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 2.4 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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    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    What's Up, Doc?
    The film is a cultivated taste -- hilarious to some, silly to others. The 94-minute romp holds up well with Madeline Kahn in her first film role and Streisand showing off her likable comic abilities. [19 Feb 1993, p.F24]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 81 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Duel
    Spielberg reveals his budding genius as he builds suspense in an excruciating series of scenes and seeming non-events. To the credit of the direction, the cinematography and Weaver's acting, you start to believe the truck has a sinister life of its own. Your imagination runs away with you because virtually all you can see is the truck grille in Weaver's rear-view mirror. [21 Jan 1993, p.28]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The French Connection
    Surely one of the most exciting -- and brutal -- movies ever made...This is slam-bang, suspenseful, sardonically funny, furious-paced melodrama culminating in the justly famous chase sequence. [21 July 1985, p.5]
    • Los Angeles Times
  4. The Murder of Fred Hampton
    It’s the rare film that decades later can seem as timely as it was the day it came out. The searing documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton is such a film.
  5. Skin Game
    The remarkable script by Pierre Marton manages to be great fun while laying bare the evils of the institution of slavery. [11 Aug 1991, p.6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  6. The Million Dollar Duck
    One of the better old-regime Disney stories. [12 Apr 1992, p.7]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Mephisto Waltz
    The film features some real mystery and suspense, a few laughably outlandish touches, one of Jacqueline Bisset's more watchable early roles, lots of Liszt and a reasonable amount of not-too-graphic scary fun. [07 Jul 1989, p.20]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 51 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    They Might Be Giants
    George C. Scott plays a gentle wacko who thinks he's Sherlock Holmes. He's being treated by a psychiatrist (Joanne Woodward) named Dr. Watson. If you think that's funny, then this movie is for you. The point of all this is that losers can be winners. The cast labors valiantly in a lost cause. [24 Apr 1987, p.19]
    • Los Angeles Times
  9. The Aristocats
    The plot does little more than link a string of vaguely related episodes, intended to provide comedy, excitement and music. But even at their least original, the Disney artists provide better animation--and more entertainment--than the recent animated features
  10. El Topo
    Unfortunately, Jodorowsky is no Bunuel -- nor a Leone, for that matter -- and El Topo’s bloody odyssey, involving endless heavily symbolic encounters with the bizarre and fantastic, expresses the eternal tug of war between the savage and the spiritual in human nature on the most obvious level and in the most ponderous fashion.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Husbands
    Empathy shades into sympathy turns to morbid fascination. You can’t stop watching, even if you want to.
  12. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
    Robert Stephens is Sherlock, Colin Blakely is Watson, and the movie is one of Wilder's least cynical and most romantic, a sadly elegant celebration of gaslit sleuthery. [09 Apr 1989, p.4]
    • Los Angeles Times
  13. The Conformist
    Seems every bit the masterpiece it was when first released by Paramount. In this dazzling film, Bertolucci manages to combine the bravura style of Fellini, the acute sense of period of Visconti and the fervent political commitment of Elio Petri -- and, better still, a lack of self-indulgence.
  14. The Great White Hope
    This big-scale work, directed by Martin Ritt, is of solid craftsmanship but little style. James Earl Jones' Johnson is, however, intensely vital and larger-than-life. [10 Dec 1989, p.2]
    • Los Angeles Times
  15. The Wild Child
    An enduring film of enchanting and provocative revelation. [09 Jan 2009, p.E15]
    • Los Angeles Times
  16. La Piscine
    The film is never just some glassy exercise in the idly loaded’s languorous cruelty, though. In each magnetic performance (especially Schneider’s), in the sparse but piquant lines from the script co-written with the great, recently departed screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière (working from an Alain Page story), and in Deray’s attention to emotional humidity, lies something resolutely curious about human frailty in relationships.
  17. Watermelon Man
    Because its gimmick lays bare the evils of racism so easily, the movie works for a while, but it becomes so predictable that it runs out of gas long before the end. [13 Oct 1985, p.5]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 95 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Woodstock
    Now, as ever, "Woodstock" is not just a great slice-of-time documentary but still the ultimate rock concert movie: A quarter-century of advances hasn't brought about any real improvements on the multiple-camera filming techniques or even significantly dated the split-screen effects and varying aspect ratio tricks. The advent of digital sound, on the other hand, has given the remixed soundtrack a theatrical glory unknown a generation ago. At this pristine volume, Jimi Hendrix's concluding bit may not be quite suitable for anyone with a heart condition, which would constitute more of the Woodstock nation than some of us might like to consider. [29 June 1994, p.F6]
    • Los Angeles Times
  19. The Boys in the Band
    Whatever its legacy, the film remains a gripping drama. [09 Nov 2008, p.E10]
    • Los Angeles Times
  20. Patton
    Written by Francis Coppola and Edmund H. North and directed impeccably by Franklin Schaffner, Patton is extraordinary for its mix of action and deft illumination of an amazingly complex man, brought to proud, robust life unforgettably by George C. Scott. [10 Jul 1988, p.2]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 82 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Honeymoon Killers
    The film's not for everyone's tastes but is extremely well done. [04 Aug 2003, p.3]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Molly Maguires
    Ritt's film does not follow predictable lines, nor does it tidy up the personalities it examines. In the end, that unflinching honesty lends the The Molly Maguires pertinence and power. [08 Apr 1993, p.21]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 66 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Reivers
    This film, deftly directed by Mark Rydell (Cinderella Liberty, The Rose, On Golden Pond), is a celebration of simpler times and gentler hearts. It is an absolute joy to watch. [24 Sep 1992, p.12]
    • Los Angeles Times
  24. The Rain People
    Intense and affecting. [24 Jun 1990, p.67]
    • Los Angeles Times
  25. True Grit
    Irresistible 1969 Hal Wallis-Henry Hathaway Western that won John Wayne his long overdue Oscar as a rip-snorting federal marshal who meets his match in Kim Darby's doughty little girl. [06 Oct 1991, p.8]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 61 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Assassination Bureau
    The marvelously sexy and witty Diana Rigg is seen to great advantage in this overlooked 1969 British gem derived from a Jack London story in which Rigg plays a turn-of-the-century liberationist bent on destroying London journalism's male exclusivity by uncovering an organization of paid killers. [06 May 1990, p.3]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 66 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
    Campy horror at its very best, courtesy of Hammer Films, director Freddie Francis and the incomparable Christopher Lee in his third outing as the bloody Count. Sexy, baroque and completely inconsequential. [29 Oct 1998, p.F45]
    • Los Angeles Times
  28. Faces
    The plot is bare and a little cliched, but the film's dramatic scenes, usually shot with a roving camera and lighted in fairly crude ways, are realistically, almost voyeuristicly, staged. [04 Jul 1991, p.13]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 49 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Ice Station Zebra
    John Sturges directed this overlong but intermittently entertaining action-thriller. [24 Jul 2002, p.2]
    • Los Angeles Times
    • 81 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Bullitt
    Not to go all Pauline Kael on you, but Bullitt -- the 1968 crime drama starring a Ford Mustang GT390 and some guy named Steve McQueen -- is a fairly tedious bit of Aquarian cinema: the chicka-chicka-waah soundtrack, the inscrutable plot, the anaerobic dullness of every second that McQueen is off-camera. Bullitt scrabbles to its minor footnote status in film history on two counts. The first: It marks the only time any man ever looked cool in a cardigan -- McQueen should have gotten the academy's knitwear award. The second is the movie's remarkable seven-minute chase scene, with real cars (the Mustang and a black Dodge Charger), real drivers and real stunts, no special effects.
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