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. Alba gives such a focused, interior portrayal that she just might have managed to carry the movie had it been better.
  2. The movie never rises above a style-over-substance exercise.
  3. Set in a noirish, gleaming Montreal, this handsome, captivating, well-paced and stylish film is fully realized in every aspect.
  4. A hodgepodge of styles, True Legend works best as a freewheeling showcase for Yuen's dazzling fight sequences above any sort of cogent storytelling.
  5. Anchored by a lovely performance from Oliver Litondo as Maruge and an exuberant Naomie Harris as Jane Obinchu, the school principal who champions his cause, the result is a tearful, joyful, imperfect, yet nearly irresistible ode to the human spirit.
  6. Director Spencer Susser, who wrote the film with David Michod, has a kinetic filmmaking style and an impish, crash-and-burn sense of humor that keeps sentiment at bay long enough to let us appreciate the loose, uncomplicated performances from a cast that includes suddenly ubiquitous Oscar winner Natalie Portman.
  7. The cast Rush has assembled around Ferrell helps as well. There are tiny gems contributed by Laura Dern as the long-lost high school crush Nick looks up, and Stephen Root as a prickly neighbor with some unusual proclivities.
  8. From the first overheated moments of Bridesmaids...it's clear we're in for that rarest of treats: an R-rated romantic comedy from the Venus point of view.
  9. Not on the same artistic level as "The Last Picture Show" yet has its own integrity and value - and a fine array of performances.
  10. Daring in the ways only quiet, unhurried but finally haunting films have the courage to be. A character study of remarkable subtlety joined to a carefully worked-out plot that fearlessly explores big issues like beauty, truth and mortality, it marks the further emergence of Korean writer-director Lee Chang-dong.
  11. Inexplicably filmed in a handful of styles - including, bizarrely, obviously processed shots - by cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Passion Play would be midnight-movie fodder if it weren't so drearily wrapped up in its wounded-male aesthetic and a clumsy approach to art-movie moodiness that was abandoned in the '80s.
  12. Alternately ambitious and simplistic, lively and bland, the French-produced adventure Mia and the Migoo never fully pinpoints its intended audience or many ecological messages.
  13. Richly inspiring and informative documentary.
  14. A fitfully engaging effort that is most successful as a performance piece for actors Kat Dennings and Reece Thompson.
  15. A transgender icon with a life as tragically short as some of the idols she worshipped, she's the deserving subject of an archivally rich remembrance, and such is James Rasin's poignant documentary Beautiful Darling.
  16. They use dialogue sparingly, powerfully; a talky detective sounds like a visitor from another planet. The world he has encroached upon is defined by the ability to run and the adrenaline-rush threat of capture. Freedom's just another word in this gripping existential portrait.
  17. With true insights in short supply, the on-the-nose material fails to seduce.
  18. This endearing picture is proof that it is still possible for a major studio release to be fun, smart and heart-tugging and devoid of numbskull violence and equally numbing special effects.
  19. It is a third man, a revolutionary, who nearly steals the show. Which might have been all right if writer-director Roland Joffé hadn't been so conflicted about whose story he wants to tell. But indecision can be deadly, and it proves to be here.
  20. An emotional runaway of a film that carries neither the insight nor the uplift to make the weight of its dark journey worth it.
  21. Despite the pretty overload and the smoldering blue-eyed handsome of Egglesfield, the heart-pounding, palm-sweating, heavy-breathing chemical reactions that should be causing major blackouts in Manhattan, where this story unfolds, are nowhere to be found.
  22. Thor has its strengths, but it is finally something of a mishmash with designs on being more interesting than it manages to be.
  23. Brings vampires, werewolves, zombies, detective noir and spoofy comedy together for a murky genre gumbo with barely any flavor.
  24. A forgettable title and a barely there theatrical release don't do justice to the captivating and nostalgic coming-of-age dramedy That's What I Am.
  25. Resourceful writer-director Jim Mickle covers both in his realism-tinged indie Stake Land and shows that a savvy mixture of characterization, atmosphere and gore-eographed suspense can make even the most familiar fright tropes feel vaguely organic again.
  26. Few filmmakers juxtapose cruelty and beauty as audaciously as Japan's Takashi Miike. A master director with great style and panache, Miike's latest, 13 Assassins, is a classic samurai movie, right up there among the finest in the genre.
  27. Despite the powerful sense of place, Sympathy for Delicious unwinds a narrative thread that grows increasingly tattered and flimsy.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Making the Boys reveals just how bound up Crowley's play is with the history of the gay community, most heartbreakingly in the number of original company members who died from AIDS.
  28. For what makes this tale something more than a puzzle to be solved is a level of emotional impact that genre exercises don't often provide, emotion traceable to sensitive acting that is similarly rare.
  29. In sitcom savant Phil Rosenthal's world, truth is at least as strange as fiction and usually it's funnier, which works to his advantage in the very entertaining cultural exchange that is Exporting Raymond.

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