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. A well-researched and iconoclastic documentary that is both thoughtful and troubling, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth is indeed a cautionary tale, but what it cautions against is the lure of easy judgments derived from prejudices and ignorance of the facts.
  2. Headhunters is a dark adult entertainment, a wild and bloody adrenaline rush of a movie that deals in gleeful grotesqueness and over-the-top implausibilities.
  3. There's nothing terribly original about Safe, but it's a suitably grimy playground for action cinema's reigning pit bull.
  4. A clever piece of business that is a complete pleasure to experience.
  5. In many ways, "Engagement" reflects both the best and worst of Stoller and Segel's creative collaborations.
  6. Nothing is rushed, everything is given its appropriate time and place. When we watch Hansen-Løve's films, we're not only experiencing a life unfolding before us, we're also realizing what a great privilege it is to be able to do that.
  7. Minn, who often appears on camera, packs this grimly compelling, if slightly padded film with strong archival TV news footage, plus wrenching testimony from the relatives of several innocent bystanders gunned down around the El Paso-Juarez border.
  8. The nonstop adversity lacks any real sense of danger. Or, for that matter, emotional punch. Why these two long-distance runners keep each other alive should be of front-and-center concern. Instead, My Way is mostly an endurance test.
  9. This time out Lee looks to bake a touch of twee-ness into the film in the hopes of keeping things light, though more often than not, the film's flourishes come off as Wes Anderson-lite.
  10. Often the film pushes Schemel to the edge of what is intended to be her story, so in Hit So Hard she feels forced into the role of self-sacrificing side-player once again.
  11. By the end, Fightville feels authentic about this world, where success may be measured in wins, but the balance of unrelenting brutality and self-discipline needed for those wins is a trickier equation.
  12. Like Freeway, the lovable stray dog at the center of this very teary comedy, Darling Companion has lost its way. Even the marquee ensemble anchored by Diane Keaton, Dianne Wiest, Kevin Kline and Richard Jenkins is not enough to rescue this motley mutt of a movie.
  13. What Marley and its wonderful performance footage leave you with most of all is the joy the man took in the music that set him free and enchanted the world.
  14. The Sparks-styled romance has almost become its own movie genre - predictable, pure of heart, sentimental and never straying from the boy-meets-girl basics, or the surface, for that matter - and in that The Lucky One delivers.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Writer-director Noel Calloway's debut Life, Love, Soul has its heart in the right place. Unfortunately, nothing else is.
  15. Though the film flirts with being in a sense too intimately drawn from Jaye and P-Orridge themselves - more context from those who knew P-Orridge before the couple got together would have been useful - the sense of intimacy created by Losier is remarkable.
  16. Exhausting before its first few minutes of whip-pans, smash cuts, coarsely self-referential jokes and on-screen text visuals is over, the teen horror-spoof Detention is a patience-trying exercise first, energetic genre-jumble comedy second.
  17. Plodding, predictable, amateurishly staged and with wild swings in acting quality - sometimes within the same person (Roberts) - this is the kind of well-meaning, homemade concoction hopelessly enamored of the kind of clichéd potboilers that don't get made anymore. And with good reason.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    If Simon's hands-off approach precludes a thorough stock-taking of Dreier's misdeeds - numbers alone hardly tell the full story - the movie's subject obligingly avails himself of the ample rope.
  18. As for the title, it's a nod to the jazz music that Don's off-the-grid dad shares with his more buttoned-up son. But, like most everything else here, it feels more contrived than authentic.
  19. "Woman" is in essence an earnestly competent, slightly overcooked B-movie potboiler, with ideas of faith occasionally added to frame the story as parable.
  20. Losing Control has a vague cheerfulness but no real snap or insight, with Weiss apparently thinking that using scientific terminology to discuss relationships is witty rather than contrived. Perhaps investigating something new would have better served Weiss than simply looking to her own experiences, exploring rather than settling.
  21. When Udo Kier is the sanest person around, you know you're in strangeville.
  22. Though overlong, Hui's valentine never milks the drama for tears, maintaining an unsentimental focus on the central duo's playful chemistry and the loving way Ah Tao's attention to detail is repaid.
  23. For poker fans only.
  24. The film is at its best when Dafoe is simply going about the ritual tasks of his character's work, setting up a camp or laying traps in the wilderness.
  25. Aided by a nimbly voluble script by Kat Coiro and Ritter, it emerges as an amusing kaleidoscope of contemporary urban angst and romantic aspirations.
  26. A cool documentary that makes the blood boil, it examines how people can be psychologically manipulated into confessing. Not only to crimes they may not have committed but, even worse, to crimes that may never have happened.
  27. Artfully put together by writer-director Falardeau, Monsieur Lazhar shows us life in the round, illustrating the way humor, compassion and tragedy can all be elements of experience. Its emotional honesty is heartening, a lesson we are never too old to learn.
  28. Mostly Lockout is lost in space.

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