L.A. Weekly's Scores

For 3,656 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 46% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 51% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 55
Highest review score:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
3,656 movie reviews
  1. May just be the most boring movie ever made; certainly it's the most boring movie I've suffered through to the bitter end.
  2. There are ticklish moments, but no real laughs.
  3. The Master of Disguise represents Adam Sandler's latest attempt to dumb down the universe.
    • Metascore: 22
    • Critic Score 10
    Equally as brainless, shrill and calculated as its two predecessors.
  4. Only a 10-year-old could parse the plot.
  5. The film stinks from start to finish, like a wet burlap sack of gloom.
  6. If, for whatever reason, you do find yourself watching it, you may begin to ponder one of life's larger dilemmas: the fact that something can be done does not necessarily mean it should be done.
  7. A promotional gimmick that's being slipped into theaters with the sort of stealth accorded only the unprofitable or the unwatchable.
  8. Since neither (Chapelle nor Koontz) seems to have any idea as to how to make an actual movie, they abandon form and reason and throw every stock trick in the book at the screen to see what sticks. And what sticks is the murky goo of storytelling gone bad.
  9. It almost appears like a little thought went into this otherwise grim exercise in soullessness.
  10. It’s like watching an annoying young drag queen who flubs the quips she’s stolen, refuses to shut up and thinks attitude is wit.
  11. Lurches from one set-piece stomach-lurcher to the next with nary a nod to narrative coherence.
    • Metascore: tbd
    • Critic Score 10
    Bad improv is bad improv, and it’s a potent virus.
  12. Mimi Leder shows none of the vigor she exhibited when directing for E.R., and screenwriters Michael Tolkin and Bruce Joel Rubin betray a real aptitude for hack work.
  13. Pitched as a black comedy, the film thus far seems to have divided audiences between those who think it unaccountably hilarious and those who see it as the latest manifestation of what might be called the new nihilism.
  14. A stunningly lethargic, uninvolving piece of crap.
  15. Anatomy of Hell offers one of the most hateful and mechanical representations of sexuality I've ever seen.
  16. It's screen comedy at the end of its tether, Capra-corn gone rancid.
  17. Vinterberg's execution is overstuffed, unoriginal and often downright incomprehensible. And what's Sean Penn doing dangling off airplanes -- pontificating, as usual, from a great height?
  18. Oxymoronic musings of a vain country singer.
  19. Put simply, in my humble opinion, Oldboy sucks.
    • Metascore: 56
    • Critic Score 10
    Slowly degenerates into a gory revenge thriller that is never thrilling, but is often boring and frequently repulsive.
  20. Too bad that by the time the volcano shoots its wad, the movie has already died a thousand deaths, ground to a halt by the interminable waiting for the damn thing to blow.
  21. Painfully bereft of wit or cogent insight.
    • Metascore: 61
    • Critic Score 10
    While the women go through a few of the motions, shifting decorously under the sheets and sucking face, there's no lust in their coupling, just choreography and the conceit of two filmmakers with nothing more on their minds than fake dykes and bloodshed.
  22. The animation is cheesy; the banter isn't funny; the score is noisy and grating; and the critters look like stuffed animals. The best that can be said for The Wild is that it's a most insincere form of flattery. The worst is that it's a sincere form of theft.
  23. You'll be begging for mercy well before the end of this self-righteous, thoroughly unsavory "farce" about a lonely gay man who - gosh darn it - can't seem to stop getting mistaken for a pedophile.
  24. Here, the CG effects are plentiful, but the scare factor rarely rises above the level of a viral email, and the desaturated color scheme of Sonzero and cinematographer Mark Plummer makes every frame look as though it was developed in a solution of vomit and ash.
    • Metascore: 27
    • Critic Score 10
    It's an astonishingly crass and vulgar film, crudely directed on a cut-rate budget by Brian Robbins, never more than almost funny or less than disturbing.
    • Metascore: 22
    • Critic Score 10
    If it was simply a jokey commentary on the dangers of greed and religious fervor, Tortilla Heaven would be forgivable. But Hecht Dumontet deserves special derision for her hypocritical condescension toward Falfúrrias' simple-folk caricatures, rendering them as God-fearing dolts worthy of scorn until the patronizing finale, which tries for a spiritual uplift that's as disingenuous as it is incompetently executed.
