Los Angeles Times' Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 8,699 out of 16526
  2. Mixed: 5,810 out of 16526
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16526
16526 movie reviews
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  1. The Berlin File
    There is something sharp, exciting and more original tucked within The Berlin File — and it is in moments a sleek, crackling film — but it all feels somehow misshapen.
  2. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    Herzog has become a master of the understatement — knowing just how long the images can sustain you without a word being said. Vasyukov and his team of cameramen gave him a stunning range to work with, so the filmmaker keeps his own narration to a minimum.
  3. No
    Even if No is not the whole truth — and no film is — its pungent dialogue and involving characters tell a delicious and very pertinent tale. And the messages it delivers, its thoughts on the workings of democracy and the intricacies of personality, are just as valuable and entertaining — maybe even more so.
  4. Shanghai Calling
    Hsia has an appealingly slick visual style for the fast-paced if predictable turns in Sam's story, shooting the gleaming, bustling Shanghai as if it had finally earned its big-Hollywood-romantic-comedy stripes as a setting for the usual fish-out-of-water jokes, broad humor, meet-cutes, silly coincidences and happy endings.
  5. Like Someone in Love
    From moment to moment the low-key intrigue threatens to slip into Hitchcock territory; when it does, it's not in the form of high-wire suspense but in a burst of understated playfulness.
  6. Beautiful Creatures
    Maybe there really are supernatural forces at work in this world. How else to explain Beautiful Creatures? The movie is an intriguing, intelligent enigma — three words not typically associated with teen romances.
  7. Safe Haven
    This sloppy sentimental journey is long on beauty shots, short on depth and seriously intent on tugging your heartstrings. Indeed, it demands you reach for those tissues. Sob.
  8. A Good Day to Die Hard
    A Good Day to Die Hard plays like an extended victory lap for star Bruce Willis and the entire "Die Hard" franchise. Not surprising, but not overwhelmingly entertaining either.
  9. Lost in Thailand
    By our quote-unquote standards of contemporary comedy, it plays as uneven at best and often just flattens out for long jokeless stretches.
  10. Room 237
    Room 237 becomes not a film about "The Shining" or even a film about film. Rather, it is an examination of the nature of obsession, about how we are capable of convincing ourselves — and possibly others — that just about anything might be true.
  11. The Playroom
    The drama often feels posed and inert. Even so, it strikes more than a few chords as it digs deeper than period cliché.
  12. Yossi
    Predictable if measured uplift aside, Fox keeps Yossi effortlessly affecting, graced with deadpan humor and a knowingness about lonely lives.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Clandestine Childhood
    Clandestine Childhood is a sincere effort but also rather sincerely a meager one too.
  14. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    The earnest passages mostly just lie there; the film works best on its frilly, exuberant surface, as a valentine to Streamline Moderne, Pop Art and L.A.
  15. Lore
    At its heart Lore qualifies as a coming-of-age story, but it is far from the ones we usually see.
  16. Side Effects
    This clever bag of tricks is made with so much cinematic skill it makes implausibility irrelevant. What happens on screen is unapologetically far-fetched, but it unfolds with enough panache to make turning away out of the question.
  17. Young Turks
    A snapshot of Los Angeles artists during a cultural pivot point, the documentary Young Turks sparks fascination and frustration in equal measure.
  18. Identity Thief
    The heart of this film is on the road with Bateman and McCarthy. If not for their brilliance, Identity Thief would be running on empty.
  19. The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia
    The storytelling, from a script by David Coggeshall, is at times nearly incoherent and relies too often on random scares.
  20. Bullet to the Head
    Bullet to the Head is an adrenaline shot to your movie memory if the blunt, gleefully dumb, no-nonsense ways of '80s-style action flicks are your nostalgia drug of choice.
  21. Girls Against Boys
    Girls Against Boys is some odd male fantasy of what female revenge might be like, sexy and enigmatically charged rather than haunting or scary or even just weird.
  22. Warm Bodies
    In doing a little genre bending of romantic schmaltz and horror cheese - some fundamental zombie mythology is turned on its head - the film breathes amusing new life into both.
  23. Sound City
    High-spirited, emotional and funny, Sound City is, of all things, a mash note to a machine. Not just any machine, however, but one that helped change the face of rock 'n' roll.
  24. Movie 43
    How many directors does it take to screw in a star-studded piece of aggressive stupidity and call it a movie? An even dozen, and there is no punch line.
  25. Smiley
    A surprisingly effective low-budget horror film that takes as its true villain the casual cynicism and nihilistic misanthropy that so often go along with online culture.
  26. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    What galls is that for all the perspiration in jazzing up an old yarn, there's not a whiff of originality in how Wirkola engages with the perverse pleasures enshrined by the Grimm brothers, two of their era's shrewdest storytellers.
  27. Let Fury Have the Hour
    Kudos to writer-director Antonino D'Ambrosio for taking such an eclectic and disparate number of aims, thoughts, subjects and mediums and creating the smart and inspiring - and uniquely whole -documentary that is Let Fury Have the Hour.
  28. Parker
    If you're going to saturate a film with so much violence, at least it's nice to see an action hero - or antihero - actually feeling the pain.
  29. Resolution
    In its gently atmospheric camerawork and nicely underplayed moments between Mike and Chris, Resolution manages to keep its eerier moments surprising and its emotional life arresting.
  30. John Dies at the End
    Flaked with offbeat witticisms, cheese ball effects and fanboy splatter gore, the surreal John Dies at the End has the vibe of a shaggy dog story, which works both for and against it.
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