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. If you've seen most any rom-com you know where this one's headed. Unfortunately, under director Sheree Folkson's unsteady hand, getting there is more frustrating than fun.
  2. Once again, the premature loss of a loved one begets family dysfunction in the strangely uneven, yet occasionally resonant Around June.
  3. It's all sharp, well-performed stuff until things go from darkly comic to just plain dark, derailing -- and dragging out -- the otherwise absorbing story. Still, this one's a cut above.
  4. The ambiguity is refreshing. And despite the complicated emotional story at the center of this film, the Dardennes, who wrote and directed, have opted to handle it all with a minimalist narrative style.
  5. The giddy laughs that ensue, though sometimes inspired, are too few and far between.
  6. Miller and Lord clearly understand the push-and-pull and hyper-competitiveness that make guy friendships both complex and stupid. That it comes to life so fully in 21 Jump Street is what gives the film an endearing, punch-you-in-the-arm-because-I-like-you-man charm.
  7. Even if you don't fancy raw fish, "Jiro" is a captivating film.
  8. Intensely specific in story yet wide-ranging in themes, with a tone that turns on a dime from comic absurdity to close to tragedy, this is brainy, bravura filmmaking of the highest level, a motion picture that is as difficult to pigeonhole as it is a pleasure to enjoy.
  9. The writing-directing brothers are usually interested in the small stuff of everyday, but perhaps they've gone a little too small here.
  10. Rueful, funny and wise, The Salt of Life is a comedy not of errors but of the tiniest of missteps. A warm yet melancholy film of quiet yet inescapable charm, it has a feeling for character and personality that couldn't be more delicious.
  11. The film is at its best as a fast-paced enigma. When Kentis and Lau start explaining what's actually going on, Silent House takes a turn not just for the worse but the ludicrous.
  12. Despite its wobbly tone and stumbles into implausible melodrama, the film succeeds as a study of realignments among friends and family, a gently cracked mirror held up to the insanity that would soon devastate the region.
  13. Without pounding home its avant-garde cred, this fresh ode to found sound and the music of silence casts an amused gaze at careerism, classical-music reverence and notions of artistic purity and ends with a pitch-perfect change of tune.
  14. Boy
    Writer-director and co-star Taika Waititi ("Eagle vs Shark") never builds much momentum for his largely uneventful if sometimes inventive story.
  15. This is definitely animation for grown-ups - its look is voluptuous, sexy and sultry; its Latin-inflected Dizzy Gillespie sound is seductive; and its story of young lovers whose passions are tested is timeless.
  16. The mildly engaging, often exasperating feature poses a few good questions and offers some well-observed moments. Yet even as it zeros in on radical shifts in the mechanics and mores of parenthood, it sits quite comfortably in a well-worn romantic-comedy groove.
  17. That John Carter is so hit and miss, and miss, and miss is unfortunate on any number of levels.
  18. The film has a grand cast, with Emily Blunt, Ewan McGregor, Kristin Scott Thomas and Amr Waked at the center of this very clever tale of modern eco-issues intertwined with old-style political intrigues and New Age romance.
  19. The only way to describe this movie's trio of party-throwing protagonists is numbingly predictable, as if writers Michael Bacall and Matt Drake had "Superbad" on a loop in the background.
  20. Even with three charismatic leads, the talky, convoluted nature of the cat-and-mouse between Zhang and Huang and their respective gangs is impossible to follow or care about, and the mix of identity comedy, cartoonish violence, philosophizing and grief over killed loved ones is hardly smooth.
  21. A 38-year-old man's coming-of-age story, the earnest Ranchero reaches for thematic resonance and ends up only cliché-deep.
  22. Starkly beautiful and exceedingly demanding, The Turin Horse, which Hungarian master Béla Tarr has said will be his last film, is both easy and impossible to define.
  23. Fascinating for what it signifies as much as what it shows, This Is Not a Film illustrates how Panahi is struggling to stay alive creatively and, paradoxically, can't help but demonstrate how much of a natural filmmaker he is.
  24. Paul Weitz has dialed things down considerably for Being Flynn, writing and directing with an earnest sensitivity that at times suits, at times undermines, the complexities of the story at hand.
  25. Cult comedy team Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim take the mechanics of the Funny or Die website and stretch it past the breaking point with their movie.
  26. This movie version adds a whole lot of other stuff, most of it not very good and not in keeping with the spirit of the Seuss original.
  27. Gone is also your hard-earned money if you buy a ticket to this slack piece of work, a movie that makes "Murder on the Orient Express" feel like "The Silence of the Lambs" by comparison.
  28. If anything, the manic energy and aggressive sarcasm of Wain's "Role Models" (2008), which also starred Rudd, has become much more refined in Wanderlust, (well, as refined as something this raw can be).
  29. This intriguing hybrid is dramatically involving only when the shooting - with real bullets, naturally - gets underway.
  30. The spirited young cast includes the luminous Oksana Akinshina, best known for her title role in Lukas Moodysson's devastating "Lilya 4-Ever," who still lights up the screen like few actresses in the world.

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