Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,522 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: 8,697 out of 16522
  2. Mixed: 5,808 out of 16522
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16522
16522 movie reviews
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  1. Avatar
    Avatar's shock and awe demand to be seen. You've never experienced anything like it, and neither has anyone else.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    Morgen has crafted an often brilliant, sometimes overheated but always humane documentary, one in which Nirvana’s music and fame is just the scaffolding to Cobain’s inner life.
  3. 20th Century Women
    The beauty of Bening’s performance lies in those marvelously suggestive layers — all the delicate, tendril-like emotional possibilities that she manages to tuck into the margins of any given moment.
  4. Klondike
    Klondike is certainly not an easy watch, but it is a profound one — a film that feels both prescient and retrospective about Ukraine, locked in what seems a never-ending existential conflict with its neighbor.
  5. Wuthering Heights
    This 1939 William Wyler version of Emily Bronte's passionate and inspired novel of l'amour on the lightning-lashed moors and gloomy heaths is the best and most successful on screen. [16 Oct 1994, p.65]
    • Los Angeles Times
  6. Pina
    Whether you're familiar with Pina Bausch's work or not, the new film Pina is a knockout.
  7. Animal Kingdom
    Faultlessly acted by top Australian talent, including Guy Pearce, Ben Mendelsohn and Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom marries heightened emotionality with cool contemporary style.
  8. Rosie
    Made with a restraint that enhances the heartbreaking nature of its narrative, Rosie is also fortunate in having top-of-the-line Irish actress Sarah Greene, who is wrenchingly involving as a character teetering on the edge of complete desperation.
  9. A Room with a View
    A virtually irresistible film. [21 March 1986, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  10. Hugo
    The director's visually thrilling Hugo has real moments of 3-D magic. Sadly, they aren't quite enough to make this adaptation of Brian Selznick's celebrated novel, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a wholly satisfying experience.
  11. Wild Reeds
    The film perfectly understands the tentative experimentation and frequent self-loathing of adolescence, the difficulty of knowing whom to trust and how much to trust them, as well as how incendiary an age this can be, with uncertain psyches ready to explode at minimal provocation.
  12. The LEGO Movie
    The Lego Movie is strikingly, exhilaratingly, exhaustingly fresh.
  13. Ladybird Ladybird
    The power of “Ladybird, Ladybird” is inseparable from its weaknesses. Loach brings us up close to the misery but, in a larger sense, he stands back.
  14. Gloria
    Between Lelio's ingenuity in staging the film, an extremely clever script co-written with his frequent collaborator, Gonzalo Maza, and the pumping disco that interjects its opinions and assessments of each situation, Gloria is one of the most enjoyable movies to come along in a while.
  15. Drag Me to Hell
    With that fire in his belly, Raimi's Drag Me to Hell does everything we want a horror film to do: It is fearsomely scary, wickedly funny and diabolically gross.
  16. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    Obsession creates its own fascination, and never more so than in King of Kong, a sprightly new documentary that's as compulsively watchable as the vintage video game it focuses on is addictive.
  17. Taxidermia
    A brilliant, often grotesquely bizarre allegory on life in Hungary from World War II to the present.
  18. Spider
    In an instance of director, stars and material melding flawlessly, Spider is a brilliantly realized depiction of a mentally ill individual.
  19. The Selfish Giant
    The Selfish Giant is devastating social realism in the mode of Ken Loach's "Kes."
  20. A.K.A. Doc Pomus
    Expertly put together by editor Amy Linton, AKA Doc Pomus uses its wealth of material to create the sense of a man with a genius for putting undistilled emotion into his songs.
  21. Ixcanul
    Even as it moves from tender ethnographic portraiture into a realm of hushed, intimate tragedy, Ixcanul quivers with a fierce if understated feminine energy.
  22. Wobble Palace
    This isn’t an idealized version of romance or L.A. millennials; Kotlyarenko and Nekrasova shine a glaring iPhone flashlight on their characters’ — and their generation’s — flaws.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Come from Away
    It turns out that the screen provides a surprisingly hospitable frame for a musical that is quite purely and unabashedly — at times even downright earnestly — a work of theater.
  24. Evil Does Not Exist
    After so fruitful a collaboration on “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi and Ishibashi may have topped themselves with something even more compelling.
  25. Crossing
    Akin, a Swedish filmmaker whose family originally hails from Georgia, knows this is a story tinged with sadness for lives that have been ostracized and marginalized. But his wider view starts from a place of optimism about what curiosity engenders.
  26. Seymour: An Introduction
    Ethan Hawke's documentary on pianist Seymour Bernstein is very much like the sonatas Bernstein plays so beautifully, teaches so insightfully — quietly moving, infinitely deep.
  27. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    Once again Chabrol's son Mathieu has composed a crucially evocative score, and Renato Berta's cinematography is gleaming. Merci Pour le Chocolat crackles with wit and elegance, humor and pathos.
  28. Triad Election
    Like any good sequel, this film takes what is familiar with the original's concept -- in this case, an internecine struggle for supremacy -- and deepens it.
  29. Up in the Air
    Up in the Air makes it look easy. Not just in its casual and apparently effortless excellence, but in its ability to blend entertainment and insight, comedy and poignancy, even drama and reality, things that are difficult by themselves but a whole lot harder in combination. This film does all that and never seems to break a sweat.
  30. Milk
    There's nothing terribly wrong with Milk, it's just that its celebration of a culture and a neighborhood, its valentine to the early days of gay rights activism, is mostly more conventional than compelling.
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