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. The satire is sagging, the irony's atrophied and the funny is flabby.
  2. Whatever else gets tossed into the mix, Shrek must be the heart and soul. In this, Myers is a master; he makes it seem easy being green.
  3. While this jury-rigged exercise may not be an explosion of laughs, it's no dud, either.
  4. Cinematically, though, After the Cup lacks the intimacy and narrative focus needed for a more wholly involving experience.
  5. Never quite catches fire, calling for more edge and narrative tension than director Kevin Asch and screenwriter Antonio Macia manage to deliver. Still, it's an often evocative dip into unique territory fleshed out by a highly convincing cast.
  6. Drawn from Rabe's diaries, the film is rich in telling and ironic details.
  7. In its telling, the love story draws from westerns, musicals, film noir, chase thrillers with stunts so preposterous they verge on parody -- and it gets away with everything because of Basu's visual bravura and unstinting passion and energy.
  8. Proves a fast-paced and enjoyable if violent diversion that revels in its quirky characters, committed performances and involving twists.
  9. The film doesn't always follow up on its more interesting issues: safety, technique, financial hardship, even the sport's history. But the emotional dynamics of its trio of formative hopefuls, and their touching relationships with the parents or guardians who work hard at enabling their passion, set a solid pace.
  10. Still, there are some things to savor. Blanchett is an actress who's always involving, and Crowe is very much in his element as an intrepid, laconic archer who lets his arrows do the talking.
  11. An ode to romance of the most starry-eyed sort, a sugary paean to quixotic clichés and a film destined to be a guilty pleasure for some (me included, sigh) and the painful price of a relationship for others (so steel yourselves).
  12. The number of clearly talented individuals who committed themselves to the folly of The Living Wake were fearless too.
  13. A meditative piece that is by turns hypnotically beautiful and painfully slow. It's the kind of film perhaps best appreciated in smaller doses, in the same way bench rest can help sustain a tiring museum visit.
  14. A wisp of a wry comedy but Lungulov's touch is delicate, even piercingly so, and his direction of actors, especially Thornton and Karanovic, is beautifully nuanced.
  15. The film is too reverently drawn and self-consciously played to muster any real momentum.
  16. The archival game footage -- Cantona on the field, the roaring crowds -- infuses the film with that high-spirited sense of hope and heart that only a brilliant play when a game is on the line can deliver. Loach, a brilliant player at his own game, delivers the rest.
  17. As sequels go, this one is acceptable, nothing more, nothing less.
  18. A film that's always on the move, a smart, lively, thoroughly involving doc about a complex, critical subject.
  19. An astoundingly bad memory piece that blows its potential dramatic heft at every turn.
  20. You can't really hate The Lightkeepers. You can only wish that writer-director Daniel Adams had invested the movie with equal measures of originality and quaintness … and maybe told Dreyfuss to tone down the whole sea captain thing.
  21. Rather than some deeper understanding of the human condition, what we get from Multiple Sarcasms is a lot of heavy breathing.
  22. Jandal emerges as someone who was truly in Bin Laden's inner circle, Hamdan seems the menial driver he claimed to be. What remains unanswered is where their allegiances now lie. Frightening or not, terrorists or not, both seem human, which at the end of the day is what Poitras set out to do.
  23. I don't know that we actually need Agent OSS 117, but the world is a slightly better place with him around. And the film itself is a harmless trifle -- make that truffle, chocolate of course.
  24. The result is irresistible and possibly infectious.
  25. While the results were probably never designed to win over his detractors, Trash Humpers is almost a perverted love letter to fans of his brand of unstable, fringe-y terror.
  26. An admirably cagey effort to mine humor from the thorny cultural and racial divide that is Muslim-Jewish relations.
  27. A new biopic of eccentric British rock legend Ian Dury, Andy Serkis uncoils a performance of spit, grit and wit so ferocious it only serves to starkly clarify how unremarkable and formulaic the rest of the movie is.
  28. This "Nightmare" is mostly stale goods. You'd think Bayer's music video background would jibe well with the playful surreality of Craven's premise. But when not paying homage -- the claw in the bathtub, the morphing wall -- Bayer surprisingly traffics in factory-level horror atmospherics and loud, saw-it-coming shocks.
  29. A film so exhausting in its mean-spirited unfunny business that it would prompt Al Gore to empty his recycling bin and light a match to the contents -- and the plastic bin itself -- in full view of news camera crews.
  30. Here, the 36-year-old filmmaker is playing around with drama and comedy. And if you're in the mood for a splash of dark drama, a bit of humor, very dry, on the rocks, with a twist, this will come close to satisfying.

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