Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,526 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 2.3 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: 8,699 out of 16526
  2. Mixed: 5,810 out of 16526
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16526
16526 movie reviews
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  1. Footnote
    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.
  2. Jeff Who Lives at Home
    The writing-directing brothers are usually interested in the small stuff of everyday, but perhaps they've gone a little too small here.
  3. The Salt of Life
    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.
  4. Silent House
    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.
  5. Cirkus Columbia
    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.
  6. Sound of Noise
    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.
  7. Boy
    Writer-director and co-star Taika Waititi ("Eagle vs Shark") never builds much momentum for his largely uneventful if sometimes inventive story.
  8. Chico & Rita
    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.
  9. Friends with Kids
    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.
  10. John Carter
    That John Carter is so hit and miss, and miss, and miss is unfortunate on any number of levels.
  11. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    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.
  12. Project X
    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.
  13. Let the Bullets Fly
    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.
  14. Ranchero
    A 38-year-old man's coming-of-age story, the earnest Ranchero reaches for thematic resonance and ends up only cliché-deep.
  15. The Turin Horse
    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.
  16. This Is Not a Film
    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.
  17. Being Flynn
    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.
  18. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    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.
  19. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    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.
  20. Gone
    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.
  21. Wanderlust
    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).
  22. Act of Valor
    This intriguing hybrid is dramatically involving only when the shooting - with real bullets, naturally - gets underway.
  23. Hipsters
    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.
  24. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    The first "Ghost Rider" film, directed by Mark Steven Johnson, was sort of a fizzy goof, the kind of movie where you don't expect much and then think, "Hey, that was actually kind of fun." Spirit of Vengeance, though, is undone by increased expectations, as promising more only makes it feel they are somehow delivering less.
  25. How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
    The film is an architecture lover's dream.
  26. Michael
    A strange and troubling little film, a hermetically sealed creep-fest that seems to have no desire to be anything more than just that.
  27. Thin Ice
    If you can get past the rough patches - a slightly sluggish start and a coda that feels like one punch line too many - there is some sinister fun to be had in watching Kinnear skating toward disaster on ice that is very thin indeed.
  28. Bullhead
    An intense, shattering film, a confident and accomplished, punch-in-the-gut debut by Belgian writer-director Michael R. Roskam that starts out like a thriller and turns into a disturbing tragedy in an unlikely and unexpected key.
  29. Undefeated
    Like all memorable sports documentaries - Undefeated is really an examination not of how games are won and lost but how lives are lived, how young people faced with daunting challenges come to see, often in the most dramatic fashion, what is important going forward and what is not.
  30. The Secret World of Arrietty
    Set in an enchanting locale where the potential for magic is everywhere, this impeccable animated film puts its complete trust in the spirit of make-believe.
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