Los Angeles Times' Scores

For 16,526 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:
16526 movie reviews
  1. At times, Lipsky's storytelling is too cutely self-aware, trying too hard, making Molly's Theory of Relativity something of an intriguing, if not entirely successful, exoticism.
  2. The movie is intimate in its telling, sweeping in its issues and stumbles only occasionally.
  3. Writer-director Eran Creevy shows himself to be well versed in the mythic sweep of Christopher Nolan's and Michael Mann's crime sagas, if not their intelligence with storytelling.
  4. "Rescue" features excellent archival footage plus a rich array of recent interviews.
  5. "Rubber" felt inventive and complex, but here Dupieux's absurdism is simply muddled, masking the fact he doesn't really have much to say.
  6. Eden is never less than suspenseful, but rather than sentimentally pander to easy outrage, or indulge in icky women-in-distress titillation, the movie...zeros in on the details of how dignity can be stripped like bark from a tree, and the queasy determination it takes to stay alive in a living hell.
  7. For all the ways Dickerson vigorously dramatizes the stages of solitary confinement — nervous humor, fear, rages, survival ingenuity (including a nifty breathing apparatus) — it's never enough to explain why this particular individual's story is worth telling.
  8. Writer-director P.J. Hogan may have based Mental on an actual incident from his childhood, but the crazy quilt of a movie that resulted feels anything but real.
  9. Filmmaker Leon has deftly structured Gimme the Loot as a picaresque tale, an anecdotal, observational film that introduces us to all manner of eccentric and original characters. Will Malcolm and Sophia get what they want, what they need, or something in between? The only sure thing is that being along for the ride is pleasure of the most unexpected sort.
  10. The story goes slack onscreen, so much so that the movie's two-plus hours will seem an eternity.
  11. Family Weekend is no worse than many of the dysfunctional family comedies that populate the Sundance Film Festival — "Little Miss Sunshine" is name-checked within the movie itself — but isn't any better either.
  12. Renoir is a lush, involving film.
  13. In an attempt to be both modern and traditional, this gorgeously made film ends up betwixt and between.
  14. It's massive, all the retaliation and the world saving stuff. And it's convoluted. Frankly no one should have to think that hard to keep up with the Joes.
  15. Moving somewhat obviously toward denouement, the film hits a false note or two. But mainly it's exhilarating in its refusal to make smooth what's messy, inchoate and tenaciously alive.
  16. [Antoine Fuqua] gives in to terrible instincts here, flirting with overwrought patriotism, one too many laugh lines amid numerous characters being shot in the head, and a general chaos-inspired editing technique all too rampant in today's action cinema.
  17. With good intentions and a warm heart but undone by uneven performances and shaky storytelling, Bob's New Suit never quite finds the right fit.
  18. As amiable art-house fluff, it's a passable way to kill time.
  19. Anyone seeking an empty-headed, derivative joy ride through crime-comedy conventions could do far worse than Silver Case, a brisk, good-looking and never dull B movie.
  20. Garrone achieves something uniquely colorful, disturbing and trenchant about self-perception in an increasingly fishbowl-like society.
  21. Loyalties are tested, futures are reconsidered and the body count climbs in the effective action import New World.
  22. Save a weak police pursuit, events are earnestly depicted and involvingly played, even if the period re-creation at times feels overly burnished. Still, Love and Honor suffices as old-fashioned, pie-in-the-sky entertainment.
  23. Though the film at times works scene by scene, Webley can't quite tie it all together. A disjointed jumble, The Kill Hole can't dig itself out.
  24. Laurence Coriat's shapeless script...pads its overlong running time with standard teen trauma — band squabbles, girl betrayals, skinhead brothers — that saps the audience's energy before the grand finale.
  25. Good stuff comes when bad stuff happens; that's when some of the movie animation prowess kicks into high gear. But too many of the "solutions" the guys concoct are so impossibly complex or just downright ridiculous — puppetry comes to mind — that like the continents, it's a little too easy to drift away.
  26. The noir-ish contours of writer-director Ana Piterbarg's story yield a frustratingly dissipated movie, one with few storytelling pleasures and an overabundance of forced mood.
  27. Brad Leong's comedy has some nicely miserable character beats.
  28. A one-man band known as Makinov — he wrote, directed, produced, shot, edited and ran sound here — has done a pretty decent job in the chills department using a simple story, small cast and largely contained location.
  29. From Up on Poppy Hill is frankly stunning, as beautiful a hand-drawn animated feature as you are likely to see. It's a time-machine dream of a not-so-distant past, a sweet and honestly sentimental story that also represents a collaboration between the greatest of Japanese animators and his up-and-coming son.
  30. It buzzes along for a while, the promising plot innovations inviting suspension of disbelief, before by-the-numbers implausibility, over-the-top valor and unsavory contrivances take over and the line goes dead.

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