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. Gas Food Lodging
    If that wistful, cleareyed melancholy were its primary mood, Gas Food Lodging might have been a little masterpiece. It isn't -- but it's good enough. Anders gets the externals of her vision of Laramie: a world of high skies, searing deserts, dusty stores and roads that vanish into a flat horizon. And the internals: the bickering, hurts, dreams and little everyday epiphanies. If many movies avoid or disguise the world, shining it up beyond recognition, Gas Food Lodging takes the opposite approach, a better one. It jumps right into life, faces it with careless affection, clarity and courage. [14 Aug 1982, p.F8]
    • Los Angeles Times
  2. Starting Out in the Evening
    Intelligent, involving and conspicuously adult, Starting Out in the Evening is almost shocking in its distinctiveness, its ability to create high drama from an unlikely source.
  3. Tori and Lokita
    I think that the filmmakers’ pessimism is inseparable from their compassion and that their compassion is inseparable from their rage.
  4. 3 Faces
    To describe 3 Faces as a multi-generational portrait would not be entirely inaccurate, though it would risk divesting the movie of its quotidian poetry, its deep reserves of mystery and its rich rewards for an open-hearted audience. Sometimes, as these characters understand by journey’s end, it’s important to go and discover the truth for yourself.
  5. Princess Mononoke
    Amore satisfying use of the medium would be difficult to imagine.
  6. Luzzu
    Sun-drenched Luzzu is an unaffected triumph with a simmering power, the type of deceivingly familiar film that helps us sail into a place and a lifestyle most of us ignore but that are made vividly compelling in the hand of a new storyteller with classically honed sensibilities.
  7. Full Metal Jacket
    In a superb cast of mostly unknowns -- with the exception of Matthew Modine and Dorain Harewood -- D'Onofrio, who put on 60 pounds for this pivotal role, and Ermey are exceptional. [26 June 1987]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Remember the Night
    Stanwyck deftly handles the film’s mix of pathos, comedy and romance. Remember the Night also demonstrates how capable MacMurray could be as leading man.
  9. Head-On
    Impeccably made, uncompromising in its implacable vision of the deranging power of love, sex and controlled substances, this savage and staggering film knows how to take our breath away.
  10. The Witches
    Unlike many “adult” moviemakers, Henson believed his core audience capable of appreciating wit, irony, topical humor, idealism, intense emotion and bemused reflections on real life and all its complexity. All these, and more, are present in The Witches.
  11. Lightning in a Bottle
    One terrific concert film.
  12. All That's Left of You
    Each new segment of All That’s Left of You is its own self-contained drama, but they build on one another, the past’s invisible weight bearing down on children who cannot fully comprehend the sorrow that came before, but have grown up knowing nothing else.
  13. Warfare
    Warfare is strictly the facts, and those alone are terrible, brave, intense, random, tedious and captivating.
  14. Glory
    An eloquent, heart-tugging Civil War epic about the first black infantry regiment to march off to battle for the Union. And epic is the word. Not since John Ford has a film maker created such dramatic large-scale Civil War battle scenes in a major theatrical film.
  15. The Deep End
    Exquisitely made with a mesmerizing sense of style, it shows the wonderful things that can happen when traditional material is both handled with care and adroitly updated.
  16. Aberdeen
    It could have done with fewer plot devices, but it is ultimately far more satisfying than countless less ambitious and risky films.
  17. The Taste of Others
    All of this romantic back and forth unfolds gradually and in charming ensemble style. As the characters think about seducing each other, as they inevitably complicate their lives without being able to help themselves, the film is simultaneously seducing us.
  18. Beware of Mr. Baker
    Writer-director Jay Bulger combines warts-heavy interview footage of Baker with vivid archival bits, concert clips, jaunty animation and chats with various musical greats to paint a lively portrait of yet another brilliant but wildly self-destructive artist.
  19. Women Who Kill
    Women Who Kill is delightfully specific in its approach to its characters and their community. It takes a familiar theme of romantic comedies — the fear of commitment — and gives it new life by adding a morbid element to the mix.
  20. In the Fog
    Intimate in the telling, sweeping in the implications, Loznitsa has created an unusually incisive film.
  21. A Bug's Life
    What A Bug's Life demonstrates is that when it comes to bugs, the most fun ones to hang out with hang exclusively with the gang at Pixar.
  22. American Revolutionary: The Evolution of Grace Lee Boggs
    A documentary that's admirably frank about the difficulties of insightfully portraying such a widely lauded — and subtly cagey and habitually self-effacing — figure.
  23. The War Room
    The Mr. Inside and Mr. Outside of the Arkansas governor’s presidential campaign, with Carville playing Huck Finn to Stephanopoulos’ Tom Sawyer, these lively presences lit up Clinton’s drive to the White House and turn The War Room into a tiptop political documentary that offers a candid and entertaining backstage look at a most unlikely electoral Juggernaut.
  24. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    Nothing quite prepares you for the rough-cut diamond that is Precious. A rare blend of pure entertainment and dark social commentary, this shockingly raw, surprisingly irreverent and absolutely unforgettable story.
  25. Funny Ha Ha
    As David Rakoff once wrote, "Youth isn't wasted on the young. It is perpetrated on the young." Exactly how is brilliantly captured by Andrew Bujalski in his debut feature, Funny Ha Ha.
  26. Police Story (1985)
    A brazen mix of head-through-the-glass violence and pie-in-the-face slapstick, with a dash of Capra-esque working-class comedy for good measure, Police Story is remarkably seamless in tone and execution.
  27. Dìdi
    Izaac Wang’s performance of this tortured teenage soul — so young, still in braces — is a sensitive expression of the insecurity Chris feels around others and anxiety about how he will be perceived. Wang’s performance is mirrored by Chen as his mother, a housewife with an artist’s heart. She delicately balances steeliness and vulnerability to deliver a heartrending performance.
  28. Welcome to Leith
    This cautionary tale couldn't be more timely or essential.
  29. After Yang
    The experience of watching it produces readily identifiable flavors and associations: It’s a gentle-toned family drama and a moody futuristic fable, with a faint techno-paranoid aroma, a melancholy mouthfeel and a lingering aftertaste of existential unease.
  30. Argentina, 1985
    In the hands of director and co-writer Santiago Mitre, co-writer Mariano Llinás and lead actor Ricardo Darín (“The Secret in Their Eyes”), Strassera is the slow-but-steady one in the story of “The Tortoise and The Junta: The Little Prosecutor Who Maybe Couldn’t, But Wouldn’t Quit.” He’s what one might call “endearingly competent.” The characterization they achieve is something rare and commendable: a lead who is interestingly uninteresting.
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