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. Not all of the ancillary characters and their stories are fully developed in the film’s quick 92 minutes, but Dating Amber convincingly channels the angst and awkwardness that can be a part of teenagers’ struggles with their identity.
  2. Polak’s film is an unflinching exploration of beauty, identity, sex and self in the wake of a life-changing event.
  3. A masterpiece of bromantic woes, the movie subdues toxic masculinity and makes a case for men’s often dismissed necessity for platonic companionship.
  4. The new Margot Robbie vehicle Dreamland seems to be about legends, the price of escape, maybe unreliable narrators — but ends up not saying much about any of them.
  5. The ending that seems meant to be wistful, even magical, reads instead as appalling, lamentable, gloomy, however you want to say “the opposite of wondrous and happy.”
  6. Freaky has a lighthearted tone and a bouncy energy that keeps it watchable, even though writer-director Christopher Landon and his co-writer, Michael Kennedy, don’t do as much as they should have with a killer idea.
    • Los Angeles Times
  7. If tension was the filmmakers’ aim, they decisively miss — especially if it was meant to come from the puzzlingly casual sniper situation. Any possibility of buying into the story’s reality is defused by the soldiers being so dang gabby, and loudly so.
  8. It’s an insightful, deeply felt film that lets us in on a personal evolution.
  9. Directed by Ron Howard and denuded of any meaningful politics to speak of, Hillbilly Elegy is an extended Oscar-clip montage in search of a larger purpose, an unwieldy slop bucket of door-smashing, child-slapping, husband-immolating histrionics.
  10. Mank demands your surrender, but also your heightened attention. It’s a pleasurably discombobulating experience, sometimes playing like mordant drawing-room comedy and sometimes flirting with expressionist nightmare, as when Welles’ dark silhouette looms over a bedridden Mank and his mummified leg.
  11. The film mixes horror elements with surreal fantasy and the crushing realism of a serious family drama. It’s metaphorical, vague but also precise in its specificity for the horrific trials these people are to face — their personal hell.
  12. Winocour shows us smart, sometimes insensitive and fundamentally decent people navigating an extraordinary situation and the sacrifices that are made in service of a grand collective undertaking.
  13. Writer-director David E. Talbert’s marvelous, groundbreaking musical-fantasy Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey stands to join the ranks of holiday movie classics. Smartly conceived, lovingly mounted and beautifully performed, this Victorian era-set extravaganza nearly sings out to be enjoyed as a communal, big-screen experience.
  14. In the end, what we’re left with is an exceptionally well-acted motion picture that mostly fails to move.
  15. Fire Will Come is a pithy and devastating masterstroke from an auteur astute in his calibration of subdued emotional impact. Its discourse on forgiveness simmers in one’s mind inextinguishably.
  16. It isn’t exactly terrifying, but is well-acted and sinister enough to rise (levitate ominously?) above the pack.
  17. This dire and dreamy road movie is impressive work from director and co-writer Winkler (he co-wrote with Theodore Bressman and David Branson Smith).
  18. The Informer isn’t bad. It’s just nothing special. It relies too much on familiar elements. It’s the same throbbing score, the same expected betrayals and the same smiling, sadistic bad guys.
  19. In many ways, it feels like the midcentury pulp thrillers it emulates: well-plotted and grisly, but almost ephemeral. It is Lane’s performance that lingers, one that dares to be uniquely hopeful about the future, and letting the old ways die.
  20. The filmmaker deftly moves backward and forward in time to chronicle Ngoy’s remarkable journey from war-torn Cambodia to the strip malls of Orange County while becoming a multimillionaire.
  21. For its merits as a dynamic nonfiction piece incisively dealing with a pivotal issue from heartbreakingly human angle, Us Kids is indispensable viewing for anyone who genuinely cares about the future of this country beyond “thoughts and prayers.”
  22. A crafty feature debut for the English writer-director Remi Weekes, His House is one of those return-of-the-repressed freakouts in which suspense and social conscience effectively breathe as one. That’s the idea, anyway.
  23. The story is deceptively simple. However, built around a universal quandary of our tech-obsessed modern world, underpinned with a folkloric tale that appeals to our most primal child selves — yearning for acceptance and connection — it has a heavy metaphorical resonance.
  24. “Wolfboy” is a compassionate film with some insight into being different and into the destructiveness of letting the world’s unkindness shape one’s self view.
  25. If scares are the movie’s raison d’etre, though, it’s hard to imagine Spell will frighten anyone but those vulnerable to a few bits of graphic gore.
  26. “The First” is a zippy 93-minute comedic adventure that embraces all the familiar building blocks of classic “Lupin III” stories: impressive car chases, impeccable disguises, impossible escapes and Lupin taking on an evil organization.
  27. In such troubled times, one supposes there’s comfort to be found in the lack of adventurousness of Holidate, but it’s like opening the same present again and again.
  28. With City Hall, his 45th feature, he [Wiseman] has composed another epic from a series of intricate, carefully arranged miniatures, a four-and-a-half-hour sprawl of a movie that will leave you admiring its agility and concision.
  29. Everything hums along until it abruptly crashes and burns, and one can’t help but wonder if the film was picked apart to fit a PG-13 rating (the original is R) and a sub-100-minute runtime.
  30. Sometimes when the moment comes to reconcile our feelings, we freeze or fumble the opportunity; other times, when we finally process the emotions and can articulate the thoughts, it is too late to communicate them. Coming Home Again, sweetly, sometimes painfully, evokes this experience.

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