Los Angeles Times' Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 8,697 out of 16520
  2. Mixed: 5,806 out of 16520
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16520
16520 movie reviews
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  1. Mary Queen of Scots
    Bright and charismatic though Mary was, she was, in effect, born under a bad sign, fated, despite all her advantages, not to have anything like the happily ever after that royals have in fairy tales and Disney movies. In a similar way, despite numerous advantages (including splendid cinematography by John Mathieson), the film with her name on it has promise it does not fully deliver on. But when those queens are on the screen, all bets are off.
  2. Swimming with Men
    Oliver Parker’s Swimming with Men is a lazily formulaic male-bonding comedy.
  3. Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes
    The result is a compelling but chilling film, one that is inevitably disheartening and disturbing as it details both how Ailes came to understand the nature and power of fear and how he honed his craft until he could sell fear to his fellow citizens like it was going out of style.
  4. Head Full of Honey
    It’s a potentially warm and delicate story that required a scalpel, but saw the blunt end of a sledgehammer instead.
  5. The Marriage
    Overall this is a solid portrait of time’s effect on what we miss, and how we miss.
  6. Back Roads
    Though there’s an abiding sensitivity in the often-noirish approach to the story’s many traumas and its characters’ flailing attempts at coping, as a whole it’s something of a tonal mess.
  7. The Party's Just Beginning
    Gillan, returning to her Highlands roots to spotlight a depressingly high suicide rate there among young people, has not only given herself an expectedly meaty role that walks a fine line between sad and bitterly funny, but she’s proven to be a director with a keen eye for expressive visuals.
  8. Write When You Get Work
    Write When You Get Work doesn’t work. Not as a romance, not as a Robin Hood-tinged caper flick, not as a social commentary on racial inequity or classism, and not as a male-buddy picture — all elements director Stacy Cochran attempts to wedge into her often muddled, under-focused script.
  9. Mr. Fish: Cartooning from the Deep End
    Sketches a provocative portrait of the prolific, trenchantly talented artist and satirist.
  10. Happy as Lazzaro
    Happy as Lazzaro is slow to reveal its full shape: It’s a realist snapshot of downtrodden lives that gradually takes on shadings of fable and myth, a deceptively plain story that, by the end, all but glows with wonderment and surprise.
  11. Everybody Knows
    For those with little prior knowledge of Farhadi’s earlier work, Everybody Knows will play like an intelligent, engrossing drama about a sudden family tragedy that reopens past wounds. The director’s admirers, myself included, might find it harder to get past a dramatic approach that, sturdy though it may be, is starting to harden into formula.
  12. Never Look Away
    The lines between good and evil are clearly demarcated at the outset and remain more or less fixed as the story progresses, a strategy that in no way compromises the filmmaker’s ability to mine fresh complications and surprises from his story.
  13. People's Republic of Desire
    Though all these technological trappings are newer than new, the human needs for happiness, applause and emotional connection are classic. The ability of People’s Republic of Desire to show these familiar desires playing out in futuristic surroundings is invariably surprising and never less than compelling.
  14. Bathtubs Over Broadway
    There is a guileless quality to the enterprise as Young interviews stars such as Chita Rivera, Florence Henderson and Martin Short who worked in industrials, as well as the lesser known performers and songwriters who became his heroes.
  15. The Great Buddha+
    As savagely satirical as it is gorgeously surreal, The Great Buddha+ is something else again — an outrageous, poignant punk Taiwanese black comedy marking the feature arrival of fresh filmmaking talent Huang Hsin-Yao.
  16. Martyr
    It leaves one with the sense that Khaled wishes to reclaim a headline-tainted religious status from the acts of violent men and bestow that mournful grace to people in an everyday struggle with sensitivity and hopelessness.
  17. Alanis
    Filmmaker Anahí Berneri, through her tough single-mother protagonist, mesmerizingly realized by Sofía Gala Castiglione, offers a no-apologies look at a member of a risk-taking underclass dinged on all sides.
  18. Making the Five Heartbeats
    Robert Townsend’s reflective Making the Five Heartbeats serves as an illuminating documentary detailing the considerable passion and perseverance that went into bringing his dream project to the big screen.
  19. Mirai
    Master Japanese animator Mamoru Hosoda makes family films, but not in the way you think. It’s not that his films are suitable for all ages, though they mostly are. And it’s not even that the family unit is central to his work, though it is. Rather it’s that Hosoda’s films stretch the boundaries of both style and content within the family film rubric.
  20. Dead in a Week: Or Your Money Back
    A stellar cast and a breezy tone partially compensate for the movie’s shortcomings.
  21. Blood Brother
    Director John Pogue brings some grit and energy to the action sequences, but ultimately Blood Brother is just a compendium of pulp clichés, with nothing to say about these characters or the worlds they inhabit.
  22. Default
    Default successfully turns a global financial crisis into a movie that’s at once engaging and educational.
  23. Ghostbox Cowboy
    The film’s as eclectic as it is eccentric, and it stays true to its own twisted sense of poetry, all the way to an epilogue that’s somehow even odder than anything that came before.
  24. DriverX
    The acting throughout is excellent; and it helps that Barrial isn’t playing Leonard’s predicament for cheap laughs or amped-up drama. Instead, he’s documenting what it’s like these days, to try and find some meaning in life while scrounging all night long, terrified to miss whatever meager scraps are being tossed.
  25. Stadium Anthems
    Its incoherent script is packed with more “Star Wars” references than Kevin Smith’s entire oeuvre, but none of the laughs.
  26. Sex Weather
    The script has a certain memoiristic quality that would edge into self-indulgence if McGhee and Stonebraker weren’t such warm and disarming presences on screen.
  27. Meow Wolf: Origin Story
    Other than showing moments of in-fighting, Meow Wolf: Origin Story is an almost entirely positive exploration of the collective and their art — but it’s an effective one.
  28. Invisible Hands
    The lack of a strong narrative through-line makes for a film that is informative but dry. Nevertheless, it is an urgent plea for us all to make conscious choices in our consumption.
  29. Song of Back and Neck
    The story...never comes together as a satisfying whole, even if it all proves relatively painless viewing.
  30. Elliot: The Littlest Reindeer
    This fantasy, about a miniature horse aching to join Santa’s team of reindeer, works hard but underwhelms.
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