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. Treating an incendiary issue in an austere, minimalist manner has turned The Assistant into an arresting independent drama.
  2. Gretel & Hansel is Perkins’ biggest film to date, and it cements a filmmaker in full possession of a visual prowess that few others with far longer filmographies can claim. But while he offers a stunning feast for the eyes, the substance is likely to leave viewers still hungry.
  3. The willingness to let Stephanie be human and react as such brings a sense of reality and authenticity back to the action-spy genre, which has become too slick.
  4. The movie’s sympathies, much like its political convictions, couldn’t be clearer. But paradoxically, what makes “Never Rarely Sometimes Always” so forceful — and certainly the most searingly confrontational American drama about abortion rights in recent memory — is its quality of understatement, its determination to build its argument not didactically but cinematically.
  5. As funny and ferocious as much of Zola is, it’s let down by an increasingly haphazard script that doesn’t know how to either sustain its humor or negotiate its turn into darker territory — and so, disappointingly, it waffles.
  6. There’s nothing notably new — or especially scary — about any of it.
  7. John Henry is a lead-footed revenge thriller that lands with all the subtlety of the mighty steel-driving man’s sledgehammer.
  8. What might have worked in theater doesn’t translate here, particularly the repetition of words and phrases that feel true to the original medium but grate here on screen.
  9. In Elsewhere, Jiménez has made a humanist film that deals sensitively with the processes of grief and moving on.
  10. Redoubt is slow going but not uninvolving. Barney’s filmmaking is less about the manipulation of image, or the roiling power of editing to create emotional states, than it is about dutifully documenting what he’s created, what he’s seeing, what’s on his mind.
  11. As an evening’s entertainment, it’s almost passable — genially diverting one minute, sour and self-satisfied the next. As a men’s fashion showcase, it’s exemplary — a parade of neatly tailored charcoal waistcoats, colorful flannel tracksuits and a lovely ribbed cardigan that Charlie Hunnam wears like a second skin.
  12. The movie is most successful when it ditches the particulars of the text and just grooves on how it feels to be displaced and disgruntled, stranded in a surreal mindscape that in some ways makes just as much sense as any other day on a dreary alpaca ranch.
  13. Director McMillin effectively interweaves the involving profiles into the lead-up to the big game, as the young players deal with the pressures placed on them by their respective schools and the expectations of family members, some facing the threat of deportation and other realities of living in Trump-era America.
  14. It’s Jasmine’s inept and unprofessional behavior during the film’s climactic trial that really sends the film into absurdist territory. It’s outdone only by a final sequence of events with a horror-show twist that might best be described as bonkers.
  15. This ambitiously titled documentary never really makes the reasons for its existence clear.
  16. This movie is gripping from start to finish, largely because of Marsan, who makes Jarvis both charismatic and complex.
  17. While Long gives it his trademark amiable best and Klabin and longtime collaborator Patrick Lawler cook up a heady cocktail of lively though budget-conscious visual effects, at the end of the day the Carl W. Lucas script feels more like a concept pitch than a fully-plotted proposition.
  18. While Pearce is typically superb as the hero — a self-doubting U.S. marshal named Jim Dillon — the film itself is otherwise utterly unremarkable. The combination of stiff, overwritten dialogue and flatly functional action sequences wastes a good lead performance.
  19. Some testimony here may rankle certain viewers, despite — or because of — Bloch’s attempt at evenhandedness. No matter, it’s a timely and essential portrait.
  20. Director Andy Newbery — working from a script credited to four writers — makes the story look classy but can’t find its beating heart.
  21. Lawrence doesn’t just steal scenes; he brings things back to earth, sometimes by expressing open contempt for the plot he’s mired in. His comic instincts are exactly what Bad Boys for Life needs as it tilts toward third-act grandiosity.
  22. While German actor Fürmann and especially Kingsley engage in a nimbly calculated game of cat and mouse, the film’s coup de grace fails to land with the intended punch.
  23. Troop Zero is bursting with personality and stylistic flourishes; it might be too twee for some, but it’s better to let yourself be won over by its sincerity and sweetness, tempered by just enough sadness and quirk.
  24. Jezebel is a reminder that in everyday human stories is proof that the world is wide, and that in going behind the doors that movies rarely open, there are even more worlds worth discovering.
  25. “Weathering” is a luminously beautiful film. Shinkai’s artists capture both micro- and macroscopic: the wonder of a raindrop acting a prism, casting refractions onto the surrounding surfaces and the glow produced by light shining through clouds.
  26. Do little? They could not have done less. The only appropriate adjective for this Dolittle is “hasty.” Everything feels slapdash and half-rendered; the plot proceeds in a fashion that could be described only as perfunctory. Everyone on screen seems to be in a stumbling daze, especially Downey as the frazzle-dazzled doctor.
  27. The filmmakers materialize a fascinating cinematic language that interrogates itself about matters of spontaneity and manipulation, man-made products and earth-given treasures, simplicity and sophistication, and how these all intersect.
  28. While Disco’d is an unvarnished, moving look at the lives affected by the rising crisis of homelessness, it could have used a bit more polish and structure in telling these stories.
  29. Even ignoring the fact that it was completed back in 2017, Reality Queen! a punishingly shrill, unfunny mockumentary about a social media darling of a Paris Hilton-type celebutante, can’t help but feel totally so yesterday.
  30. Like the original experiment, this film fails when it tries to impose a conclusion, rather than letting its meaning reveal itself naturally.

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