L.A. Weekly's Scores

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For 3,701 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 7.7 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 56
Highest review score: 100 The Fallen Idol (re-release)
Lowest review score: 0 Whipped
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 1,515 out of 3701
  2. Mixed: 1,523 out of 3701
  3. Negative: 663 out of 3701
3701 movie reviews
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  1. Transformer
    The film might prove more illuminating and instructive if it examined more reactions to Kroc’s flowering from within the lifting world. Overall, though, Del Monte has crafted a warm portrait of the birth of a woman from a man who found that he had even more strength than he ever realized.
  2. What They Had
    The family squabbles jangle the nerves while not hitting on insights or memorable emotion.
  3. Mid90s
    Mid90s, for all its darkness, is uplifted by its hilarious moments and joyous skating shots.
  4. Galveston
    Laurent's work as an actor serves her well as a director, and she allows her performers the freedom to find each moment’s emotional core. Foster and Fanning are excellent, their chemistry intensified by their characters' shared bitterness and loss of what could have been.
  5. Wildlife
    Dano’s film is shrewd and exacting, composed with rigor yet alert to the rhythms of its performers.
  6. Halloween
    Too often, in this version, Green doesn’t seem to know where to put the camera to elicit that sense of surveilling or being surveilled. Worse, that incompetence often works hand in hand with overwrought comic dialogue. But let’s get to what really works here: Curtis.
  7. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    No one does dissolute hubris with as much charm as Grant, and his ebullience is the perfect foil to the misanthropic McCarthy.
  8. The Sentence
    Here’s a true surprise in 2018: a documentary about an American injustice that will likely leave you, by its end, blubbering tears of relieved joy.
  9. First Man
    In the end, what shines through First Man is the toughness and resilience of the men whose no-nonsense efforts allowed the rest of us to dream.
  10. Studio 54
    Helped along by news clips, the filmmakers do better with the crash-and-burn business story than with the actuality of the Studio experience.
  11. The Kindergarten Teacher
    The Kindergarten Teacher dares us to work out for ourselves, from moment to moment, whether Lisa is a hero, a monster or something in-between
  12. After Everything
    White and Monroe are terrific — their relationship, as well as its dissolution, is completely believable — but they’re limited by a script full of old tropes.
  13. The Oath
    While watching the film, I not only laughed a lot and gasped oh, shit! in the right places. I somehow never once found myself tempted to sneak a peek at my phone to check in on our real American hellscape.
  14. Beautiful Boy
    The imperfect yet affecting new film Beautiful Boy, based on memoirs by the real-life Nic and David, examines addiction and its effects on one family. But it’s also a meditation on memory and the difficulty of reconciling the happiness of the past with a present that’s become too sad to bear.
  15. Rodents of Unusual Size
    The documentary, directed by Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer and Quinn Costello, and narrated by Wendell Pierce, uses cartoon diagrams and a cheerful score by the Lost Bayou Ramblers to make its tale of inherited destruction and trauma as charming as possible. The way that initial ease peels back is the film’s greatest asset.
  16. Shine
    While Saldivar and Burgos are better dancers than actors, Collado and Flores are incredibly charismatic performers who bring every scene they’re in to life, but it’s Zayas who anchors Shine. His gravitas shot through with mischief sets the film’s tone, showing that serious-minded storytelling can still be fun.
  17. Heavy Trip
    In their feature debut, co-writers/directors Juuso Laatio and Jukka Vidgren and co-writers Aleksi Puranen and Jari Olavi Rantala reach for absurdist comedy — the reindeer-blood accident, the projectile-vomit bit, the grave-robbing incident — with a touch so light that the general nuttiness comes to seem a central (and essential) component of Finnish rural life.
  18. Living in the Future's Past
    Director Susan Kucera and the film’s guiding spirit, Jeff Bridges, have created a wonkish lovefest, incorporating the diverse ideas of (predominantly white) scientists and academics, philosophers and authors, activists and politicians into a plea for equable reflection and sustained action.
  19. The Hate U Give
    The Hate U Give takes time to focus on the nuances of Starr’s life, on the effort of code-switching, on the layers of self that Starr must sort through in everyday interactions.
  20. Loving Pablo
    Double-stuffed with kill squads, killer ’80s couture and mood-killing howlers, Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s Loving Pablo is more a greatest hits than a story, the kind of radically compressed life-of-a-legend movie where everything happens in a giddy, ridiculous gush — except for when it slows down to dwell on horrors.
  21. Knuckleball
    Knuckleball mostly fills up its running time by being a twisted, even more ridiculous Home Alone.
  22. Ride
    Despite valiant effort from the performers — especially Usher, who's onscreen for nearly every scene — this three-hander is no joyride.
  23. Private Life
    Jenkins (director of The Savages and Slums of Beverly Hills) is always more interested in emotional truth than she is in laughs. Throughout Private Life’s tense 124 minutes, she continually achieves both.
  24. A Star Is Born
    To fall in love with Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born is to embrace its paradoxes and, to quote a song Lady Gaga sings in the film, go “off the deep end” and submerge oneself “far from the shallow.” My advice? Submit. Suspend yourself in the charms and romance of this melodrama.
  25. Call Her Ganda
    Call Her Ganda works best when it’s focused on Laude and the case of her murder, an overwhelming showcase of empathy and persistence in the face of American racism and transmisogyny.
  26. The Old Man & the Gun
    Rather than a tragic inevitability or a comic detachment, the final scenes have about them the whiff of resignation, possibly meaningful or possibly not.
  27. Monsters and Men
    Monsters and Men seems as if it was made for the world that existed a few years ago. I honestly can’t tell if my dissatisfaction is with the movie or the era into which it is released.
  28. Maximum Impact
    There’s something oddly fascinating (and — dare I say it! — watchable) about a movie being this defiantly dumb. I never thought I’d say this, but this guy could give Tommy Wiseau a run for his money in the best worst filmmaker department.
  29. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    With Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., Loveridge celebrates the mashup aesthetic that enabled the artist to find a voice, and reveals that reconciling contradictions — like an outrageous sense of humor and earnest political activism — is key to both Arulpragasam’s music and the life she’s constructed with audacity and wit.
  30. Free Solo
    To watch Honnold think through each ledge of his climbs can stop the heart; to watch him navigate human emotion might melt it.
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