    • Metascore: 14
    • Critic Score 10
    Actor-writer-director Mars Callahan's diarrheal 10-character rant about modern relationships sounds like it was researched by eavesdropping on the restroom chatter at a high school prom.
    • Metascore: 18
    • Critic Score 10
    This ostensible comedy may be a new depths-of-hell low in the Emmanuel Lewis filmography, but for star Jamie Kennedy it’s par for the coarse.
  25. Replete with false dilemmas, assisted by a dreadfully stagy screenplay and directed with all the animation of a tableau vivant, Metroland is such a draggy bore.
    • Metascore: 13
    • Critic Score 10
    Depressingly shrill.
    • Metascore: 12
    • Critic Score 10
    No snob to low-brow ridiculousness when it’s actually unexpected, I’ll admit to being amused exactly once, when Zahn gets deep-throated by a gigantic prop turkey who, despite the mouthful, keeps on flapping.
    • Metascore: 44
    • Critic Score 10
    As a satire of France's recent turn to the right, Frontier(s) is both hysterical and muddled; as straight-up splatter -- a Grand Guignol concerto of scalding steam, slashed tendons and table saw, with a solo for exploding head -- it's as relentless as it is hateful, hammily directed and derivative of the dreariest slop in contemporary American horror cinema.
    • Metascore: 70
    • Critic Score 10
    One graphic that I.O.U.S.A. doesn't include is a national balance sheet of our assets and liabilities, which would illustrate that the former is more than double the latter. We're in the black, and a film this deep in the red isn't something to be scared of at all -- or taken seriously.
    • Metascore: 16
    • Critic Score 10
    Lacking even the train-wreck appeal of a brainless stoner comedy like "Half-Baked," Surfer, Dude is a numbing experience at just 89 minutes.
    • Metascore: 28
    • Critic Score 10
    From Freestyle Releasing, the self-service distributor that brought you "D-War" and "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale," comes a movie even worse than those two combined.
    • Metascore: 41
    • Critic Score 10
    The diminishing returns of shock value are the movie's built-in joke, and it would be a lot funnier without the directors' unforgivably bratty postsexist/postracist/posthuman showboating.
    • Metascore: 20
    • Critic Score 10
    This is one muddled attempt at franchise making: confusing, drab, sluggish. (Ugly, too, if you're forced to see it in 3-D.)
  26. Smart money says Friedberg and Seltzer never sit through these movies in entirety.
    • Metascore: 28
    • Critic Score 10
    A dreadfully unfunny slog through contemporary dysfunctional family indie cliché.
    • Metascore: 55
    • Critic Score 10
    A manifesto in the form of an enormously budgeted quasi-sci-fi epic, Cloud Atlas is evidently personal, defiantly sincere, totally lacking in self-awareness, and borderline offensive in its gleeful endorsement of revenge violence against anyone who gets in the way of a good person's self-actualization. The rest of the time, it's just insipid, TV-esque in its limited visual imagination, and dramatically incoherent.
  27. Director Chuck Russell ("The Mask") and screenwriter Thomas Rickman don't need new agents -- they need backup careers.
  28. A mean-spirited, hyperviolent, stupid movie.
    • Metascore: 25
    • Critic Score 0
    Complete and utter horseshit.
  29. As repellent as their characters are, one feels a degree of pity for the three male leads, who give fresh evidence that hungry actors can't say no to a studio feature, no matter how humiliating the script.
  30. Astonishing isn't the word -- neither is incompetent, incoherent or just plain crap. Indeed, none of these words really gets at the very special type of badness that is Deuces Wild.
  31. This movie could have easily been shot as porn, a transition that would have given it a modicum of respectability and, better still, true social purpose.
  32. Could it get any worse?
  33. Barely proficient on a craft level, this jumble of putatively comic misunderstanding and overly familiar crude burlesque achieves its nadir with a cameo from Mamie Van Doren, a degrading, shameful turn that lays bare, all too literally, the filmmakers' contempt for women.
  34. Miraculously seems a great deal longer (this is not a good thing) as it careens from shit joke to corpse joke to ass joke to dog-turd joke and back.
  35. Rollerball pushes the Hollywood action movie to stratospheric new levels of incoherence; pounding at the senses, it's mashed story, character, time and space into a chunky hash.
