Los Angeles Times' Scores

For 16,520 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:
16520 movie reviews
  1. The events of Woodstock have been told, so it’s refreshing that this documentary draws out the details one might not have heard before — the food donations from the town, the volunteer Army doctors, the attendees who stayed to pick up trash.
  2. The resulting film is a gripping story about a search for justice amid systemic corruption.
  3. The film, which adeptly touches on then-apartheid South Africa’s thorny intersection of religion, politics and racism, smartly eschews lurking melodrama and easy outs for subtle tension, tender symbolism, stirring musical bits and effective flights of fancy.
  4. There are times when this visual twist confuses rather than elucidates. However, there’s no denying the bracing, honest nature of Mouthpiece, a truly revolutionary piece of filmmaking.
  5. Even as it borrows a few beats and riffs from the coming-of-age drama (and from Sotomayor’s own childhood), Too Late to Die Young is marked by a fascinating open-endedness, a strange and intriguing reticence as to who and what it’s really about.
  6. [An] authoritative and engrossing documentary.
  7. A warm, emotional and completely involving film about the celebrated tenor.
  8. Avant’s skin color is one aspect of his inspiring story, for sure, but the heart inside The Black Godfather — and the ways an honorable soul with personal power can effect meaningful change — spins its own joyful melody.
  9. The man is the movie, and the long stretch of lived road Frank describes as an immigrant grappling with his adopted country’s faults is revealing, at times heartbreakingly so.
  10. Late Night is that rare thing: a deft and intelligent entertainment that can touch on serious issues because being funny is something it never forgets to do.
  11. Amid all the clunky lines, the derivative plot turns and the surprisingly indifferent production values, you can sense this movie striving for something more sensitive and intimate than the usual blockbuster blowout.
  12. This increasingly convoluted tale moves quickly but goes nowhere.
  13. The cast is talented — and occasionally funny — but they run out of fertile material quickly.
  14. It’s a little like a post-apocalyptic survivalist thriller, crossed with Lynn Ramsay’s impressionistic masterpiece “Morvern Callar,” crossed with a Radiohead video. Not all of those pieces fit together. But they combine into something strikingly original.
  15. Halston places the designer at the top of fashion’s most influential artists, but it avoids hagiography, showing his ego and addiction. Unfortunately, just as Halston did in life, this documentary avoids delving deeply into the mysterious man.
  16. An exceptional tribute.
  17. As Gamal, himself raised in a leper colony, knowingly navigates the uncomfortable glares he encounters along the way, Yomeddine (Arabic for “judgment day”) takes an affecting path toward belonging and acceptance.
  18. It’s as absorbing as a caper, as maddening as a broken romance, and as thought-provoking as an impassioned editorial.
  19. As the true purpose of the quest becomes clearer, Huang raises the film’s stakes, aiming for a profundity that he can’t quite hit — though he takes a solid shot.
  20. There’s just not enough of that good De Palma stuff here. The lush Pino Donaggio score and some well-choreographed chase sequences only hint at the movie Domino could’ve been, if a great artist had been granted access to his full palette.
  21. Ultimately, Ferrara makes a convincing case for being Pasolini’s biographical caretaker, one troublemaker looking after another’s legacy, albeit with a more serious, thoughtful approach than a transgressive one.
  22. Amazingly, somehow, an overstuffed Godzilla movie feels scant.
  23. Ma
    Spencer succeeds much more than the movie itself does; even when the writing and the filmmaking fail her, which is annoyingly often, she’s awfully good at using her beatific smile and tough-talking charm to elicit your nervous chuckles.
  24. Always Be My Maybe is pleasant without being particularly powerful, appealing if not exactly transformative.
  25. A numbingly obtuse experience, a feat of maddeningly indulgent non-storytelling hiding behind a symphony of bared midriffs and jiggling derrières. ... Kechiche doesn’t just sell out his characters, his story and his collaborators; he sells out his own talent.
  26. Perfect also shows that striking images alone aren’t always enough. Alcazar and cinematographer Matthias Koenigswieser have concocted some fine illustrations. Now all they need is some decent text.
  27. Amanda Crew and Adam Brody give bracingly realistic performances as a grief-stricken couple in “Isabelle,” a supernatural thriller ultimately too sensationalistic to make proper use of the stars’ excellent work.
  28. Even with solid supporting performances by Morgan Freeman, Robert Patrick and Peter Stormare, this movie’s just … well, sad. Twenty-five years ago, this exact cast and creative team might have turned this material into something to rival “Harper” or “Body Heat.” Now, they all seem slower and lazier: as committed to making a taut mystery as they are to mastering a Texas drawl.
  29. There’s nothing especially original about “Assimilate.” But director John Murlowski and a talented young cast — including Joel Courtney, Calum Worthy and Andi Matichak as the plucky high schoolers trying to save their town — do at least keep the action lively and unpretentious.
  30. Avengement features a good balance of colorfully profane British gangster-speak and intense, explicitly gory punch-outs.

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