Los Angeles Times' Scores

For 16,523 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:
16523 movie reviews
  1. One of the five most popular films of the year in France, "Wolf" is a cross-cultural hoot that no one should take too seriously.
  2. Starts out deliriously funny but allows sentimentality to squeeze it to a pulp by the time it's over.
  3. Likely to be best appreciated by dedicated sci-fi fans, admirers of Dick in particular. It hasn't the stupendous razzle-dazzle of a mega-budget picture like "A.I. Artificial Intelligence."
  4. Intoxicating and meditative by turns, helped by Fred Frith's minimalist score, this film opens a portal into a singular creative mind.
  5. Charlotte Gray, for all Blanchett's radiance and intelligence in the title role, is a bore.
  6. A warm, hard-to-resist story.
  7. As it stands, Dark Blue World -- for all the considerable skills of the Sveraks and their colleagues on both sides of the camera -- occupies that treacherous territory between art film and popular epic.
  8. His is a triumph of pure filmmaking, a pitiless, unrelenting, no-excuses war movie so thoroughly convincing it's frequently difficult to believe it is a staged re-creation.
  9. It's the style of the thing, not the plot, that is the attraction here, the great way the cast has with the snarky dialogue.
  10. Hank is but the latest of Thornton's strikingly taciturn characters in a whole string of movies, but for Berry, Leticia represents a big-screen breakthrough.
  11. It's a portrayal so unconvincing it makes it close to impossible for the rest of the film to function as intended.
  12. Ali
    Whatever the reason, the energy and hold-onto-your-seat excitement that Muhammad Ali brought to the sports world is oddly absent from this quite accomplished but finally distant film.
  13. The Majestic isn't. Rather it's "The Film That Wasn't There," a derivative, self-satisfied fable that couldn't be more treacly and simple-minded if it tried. And it tries, oh, how it tries.
  14. A flawed time-travel love story, benefits from Meg Ryan's reliable perkiness and establishes Australia's Hugh Jackman as a potent romantic leading man. These and other pluses, however, cannot overcome the film's inability to come alive for a full hour and 20 minutes.
  15. There is more to admire in A Beautiful Mind than you might suspect, but less than its creators believe. When the film does succeed, it almost seems to do so despite itself.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    From its invitingly upbeat overture to its pathos-filled but ultimately life-affirming finale, "Martin" is a masterfully conducted work.
  16. There's a spirit of generosity to How High that allows many performers to shine beyond its sharp and amiable stars.
  17. The movie's clatter and whiz-bang suggests more humor than there actually is.
  18. Little Otik is too outre not to turn off some, but for those who can go the increasingly macabre distance, its sheer power to confound can be enthralling.
  19. Joe Somebody sends audiences home happy but also with an awareness that happy endings have to be earned in real life as on the screen.
  20. Made with intelligence, imagination, passion and skill, propulsively paced and shot through with an aged-in-oak sense of wonder, the trilogy's first film so thrillingly catches us up in its sweeping story that nothing matters but the vivid and compelling events unfolding on the screen.
  21. This remarkably revealing and timely film, in which the depiction of pain and sorrow is suffused with a sense of beauty and a graceful, flowing style, more than lives up to glowing advance notices.
  22. A remarkably thoughtful drama, Lantana makes it clear not only how hard to come by any emotional comfort is in this life, but more important, why we can't give up on the struggle.
  23. Stirring, often tragic yet hopeful, In Search of Peace benefits from its eloquent narrator Michael Douglas, and from the voices of Edward Asner, Anne Bancroft, Richard Dreyfuss, Miriam Margolyes and Michael York.
  24. Ichaso moves easily between a black-and-white past and a full-color present, maintaining a pace as buoyant and rhythmic as the beat of the infectious Latin music that accompanies the film.
  25. Intelligent, poignant film.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    That's not to say there aren't funny moments here. There are. Two, maybe three of them. But unless you're a hearty 14-year-old -- who of course is not supposed to be seeing this R-rated movie -- it's hardly worth fishing them out of the potty humor and repulsive sex talk.
  26. Director Wes Anderson, who also co-wrote the "Royal" script with actor Owen Wilson, unquestionably has one of America's most distinctive filmmaking sensibilities, but that is part of the problem. As my mother used to say, too good is no good.
  27. Though Vanilla Sky is smoothly and professionally done, even audiences who haven't seen the original will sense there is something off in the translation.
  28. Carvalho's superb cinematography, Antonio Pinto's score and a dedicated cast and crew admirably sustain this poetic and uncompromising film.

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