Los Angeles Times' Scores

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For 16,520 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: 8,697 out of 16520
  2. Mixed: 5,806 out of 16520
  3. Negative: 2,017 out of 16520
16520 movie reviews
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  1. Lionheart
    Being able to kick people in the head, at least while they’re standing up, is no negligible talent--though Lionheart is a pretty negligible movie. It has that grotesquely off-scale exaggeration of many post-'80s action movies.
  2. Not Without My Daughter
    Not even Seth's elegance and worldly warmth, nor his short speech about the virtues of his country's culture, is enough to give balance to the film's nearly two-hour portrayal of harassment, inequality and suppression. [11 Jan 1991, p.F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  3. Warlock
    Warlock is supposedly about the battle between Good and Evil, but movies about the battle between Heckle and Jeckle have more terror or profundity. [17 Jan 1991, p.F12]
    • Los Angeles Times
  4. The Godfather: Part III
    Though definitely one of the best American movies of the year--a work of high ensemble talent and intelligence, gorgeously mounted and crafted, artistically audacious in ways that most American movies don't even attempt--it's still a disappointment… It's not the capstone we might have wanted Coppola to make. [23 Dec 1990, Calendar, p.9]
    • Los Angeles Times
  5. Alice
    Allen may consider Alice to be a minor jest before his next Big One, but there are pleasures in its small-time ambitions that sometime elude him on his more ambitious projects.
  6. Kindergarten Cop
    It would be lying not to say that some of the moviemakers here aren't working at the top of their craft, or that the movie won't reach audiences. On its own terms, Kindergarten Cop is nearly fool-proof: the last word in glib, shallow, soulless, spuriously warm-hearted commercialism. [21 Dec 1990, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  7. The Long Walk Home
    A blob of good intentions. Good intentions do not a good movie make. 
  8. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    So what was rich, journalistic and precisely observed is now overstated, under-textured and cartooned, in playwright/screenwriter Michael Cristofer’s witless screenplay. Certainly Wolfe’s canvas might lend itself to a broad approach, but broad like “Dr. Strangelove,” not broad like the Three Stooges.
  9. The Russia House
    Schepisi may have made the first truly and intelligently uplifting spy movie. His style here is magisterial yet playful: The melancholy grandeur of Russia, on view at last for the whole world to see, has turned him into an eye-popping enthusiast.
  10. Awakenings
    As well-meaning and "sensitive" as Awakenings is, it never rises much above the level of a grade-A tear-jerker. It achieves most of its effects by tenderizing raw material into something marshmallowy. [20 Dec 1990, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  11. Edward Scissorhands
    Perhaps the most original movie fantasy creation of the year: an icon of tenderness and artistic alienation that clings, stickum-like, to your mind's eye and the softest, most woundable parts of your mass-culture heart. [7 Dec 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  12. The Rookie
    Even as an Eastwood vehicle -- an appropriate term for a movie about a cutthroat car-theft ring -- the film is a warmed-over compost. [07 Dec 1990, p.F10]
    • Los Angeles Times
  13. The Grifters
    Diamond-hard and mesmerizing… Bening and Cusack are perfection at what they are doing, she twinkly as any rhinestone, he dangerously passive; it's hardly their fault that Huston is the motor of the piece and so ferociously seductive that one cannot look away from her. [5 Dec 1990]
    • Los Angeles Times
  14. Cyrano de Bergerac
    Well-nigh flawless, with scarcely a moment's lull. [18 Dec 1990, p.F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  15. Misery
    As compelling as Misery often is, I can't say that I really enjoyed it a whole lot. It's too flat-footed and vise-like. Reiner doesn't provide the kind of nasty, sophisticated finesse that might have lifted the film out of pulpdom and into more Hitchcockian terrain. [30 Nov 1990, p.F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  16. Eating
    With Eating the ever-idiosyncratic independent filmmaker Henry Jaglom continues his intimate, spontaneous, witty but always compassionate observations of compulsive, neurotic human behavior--and reveals his ongoing fascination with women.
  17. Mr. & Mrs. Bridge
    Its stars, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, are on screen virtually all of the time, and they're always worth watching. But the film puts such a premium on tastefulness that it never threatens to become exciting. [23 Nov 1990]
    • Los Angeles Times
  18. Predator 2
    Virtually everything about the film is derivative--even the design for the eerie setting for the climactic struggle recalls the interiors of the more exotic old movie palaces--but its makers can't be accused of cutting corners. No doubt about it, those who ask only for pure action will be getting their money's worth.
  19. 3 Men and a Little Lady
    Other than Shaw's turn, which gets dampened in the determinedly frolicsome finale, there's little to like in Three Men and a Little Lady. Selleck is charming. Danson, aided by latex and a Carmen Miranda outfit, has two funny scenes. Travis has a lovely smile, which she overuses.
  20. Rocky V
    In Rocky V, the fifth and presumably last episode of Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa saga, the writer-star once again contrives a way to make his hulking, sad-eyed gladiator the underdog. And we get whiffs of funkiness and humanity stirring around for the first time since the original Rocky. [16 Nov 1990, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  21. The Rescuers Down Under
    With its exhilarating action sequences, Walt Disney Pictures' The Rescuers Down Under challenges the adventure films of Spielberg and Lucas and confirms the special power of animation to present extravagant fantasies on screen.
  22. Dances with Wolves
    A clear-eyed vision. Authentic as an Edward Curtis photograph, lyrical as a George Catlin oil or a Karl Bodmer landscape, this is a film with a pure ring to it. It's impossible to call it anything but epic [9 Nov 1990, Calendar, p.F-1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  23. The Krays
    If Medak had been able to delineate the twinship of crime and show biz, he might have moved the film's frights into a higher realm. Instead, he's come up with a classy freak show.
  24. Child's Play 2
    It's an all-out horror film--handsomely produced but morbid and not in the least amusing to watch.
  25. My Twentieth Century
    My Twentieth Century (Times-rated Mature for sex, complex style and themes) remains on the whole buoyant and beguiling--and is surely among the most distinctive films to arrive this year.
  26. Jacob's Ladder
    Really effective horror films make us participants in the horror. Jacob's Ladder doesn't draw us in in that way. It's a movie about interior states that's all on the outside. [30 Oct 1990, p.1]
    • Los Angeles Times
  27. Vincent & Theo
    It's a tortuous, unsatisfying movie, but it's not like any other film I've ever seen about an artist, and it has sequences of blinding intensity.
  28. Graffiti Bridge
    It's a mixed bag; parts of it are awful. But it has, and needs, only one major defense: It's full of Grade-A rock 'n' roll, rousingly well performed. It moves, it swings, it jumps and vibrates. It's a musical. [05 Nov 1990, p.F10]
    • Los Angeles Times
  29. Graveyard Shift
    This picture, which looks far, far better than it is, is so clunky that you can't be sure just how funny writer John Esposito, in adapting an early King short story, and director Ralph S. Singleton intended it to be.
  30. Night of the Living Dead
    While this "Night" hasn't the chilling, almost cinema-verite credibility of the original, it is certainly a well-sustained entertainment, with one foolish or unlucky incident triggering another. Like the original, this R-rated production is definitely not for children. [19 Oct 1990, p.F1]
    • Los Angeles Times
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