Ty Burr

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Boston Globe, Entertainment Weekly, Washington Post
For 2,962 reviews, this critic has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 1.1 points higher than other critics. (0-100 point scale)

Ty Burr's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
Average review score: 67
Highest review score: 100 The Kid Stays in the Picture
Lowest review score: 0 The Nutcracker
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 2,118 out of 2962
  2. Mixed: 484 out of 2962
  3. Negative: 360 out of 2962
2962 movie reviews
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    • 90 Metascore
    • 75 Ty Burr
    Blue Is the Warmest Color
    If you don’t really understand women — or don’t even want to — it’s easier to just call them a mystery and let it go at that. For all the close-ups, that may be why Blue Is the Warmest Color never gets close enough.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    American Splendor
    The movie is pricelessly comic -- the Harvey/Joyce scenes catalog the couple's neuroses with glee -- but it just as often reaches for something richer.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Phantom Thread
    Absurdly pleasurable to watch and to listen to, an effortless display of poise from its camerawork and costumes to the characters and the things they say.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    This Is Not a Film
    In short, This Is Not a Film is the world within an apartment, and it is quietly devastating.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Finding Nemo
    Pixar is so good at what it does that every other kiddie-entertainment purveyor -- including parent company Disney -- flounders in comparison.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    The Incredibles
    Such smart, whiz-bang fun that you may not realize what it's about until you're safely home.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Cold War
    Cold War is a ravishment, a cinematic feast for the senses, and it packs an epic inner landscape into a dense 88 minutes.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Once
    Once is the first rock musical that actually makes sense. People don't burst into song in this movie because the orchestra's swelling out of nowhere. The guy and the girl are working musicians -- or they'd like to be, if they could make a living at it -- and they're played by working musicians.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Paterson
    Paterson the movie doesn’t mine the dross and drab of our everyday lives for gold — it says they already are gold, and all you have to do is look. “Say it! No ideas but in things.” See it.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    The Fits
    The Fits is what independent moviemaking should be and can be in this country. Like its heroine, it’s slight but it’s built to last.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Raging Bull
    The film that many consider the finest of its decade, Raging Bull, has aged well, and not just because it was filmed in black and white.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    United 93
    The movie is hard going, not least in the sense of powerlessness it leaves in an audience that knows exactly what will happen. And yet you come out feeling that the filmmakers have done the right thing by these people, and by this day.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Capturing the Friedmans
    As the Friedmans split apart like fissile neutrons, their story becomes five stories, none of which is remotely like the others.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 75 Ty Burr
    American Hustle
    It’s a juggling act that Russell can’t sustain and doesn’t: The last 20 minutes feel aimless, and the movie doesn’t end so much as coast to a halt. And still you walk away giddy and full. American Hustle takes your money and makes you glad you were fleeced.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    The Passenger (re-release)
    What's most shocking about The Passenger 30 years later? Seeing Jack Nicholson at the lean, sardonic height of his youthful powers? Finding a Michelangelo Antonioni movie with an actual plot?
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Persepolis
    They're both tales of growing up in the shadow of Islamic fundamentalism, but Persepolis is everything "The Kite Runner" is not. It's a personal memoir rather than fiction, coolly observant instead of melodramatic, female rather than male in sensibility and sense of humor - it has a sense of humor.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Ty Burr
    Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    This is the art-film Carrey: repressed, lovesick, unshaven. Essentially he's doing the same intellectual sad sack played by John Cusack in "Malkovich" and Nicolas Cage in "Adaptation"
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    The Best of Youth
    A slowly flowering miracle: an epic of normal life.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Whiplash
    At Sundance, Whiplash quickly picked up the nickname “Full Metal Juilliard” on the basis of scenes in which Andrew, plucked from a late-night practice session to be the orchestra’s drummer, is raked over the coals by his new mentor. Horrifying as they are, these sequences are dazzling exercises in total humiliation.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    The Lives of Others
    The Lives of Others has similarities to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic "The Conversation" but with undercurrents that resound across an entire century of European political history.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Ty Burr
    House of Flying Daggers
    It's a perfect example of how far production design and editing WON'T take you when the story's not there.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    63 Up
    These documentaries are a time-lapse study of human life. They are a gift.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Two Days, One Night
    This is a small, compassionate gem of a movie, one that’s rooted in details of people and place but that keeps opening up onto the universal.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Man on Wire
    The sight is magical and heartbreaking in equal measure. Look, the movie says: Where so many would fall, a man walks on air.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Elle
    Elle may be the purest distillation of his worldview yet, and it’s a terrifying thrill.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
    A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Minari
    Minari is as American as apple pie and kimchi, which is to say it’s what America is all about.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    The Farewell
    Like her heroine, Wang straddles the fence and argues from either side of it; like her, the movie is profoundly Chinese-American, speaking to both audiences and able to be enjoyed by both.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    It’s a gentle epic, based on a 10th-century Japanese folk tale, that uses pencils, ink, and impressionistic washes of color to convey a glowing visual otherworld, one that stands in contrast both to Takahata’s earlier work and the hard-edged lines and bright tones of much anime.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Phoenix
