Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,533 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: 8,703 out of 16533
  2. Mixed: 5,813 out of 16533
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16533
16533 movie reviews
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  1. Malibu's Most Wanted
    After an hour, or two-thirds of the film, they run out of gas. This is the kind of material that's easier to set up than it is to bring together in a satisfying fashion.
  2. Venus and Mars
    Not exactly terrible, merely stale and pointless.
  3. A Mighty Wind
    The jokes would be funny even if they weren't perfectly timed, but what makes them come across as so poignant is the seriousness with which the director and his co-conspirators deliver their jabs and japes.
  4. Bulletproof Monk
    Began life as a comic book, and screenwriters Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, ever respectful of that lineage, have not allowed the film's dialogue or plot points to rise above their cartoonish origins.
  5. Chasing Papi
    A giddy, slight Latina-lib comedy.
  6. The Young Unknowns
    Jelski is a skilled filmmaker, and her sense of reality is so uncompromising that, even when tempered by a touch of dark humor, her film is a grim, hard-to-take business.
  7. XX/XY
    It's an overly familiar setup played out by overly familiar types but, curiously, what invests XX/XY with its tension is that there's no sense that Austin Chick, the film's capable young director and writer, knows what he feels about any of this.
  8. Better Luck Tomorrow
    It has the virtue of Lin's tangy wit but it also suffers from the vice of a director who, torn between personal vision and wide public reach, tends to smother his ideas under a veneer of cool.
  9. Khab-e sefid
    A sweet-natured Iranian film of considerable charm and humor that might have been more enjoyable had its writer-director-star, Hamid Jebelli, been a tad less self-indulgent in telling his slender tale.
  10. Anger Management
    Though what he does here pretty much defines coasting, Nicholson just fooling around adds an energy to even the kind of hopelessly contrived material that lets you know that the lowest common denominator just got lower.
  11. Going Down
    Teen sex comedies don't come more mindless than Joseph A. Pineda's Going Down, a movie so seriously underinspired it's hard to imagine it appealing to anyone but fantasy-prone middle schoolers who can barely wait to live it up like their older brothers and sisters.
  12. House of 1000 Corpses
    The endless gore and violence make the experience torturous -- and not just for the victims in the movie.
  13. The Rose Technique
    With The Rose Technique, producer-writer Ray Stroeber came up with a promising idea, but director Jon Scheide plays this pitch-dark comedy far too straight.
  14. DysFunktional Family
    Some may be offended by Eddie Griffin's blunt language, yet they would find it hard to deny that he tells it like it is.
  15. The Man Without a Past
    Offers up a subversive comic sensibility, one that somehow combines Buster Keaton's deadpan stare with Frank Capra's tireless optimism and filters them both through a black-ice Finnish point of view. Welcome to Aki World.
  16. Phone Booth
    Without question, the whole thing's absurd -- this is, remember, about a guy stuck in a phone booth -- but for its first 40 minutes or so it's also mildly entertaining, fueled by the nuttiness of the setup and Schumacher's energy.
  17. Manna from Heaven
    Suffers from an overcomplicated plot, an overpopulated cast, a lot of corny humor and artificial contrivance, topped by a sluggish pace.
  18. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion [re-release]
    A provocative political thriller that is as troubling today as when it came out in 1970. Maybe more so.
  19. What a Girl Wants
    Works well enough. It has a decided plus in its appealing young star, Amanda Bynes, last seen opposite Frankie Muniz in "Big Fat Liar."
  20. Levity
    About as well-meaning as a movie can get, but that's never enough to ensure it comes alive on the screen, which is sadly the case here.
  21. A Man Apart
    Though it wasn't planned this way, it's an amusing exercise to view A Man Apart as an allegory for the war in Iraq.
  22. Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
    Demonstrates how exciting and vital contemporary animated filmmaking is in Japan. The characters may not move with the fluidity of their American counterparts, but the story unfolds with a sinister grace that any live-action director might envy.
  23. Cet amour-là
    A crisp, elegantly resonant film.
  24. Fellini: I'm a Born Liar
    Both completely fascinating and intermittently frustrating; however, as with Fellini's own films, the downside is far outweighed by the pluses.
  25. The Good Thief
    Promising as it seems in theory, everything in this new version, like Lena Lamont's image in "Singin' In the Rain," falls apart as soon as the talking starts.
  26. Stevie
    Of course, James is exploiting Stevie, but the peculiar power of this film lies in James' indirect acknowledgment of it and his hope that his film has some point and value.
  27. Assassination Tango
    A wonderfully eccentric piece of filmmaking -- to demand it cohere to formula would be to miss the point.
  28. The Core
    If The Core finally has to be classified as a mess, it is an enjoyable one if you're in a throwback mood. After all, a film that comes up with a rare metal called Unobtainium can't be dismissed out of hand.
  29. Head of State
    Rock can't set up a decent-looking shot, and he doesn't care about niceties such as character development and all that narrative downtime in between jokes. But he nonetheless wrings biting humor from serious issues with the sort of ferocity that made Richard Pryor and Lenny Bruce men of respect as well as comedy.
  30. Raising Victor Vargas
    His film may be something of a beautiful lie, but what's true about Sollett's characters is that their dreams, their grace and their struggles are as real as it gets.
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