Los Angeles Times' Scores

Select another publication »
For 16,524 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:
  1. Positive: 8,698 out of 16524
  2. Mixed: 5,809 out of 16524
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16524
16524 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Crimson Gold
    Through everyday actions and gestures -- in Hussein's awkward exchanges with other people, in his tender fumbling of his fiancée's purse -- Panahi shows a man for whom life has become increasingly arduous, alien. The filmmaker captures, in other words, what Bresson called "the force in the air before the storm."
  2. WXIII: Patlabor the Movie 3
    The route to the film's dramatic and poignant climax is so hard to follow that the pleasure, the potential for which is considerable, has been substantially diminished.
  3. The Son
    There are all sorts of ways to look at The Son -- as a philosophical thriller, as a statement of faith, as a call to political arms or just as a terrific entertainment.
  4. Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    A dazzling epic of love, guns, gangsters and cigarettes.
  5. Just Married
    Ashton Kutcher and Brittany Murphy are attractive and skilled performers as the film's newlyweds, but the movie is so mechanical it's like watching Barbie and Ken dolls going through the motions.
  6. The Slaughter Rule
    Has the virtue of sincerity but not that of restraint. Unlike Terrence Malick, whose shadow looms over the film's visual style, the Smiths over-explain, not grasping that all those barren fields and blood-red clouds are doing plenty of work for them.
  7. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    George Clooney's first effort behind the camera was doubtless more stimulating to direct than it will be for audiences to watch.
  8. Love Liza
    "Dark and demanding" doesn't begin to describe this devastating film -- It is not too much to say that without its splendid use of music Love Liza might not be bearable.
  9. Sonny
    The day-to-day realities, especially economic, of Sonny and Jewel's lives could have been more fully detailed to good effect, and Cage might have also have risked setting off the tenderness of his storytelling with an edgier style. Even so, few films take the viewer by surprise with such emotional impact as Sonny.
  10. Nicholas Nickleby
    McGrath, who adapted the novel, manages to catch the flavor of it without its tang.
  11. Max
    Just because people are objecting to Max for all the wrong reasons doesn't make it a good film, and it's not. It's a bizarre curiosity memorable mainly for the way it fritters away its potentially interesting subject matter via a banal script, unimpressive acting and indifferent direction.
  12. The Hours
    A splendid film. It uses all the resources of cinema -- masterful writing, superb acting, directorial intelligence, an enveloping score, top-of-the-line production design, costumes, cinematography and editing -- to make a film whose cumulative emotional power takes viewers by surprise, capturing us unawares in its ability to move us as deeply as it does.
  13. The Pianist
    Never before has a fiction film so clearly and to such devastating effect laid out the calculation of the Nazi machinery of death and its irrationality.
  14. Chicago
    It's Zeta-Jones who keeps you watching from start to finish -- You'd have to go back to Joan Crawford in her hungry prime, in films like "Rain" and "The Women," to find another female film star who grabs hold of the screen with such ferocity.
  15. Pinocchio
    The only way his (Benigni's) show-off performance could have a prayer of working would be if the film were released as a silent.
  16. Catch Me If You Can
    For all his genre-hopping and shape-shifting Spielberg seems to have become too big to tell small stories, which is one reason why the film sputters on one too many false endings.
  17. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    A witty and delightful Christmas present for the entire family.
  18. Smokers Only
    A venturesome, beautifully realized psychological mood piece that reveals its first-time feature director's understanding of the expressive power of the camera.
  19. Thorns
    Ready for a singing and dancing "Reservoir Dogs"?
  20. Two Weeks Notice
    It is a lovely, amusing diversion from the start, but the depth of its poignancy by the time it's over comes as a surprise.
  21. Morvern Callar
    Ramsay reaches out boldly with a film that is as unsettling as it is minimalist.
  22. Spider
    In an instance of director, stars and material melding flawlessly, Spider is a brilliantly realized depiction of a mentally ill individual.
  23. Narc
    To transcend cliché, movies like Narc need the passion of a heretic who can take stock characters with their stock predicaments and turn them inside out, the way Curtis Hanson and Quentin Tarantino do. Blood, guts and flash aren't enough.
  24. Gangs of New York
    Scorsese and his team have created a heavy-footed golem of a motion picture, hard to ignore as it throws its weight around but fatally lacking in anything resembling soul.
  25. Antwone Fisher
    Rarest and most impressive of all, Antwone Fisher is a serious drama set in the African American community, one that showcases powerful, confrontational scenes between black actors.
  26. 25th Hour
    There are two films at war in director Spike Lee's newest feature 25th Hour, one uninteresting, the other an epic of near-tragic miscalculation.
  27. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    If the second film never reaches the highs of the first -- we have met the players before and there are no new worlds of wonder -- it nonetheless invests moviegoing with a sense of adventure.
  28. The Guys
    Anthony LaPaglia and Sigourney Weaver are superb in this moving adaptation of the post-Sept. 11 play.
  29. Evelyn
    Its heart is so much in the right place it is difficult to get really peeved at it.
  30. Maid in Manhattan
    As saccharine as it is disposable.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »