Los Angeles Times' Scores

For 16,550 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:
16550 movie reviews
  1. Johnny Be Good, a would-be satire on the excesses of big-time college football recruiting, is so bad that the NCAA might consider using it as punishment for coaches who violate regulations.
  2. Its so-called audacity smacks of calculation and emotional cowardice.
  3. Save Mailer’s pushy “New Yawk” accent, the leads do what they can with their unconvincing characters and the rusty plot, but it’s a hopeless effort. Nice opening title sequence though.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    It also begs for an anarchic-camp approach, or else a deeper exploitation of the very real fears the common citizenry have of men in blue in so many urban climes nowadays.
  4. Jexi is such a dumb, lazy film that it might have even the most ardent cinephile reaching for their device, ready to defend their defection to the dark side when faced with this clunker of a comedy.
  5. Rather than speaking to the moment coherently, the movie communicates its message in loud fits of dull screaming.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    It’s the banal dialogue, lack of tension, one-note characterizations and overly earnest acting — even by such veterans as Treat Williams, Bruce Davison and Henry Thomas — that conspire to turn this potentially moving and exciting picture into mush.
  6. This teen musical comedy is set at a girls performing arts camp, but it never convinces the audience of anyone’s talent.
  7. There’s something admirably bravura about Beloved Beast, which just keeps going, hour after hour, grinding through dry, tedious scenes of lousy people misbehaving, with no end in sight. This is a movie about misery, which makes viewers feel every bit of the characters’ ennui.
  8. Awfully bewildering till the end, a final bombshell catapults the persistently nonsensical plot onto a level of implausibility that defies basic logic and ethics.
  9. Even the weakest horror anthology films can be redeemed by one good segment; but alas, the semi-comic compendium Holiday Hell is pretty dire from start to finish.
  10. A poorly produced experiment by writer-director Dae Hoon Kim, also the act’s lead singer on- and offscreen, the film’s mere existence baffles.
  11. John Henry is a lead-footed revenge thriller that lands with all the subtlety of the mighty steel-driving man’s sledgehammer.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    A true Golden Turkey starring Willie Aames and Phoebe Cates, who spend the movie in various stages of undress. This Blue Lagoon rip-off finds them playing two young people who find love at a desert oasis. [10 Feb 2000, p.F11]
    • Los Angeles Times
  12. This ambitiously titled documentary never really makes the reasons for its existence clear.
  13. Hool directs all this so lethargically you might suspect he’s gone missing in action himself.
  14. The jokes grate on you, the buoyancy seems feigned and none of the nonsense is lyrical. The talent involved seems misused. This film is conceived as a vehicle for Madonna and, even as such, it's a rattling failure. The movie diminishes her, the worst thing a vehicle can do. [10 Aug 1987, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  15. You forgive much due to obvious budgetary constraints. But the excruciatingly slow, soapy storytelling stifles emotional energy. It’s not easy to follow, hampered by severe logical lapses. Character threads abruptly drop. How anyone feels about anyone is unclear at any given moment.
  16. [An] inept, incoherent and charmless would-be romantic comedy-thriller.
  17. Blue City has exactly one thing to recommend it: Ry Cooder’s typically funky, steely, hard-edged score. Overall, it’s such a flabbergasting turkey--misfiring in every conceivable direction--that it may actually improve if you watch it with your eyes shut.
  18. Maybe the whole project should have been junked from the get-go.
  19. Watching Jade is such a hollow experience it’s hard to work up the energy to dismiss it. A movie where the car chases have more personality than the people, its monotone acting and recycled plot make one wonder, not for the first time, how something this tired ever got made.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Soft-core porn dressed up in a silly story about a murder at a sex-therapy clinic. [5 March 1993, p.F20]
    • Los Angeles Times
  20. The veneer of historical reality is thin on the baldly nativist and manipulative Serbian World War II movie Dara of Jasenovac, a slickly made extermination camp drama about child peril that will test the patience of even the most rigorous students of cultural representations of genocide.
  21. It is excruciating: a combination of Beth Henley’s insistently eccentric screenplay, Bruce Beresford’s frenzied direction and the sight of three singular talents on an acting roller coaster with no one riding the brakes.
  22. Warlock is supposedly about the battle between Good and Evil, but movies about the battle between Heckle and Jeckle have more terror or profundity. [17 Jan 1991, p.F12]
    • Los Angeles Times
  23. Relentlessly awful. Not even Terry Kiser’s wandering corpse is funny this time around.
  24. The Neverending Story 2 is a story you may want desperately to end. Soon. [11 Feb 1991, p.F10]
    • Los Angeles Times
  25. Thunder Force is at least an equal-opportunities bummer: It doesn’t work as a superhero adventure or a midlife reclamation movie or a mismatched buddy comedy or a family entertainment unless your aim is to disappoint all members of the family equally.

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