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. The Stroll
    With the help of some vivid old photographs, their documentary reconstructs a world that was both darkly dangerous and strangely liberating.
  2. Confessions of a Good Samaritan
    As Lane wends her way to a conclusion of her own, it’d be a mistake to view “Confessions of a Good Samaritan,” with its serious curiosity balanced by a quirky theremin score and humorous asides, as Lane turning personal experience into public advocacy. She’s cagier than that.
  3. Silent Souls
    Silent Souls is a marvel. Fedorchenko's expressive powers and his visual prowess are astonishing, and though the film's conclusion is abrupt and confounding, it feels right.
  4. Stand by Me
    Stand By Me is the summer's great gift, a compassionate, perfectly performed look at the real heart of youth. It stands, sweet and strong, ribald, outrageous and funny, like its heroes themselves--a bit gamy around the edges, perhaps, but pure and fine clear through. It's one of those treasures absolutely not to be missed.
  5. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    A fascinating hybrid of a film. Even though its purpose couldn't be more serious, its style could hardly be more pulp.
  6. Retrograde
    Heineman’s trust in what his camera reveals — in the forlorn faces of U.S. soldiers, in the slump of Sadat’s demeanor, in the distraught eyes of a mother caught in that Kabul airport scrum of the desperate — tells its own necessary story of war wreckage.
  7. It Felt Like Love
    Hittman's debut isn't just a brilliantly tactile study of the mounting sexual curiosity and frustration of 14-year-old Lila (Gina Piersanti); it's also an important landmark in the oft-ignored subgenre of realistic movies about female adolescence.
  8. Dreamgirls
    Dreamgirls is the entire musical package, a triumph of old school on-screen glamour, and we wouldn't want it any other way.
  9. Outside In
    Duplass' puppy-dog affect may seem softer than you'd expect for a character who spent 20 years behind bars, but the actor's quietly wrenching performance gives the lie to any easy assumptions about the experience of the incarcerated. And Falco...gives a performance of aching depth and subtlety.
  10. Dogtown and Z-Boys
    A more impartial filmmaker might have understood the need for other voices to balance against all that attitude, might have understood how hungry the film makes us for even a single non-adulatory moment.
  11. All Quiet on the Western Front
    While it’s instructive to witness the luxuries enjoyed by the lofty and powerful — the tea, the wine, the pastries — in contrast with the soldier’s miserable starvation diet, it’s ultimately a mistake to cut away from Bäumer and his comrades, removing us from the physical and psychological hellscape to which they’ve been abandoned.
  12. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
    While Cruz wins us over with her emotionally charged amateur sleuthing, the weight of a constant struggle to not just gain acceptance, but survive fighting for it, gives France’s documentary a stirring poignancy.
  13. Flight
    A solid, often engrossing film that doesn't engage us overall the way Denzel Washington's work does.
  14. Tucker: The Man and His Dream
    Stylistically, the film is a dream. But in every case, the style has a reason. [12 Aug 1988]
    • Los Angeles Times
  15. 99 Homes
    Because of its strong dialogue and convincing acting, 99 Homes stays on point for quite some time, artfully disguising the film's increasing reliance on plot devices.
  16. Father of My Children
    What French writer-director Mia Hansen-Love has created is an extraordinarily empathetic humanistic drama, a film of love, joy, sadness and hope that understands how complex our emotions are and does beautiful justice to them.
  17. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    The Trial of the Chicago 7, smoothly entertaining as it is, may also elude clear consensus. Democracy is a messy business, but an element of real, lived-in messiness seems beyond this movie’s purview.
  18. Cloud
    The journey to that lethal, rolling boil is, in the hands of Japan’s premier suspense director, certainly a nail-biting one, a tale of carefully weighed clicks that lead to a lot of rashly pulled triggers.
  19. A Cop Movie
    The blurring of real testimony with a compassionate filmmaker’s inventions is so compelling that when the documentary portion arrives, the movie can’t help but sink a bit.
  20. 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.
  21. The Lunchbox
    One thing that makes Lunchbox so strong is that a touch of melancholy hangs over its sweetness. Finally this is a film about the wheel of life, about what helps us cope with its turns and find our way in its unforgiving labyrinth.
  22. Citizen K
    Citizen K uses Khodorkovsky’s story as a way to guide us through the thickets of modern Russian history, a tangled, through-the-looking-glass world that the film surveys from the days of Boris Yeltsin in 1991 to today’s increasingly autocratic reign of Vladimir Putin
  23. Dave
    Though replete with amusing situations and clever lines, its strongest suit is the delicately pitched comic performances of its actors, most especially star Kevin Kline.
  24. Shine a Light
    Shine a Light may not be the last Rolling Stones movie, but it's likely to be the last one with a touch of the poet about it.
  25. La Ciudad (The City)
    A most-affecting experience, an impressive accomplishment in all its aspects.
  26. Menace II Society
    Their instincts as filmmakers override their instincts as moralizers. Menace II Society is best--and most shocking--when it just sets out its horrors and lets us find our own way. [26 May 1993, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  27. Chuck & Buck
    Succeeds because it turns out not to be the movie it might so easily have been.
  28. Blue Car
    Even with its drawbacks, Blue Car remains an intimate, thoughtful drama, with a performance no one is likely to forget.
  29. This So-Called Disaster: Sam Shepard Directs the Late Henry Moss
    Surprisingly compelling viewing.
  30. A Very Long Engagement
    A resolutely odd, occasionally absurd movie, but it's as charming and stylish as one could expect from this pair - if you like that sort of thing.
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