Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,522 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 16522
  2. Mixed: 5,808 out of 16522
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16522
16522 movie reviews
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  1. Author: The JT LeRoy Story
    You may well question the worth of a documentary that so fully embraces the perspective of a narrator this unreliable, just as you may crave the reassuring conventions of a more balanced filmmaking approach. But even for those who don’t regard the notion of perfect objectivity with the wariness it deserves, there are compensatory insights in this movie’s unapologetic fascination with its subject.
  2. Antibirth
    Had the movie been just a little more thought through, it could have been a new classic. Antibirth is still quite good, though, with memorably surreal imagery and an abrasive texture that enhances Perez’s overall vision. As a portrait of a middle America full of forgotten people and ruined civilizations, this is one of the year’s scariest movies.
  3. The Wild Life
    The Wild Life is a family-friendly take on the story of Crusoe, with a twist, and kids no doubt will be drawn to the colorful animal characters, but there's a lack of emotional connection that makes the film just another cartoon flick, not a special favorite or animated classic.
  4. The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    It’s an off-putting mix of matters whimsical and disturbing, more obvious and ludicrous than chilling.
  5. An Art That Nature Makes: The Work of Rosamond Purcell
    One wishes Bernstein had more cleanly presented the arc of Purcell’s life and career and how her representative eye evolved. Nevertheless, the sheer number of images shown gives this brisk foray into Purcell’s work an admirable guided-tour feel.
  6. Black Women in Medicine
    It runs less than an hour, but the inspiring documentary Black Women in Medicine packs in enough smarts, context and emotional clarity for a far longer film.
  7. Kickboxer: Vengeance
    While Moussi has ample skills as a fighter — and is plenty handsome to boot — he lacks Van Damme’s charisma. It turns out that just slapping the title “Kickboxer” onto a movie isn’t enough to revive a B-movie favorite. The actual kickboxer matters.
  8. Klown Forever
    While their last movie managed to temper the outrageousness with an underlying goofy sweetness, the biggest offense here isn’t that it’s offensive, it’s just not all that funny.
  9. Zoom
    Is there a point to all these cheeky meta-shenanigans? Not really. Yet it’s hard not to share Morelli’s delight in the possibilities of an impossible story structure, and if the final work feels inevitably uneven, that’s less a flaw than a feature — a testament to the visual and tonal distinctiveness of the movie’s individual parts.
  10. Summer of 8
    The film is more mood and aesthetic than anything else, and it nails the fictionalized, aspirational high school look — down to the actors who appear to be in their mid-to-late 20s playing 18-year-olds.
  11. Yoga Hosers
    There’s enough weirdness for Yoga Hosers to possibly generate some stoner cult appeal, but it’s shoddily slapped together, with a clearly first-draft script, terrible editing (by Smith the elder) and continuity errors.
  12. The Light Between Oceans
    The actors hurl themselves into their roles with sufficient commitment and feeling that you believe in Tom and Isabel completely, even when the creaky narrative machinery around them begins to trigger your skepticism.
  13. Skiptrace
    Too much of this project feels like it’s been coldly calculated for maximum international box office.
  14. Game of Aces
    This sparsely populated film’s smart, enjoyable first half provides some nifty banter, fun character bits and a few jokey surprises. But the story turns a bit flat and convoluted as secrets are revealed, allegiances shift and bullets fly.
  15. Tell Me How I Die
    Dull and drab, the film squanders an attractive young cast and a killer title.
  16. Complete Unknown
    An intriguing entertainment that’s invigorated by smart filmmaking and potent acting by the virtuosic Weisz and her fine costar, Michael Shannon.
  17. Morgan
    It’s bland enough to serve as a kind of palate cleanser at the end of a long and punishing moviegoing summer.
  18. Mechanic: Resurrection
    When the sequel’ is really clicking, it becomes action cinema in its purest visual form: just one buff, taciturn dude doing major damage to his enemies. But those scenes constitute only about half of Mechanic: Resurrection.
  19. Natural Selection
    Enduring Natural Selection, with its painfully overt themes of good versus evil, absolution and redemption, is the true definition of survival of the fittest.
  20. Space Dogs: Adventure to the Moon
    The jokes aren’t especially clever, and the story’s too cluttered, adding characters that range from an aloof poodle (with a French accent, naturally) to a blustery American monkey (no comment) to a cute alien.
  21. Tunnel
    Unfortunately, there’s not enough story here to warrant the film’s more than two-hour running time; 90 taut minutes tracking a week in the ruined tunnel would have sufficed. Still, it’s a vivid and relatable tale.
  22. Spa Night
    Ahn’s erotically charged, quietly devastating drama suggests David might yet find a way to be true to himself, but it finds no easy answers for this good son.
  23. My King
    The actors wrestle passionately with compelling questions about attraction and love.
  24. The Intervention
    DuVall shows a welcome light touch with tone, easing back and forth between humor and neurosis and never treating her material as the last word on relationships.
  25. The Hollars
    Strouse’s deft script and Krasinki’s game direction upend a host of familiar moments in ways that are fresh and unexpected — if sometimes overly broad. The terrific cast doesn’t hurt.
  26. In Order of Disappearance
    An absorbing and atmospheric entry in what we might as well term the “red snow” genre.
  27. Floyd Norman: An Animated Life
    Like the man himself, Floyd Norman: An Animated Life is genial on the surface but lets us go a little deeper into an unusual life than we might have expected.
  28. Mia Madre
    With an unassuming directness, Moretti...toggles between work and life pressures in a way that finds the curious feelings and epiphanies that bind the two, and somehow give meaning to the whole dance.
  29. The Sea of Trees
    The Sea of Trees proves a stronger movie experience than one might expect. It’s anchored by a fine, understated performance by Matthew McConaughey and a deeply felt, if at times melodramatic, story that proves strangely immersive.
  30. Don't Breathe
    [Alvarez is] a master at orchestrating tension in close quarters, at painting his characters into a corner one minute and dangling them out a window the next.
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