Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,535 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: 8,705 out of 16535
  2. Mixed: 5,813 out of 16535
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16535
16535 movie reviews
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  1. Climates
    An intimate drama that views the deterioration of a relationship from the inside out. Moving from summer through fall and concluding in winter, it's minimalist cinema that turns on subtle emotion rather than narrative and demands the audience's full attention.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Conversations with God
    Conversations has all the telltale signs of a religious film that keep your basic moviegoer away: stilted dialogue, overwrought music, the subtlety of a daytime soap.
  3. Death of a President
    A technically inventive, thoughtful, but otherwise not particularly earth-shattering movie.
  4. Cocaine Cowboys
    In a sense it's a shame that Cocaine Cowboys is so obsessed by violence, because the film has interesting points to make.
  5. Absolute Wilson
    Impressive as is Wilson's output and oeuvre, it's the fully-engaged, aesthetically driven life that fascinates. And Otto-Bernstein's movie is a portrait of an artist at his most essential, in every sense.
  6. The Bridge
    Both a beautiful film and a disturbing one, and the connection between those two characteristics makes it the most disquieting of documentaries.
  7. Marie Antoinette
    Marie Antoinette gives a wide berth to the conventions of period dramas, especially their time-capsule remove, and instead tries to mainline the singular personal experience of the arch-villainess of French history (and freedom history, for that matter). The result is a startlingly original and beautiful pop reverie that comes very close to being transcendent.
  8. Running with Scissors
    Murphy, who created the creepy, funny, lunatic "Nip/Tuck," is a master of mordant and macabre camp. But here he loses his teeth, seeming to lack any ironic distance from material that practically begs for it.
  9. Flags of Our Fathers
    As he did in "Unforgiven," "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby," Eastwood handles this nuanced material with aplomb, giving every element of this complex story just the weight it deserves. The director's lean dispassion, his increased willingness to be strongly emotional while retaining an instinctive restraint, continues to astonish.
  10. The Prestige
    The Prestige does more than focus on magicians. It is so in love with the romance, wonder and ability to fool of stage illusion that it becomes something of a magic trick in and of itself
  11. Sleeping Dogs Lie
    Rather than the escalating gross-out spectacular it could have been, Sleeping Dogs Lie is an unexpectedly thoughtful look at what it takes to make relationships work.
  12. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
    This calm and thorough film has just the right attitude and tone to deal with a most incendiary story.
  13. Requiem
    In its subtlety, complexity and dexterity, Requiem is a notably original work.
  14. Masai: The Rain Warriors
    The film has its flaws -- the length of the arduous journey certainly could be conveyed with greater economy, the action is not dynamically depicted and the lack of character development makes it occasionally difficult to follow -- but the earnest minimalism of "Masai" makes it an unusual moviegoing experience.
  15. Sweet Land
    A type of American independent we don't see often enough.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    51 Birch Street
    What makes 51 Birch Street a moving revelation rather than a therapeutic exercise is Block's commitment to understanding his parents, Mike and Mina, on their own terms, regardless of what it does to his image of them.
  17. Hair High
    Smorgasbord of the bizarre. Hair High is not for everyone, but it's not like anything else out right now.
  18. The Grudge 2
    This is not the cool, eerie déjà vu, but the "Hey, isn't that exactly what happened in the first movie?" déjà vu.
  19. The Marine
    The Marine is bad in just the right way, a mindless throwaway that's at least smart enough not to take itself too seriously.
  20. Driving Lessons
    Driving Lessons follows the well-worn path laid down by other, better movies while making strained, ludicrous things happen toward the end.
  21. Infamous
    The problem is that the first half of Infamous is nowhere near as comic as McGrath intends. Instead the picture gives off a tone of arch stylization that plays as artificial, overwrought and off-putting.
  22. Nearing Grace
    This film is smart, funny and, thanks in no small part to David Geddes' cinematography, it occasionally approaches the poetic.
  23. The Ritchie Boys
    This is a film with a story we have not seen before, a story about American troops so unusual it needed a German director to ferret it out.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tideland
    Tideland is equally evocative of the pastoral mystery of an Andrew Wyeth painting and the looming menace of "Psycho." The disparity is fitting, because as Tideland unfolds, it's difficult to tell if you're watching a fantasy or a horror movie, or one superimposed on the other.
  25. Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker
    The film is forever trying to balance between being for younger teenagers and keeping their parents occupied as well, and never quite gets it right.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    One Night with the King
    There's not much joy in One Night With the King, a lavish but listless retelling of the biblical story of Esther.
  27. Hard Scrambled
    If Hay's style tends to the theatrical, his use of flashbacks, aided by Edie Ichioka's sharp editing and Matthew Heckerling's resourceful camera work, is entirely cinematic, revealing his clever way with plotting.
  28. The Departed
    Frequently excessive but never dull, The Departed is a little too much of a lot of the things that define Martin Scorsese films but it's also almost impossible to resist. Too operatic at times, too in love with violence and macho posturing at others, it's a potboiler dressed up in upscale designer clothes, but oh how that pot does boil.
  29. Little Children
    The movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.
  30. Employee of the Month
    This may be a just-for-fun comedy, but that shouldn't mean that it must entirely disconnect from the world.
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