Los Angeles Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 16,532 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: 8,702 out of 16532
  2. Mixed: 5,813 out of 16532
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16532
16532 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
    Despite its good intentions, Spirit is more self-conscious and uninspiring from a dramatic point of view than one might have wished. Still, whenever it threatens to get bogged down in earnest dramaturgy, a stirring visual sequence -- rouses us.
  2. Enough
    Lacking a real actress, director Michael Apted is called upon to fudge the facts and make Slim's ordeal as taut as possible. He gets the job done, but the suspense scenes have a generic fright-by-numbers feel that tell us he's wearing his professional hat and knows it.
  3. Insomnia
    Insomnia shows an equally welcome ability: a gift of creating intelligent, engrossing popular entertainment.
  4. The Importance of Being Earnest
    The result is a film that is at best highly uneven and perversely at odds with itself. Luckily, Wilde's delicious sense of absurdity and peerlessly witty dialogue are pretty indestructible, and "Earnest" itself remains a peerless comedy of manners.
  5. Late Marriage
    Late Marriage will assuredly rank as one of the cleverest, most deceptively amusing comedies of the year.
  6. The Believer
    Admirably ambitious and utterly unsparing, but as credible as the arc of Danny's odyssey is in itself, the all-important need to evoke a profound sense of the enigmatic and paradoxical in relation to Danny's fate has eluded Bean.
  7. About a Boy
    Because a gradually thawing Will plays more to Grant's strengths, the second part of the film, helped as well by Rachel Weisz as a love interest, is much more fun. But it is still hard not to feel that this film is pushing us too hard, slickly trying to seem more honest than it actually is.
  8. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    Only a teenage boy could find this kind of stuff continually diverting, and only a teenage boy would not notice flimsy emotions and underdeveloped acting. It seems George Lucas, like Peter Pan, has never really grown up.
  9. Ultimate X: The Movie
    The film's strengths may actually work against it with younger fans who might be disappointed by the few stomach-churning, white-knuckler moments.
  10. Blackwoods
    Always a welcome presence in any film, Howard, as a simple-minded hick, gives Blackwoods whatever humor and life it has.
  11. The Lady and the Duke
    Just as interesting, if not more so, is how Rohmer integrates his very contemporary concerns into a period drama, how he creates characters who manage to be true to our times as well as their own.
  12. Unfaithful
    Though it is difficult to take Unfaithful as seriously as it takes itself, on its own terms it's quite well done.
  13. The New Guy
    An unintentional parody of every teen movie made in the last five years. Which can be the only rational explanation for making such a mess all over the screen.
  14. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India
    Raises it to the level of an art film with fully drawn characters, a serious underlying theme, and a sophisticated style and point of view.
  15. Home Movie
    There is something reassuring in seeing free-thinking individuals express their personalities so emphatically yet invitingly in the places they live.
  16. The Mystic Masseur
    The result is an eccentric, amusing fable that moves at an unhurried island pace, a picturesque tale that Merchant seems to have invested with an almost personal sense of spirit.
  17. A Shot at Glory
    Not as distinctive or even as humorous as its needs to be to stand out, but it has clearly been made with affection and care.
  18. Warm Water Under a Red Bridge
    May well be Imamura's funniest film; it is also one of his most accomplished. It is the work of a mature artist who has kept his adventurous spirit alive, which he has expressed in a complex and risky work carried off with an effortlessness that comes only from wisdom and experience.
  19. Hollywood Ending
    It's as sad and painful to report as it is to experience, but Hollywood Ending makes the conclusion inescapable: Woody Allen has become his own worst enemy.
  20. Fleeing by Night
    An exquisite love story directed with admirable subtlety and sensitivity.
  21. Spider-Man
    Spider-Man may look like an action comic come to life, but its best feature is its romance comic heart. It's that rare cartoon movie in which the villain is less involving than the love story.
  22. The Other Brother
    Perfectly pleasant if slightly pokey comedy.
  23. Circuit
    At once a sexy soap opera, at times lurid and bathetic, and also a gritty cautionary tale made by a filmmaker honest enough to have it both ways.
    • 5 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    Vulgar
    Johnson does seem to have some psycho-sexual ax to grind amid all this visual and sexual crudity. For instance, women barely figure in the action, with Will taking on various stereotypical feminine attributes. But good luck finding meaning in all this mess.
  25. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    A more impartial filmmaker might have understood the need for other voices to balance against all that attitude, might have understood how hungry the film makes us for even a single non-adulatory moment.
  26. Life or Something Like It
    Amiably glossy if naggingly old-fashioned.
  27. Jason X
    Like a dinner-theater version of the "Alien" movies without the good grooming.
  28. Night at the Golden Eagle
    A modest pleasure that accomplishes its goals with ease and confidence.
  29. Rain
    Moves way past the predictable into the shocking. Indeed, the film is so expertly structured and paced that its denouement knocks you off your feet.
  30. The Salton Sea
    Taking issue with efforts like The Salton Sea, cold and unemotional films that couldn't be more pleased at the opportunity to enthusiastically drag audiences through unhappy material, is as futile as getting mad at the wind.
    • Los Angeles Times
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »