parental blind spots, she doesn't turn her character's single motherhood into an argument for sainthood. Yet she avoids any darker glimpses that would lend a more satisfying complexity to the mother-daughter tension and to the movie's too-neat ending.
  6. If only the falling-in-love machinations and character details weren't so wispy, Tonight You're Mine might have had more resonance. That said, the film has its moments.
  7. Part road movie and part coming-of-age story but mostly plays like some creepy-perv fantasia looking for mileage from the mature-beyond-her-years presence of young star Chloë Grace Moretz.
  8. The film's three-pronged narrative does a fair job of laying a spooky groundwork for the revelatory emotional sadism that lies behind most acts of evil; it just takes a bit of clunky exposition to get there.
  9. There is a lot of hope in the air in I Wish, but the film never feels sappy. The very appealing score by the Japanese indie-rock group Quruli brings a kind of upbeat energy that matches the clean, open style of director of photography Yutaka Yamazaki, a frequent Kore-eda collaborator.
  10. The film aims to be a gentle comedy (there are even some songs approaching musical numbers) with serious undercurrents. It stumbles most when reaching for its bigger themes.
  11. Writer-director John Chuldenko stretches a sitcom episode premise to feature-length breaking point in Nesting.
  12. The film's single saving grace is Turner, who channels that legendary Catholic guilt like there is no tomorrow.
  13. This film has much more to do with what goes on inside director Tim Burton's head than with any TV show, no matter how beloved. In fact, Dark Shadows is as good an example as any of what might be called the Way of Tim, a style of making films that, like the drinking of blood, is very much an acquired taste and, unless you're a vampire, not worth the effort.
  14. The movie perks up during Dinklage's scene as an escort, and screeches to a painful halt for a few conversations with God, who's played by a cloud-roosting Whoopi Goldberg. In a sophomore letdown from "The Woodsman," director Nicole Kassell gives the film no energy or rhythm, while the script pushes all the pre-set buttons.
  15. To his credit, writer-director Nathan Morlando has crafted a stylishly shot and evocatively designed period piece. But it's the dashing, quietly charismatic Speedman who proves the main draw, holding our attention even when the movie doesn't.
  16. These performers are so young, so serious, so full of dreams and so hard on themselves that it is difficult not to be moved by their striving.
  17. When Rebecca De Mornay shows up as the criminals' fiercely doting matriarch, the ready crackle of her studiously demonic performance brings welcome distraction from this otherwise crude litany of torture and wretched death.
  18. It all makes for a movie whose infectious charm outweighs some of the predictability that slips in around the edges.
  19. Deliberate and marked by uncommon grace, In The Family manages to feel politically and culturally acute without ever resorting to melodrama, or having to wave banners for issues or causes, except perhaps in its quiet way for a renewed humanism in movies and a return to stories about everyday lives.
  20. Whedon is the key reason why this $220-million behemoth of a movie is smartly thought out and executed with verve and precision. It may be overly long at two hours, 23 minutes, but so much is going on you might not even notice.
  21. rRegrettably falls prey to its grand and grisly ambitions - it's neither grand nor grisly enough to seriously satisfy Poe-ish cravings for murder, mystery and literary allusions.
  22. Warriors is a bruising, relentless experience, one more tiring than inspiring.
  23. With storytelling economy and dramatic precision often missing from today's independent films, Batmanglij augments the building blocks for a nifty paranoid thriller with sharp commentary on our faction-centered society and the pitfalls of reinvention.
  24. In its portrait of a Restless City the film is strangely inert and feels like the work of image-makers, not storytellers.
  25. The film feels overstuffed and overcooked, as if the filmmaker were trying to get too much out all in one go.
  26. Unbalanced storytelling aside, Ozeki wisely works to keep the film focused on his actors.
  27. It's hard to say if the two ever really mesh or if they were intended to. Here seems motivated by a tone of searching and yearning, not of finding a single way.
  28. It's tempting to call Elles some kind of thinking-person's sex movie, but it's more about thinking and about sex (and thinking about sex) and is far more likely to encourage awkward, emphatic conversation than post-show friskiness.
  29. This is writer-director Richard Linklater at his wry, whimsical best, and considering he was the filmmaker behind 1993's "Dazed and Confused," that makes the movie something of a milestone.
  30. The film, which plays like "The Help" minus the safety net of nostalgia, provides a powerful reminder that as we all carry history with us, it is still possible for each of us to change it.

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