  36. Three strikes maybe, but no stars and no thumbs up (except the one way, way up its own ass).
  37. Lifeless, desultory slog.
  38. What the film suffers from most, though, are its own low aspirations: stroking the libidos and funny bones of brain-dead 12-year-old boys immersed in the shallow end of hip-hop.
  39. Isn't just rotten -- badly acted, badly written, badly conceived -- it's dead inside.
  40. That clunky, God-awful bit of exposition-heavy dialogue perfectly encapsulates all that's wrong with this dismal film.
  41. "It's no longer funny, but he refuses to give up the joke." That just about sums it up except for the film's shopworn plot -- and its wretchedly cheap production design.
  42. A crass, condescending piece of corporate bamboozling, Grind plays like a movie conceived by monkey-suited honchos who regard their targeted audience as impressionable nincompoops susceptible to every new trend in sports, clothing and music that comes down the pike.
  43. One of those puppy-love movies that make you feel like you're slowly drowning.
    • Metascore: 19
    • Critic Score 0
    Cloying, obnoxious, unfunny, evil, shallow, schadenfreude-wielding, dumb-fuck-fratboy-wants-a-blowjob, sitcom-directed piece of elbow-in-the-rib-till-you-puke-blood, just-connect-the-dots-and-we’ll-all-make-a-lot-of-money-and-nobody-gets-hurt...
  44. Bad movies can be a hoot, but rather than campy, Ameer appears to be dead serious; and it's hard to feel anything but fury toward a filmmaker whose opening title sequence intersperses black-and-white flashbacks of his sexy young lovers with actual concentration-camp photos of stacked, emaciated corpses.
    • Metascore: 38
    • Critic Score 0
    Some of the most heavy-handed, laughless, uninspired attempts at comedy since prime time. But I still dig “South Park.” Let’s forget this ever happened.
  45. Pure junk.
    • Metascore: 6
    • Critic Score 0
    A May-September sex farce so prodigiously unintriguing that audiences could be forgiven for stampeding from theaters to strangle its writer-director, Gary Preisler, in his sleep.
  46. A good horse kick, or a fistful of Valium, may help you get through this relentlessly sadistic exercise with your soul more or less intact.
  47. A schizoid monster slapped together by uneasy bedfellows.
  48. Irons' doleful lassitude sucks the energy right out of the story and makes this listlessly directed adaptation droop all the more.
  49. Scottish director Michael Caton-Jones continues to fritter away the last traces of his talent with this ugly variant on Fred Zinnemann's 1973 original, The Day of the Jackal.
  50. It's cynical and it's depressing, and I would lock a child in a room before I'd show him Mortal Kombat: Annihilation.
    • Metascore: 15
    • Critic Score 0
    This carpet-fouling mongrel of a movie no more deserves release than do anthrax spores.
  51. Film critics never come home stinking of their honest labor, but the nearest equivalent is reviewing something like College, which leaves its stain on one's very humanity.
    • Metascore: 40
    • Critic Score 0
    So bad it's scary.
  52. Mostly, Lafferty is all about expletives and sexual innuendo of the frankest kind, some of it so raunchy (and unfunny) as to make one wonder if the parents of the film's many child actors bothered to read the script.
    • Metascore: 7
    • Critic Score 0
    Only a moron would expect a dude road-trip-sex comedy to be more than an aggressive expression of male sexual anxiety. But really, when did women become such vile creatures.
    • Metascore: tbd
    • Critic Score 0
    In 2009, its hilarious ineptitude makes it border on becoming a cult classic for the ages ... and we're not talking religious cult.
    • Metascore: 34
    • Critic Score 0
    Unbearably painful from shrugging start to outtakes-laden finish, Harold Ramis’ half-assed, hare-brained return to writing and directing makes Mel Brooks’ equally muddled, soporific "History of the World, Part 1" look downright majestic by comparison.
  53. Taken just as an objet d’art, Saw VI — gray, grisly, solemn, stupid — would be about the most dismal thing I’ve ever laid eyes on, the argument against film preservation. But it vaults into the realm of real detestability through pretensions of relevance.
  54. Writer-director David DeFalco's ugly, pointless and dishonest remake of Craven's remake.