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. Residue
    Though as leisurely as a summer’s day, this kaleidoscopic memory film has an intensity of purpose that wants to knock you on your heels — or maybe harder — in its take on gentrification.
  2. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
    The most entrancingly feel-good movie of the year.
  3. A History of Violence
    A ticking time bomb of a movie, a gripping, incendiary, casually subversive piece of work that marries pulp watchability with larger concerns without skipping a beat.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    It is expansive but more tightly time-framed in terms of plot. I wish it were a handful of minutes shorter, but this is my single caveat about another richly imaginative, engrossing and spectacular motion picture from the redoubtable George Lucas. [18 May 1980]
    • Los Angeles Times
  5. Grand Theft Hamlet
    The film’s most disorienting and wondrous realization, however, is that Shakespearean acting can exist even within “Grand Theft Auto’s” limits.
  6. Joyland
    A visually arresting, politically forceful melodrama from Pakistan.
  7. Sugar
    As good as it is because of the care and skill writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck bring to it, gifts that were visible in their first film, "Half Nelson," which earned a lead actor Oscar nomination for Ryan Gosling.
  8. Marwencol
    Watching Marwencol, Jeff Malmberg's probing documentary on Hogancamp's undertaking, is an exhilarating, utterly unique experience.
  9. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    The Wind That Shakes the Barley turns out to be a more complicated, more dramatically potent story than it appears at first. It's concerned at its core not with how bad the British were but with what the cost of dealing with them was for the Irish.
  10. Rye Lane
    This is a rom-com with heart, wit and style. But it also shows a clear-eyed understanding that one dreamy day — no matter how epic — is really just a good start.
  11. The Serengeti Rules
    The Serengeti Rules celebrates not only the diversity and beauty of the natural world but also recognizes the transformative power of curiosity and knowledge.
  12. The Lobster
    It’s a wondrously silly premise, and one that Lanthimos, not unlike those great cine-surrealists Luis Buñuel and Charlie Kaufman before him, executes with rigorous illogic and immaculate formal control.
  13. Forrest Gump
    It's most successful when it is being off-center, a state of grace it doesn't quite have the nerve to maintain. [6 July 1994, Calendar, p. F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  14. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    Part avant-garde art film, part amusing but morbid fairy tale, it is a delightfully ghoulish holiday musical that displays more inventiveness in its brief 75 minutes than some studios can manage in an entire year.
  15. Paris Is Burning
    Wildly entertaining, deeply humanitarian and fundamentally educational film.
  16. Black Ice
    The bitter truths in Black Ice paint a sobering picture of a sport with a lot to reckon with, especially in a country that prides itself on embracing its diversity of culture.
  17. Breaking the Waves
    Shallow where it would be meaningful, demanding leaps of faith it has not earned, this film's marriage of arresting technique to empty thinking is not unique, only frustrating.
  18. The Squid and the Whale
    Acutely observed, faultlessly acted, graced with piercing emotion and unsparing honesty, it will make you laugh because you can't bear to cry.
  19. Winged Migration
    At its best, Winged Migration is a marvel, and if that seems like a gee-whiz word, that's because this film has a lot to be gee-whiz about.
  20. Rebels of the Neon God
    As a first film, it is incredibly accomplished, its influences (French New Wave, Wong Kar-Wai) apparent but integrated.
  21. School of Rock
    Takes a clever premise and Black's unflagging manic energy and comes up with a pleasing mainstream comedy that uses new people and attitudes to entertain in old-fashioned ways.
  22. Life and Nothing More
    It’s a vital, singularly crafted film that simply tells it — or more specifically shows it — like it is through the eyes of a struggling African American single mother and the adolescent son she desperately wants to keep out of trouble against the mounting odds.
  23. The Girl with the Needle
    The film is a harrowing and eerie horror fairy tale from another time, even as it feels startlingly fresh and always unpredictable.
  24. Star Trek
    Though it has its over-caffeinated aspects and its missteps, this Star Trek has in general bridged the gap between the old and the new with alacrity and purpose.
  25. The Unknown Country
    Sometimes, The Unknown Country may be more a feeling than a movie, but that’s more than satisfactory. Attentive and artful, Maltz is a talent to watch, and in Gladstone, she’s fortunate enough to have a star (and guide) whose presence binds us to all this soulful roaming.
  26. A Quiet Place
    The pleasures of this story are the pleasures of watching people think, quickly but methodically, through a situation. To the very end, where a different picture might have devolved into a routine bloodbath, the movie clings to its intelligence like a protective amulet; it keeps the viewer in a state of heightened alertness throughout.
  27. Riefenstahl
    It answers Riefenstahl’s carefully chosen narrative, a fable of disillusioned purity, with an equally forensic counternarrative exposing her childlike narcissism about the impact of her talent. More disquietingly, she reveals a selective ignorance regarding the circumstances that brought her power and recognition.
  28. Carmine Street Guitars
    Carmine Street Guitars is a leisurely Sunday stroll of a documentary.
  29. The Teachers' Lounge
    Ilker Çatak, a German writer-director of Turkish descent, has shrewdly crafted a taut and tight examination of the concept of justice folded into an absorbing character study.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Namesake
    Despite being rooted in knotty issues of identity, Lahiri's novel forgoes didacticism in favor of vivid portraiture. Nair and her uniformly superb cast take the same tack: The characters are individuals before they are emblems.
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