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. Bad Education
    Bad Education reminds us how synonymous great acting and great lying can be. Jackman and Janney, both giving their richest performances in some time, manage to pull the wool over your eyes with one hand even as they teasingly pull back the curtain with the other.
  2. Chichinette: The Accidental Spy
    The highly decorated Cohn is a feminist heroine who definitely deserves her own cinematic close-up. This one’s a start, but perhaps there’s a star-driven narrative feature to be had that can more richly bring her striking story to life.
  3. Sergio
    Barker and Borten have chosen to retain the documentary’s framing device of the rescue attempt. In the nonfiction film, it served as a propulsive engine, carefully balanced against the interviews that told Vieira de Mello’s story and its tragic conclusion. Here, it feels abstract, disjointed from the scenes with him and Carolina, thus weakening and muddying the story.
  4. Extraction
    Extraction would be better if it just doubled down on being dumb. Instead, although the movie does indeed have some dazzling action sequences, they are interspersed with dramatic scenes that feel increasingly belabored, giving the movie a peculiar stop-start rhythm as it makes its way to a lumbering, extended gun battle final set piece.
  5. To the Stars
    It is a movie that will reward your patience.
  6. Circus of Books
    Rachel Mason performs a nice bit of misdirection with the film, starting with humorous juxtapositions of this nice, elderly Jewish couple running a gay porn shop and then moving toward a poignant story of acceptance.
  7. Why Don't You Just Die!
    Why Don’t You Just Die! is too cartoonish and glib to have much to say about Russia or about genre films in general. But it is stylish and snazzy — a confident throwback to the knowing exploitation pictures of yesteryear.
  8. The Willoughbys
    The film’s bright colors and blaring happy music may not be enough for viewers to overcome the rather unfunny themes of neglect (“Back up the abuse caboose”) routinely excused in more engaging fare.
  9. Strike
    The handcrafted feel of the film is mainly a virtue, setting it apart from the vast majority of animated fare.
  10. A White, White Day
    To ascribe easy labels to A White, White Day — to call it a study of masculine rage or a portrait of a community perched at the edge of the world — is to risk bleeding it of its elemental poetry.
  11. Abe
    It almost works as food porn when we spend some time in Chico’s kitchen, but we never linger long enough for the experience to marinate.
  12. The Booksellers
    D.W. Young’s lovely film introduces us to several sellers of rare books, New Yorkers, all of them smart and self-aware enough to know how they’re perceived. (There hasn’t been this much tweed in a movie since “Gosford Park.”)
  13. The Quarry
    An ambitious combination of suspense thriller and brooding treatise on existential themes, The Quarry feels like a throwback to the era of late-night cable movies, when art, ambition and genre pulp would often collide.
  14. Endings, Beginnings
    Endings, Beginnings has some genuinely engaging moments somewhere in between its beginning and its ending, but too much gets lost in a saggy, shaggy middle.
  15. Selah and The Spades
    As a character study, Selah and the Spades is more than requiem for a mean girl. Think the stylistic snappiness of “Brick” meets the fastidious world-building of “Rushmore” with a fourth-wall-bending feminist perspective and two young black female leads, and you’ve got “Selah.”
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Beyond The Visible: Hilma af Klint
    It’s more than worth a look — not only for its careful illumination of the artist’s biography, plus an abundant representation of her luminous paintings, but for the way in which it exposes the obstacles af Klint and her legacy faced.
  17. Children of Paradise (1945)
    As a piece of romantic/dramatic cinema, its peers are few, its superiors simply nonexistent.
  18. Butt Boy
    Some might describe Butt Boy’s plodding, procedural-style storytelling as (ahem) assiduous, though I’d say constipation is the more appropriate metaphor: The story strains and clenches for more than an hour before finally reaching its bloody, long-overdue and admittedly eye-popping release.
  19. The Main Event
    The filmmakers cast several comic performers — Adam Pally as the dad, Tichina Arnold as the grandmother, Ken Marino as the bad guy — but there aren’t really opportunities for them to shine. Arnold seems to have the most fun with it. The Main Event, sadly, never gets off the mat.
  20. Love Wedding Repeat
    The obstacles here soon prove so contrived and the setups so schematic the movie can feel like a not-very-well-oiled, Rube Goldberg-like machine. And a predictable one at that.
  21. Tigertail
    What distinguishes “Tigertail” is the way Yang explores Pin-Jui’s earlier life as a means of showing how duty and obligation brought him to that place. And as Yang takes us on that journey with him, he also offers a low-key lesson for redemption — examine the past to escape regret.
  22. The Mindfulness Movement
    There’s merit — and in fact, real present need — for what The Mindfulness Movement is trying to say, but the film often gets in its own way.
  23. Close Encounters of the Fifth Kind
    This “Close Encounters” is overlong and rambling — more concerned with disconnected anecdotes than making a compelling case or telling an interesting story.
  24. The Lost Husband
    While nearly everything about The Lost Husband is pat and predictable, the movie’s easy to watch. Credit the charisma and polished professionalism of Bibb and Duhamel.
  25. We Summon the Darkness
    We Summon the Darkness is fine throughout; but it peaks in its first third, when nothing much is happening beyond some very good actors recreating the small-town rock ’n’ roll lifestyle of the recent past.
  26. Stray Dolls
    Stray Dolls lacks some narrative momentum, as the characters drift from petty crime to petty crime and party to party. But the film has a remarkable sense of place.
  27. Sea Fever
    Writer-director Neasa Hardiman mostly keeps her debut feature at the level of a claustrophobic psychological thriller, saving her special effects budget for a few breathtaking undersea views of the glowing, multi-tentacled beastie. But after a fairly sedate start, the movie gets increasingly grim and violent.
  28. About a Teacher
    More aligned to the docudrama stylings of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach than the likes of a “Lean on Me” or “Stand and Deliver,” Harchol’s inspirational film eschews mainstream tropes in favor of a bracingly candid sociological study that has compellingly done its homework.
  29. Waldo on Weed
    There’s no definitive verdict on pot’s attributes here, but Waldo on Weed offers reasonable hope with discerning caveats.
  30. Trolls World Tour
    Despite the range of musical genres represented and the obsessive attention to visual detail, there is a bland, wearying homogeneity to the way Trolls World Tour looks and sounds.
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