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 Hottest August
    Sometimes an experiment feels like just an experiment, and that’s where the well-intentioned query The Hottest August ultimately lands.
  2. Cinema Sabaya
    A wonderfully unforced, lightly intimate experience existing in a dramatic arena between observational nonfiction and bare-bones theater’s nowhere-to-go focus.
  3. OBEX
    What’s surprising is how ethereally effective Birney’s DIY gestalt is as a reverse state of consciousness: an outside where before there was only inside.
  4. Young@Heart
    This may sound like a suspect enterprise, a musical gimmick impossible to embrace, but the reality is otherwise. For what the members of this uncanny chorus lack in pure ability they make up for in irrepressible spirits and a desire to simply have fun.
  5. Rango
    Verbinski's greatest triumph is that he allowed the animation to free rather that confine him. There is indeed a new sheriff in town, with Rango destined to become a classic.
  6. Border
    Selected by Sweden as its entry for the foreign language Oscar, the refreshingly offbeat, sturdily handled Border is not just unlikely to resemble any of its subtitled competition but also anything else you’ll see this year.
  7. Aatsinki: The Story of Arctic Cowboys
    Aatsinki is a work of cinéma vérité of the highest order: vivid, immersive and unflinching.
  8. Waiting for August
    Waiting for August" is an impressive, if muted, debut documentary.
  9. Ali & Ava
    Barnard’s grounded yet kinetic filmmaking — her collaborators include director of photography Ole Bratt Birkeland and editor Maya Maffioli — catches you up in its own infectious, wittily syncopated rhythms.
  10. Emily the Criminal
    Plaza doesn’t have to steal scenes in Emily the Criminal. She plays the title role, and nearly every moment — starting with the one where Emily storms out (not for the last time) of a degrading job interview — rightly belongs to her.
  11. From Nowhere
    Newton draws us persuasively into the sheer normalcy of his characters’ world — and forces us to imagine the feeling of having that normalcy suddenly ripped away.
  12. Frank
    Odd, offbeat, somehow endearing, the bleakly comic Frank has its own kind of charm as well as some pointed, poignant things to say about the mysterious nature of creativity, where it comes from and where it might all go.
  13. Europa Europa
    This man whose family was almost entirely wiped out must feel like he's the recipient of a great cosmic joke, with his survival as the punch line. Europa Europa does justice to the joke.
  14. Easy Money
    This jazzy crime melodrama is engrossing and exhilarating because of Espinosa's impressive command of a wide range of filmmaking skills.
  15. The Kindergarten Teacher
    The Kindergarten Teacher may offer a less audacious, more stylistically muted version of its predecessor, but by the time its quietly perfect final shot arrives, the movie has reached the same provocative conclusion. It’s not poetry, exactly, but it’s pretty shattering prose.
  16. The Art of the Steal
    Energetically entertaining if a bit one-sided.
  17. Tin Men
    The year's most pungently offbeat comedy and the most improbable love story since King Kong sighted Fay Wray.
  18. Try Harder!
    As snapshots go of bright kids facing the next step, Try Harder! is winning enough, but considering how much more there is to follow up on, here’s hoping it’s only part one.
  19. Tokyo Godfathers
    As with the greatest animated films, the triumph of Kon's work lies not just in its beauty and singularly sophisticated storytelling but in how that beauty and storytelling combine to give the films a sting so human you can forget you're watching a cartoon.
  20. The Naked Gun
    [Schaffer's] Naked Gun doesn’t want to regress; it wants to surprise and surpass while never punching down. The film is so committed to its PG-13 rating that it manages to pull off some truly filthy, bawdy slapstick without exposing a frame of skin.
  21. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    [An] impressive and deeply felt documentary.
  22. Bodied
    From crisp academic arguments to sick burns, words spew, stutter, and startle, and as delivered by a totally committed Worthy, a soulful Jackie Long, and a posse of actors and rappers from the scene, the wordplay is dizzying, mesmerizing and intoxicating.
  23. The Load
    The overtly graphic isn’t Glavonic’s visual style, but rather a cold, more powerful image seepage — what a man’s physicality says about complicity, and what a shot of the muddied ground near a hosed-down truck says about what war does to the ground, a land and the soul.
  24. Fear and Trembling
    A dark comedy that reveals the stultifying rigidity of Japanese office life - which the film persuasively suggests endures to this day.
  25. Ruben Brandt, Collector
    An acrobatic, larkish globetrotting adventure about paintings and psychotherapy that defies easy categorization save inclusion on any adult animation fan’s must-see list, its slinky, colorful pleasures and wittily referential joie de vivre are like a lifeline in a season when the art house is typically beholden to severe, award-seeking bids to depress you.
  26. Man on the Train
    As a filmmaker, he (Leconte) doesn't have anything profound to say but does say his something with craft, visual flair and professionalism. Depending on your mood, that can be either too little or just enough.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Nightmare Alley
    Jules Furthman penned the uncompromising script; Edmund Goulding directed with a master hand. [05 Jun 2005, p.E12]
    • Los Angeles Times
  28. My Little Sister
    My Little Sister is frank and poignant. With a distinctive angle and the rawness of the cast’s first-rate performances, Chuat and Reymond elevate a premise that could have, in other hands, veered into the realm of the uninspired.
  29. Blaze
    That Hawke so closely aligns his cinematic style, inventive as it is, with the story’s disorderly, scruffily offbeat characters and settings is both a strength and a liability. His kaleidoscopic, at times ghostly, approach proves a valiant if studied effort.
  30. Down by Law
    The humor of Down by Law is marginally easier to describe than Stranger Than Paradise, but only because, by now, we have a small idea of Jarmusch's style. It's still a kind of humor that evaporates as you try to explain it. Also eluding description is the beauty, the street poetry and the precision of the images caught by Jarmusch and his cameraman, the great Robby Muller, whose black-and-white photography illuminated the early films of Wim Wenders. They have created a dream New Orleans, more succinct and more haunting than the city itself, and Lurie has set it to music.
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