Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,524 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: 8,698 out of 16524
  2. Mixed: 5,809 out of 16524
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16524
16524 movie reviews
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  1. What a Man
    With its stock characters and low-expectation high jinks, the German import What a Man could have been fabricated on the Hollywood rom-com assembly line.
  2. The Purge
    A routine home invasion movie more interested in B-horror tropes and bloodletting than a thought-provoking look at "Hunger Games"-ish class warfare.
  3. Machete Kills
    Machete Kills winds up a slightly camp, tinny parody of bad action movies, playing out with the same sense of tedium as a genuine bad action movie.
  4. Knife Fight
    The underwhelming, would-be political satire Knife Fight plays more like a failed network TV pilot than the savvy feature it clearly set out to be. Think: Aaron Sorkin-lite, uh, really, really lite.
  5. Jobs
    There was a time when the slack storytelling, stock characterizations and general by-the-numbers feeling of the film could be put into perspective by saying it seemed like a TV biopic. But even TV movies are done with more verve than this these days.
  6. Inescapable
    Inescapable is like "Taken" without the tension.
  7. The Condemned
    A good idea for a ghost story is dead on arrival in The Condemned, a would-be thriller whose intended horror-tinged chills register as ho-hum hokum.
  8. The Power of Few
    Writer-director Leone Marucci has a scratch-worthy itch for plump visuals and flashy camera moves, but a limp way with dialogue and story, and — despite his cast — no grip on directing actors.
  9. Hunky Dory
    Laurence Coriat's shapeless script...pads its overlong running time with standard teen trauma — band squabbles, girl betrayals, skinhead brothers — that saps the audience's energy before the grand finale.
  10. Mental
    Writer-director P.J. Hogan may have based Mental on an actual incident from his childhood, but the crazy quilt of a movie that resulted feels anything but real.
  11. Annie
    Director Will Gluck's glam, grim re-imagining of the Depression-era musical about the hard-hearted rich man and the little girl who melts him, is truly depressing.
  12. Adventures of the Penguin King
    The inherent cinematic potential of one of nature's cutest animals rescues the film from being a total waste of time.
  13. Erased
    Erased is eminently forgettable.
  14. The English Teacher
    The English Teacher is a tragedy masquerading as a comedy and doing a disservice to both.
  15. Silver Circle
    There's plenty of action, some ping-ponging romance and even a bit of tension as Silver Circle spins its muddled tale. But it's all so overwhelmed by the rudimentary, computer-generated animation (characters don't so much walk as lurch and glide) that, well, the medium becomes the message.
  16. Beverly Hills Cop II
    It's hard to believe that the group who came up with the hard, clean edges of "Top Gun," sleek and unfeeling though it may have been, could make a picture as crude, as muddled, as destructo-Derbyish as this one. If Beverly Hills Cop II is its opening salvo, this is going to be a long, smoggy summer. [20 May 1987]
    • Los Angeles Times
  17. Detour
    For all the ways Dickerson vigorously dramatizes the stages of solitary confinement — nervous humor, fear, rages, survival ingenuity (including a nifty breathing apparatus) — it's never enough to explain why this particular individual's story is worth telling.
  18. Bert Stern: Original Madman
    Though the photographs are memorable, the photographer is not.
  19. Only God Forgives
    The Danish filmmaker's latest theater of the macabre is brutal, bloody, saturated with revenge, sex and death, yet stunningly devoid of meaning, purpose, emotion or decent lighting. Seriously. Artful shadows can certainly set a mood; too many and it merely looks like someone is trying too hard.
  20. Paradise: Love
    The film is, perhaps, intended as a deadpan burlesque of race and class and beauty ideals...but it plays more as a boorish, overextended punch line.
  21. Slacker
    Aside from preserving these folks for a presumably grateful posterity and convincingly depicting Austin as an open-air lunatic asylum, Slacker does not offer much to anyone who likes to stay awake.
  22. Stranded
    Stranded stops at being merely seriously dull and trite, rather than tipping into train-wreck silliness.
  23. Think Like a Man Too
    Mostly, the movie swings wildly between mania when Hart is on-screen and relative serenity when he's not. It gives the film a multiple-personality feel that does not work in its favor.
  24. When the Game Stands Tall
    A true tale of high school football achievement becomes a strained, by-the-numbers grab bag of uplift in the Christian sports drama When the Game Stands Tall.
  25. Walk of Shame
    Even without the queasy racial stereotypes, Walk of Shame feels perfunctorily assembled, its obstacles straining even screwball logic.
  26. One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das
    Insights are few in this fan letter of a documentary.
  27. The Guillotines
    An action fan could be forgiven for the medicinal taste that this slick but dissipating exercise leaves behind.
  28. 33 Postcards
    The climactic collision of agendas is even more contrived than everything leading to it.
  29. Blood
    Blood feels perfunctory, needing something besides fussy plotting to jolt it to life.
  30. Devil's Due
    We're more than 45 years out from Roman Polanski's director-controlled masterpiece in gestating terror, and yet no gimmick in Devil's Due — no point-of-view shock cut or shaky-cam "realism" — is as dread-inducing as tracking the grim revelations on Mia Farrow's face.
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