Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,550 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 2.2 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: 8,714 out of 16550
  2. Mixed: 5,819 out of 16550
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16550
16550 movie reviews
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  1. In America
    A recklessly emotional film that is so committed to feelings it occasionally overflows its banks. Which may be a little messy, but it's a lot more welcome than the drought-stricken alternatives.
  2. Bad Santa
    It unapologetically exults in its characters' glorious imperfection. It's good to know that oddballs, outcasts and people who don't look like Barbie and Ken still have a place in American movies and that not everyone in Hollywood pays lip service to the nice and polite.
  3. Blindness
    It's a glum, stale soap opera, tediously paced but mercifully running only 75 minutes, its sole virtue.
  4. The Big Empty
    Has a seductive easiness (which may not be for everyone, but it works), a laid-back yet ever-so-slightly portentous score and a wonderful sense of place.
  5. 21 Grams
    What gives the film a formalist kick is that the story unfolds piecemeal as a series of nonlinear moments. What gives it soul are the three lead actors who pull the pieces together with devastating power.
  6. Gothika
    How anyone in the cast manages to keep a straight face is one of the film's innumerable mysteries.
  7. The Barbarian Invasions
    Bristling but finally surprisingly moving film.
  8. The Cat in the Hat
    Critics are paid to suffer bad art, no matter how icky it is from the start. So all we could do was to Sit! Sit! Sit! Sit! And we did not like it. Not one little bit.
  9. The Missing
    The combined intensity of these two performances (Jones and Blanchett) obliterates objections and raises the stakes in what might otherwise have been a standard western.
  10. The Singing Forest
    Awkwardly staged and edited and fitted out with an overly intrusive score drawn primarily from classical music, the film consistently subverts the earnest efforts of its cast.
  11. One from the Heart (re-release)
    Francis Ford Coppola has reworked somewhat and meticulously restored his ambitious 1982 romantic musical fantasy One From the Heart, out of circulation for more than 20 years, but for all his efforts it stubbornly remains a bold experiment in style and technique that doesn't work.
  12. The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John
    Though it has loftier aims, it is in reality strictly a film made by believers for believers. It's like the Discovery Channel version of the Greatest Story Ever Told, an earnest, not particularly distinguished piece of work that has none of the touch of the poet that made Pasolini's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" such a triumph.
  13. Tupac: Resurrection
    Especially good at showing how unnervingly, even heartbreakingly contradictory this man could be.
  14. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    Looney Tunes doesn't have much on its addled mind other than pure entertainment, and on this level it succeeds quite nicely.
  15. I Vitelloni [re-release]
    It was this ineffably poignant semiautobiographical reverie that unleashed fully Fellini's shimmering, flowing poetic style, echoed perfectly in a plaintive score by Fellini's potently evocative collaborator, Nino Rota.
  16. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    Few actors can be as convincing as leaders of men, and to see Crowe as Capt. Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is to see a consummate performer doing what he does best.
  17. Anything But Love
    Robert Cary's Anything but Love is that rarity, an hommage to the sweeping Technicolor Hollywood love story of the '40s and '50s that works.
  18. My Architect
    Nathaniel Kahn is very much a presence in this film, at times too much so. The title is properly read with the emphasis on the "my," and the work itself is a plea, understandable but disconcerting at times in its nakedness, to be linked irrevocably to his father.
  19. In My Skin
    Spectacularly grotesque and literally nauseating, even for this usually intrepid moviegoer, In My Skin is among the more disturbing films in this blood-drenched cinematic season.
  20. Gloomy Sunday
    A beautiful period piece, set against one of the world's glorious cities, adding poignancy. Twists and turns heighten a gradually accruing effect, building to a risky moment of truth, a coup de théâtre that is as daring as it is satisfying.
  21. Elf
    Directed by Jon Favreau from a script by David Berenbaum, Elf returns to the hip but warm-hearted spirit of "Swingers," which Favreau both wrote and starred in. It brings sophisticated glee and a sense of innocent fun to what could have been a moribund traditional family film.
  22. Love Actually
    Though it would be dishonest to call this an unqualified success, it would be churlish not to tip the hat to Love Actually's genuine charm.
  23. The Matrix Revolutions
    How did something that started out so cool get so dorky?
  24. The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    Their (Kim Bartley and Donnacha Ó Briain ) remarkable true-life footage makes this 74-minute film as potent as behemoths twice its size.
  25. Suspended Animation
    A bold and unqualified triumph, nifty trick and treat for Halloween that is, arguably, Hancock's best film ever, surpassing even his potent heart-tugger, the 1973 baseball drama "Bang the Drum Slowly."
  26. Die, Mommie, Die!
    With his hilarious spoof Die Mommie Die! Charles Busch takes the melodramatic woman's picture of the '40s and '50s to delirious extremes.
  27. Shattered Glass
    What is a most pleasant surprise is how emotionally involving a story writer-director Billy Ray has fashioned, how he's turned Shattered Glass into a film for anyone who cares about strong drama.
  28. The Human Stain
    Etched in acid, stoked by wrath, it is one of those big-ideas novels that fits perfectly in human hands, where it can be savored over time or wrestled with page by page. But big ideas don't always size down for movie screens.
  29. Eyes Without a Face [re-release]
    Disturbing, disorienting, quietly terrifying, it's one of the least known of the world's great horror movies and, in its own dark way, a startlingly beautiful and artful piece of cinema as well.
  30. Girlhood
    The impulse to end on an "up" note, to turn complex and contradictory lives into palatable narratives, is one of the least-examined pitfalls in nonfiction filmmaking. But in her attempt to give their lives a shape that the girls themselves seem to resist, this talented filmmaker has done both herself and them a disservice.
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