Los Angeles Times' Scores

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:
16522 movie reviews
  1. That’s Entertainment! III is the sunniest of memento mori, a showy tribute to the flabbergasting musicals of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer that emphasizes both how delightful the genre was and how inescapably extinct it’s become.
  2. A raucous, weird, occasionally fascinating entry in the genre of disease-documenting, a portrait of raw nerve in the face of deteriorating nerves.
  3. The fact-based story, which is allowed to quietly unfold in a series of extended takes, has been stripped of all artifice, especially in regard to the pared-back performances of Harewood, a British actor with regular roles on “Homeland” and “Supergirl,” and Findley, who starred in Ava DuVernay’s 2012 breakthrough feature, “Middle of Nowhere.”
  4. A poetic attempt to re-create a bygone culture as not only a role model for the present but also a positive mythology for the future, the movie's strong visual qualities and epic emotions make it a bracing remedy to swallow.
  5. Beginning with a gentle lullaby and ending with a tightly packed wallop, Goodnight Mommy is one viscerally chilling, seriously unsettling horror film.
  6. You might say this magical, intoxicating piece of work does not have an ordinary bone in its body, and what a delight that turns out to be.
  7. The central mystery hinges on an audacious structural coup that produces a succession of giddy, breathless moments in the movie’s second half, as cinematographer Steve Yedlin and editor Bob Ducsay excel at reframing earlier plot points from revelatory new perspectives.
  8. To ascribe easy labels to A White, White Day — to call it a study of masculine rage or a portrait of a community perched at the edge of the world — is to risk bleeding it of its elemental poetry.
  9. Giving flair to the inevitable and imbuing those stakes with emotional heft are key to this type of patiently nasty, slow-boil noir. That Johnson understands this makes his feature debut a particularly confident and enjoyable one.
  10. Ultimately, this is a memorable look at our desire to love and feel safe, to connect and belong — and the unexpected ways in which families can reshape and grow.
  11. With Midnight in Paris, Allen has lightened up, allowed himself a treat and in the process created a gift for us and him.
  12. The Guardians is an intimate French epic, elegantly made and quietly emotional, a family story filled with characters whose lives we sink into, feeling the hope, the sadness, the sorrow and the joy right along with those on the screen.
  13. Master Japanese animator Mamoru Hosoda makes family films, but not in the way you think. It’s not that his films are suitable for all ages, though they mostly are. And it’s not even that the family unit is central to his work, though it is. Rather it’s that Hosoda’s films stretch the boundaries of both style and content within the family film rubric.
  14. Like so many globe-trotting thrillers and big-screen tourist brochures, it’s also a gleaming advertisement for Hollywood itself, a celebration and a reminder of how profoundly the movies have shaped our views of the world.
  15. Love and Death on Long Island is sharp, sophisticated and completely delicious, a purposeful comedy that focuses on the power of screen images to uproot lives and the poignancy of amour fou, totally mad love.
  16. Benediction, Terence Davies’ achingly beautiful portrait of the English war poet and soldier Siegfried Sassoon, is a movie of acute sadness and intense pleasure. The pleasure and the sadness are inextricable, which seems fitting, given how closely aesthetic bliss and moral despair were entwined in Sassoon’s own art.
  17. A War is a film done exactly right about a situation gone horribly wrong.
  18. The concision of its story and the elasticity of its themes are crucial to its peculiar potency: Operating within tight narrative and budgetary confines, Seimetz seeks to reshuffle our perceptions, to alter our sense of how movies can represent the unrepresentable.
  19. Nighy lures you into the impression that he’s sharing a private joke with you, a glimmer of comic insight into an unbearably sad situation.
  20. Mixes satire and suspense in unexpected ways in a film that is as darkly amusing as it is bitterly critical of bourgeois society's indifference to suffering.
  21. "Weeping" is a simple tale of animal estrangement and reconciliation that in its own quiet way manages to be soothing, hypnotic, even magical.
  22. Audacious and witty, The World's End is a strange brew.
  23. Top Spin grips, exhilarates and breaks hearts like the 1994 film "Hoop Dreams."
  24. An enigmatic, if perhaps hopeful, epilogue caps this sad, strange, at times weirdly poignant portrait.
  25. The lack of a strong narrative through-line makes for a film that is informative but dry. Nevertheless, it is an urgent plea for us all to make conscious choices in our consumption.
  26. It’s valuable when any vérité documentary with such a vantage point is able to show us how many societal ills — from addiction to gun violence to poverty to gentrification to incarceration — can touch one family, keeping them in a near-constantly reeling state.
  27. Reflected in its native language title (“My Lens”), Chinese Portrait is a personal reflection on the country’s past and present. Brimming with humanity, Wang’s contemplative, minimalist approach forces us to consider the day-to-day lives of these people, and perhaps our own.
  28. Directed by George Marshall, Destry revived Dietrich's waning screen career, and her barroom brawl with Una Merkel is a classic. [25 Aug 1996, p.74]
    • Los Angeles Times
  29. As a slice of ultra-orthodox life, Menashe offers an unusual — and unusually sympathetic — look inside a world that is often hidden from view.
  30. District 9 is very smart sci-fi, but that's just the beginning; it's also a scathing social satire hidden inside a terrific action thriller teeming with gross aliens and regrettable inter-species conflict. And it's a blast. . . .

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