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. For 20 years, Claire Denis has been among France's foremost filmmakers with her acute yet subtle observations of the ebbs and flows within relationships. Her perception and understanding seem to grow only richer over the years, and her newest film, 35 Shots of Rum, is surely one of her finest -- and thereby one of the best films of the year.
  2. The gripping story of how hawk-turned-dove Ellsberg's explosive actions circuitously led to the impeachment of Richard Nixon and, in turn, an end to the Vietnam War is comprehensively detailed in Judith Ehrlich and Rick Goldsmith's evocative documentary.
  3. What works best, though, is that it's practically an R&B/gospel musical.
  4. The leads can't lend either spunk or gravitas to what was already a preposterous yarn 50 years ago.
  5. A movie that's more convoluted than satisfying.
  6. The film ultimately is more practical than profound, a slightly smartened-up "Dummy's Guide to Green Living," which, as you learn, most of us probably know a good deal less about than we imagine.
  7. It lapses into that familiar category of movies that go in for lots of fancy obfuscation along the way only to make its story seem all the more simple, trite and contrived by the finish.
  8. Approaching the film with, let's say, lowered expectations may go a long way toward appreciating what it attempts, as well as what it achieves.
  9. It's revealing that writer-director Dave Boyle has said that in a way he fulfilled his lifelong ambition to be a cartoonist with the live-action White on Rice because his people in this wan, trite and increasingly silly comedy are little more than stick figures.
  10. For what Crude does best is take us behind the scenes and show in often candid detail how campaigns are waged, tactics decided on and strategies prioritized.
  11. The best kind of labor of love. A documentary made with affection and intelligence, it looks at a brief episode in the life of a cultural icon and uses it to illuminate what turns out to be a telling moment in time and in the process shed some light on the man himself.
  12. Rarely have the words "game over" come as such sweet relief.
  13. A dippy clunker like All About Steve has no purpose other than as a challenge: If you laden a usually charming A-lister with a thoroughly off-putting, unhinged character, can she claw her way to likability? The short answer is no. The long answer is, what in the world was Bullock, who also produced the movie, thinking?
  14. An enjoyable celebratory ode to a fiercely entertaining counterculture-inspired genre.
  15. While Extract is mildly amusing and a slice of a mostly working-class world that doesn't make it into comedy that much anymore, it's not completely convincing as a movie.
  16. This is a pointed, emotional story of a divorced Palestinian woman and her son who immigrate to the U.S. just after the invasion of Iraq, a story that benefits from Dabis' background as a child growing up in the Midwest during the Gulf War as the daughter of a Palestinian father and a Jordanian mother.
  17. The result is a lopsided, visually uninspired film that works best when it eschews the complex numbers-crunching of its financial industry pundits and whistle-blowers to profile the everyday victims of the crisis.
  18. Though this latest entry has an OK sense of humor, moves swiftly enough and sports an effective opening sequence of racetrack destruction that puts its Fusion 3-D technology to good use, it mostly comes off as a particularly flimsy excuse to string together a bunch of gory killings.
  19. It's a low-key road movie that doesn't stray far from the very, very beaten path.
  20. A slight, if often riveting, behind-the-scenes documentary.
  21. If anything, the film is a reflection of the Web zeitgeist, where observation comes easily but insight is rare. What saves the documentary from becoming a complete frustration is the sheer, stunning prescience of Harris.
  22. Starring an ideally cast Patton Oswalt in the title role, Big Fan is a poignant, dead-on character study, an examination of a crisis in the life of the most die-hard of die-hard New York Giants football fans.
  23. What you won't feel is genuine horror, because unlike John Carpenter -- whose original 1978 film is a sly game of nerve-racking peekaboo -- Zombie isn't out to engage fans of the genre with a slaughterhouse bonbon like "Halloween II."
  24. It's a frustrating complication of a movie with a sprawling story and grand ambitions -- and some truly grand acting -- that stumbles almost as often as it soars. Bummer.
  25. Clocking in at 2 hours and 32 minutes, it is unforgivably leisurely, almost glacial, a film that loses its way in the thickets of alternative history and manages to be violent without the start-to-finish energy that violence on screen usually guarantees.
  26. For all of its cutting cynicism, "Dad" proves unexpectedly moving in its portrait of a middle-aged man leaving childish things behind.
  27. A joyless fluffball about after-college job woes with a dispiriting message for smart young women.
  28. The problem with Shorts is in the execution. The blown-up plot line at times derails even the little ones, the many fine comedic grown-ups are mostly squandered, and the "message" part of the movie feels like it was thrown together during detention, resulting in a wrap-up that is rushed and cloyingly PC.
  29. A fascinating hybrid of a film. Even though its purpose couldn't be more serious, its style could hardly be more pulp.
  30. Terrific performances and an array of kinetic action scenes help distinguish Fifty Dead Men Walking from the seemingly endless stream of films about Northern Ireland's infamous era of sectarian violence known as the Troubles.

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