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 message is lost in this laughably deck-stacked journey, a movie-long version of "They started it!"
  2. Director Jason James, working off a darkly amusing, often lovely script by Jason Filiatrault, effectively juggles the film's disparate, tone-shifting parts and bits of magic realism while coaxing memorable performances from Middleditch, Weixler and Bang.
  3. A few plot contrivances aside, Padman is a well-told and performed film that compellingly fills its lengthy running time with hope, resolve and exuberance.
  4. The movie...resembles a sloppily tended garden plot where crude sight gags and violent set-pieces flourish like weeds, but anything resembling actual humor or delight refuses to take root.
  5. With such a fractured narrative, it's difficult to get into a groove with these short, shallow and over-simplified stories.
  6. Made with its subject's cooperation and talking to people like comrade in arms Gloria Steinem and Allred's daughter, fellow attorney Lisa Bloom, the film allows us, at least to a certain extent, to get behind the public persona to the private person.
  7. This watered-down rom-com doesn't fully deliver but it's a diverting twist on the genre nonetheless.
  8. The colorful animated comedy Monster Family relies so heavily on pratfalls, slapstick and other bits of rude or raucous action that it undercuts whatever good intentions its workable story may have had.
  9. Permission asks difficult questions and doesn't offer easy answers. But while it deals with heavy relationship issues including the validity of monogamy, it manages an easy, seemingly effortless humor that seduces the audience while simultaneously breaking filmgoers' hearts.
  10. Despite his attempt to graft an environmental message onto a traditional musical template, there's little about director Danny Baron's feature debut that feels convincingly organic to either the plotting or the characterizations.
  11. Sexy and sexually frank, Becks works thanks to the musical talent and offbeat charms of its lead. Hall feels authentic at each moment, whether she's strumming a guitar in a dive bar, fighting with her mother or falling in love.
  12. Though the sequences of the actual heroism on the Paris-bound train are fully as crisp and involving as you'd expect, the other sections of the film, intent on demonstrating how undeniably everyday the three participants were up to that crucial moment, fall regrettably flat.
  13. If liberation is the endgame of Fifty Shades Freed, most of the time we feel trapped right alongside the characters, immobilized by the pointless, suffocating beauty and the stultifying dramatic inertia of the world James has created for them.
  14. Energized to a thrilling extent by a myriad of Afrocentric influences, Black Panther showcases a vivid inventiveness that underscores the obvious point that we want all cultures and colors represented on screen because that makes for a richness of cinematic experience that everyone enjoys being exposed to.
  15. Narrative incompetence is one of the more venial sins of big-budget filmmaking, but there is something particularly ugly and cynical about the sloppiness of The Cloverfield Paradox, as if its status as a franchise stepping stone excused its blithe contempt for the audience's satisfaction.
  16. No matter how many non-sequitur jolts they manage to squeeze into these jumpy proceedings, the ability to sustain a sense of dread, to create tension that lasts beyond the immediate moment, seems dispiritingly beyond their grasp.
  17. It's Momoa's show and he brings strength, warmth and gravitas to a part that, thanks to an emotionally-grounded script by Thomas Pa'a Sibbett, based on Mike Nilon's story), proves more than just "Conan, the Lumberjack."
  18. Ultimately, Wastelander is a movie for fetishists, who likely won't care about the emptiness at its center so long as its surfaces are as smothered with cheese as the straight-to-VHS junk they loved as a kid.
  19. The pedestrian filmmaking and community-theater pacing mostly recalls PBS pledge drives hawking Bocelli records.
  20. A decent premise — and a game Gina Carano — get left in the dust kicked up by Scorched Earth, a dull, draggy post-apocalyptic western set in the not-too-distant, environmentally toxic future.
  21. Amid the verisimilitude of location shooting and a cast of mostly nonprofessionals playing fictionalized versions of themselves, Carpignano inserts poetic touches.
  22. Like the best of dreams, familiar yet wondrously different, On Body and Soul adroitly mixes recognizable cinematic tropes with extraordinary ideas that are very much the filmmaker's own.
  23. A Lesson in Cruelty tries to affect a dark comedic tone, but fails spectacularly. There's no comedy, despite Lebrun's over-the-top vamping, and the dark elements are far too disturbing and violent.
  24. Liu gives you plenty to listen to, but don't forget to look: Beyond the formulaic thriller plotting and the showy verbiage, it's the movie's richly textured vision of urban decay that stays with you.
  25. It's a no-go from the get-go with its labored stabs at humor and satire, doltish characters, utter disconnection from reality (even for a spoof) and scenes stretched to the breaking point.
  26. Truth be told, Lies We Tell is a pretentious and muddled dud of a melodrama.
  27. Writer-director Norman Gregory McGuire needed to better flesh out his inconsistent main characters, clarify their goals and motivations, and deepen their journey with more vivid set pieces and fewer clichés.
  28. Writer-director Brian A. Metcalf avoids the usual found-footage looseness, instead relying on scripted dialogue and professional actors (including former child star Thomas Ian Nicholas, who also produced). The cast is strong but their lines are painfully stilted.
  29. If Before We Vanish isn't nearly as focused or accomplished as Kurosawa's horror masterpiece "Cure" (2001), or as shattering as his magnum opus "Tokyo Sonata" (2008), it's nonetheless a reminder that he has few equals when it comes to spinning even the flimsiest B-movie template into a cinema of ideas.
  30. At just 81 minutes, The Cage Fighter has been whittled down to its fighting weight, trimmed of every ounce of fat. Unay tells Carman's story without interviews or narration, but the film lands every punch without their help.

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