Los Angeles Times' Scores

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:
16522 movie reviews
  1. The cryptic and mysterious story is crammed with overwrought issues — cancer, divorce, fraud, war — which the characters then over-explain.
  2. Matthiesen offers no easy answers, but The Model paints a decidedly unglamorous picture, while pulling back the curtain on the exploitative realities of the business.
  3. The movie sports more personality than most low-budget thrillers, yet sometimes devolves into the kind of ponderousness that a collaborator might have second-guessed.
  4. Ultimately, it’s a fascinating depiction of the way men do — or don’t — confront life’s tragedies and traumas.
  5. If there is a through line that unites all the women in Abortion: Stories Women Tell, it’s that they take the potential responsibilities of parenthood very seriously. And no matter how tough and self-reliant they are, this decision is always an impossible one, and one that the outside world's unbending attitudes do not make any easier.
  6. Experiencing Pete's Dragon is like seeing something thought to be extinct, a creation every bit as magical and mythical as the flying, fire-breathing beast its named after. That would be the straight ahead, unapologetic family film.
  7. An intriguing casting gimmick can’t mask a story — and a relationship — that’s largely unremarkable.
  8. Neither Heaven Nor Earth is a case of the inexplicable rendered without forced mysticism or explanation, but rather explored with a clinical dramatic focus that somehow boosts the eeriness.
  9. A frostbitten B-movie can still provide a little welcome relief in the dead of summer. Edge of Winter suffices as a diverting breath of recycled cool air.
  10. The Fight Within is too generic as a sports flick, and too pro forma as a tract. There’s more vitality and humanity in the closing-credits blooper reel than in anything in the actual picture.
  11. [An] annoyingly oblique exercise in arty affectation.
  12. Unfortunately, writer-director Ray Yeung leapfrogs over several key emotional beats and points of credibility. At the same time, he plies an ambitious slate of social, sexual and cultural messages, some more fully formed than others.
  13. That Hell or High Water makes you empathize with and understand (though not excuse) each member of this disparate quartet is a tribute to the way Taylor Sheridan’s screenplay works equally well as a thriller, character study and pointed social commentary.
  14. It’s a film that dares you to give it a bad review, simply so it can turn around and call you a bully who picks on the people who try. It invites you to giggle at Florence’s horrible singing and then promptly scolds you for laughing, creating a contradiction that goes unreconciled.
  15. Ira Sachs’ beautifully observed Little Men zeros in on teen-spirit qualities that might, by conventional standards, be considered less cinematic: creativity and innocence, a tender spark brought to life by terrific newcomers Theo Taplitz and Michael Barbieri.
  16. The most disappointing thing is that Nine Lives doesn’t even dare to be an audacious mess. It’s a Frankenstein’s monster of Hollywood’s worst instincts, a movie made with a math formula where its vision should have been.
  17. The Tenth Man is a low-key charmer, an unlooked-for combination of Jane Austen and Isaac Bashevis Singer. With a twist of Buenos Aires thrown into the mix.
  18. While one wishes Carré, who shares screenplay credit with Charles Spano, might have hung those stirring visuals on more involving plotting, Embers nevertheless makes a strong, not to mention timely, impression.
  19. With a highly stylized form, and thick, syrupy ribbons of blood splashing everywhere, Sun Choke evokes a creepy, eerie vibe, but it’s difficult to muster more than a passing interest in the story, because we don’t know who this girl is, or why she does these things.
  20. The film insistently asserts its autobiographical roots at the expense of sharper plotting and characterizations, not to mention more energetic pacing.
  21. Begos gets the texture and atmosphere right, but there’s nothing beneath his cool ’80s fog.
  22. Admirably imaginative but frustratingly clunky, the sci-fi thriller Let’s Be Evil is a technophobic cautionary tale that ironically demonstrates how fancy new digital filmmaking tools make a low-budget project look spiffy.
  23. Deeper socio-historical context and a more electric approach could have helped us better appreciate the far-flung impact of this visionary artist.
  24. The dreary postmortem drama Five Nights in Maine is barely kept afloat by the gravitas of dueling leads David Oyelowo and Dianne Wiest.
  25. Lace Crater is a thoroughly modern ghost story that creeps into camp, testing the audience as it wavers between terrifying and deadpan funny.
  26. Citizen Soldier makes for an honorable addition to the densely populated modern war film field.
  27. There’s no overarching life-story chronology; biographical details emerge in bits and pieces. The director doesn’t wring maudlin tears from her subject’s ordeal, in part because Jones never asks for pity.
  28. History is not neat and tidy, however much we wish it could be, and Olympic Pride, American Prejudice is more than adept at getting to the truth about perhaps the most mythologized event of the modern Olympic movement.
  29. Although Mark Osborne’s new CG/stop-motion feature succeeds in bringing the essence of Saint-Exupéry to life in the lovely stop-motion sequences, there are only a few of these delightful moments in an otherwise muddled movie that feels like three films ineptly grafted together.
  30. Suicide Squad is a concept in search of a story worth telling. Both energized and betrayed by its “Worst.Heroes.Ever” theme and writer-director David Ayer’s trademark visceral filmmaking, it ends up in a kind of limbo, not as strong as partisans will insist or as worthless as its weakest elements would have you believe.

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