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 2.4 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. While Retribution is far from Neeson’s best, it still mostly works, so long as you tune out the dialogue and focus on the hero’s twitchy face, waiting to see which will blow to smithereens first: his car or his patience.
  2. Open your heart and turn off your logic meter and you‘re going to enjoy “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.”
  3. If it’s imperfect, or certain narrative turns are rocky, you forgive it because Bottoms is just so audacious, and most important, the jokes are nonstop. Perfectionism is a trap, anyway.
  4. “Golda” feeds that time-honored tradition of watching a virtuoso screen performer vanish behind a famous name and a wall of cinematic artifice.
  5. What sets this film apart from other docu-memoirs is the way Sahakyan articulates how being the spokesperson for an atrocity can foster dissociation.
  6. The film’s chaotic structure and panting sensibility leaves Veil feeling more like the star of a fast-moving timeline than someone we get to know.
  7. What rings truest and richest about The Eternal Memory, as exquisitely humane a film as you’re likely to see all year, is what abiding love and stewardship look like in the moment: to care so deeply for someone as to tend to their memories, and to be loved so deeply that it’s the last beautiful thought one may ever need.
  8. Although Finley, who previously directed the Emmy-winning Hugh Jackman drama “Bad Education,” doesn’t quite manage to sustain the film’s irreverent energy, especially during its more melancholic second half, he handily succeeds in delivering a piece of entertainment that is at once wildly out of this world and all-too-relevantly down to earth.
  9. The swearing and gross-out humor loses its bite after a while. We’re left with an at times heartfelt and enjoyably observed story that may hold interest with more patient viewers but, due to some episodic scene work and slack pacing, leave others restless.
  10. The Biz Markie story is not framed as a tragedy here. It’s a celebration of a lovable weirdo who made people happy.
  11. The slam-bang stuff in this picture is too tediously routine. The movie is much better when it gets philosophical, pondering a world where everybody’s surveiling everybody else but nobody can agree on how to use that information to keep us all safe.
  12. Though the film is largely driven by Cera’s knowing, unsparing performance, both Gross and Lillis are also given plenty of room to develop nuance.
  13. The documentary has an easy, anecdotal charm and acts as a welcome corrective to Baz Luhrmann’s scrupulously mimetic, factually whimsical biopic. Fans, it goes without saying, will want to see it.
  14. López’s film smuggles queer ideas and images into spaces traditionally populated by straight people and shaped by straight tastes. Which is, to be clear, no more the “right” way of updating the genre for the 21st century than any other. It’s just nice, for a change, to come in through the front door.
  15. It seeks to demystify the bodies we see, normalize the act of seeking medical intervention and remind us of the great swath of humanity — of different ages, colors, genders, shapes and sizes — passing every day through this ward and others like it.
  16. Conquering time travel may be a big deal, but Greer’s affecting portrait of a woman processing a second chance keeps the miracles of Aporia grounded and not flashy — a portal to human epiphanies, not digitally rendered spectacle.
  17. In Barthes’ curiously distanced, muted handling, we only sense points being made, not lives being lived.
  18. This absorbing, thoughtful film doesn’t take sides; that’s not James’ way.
  19. Darkness is a harrowing and affecting story about young women trying to hold onto hope across the grim, unchanging days.
  20. As a director, Park stages his scenes with an unadorned flatness that strives to approximate the humdrum workaday poetry of Tomine’s comic-book frames but sometimes allows too much dead air to coalesce around the jokes and arguments.
  21. A well-cast, modestly affecting drama of the kind studios regularly programmed in the before-IP times, it boasts a generous heart gently dusted with life’s complications as it beats a familiar rhythm of easygoing redemption.
  22. A constantly surprising, undeniably entertaining portrait that proves anything but monochromatic.
  23. Klondike is certainly not an easy watch, but it is a profound one — a film that feels both prescient and retrospective about Ukraine, locked in what seems a never-ending existential conflict with its neighbor.
  24. As with all great moral dilemmas, Sorogoyen makes it impossible to entirely side with either party without considering that each of them has been victimized by larger social ills.
  25. Even with all the metaphysical mayhem, the movie remains rooted in the lives and attitudes of its characters, and in the magnetic performances of Martini and Appleton.
  26. Nimbly directed by Jeff Rowe (“The Mitchells vs. the Machines”) from a funny, perceptive script he wrote with Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit, this rambunctious action-comedy gives nostalgia-stoking, action-figure-selling, comic-book-derived franchise relaunches a good name.
  27. Tomas is an inimitably singular creature. Loathsome and magnetic, infuriating and unforgettable, he is, by several bed lengths, the most dynamic protagonist Sachs has given us, a vessel of pure, untrammeled id.
  28. This movie’s heart is in the right place, and its company is pleasant enough. But by its final half-hour, it starts to feel too much like a rote recitation from a rom-com to-do list.
  29. If After the Bite ultimately has more questions than answers, it’s only because the film is reflecting the people it’s about, who see existential dangers everywhere and no easy way back to safety.
  30. Like the movies covered within, Sharksploitation is undeniably entertaining — especially at its most preposterous.

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