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. Tori and Lokita
    I think that the filmmakers’ pessimism is inseparable from their compassion and that their compassion is inseparable from their rage.
  2. Private Desert
    Buoyed by two superb performances, writer-director Aly Muritiba’s tenderly electrifying new feature is part sensual queer romance and part moving character study.
  3. Pacifiction
    In scene after scene, Serra holds beauty and menace in a kind of uneasy equilibrium. He’s made a trouble-in-paradise movie where the trouble doesn’t overwhelm the paradise so much as poison it, at an almost imperceptible slow drip, from the inside.
  4. Godland
    The problem with this priest — one of them, anyway — may not be an excess of spiritual fervor but rather a dearth of it, a lack of reverence for the beauty that Pálmason’s camera exalts in every magisterial frame. Lucas may be a blind wretch, but the creation through which he stumbles is a source of never-ending awe.
  5. Equinox Flower
    Ozu uses his austere style to express warmth, occasional humor and and a spirit of reconciliation; as usual, his repeated shots of people crossing a corridor suggest the passage through life. [19 Jan 1990, p.F10]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 76 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Music Man
    Arguably one of the best translations to film of any Broadway musical. [15 Nov 1991, p.F26]
    • Los Angeles Times
  7. Testament
    Lynne Littman's unforgettable, uncompromising and understated Testament is quite simply the most powerful anti-nuclear dramatic film ever made and stars Jane Alexander, superb as a woman trying to hold her family together in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. [10 Aug 1986, p.4]
    • Los Angeles Times
  8. Oppenheimer
    Not for the first time, the demonstrative cleverness of [Nolan's] storytelling can seem too precise, too hermetically sealed and engineered, for a sense of raw collective devastation to fully take hold. That might be a rare failing of this extraordinarily gripping and resonant movie, or it could be a minor mercy.
  9. Free Chol Soo Lee
    In its clear-eyed empathy for the totality of life, Free Chol Soo Lee is only deepened by not ignoring what happens when the spotlight fades on a righted wrong, and what’s left are demons, trauma, guilt and that thing both sought after and scary: being free.
  10. Other People's Children
    Partly drawn from Zlotowski’s own personal experience, Other People’s Children sneaks up on you, with a depth and complexity of feeling that throws those glossy, idyllic opening moments into bittersweet relief.
  11. Piggy
    Piggy is a masterful mix of dark comedy, social commentary and raw suspense.
  12. Last Flight Home
    Ultimately, and perhaps most beautifully, the film makes a case, à la the musical “Rent,” about how, in the end, we must measure our life in love. On that score, Eli Timoner left the world a very wealthy man.
  13. Scarlet
    Classify Pietro Marcello’s sweet new film Scarlet at your own risk, because its pleasures are as diverse and unexpected as a stroll through uncharted lands: Mapping the terrain wouldn’t be half as enjoyable as letting the place host its own truths and enchantments.
  14. Unicorn Wars
    An inspired antiwar epic that recently won the Goya Award (Spain’s equivalent to an Oscar) for animated film, Vazquez’s sophomore nightmarish fairy tale culminates with frighteningly revelatory imagery signaling the pattern of destruction that has characterized human history.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Train
    The last great action movie filmed in black and white. [04 Nov 1994, p.F17]
    • Los Angeles Times
  16. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
    Porous enough in their philosophical intent though as not to impose a strict meaning, and yet sufficiently potent to make us reassess our priorities, the array of interpersonal conflicts floating in the idiosyncratic “Blind Willow” feel like elegantly animated lucid dreams full of poetic imagery: far from realistic but viscerally truthful.
  17. Theater of Blood
    A triumph of stylish, witty Grand Guignol, it allows Price to range richly between humor and pathos as a crazed Shakespearean actor. It's not too much to say that if horror pictures were taken seriously Price would have been a 1973 Oscar contender. [24 Mar 2005, p.E15]
    • Los Angeles Times
  18. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    The remarkable debut from writer-director Michelle Garza Cervera is as effectively blood-curdling as it is intellectually incisive.
  19. Wildcat
    On its exotic surface, Wildcat might hold all the trappings of a standard wildlife conservation documentary, but lurking beneath the lushly photographed camouflage is a tenderly moving, deeply empathetic human survival story that has as much to do with emotional trauma as it does with the physical.
  20. Joyland
    A visually arresting, politically forceful melodrama from Pakistan.
  21. They All Laughed
    One of Peter Bogdanovich's most assured and ingratiating pictures, an unabashed romantic comedy of grace and sophistication featuring one of the most thoroughly likable groups of people seen on the screen in the '80s. [15 Apr 1990, p.5]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 94 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles
    Jeanne Dielman belongs to the rare class of films capable of transforming the world around you, though it requires the kind of patience and dedication that can be hard to come by at home. [23 Aug 2009, p.D10]
    • Los Angeles Times
  23. The Super 8 Years
    This moving, probing, beautifully written film doesn’t completely eschew nostalgia, but like Ernaux’s books, it treats the past as a prism, casting varying light depending on how, when and where it’s held.
  24. Twisters
    Even if Chung does leave us wanting just a little bit more romance, he delivers a supremely entertaining summer blockbuster in Twisters, one with a thematic heft that makes it even better than expected, and better than the first.
  25. A Thousand and One
    The film is utterly absorbing, anchored by the unpredictable performance of Taylor, playing a hopelessly complicated, but deeply caring woman.
  26. 20 Days in Mariupol
    Acrid and harrowing, it’ll slap you awake.
  27. You Hurt My Feelings
    Yes, You Hurt My Feelings explores the incident of its title and the risks and limits of total honesty in a relationship. But it’s also a funny and incisive look at middle-age malaise
  28. Past Lives
    This is at once the loftiest and the most grounded love story I’ve seen in some time, a movie that feels lingering and contemplative in the moment but is over as quickly (too quickly) as a drink with a long-absent friend.
  29. Flora and Son
    It’s almost unbelievable that Carney pulls off films like this, which could easily tip over into maudlin. Instead, the winning Flora and Son is an utterly irresistible emotional ear-worm.
  30. The Man in the Basement
    Le Guay effectively keeps the pressure on his characters and their loaded situation throughout, using ominous camera angles and anxious music cues to heighten the dread and uncertainty. He receives a fine assist from Renier and Cluzet, who commit to their divergent roles with unnerving intensity. It’s a terrific film.
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