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. As boredom sets in, the viewer realizes that "The Covenant" does possess one magical power: It afflicts its audience with restless leg syndrome.
  2. Has enough virtues -- principally Sutherland's presence and the quality of the music -- to make it an enjoyable trip.
  3. The problem with Sherry is that, unlike Ryan Gosling's Dan in "Half Nelson," whose humanity transcends his addiction and who is still capable, no matter how uneasily, to maintain relationships with others, she is a terminally uninteresting narcissist with a bad case of arrested development.
  4. A quiet powerhouse of a film, an implacable, uncompromising French police drama, both old-fashioned and modern, that underlines the reasons impeccably made crime stories do so well on screen.
  5. Man Push Cart, largely the work of newcomers and near-newcomers, is a remarkably disciplined, subtle film that avoids striking a "triumph of the human spirit" note or any other cliché.
  6. Neo Ned is exactly the kind of production -- scrappy, flawed and a little odd -- that should exemplify the very notion of "independent film."
  7. Following Woody Allen, Ang Lee and any number of sitcoms, Georgia Lee constructs her well-shot, well-written film around three daughters.
  8. A well-photographed inside look at a fascinating culture and its people.
  9. Neveldine and Taylor empty their handbasket of cinematic tricks. They display visual wit, have fun with pop songs, and shoot much of the film in slightly choppy fast-motion ("under-cranked," get it?).
  10. In the end, LaBute's remake is an interesting idea that never transforms into a particularly satisfying movie.
  11. There's a rawness and immediacy to his (Bujalski's) work that cuts straight to the experience, a starkness that's startling in an age of bloated spectacle.
  12. Unlikely to be ranked as one of Zhang's greatest accomplishments but is clearly the work of a major filmmaker. It is best seen as a heartfelt tribute to Takakura, as heroic and enduring a star as John Wayne.
  13. An impassioned piece of activist filmmaking that's as persuasive and entertaining as it is disturbing.
  14. A documentary about transsexuals from the Philippines working as caregivers in Israel sounds highly specialized in its appeal, but Heymann brings to Paper Dolls not only an engaging poignancy and depth but also a powerful universality.
  15. The plot, naturally, is silly and not exactly bound by logic. But it's Judge's gimlet-eyed knack for nightmarish extrapolation that makes Idiocracy a cathartic delight.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Patton and Benjamin can both hold the screen and are great in their musical sequences, but sorry, they aren't actors -- Terrence Howard, as the villain Trumpy, blows them into dust when he's on camera -- and their limited expressiveness detracts from the film's hallucinatory edge. The plot fails them too, as it takes turns we've seen in a dozen melodramas.
  16. It never quite settles on whether it's a "Mean Girls" burlesque of teen life, an "American Beauty"-style bad-things-in-the-suburbs drama, or a wayward horror film. And it certainly never reconciles itself to successfully pulling off a hybrid of the three.
  17. The movie has no higher ambition than to please a crowd; the fact that it easily does is proof of the world's heartening capacity for change.
  18. The result is an insightful look at a remarkable behind-the-scenes life and slice of American and Hollywood history. Told from an outsider's perspective, it sheds light on the workings of a glamorous but often treacherous business.
  19. There seems to be a high level of personal commitment to the project. It is then all the more disappointing that such effort went into something that comes off so hollow and uninspired.
  20. Indeed, Aranoa loves these women so completely that his film seems overly drawn out at nearly two hours and likely would have had greater effect had it been half an hour shorter. Even so, Princesas remains largely engaging and rewarding.
  21. The result is not quite a horror movie (too cheerful and can-do) or a thriller (too cheerful and stupid), nor does it parody itself or take itself seriously, thereby canceling out the camp factor. It's more like an improv sketch at 30,000 feet.
  22. Sewell and Giamatti ham it up as the imperious pretender to the throne and his ambitious but conflicted minion in this uncheesy but entertainingly tricky mystery. There's more heat between the two of them than between the sappy lovers.
  23. The result is a surprisingly satisfying film, true to Bukowski and itself, a work that manages to make the man and his profane world more palatable without compromising on who he was and what he stood for.
  24. The actors gamely keep up their spirits, but the male characters are too one-dimensional and the female characters too bizarrely divorced from reality to be at all engaging.
  25. If Pusher III is the trilogy's least effective, that may be because the soured-deal plot line is by now a given, and its theme is the simplest: Old habits die hard.
  26. Although King Leopold's Ghost dwells perhaps too long on the viciousness, it does offer clues on how it became a circle.
  27. The introduction of a baby that Tonny supposedly fathered feels worrisome initially...but in Refn's skilled street-realist hands, the child becomes a potent, wailing metaphor for Tonny's own dilemma of rudderless need.
  28. An intimate movie in every sense, Conversations With Other Women sets out to explore well-trammeled yet at the same time uncharted territory without grinding any axes. What it offers is a modest fantasy that will be familiar to contemporaries of Bonham Carter and Eckhart especially. It's sad and funny, satisfying and frustrating, totally familiar.
  29. What is different about Half Nelson is the execution, the kind of subtlety in writing, directing and acting (by costars Shareeka Epps and Anthony Mackie as well as Gosling) you seldom see.

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