Los Angeles Times' Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 8,706 out of 16536
  2. Mixed: 5,813 out of 16536
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16536
16536 movie reviews
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  1. Tanner Hall
    The better moments are fleeting. More often, the film feels flat-footed, and the story plays out as you'd expect. Long before Tanner Hall ends, you may well find yourself wishing for the final bell.
  2. Contagion
    This may not fit any conventional definition of entertainment, but it certainly keeps your eyes on the screen.
  3. Brother's Justice
    Sure, this frequently improvised spoof isn't intended to be taken seriously, but it's also not funny or incisive enough to counter the unappealing persona the actor-comedian has concocted here: an impulsive, clueless narcissist on a journey to reinvent himself as an action star.
  4. Apollo 18
    Even if Apollo 18 is not exactly as it presents itself to be, it is less of a stunt than a low-key and unassuming film of rising tension rather than big scares or wild shocks.
  5. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    It has opulent, stylized settings of elegance, grandeur and scope, flawless special effects, and awesome martial arts combat staged by the master, Sammo Hung. Yet bravura spectacle never overwhelms either the plot or the key characters. Chang Chia-lu's intricate script bristles with wit and suspense; the film from start to finish is a terrific entertainment.
  6. Bodyguard
    A rousing example of Bollywood-style pure escapist entertainment.
  7. Shark Night 3D
    Stay past the credits, though, and you'll find a tongue-in-cheek rap video recap with the cast - and directed by star Dustin Milligan - that carries the kind of spoofy insouciance missing from the main attraction.
  8. Seven Days in Utopia
    Though the drama has its heartfelt moments, it unrolls as flat as the Texas terrain, cast in an idyllic summer glow.
  9. Littlerock
    McLaughlin, who has a good eye for the minimal, manages to bring out the haunting beauty of empty places littered with the discards of forgotten lives.
  10. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    Unconventional, imaginative, nothing if not audacious, Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life is a portrait of creativity from the inside, a serious yet playful attempt to find an artistic way to tell an emotional truth.
  11. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    At best, the jokey bits are occasionally funny.
  12. The Debt
    Bristling with dangers both corporeal and cerebral, The Debt is a superbly crafted espionage thriller packed with Israeli-Nazi score settling.
  13. Rebirth
    A unique glimpse into the recovery mechanism of damaged hearts and bewildered minds, how a visage of hollowed-out sorrow after one year becomes a look of more peaceful acceptance down the road.
  14. Circumstance
    Kazemy and Boosheri are excellent, and Soheil Parsa and Nasrin Pakkho are also fine as Atefeh's doting, liberal parents. And if Keshavarz is less successful managing the film's sometimes choppy narrative, she is clearly willing to take risks on all fronts. More power to her.
  15. Chasing Madoff
    The unintended take-away is that you can grasp why the Securities and Exchange Commission - terribly negligent though it was in investigating Madoff - might dismiss the claims of someone so theatrically odd.
  16. The Family Tree
    Director Vivi Friedman's inability to successfully reconcile the film's duality undercuts an eclectic cast gamely committed to Mark Lisson's thematically ambitious, if scattered, script.
  17. The Interrupters
    No concept in the critical lexicon has been more devalued and debased than "inspirational." The term has been so misused, it's just about lost all meaning. A film that makes that word real and vital has to be special. The Interrupters is such a film.
  18. Colombiana
    All of that combines to make Colombiana into a scandalous blend of action, sex and violence. My apologies in advance for having so much fun.
  19. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Really, truly, very scary … At least until about 30 minutes in, when you start to be distracted by the lack of logic in the storytelling and the fact that the nasty little gremlins responsible for all the bumps in the night can be offed pretty easily.
  20. Our Idiot Brother
    The comedy isn't always as crisp as it should be, but Peretz has the perfect partner in crime in Rudd.
  21. Higher Ground
    The same intelligence, wit and mature spirit that actress Vera Farmiga brings to her performances is richly apparent in her directorial debut as well, the inquisitive spiritual drama Higher Ground.
  22. A Proper Violence
    Weakly developed characters, a lack of substantive tension and an ending that's more startling than sound round out the minuses of this earnestly motivated but undercooked morality tale.
  23. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    This fourth "Spy Kids" picture isn't so much bad as it is just boring, lacking the buzz and brio of even some of the earlier entries in the series. It feels like someone is now just marking time.
  24. 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy
    For all its sophomoric humor and prim prurience, in the end 3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy finds it is love, not sex, that rules the human heart, a sweet and conventional idea regardless of the technology of the film's projection.
  25. Battle for Brooklyn
    Although not exactly even-handed, the movie proves a deft look at a reluctant crusader and how financial sway and political override can so effectively trump the power of the average citizen.
  26. Griff the Invisible
    The darkly funny Australian charmer Griff the Invisible introduces its titular hero to us as nighttime caped crusader first, mild-mannered daytime office drone second.
  27. The Hedgehog
    An exquisite, intimate film of restraint and delicacy.
  28. Mozart's Sister
    The object isn't to stir you into what-if feminist outrage so much as to let a culturally magnificent era's societal inequalities act as a dissonant countermelody to a famous artist's biography.
  29. Amigo
    The history lesson is often framed in stagy exchanges of dialogue, diluting the strong sense of place.
  30. One Day
    As so often happens with love, what you hope for is not even close to what you get, and in this case we are left with a heartbreaking disappointment of a film.
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