    It is first and foremost a moral tale, and an overpowering one.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Gunda
    Gunda ― which doubles as the name of the movie and the name of the pig ― is as close as we may ever come to experiencing the world as animals do, specifically the animals that become our food.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Alien
    What's most unusual about the original 24 years later, though, is its elegant minimalism.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    The Artist
    Michael Hazanavicius's love letter to classic cinema isn't perfect but it's close enough to make just about anyone who sees it ridiculously happy - and that includes children and grown-ups who have never come across a silent film.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Zama
    The final shots are both majestic and damning, and they lift the film with a kind of gentle contempt into a surrealism that makes an awful kind of sense, the world in its lushness swallowing Zama as it will swallow us all. Some movies unfold as dreams; Zama dances us playfully toward the edge of nightmare and then asks us to open our eyes.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    The Machinist
    The main, if not only, reason to see The Machinist is for Christian Bale's title performance, and even then you have to be a fan of hardcore martyrdom in the service of craft.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    The End of the Tour
    Just because David Foster Wallace would almost certainly have hated The End of the Tour doesn’t mean that it’s not a worthwhile movie. And in fact James Ponsoldt’s dramatic adaptation of Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky’s memoir about his 1996 road trip with Wallace is pretty excellent: heartfelt, probing, funny, above all touching.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 75 Ty Burr
    Dick Johnson Is Dead
    If you’ve ever helped shepherd a parent or a grandparent in their final years, you may be better equipped to handle this movie’s gallows humor and to appreciate the care with which it separates the contradictory emotions felt by Kirsten and all grown children.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Quai des Orfèvres [re-release]
    A film noir? A backstage musical? A whodunit? A comedy? In truth, it's all of the above -- plus a kinky love story, an absorbing melodrama, and a mordantly jaded snapshot of postwar Paris -- and all of them are wonderful.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Letters from Iwo Jima
    Eloquent, bloody, and daringly simple.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Girl Who Played with Fire
    Whenever The Girl Who Played With Fire threatens to stall, Lisbeth whips out her Taser and tortures another sleazy, abusive man into vomiting forth his dirty secrets. In Sweden, I believe they call this "light entertainment.''
    • 88 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Diva
    What has aged well in Diva is the grave beauty of that aria and the wry, painterly camera shots - you should see the new print for the colors alone - conceived by Beineix but executed by the great French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. They're enough to tide us over and maybe convince the kids that hip date movies existed back when their parents and dinosaurs roamed the earth.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Languorous and enigmatic, “Long Day’s Journey” is the very definition of art cinema, and it will baffle and possibly enrage casual filmgoers expecting such niceties as plot. It is a movie not to be followed but steeped in and ultimately surrendered to.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 91 Ty Burr
    Wild Strawberries
    A film that goes where many others have gone (yes, this is Scrooge for Ph.D.s) but with a subtlety few have dreamed of?
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Ty Burr
    How Green Was My Valley
    The acting is strong (especially that of 13-year-old Roddy McDowall as the youngest son and Maureen O’Hara as the lovelorn daughter), and Arthur Miller’s Oscar-winning photography gives the images a spooky luster, but a little bit of Ford’s salt-of-the-earth piety goes an awfully long way.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    A Serious Man
    It’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Ty Burr
    Barnyard
    Speaking as both a parent and a critic, I do believe I'd rather drive rusty railroad spikes through my eyes than have to sit through one more computer generated family film about talking animals. The bad news for Hollywood is that after seeing Barnyard my kids feel the same way.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Capote
    Richly provocative entertainment, as heady as a cocktail party with the Manhattan literati and as vaguely troubling as the morning after.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    The Death of Stalin
    Buscemi is magnificent, but all the players rise to the occasion; you may especially cherish Rupert Friend (“Homeland”) as Stalin’s demented alcoholic son Vasily and Olga Kurylenko (“Quantum of Solace”) as pianist Maria Yudina, the film’s elegant and only note of genuine conscience.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Tulpan
    In the tradition of ethnographic dramas from "Nanook of the North" to "The Fast Runner," Tulpan drops us in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere and marvels at the people who live there.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Hard Truths
    Where some Leigh films bear down on their main characters, “Hard Truths” feels expansive and forgiving, except when it comes to the mystery of Pansy herself.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    The script is pungent and profanely funny while remaining rooted in strong and serious emotions.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    A Film Unfinished
    It's the only film that exists of the Ghetto, and it's both revelatory and profoundly suspect.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    The Grand Budapest Hotel
    What does it add up to? What’s it all about, Wes? In a word: evanescence.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    A Star Is Born
    The latest update, directed by Cooper and built on the sturdy bones of William Wellman’s and Robert Carson’s 1937 script, has heart, soul, and sinew. Above all, it has Lady Gaga, both before and after her character’s transformation from an outer-borough duckling into a superstar swan.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Citizenfour
    Citzenfour is prosaic in its presentation and profoundly chilling in its details, and if you think Snowden is a traitor, you should probably see it. If you think he’s a hero, you should probably see it. If you haven’t made up your mind — well, you get the idea.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Away from Her
    With a tranquil fearlessness, it goes beyond the death of memory, to see what might be found in the unexplored country beyond. The answer is both frightening and comforting: More love. Unspecified love. Universal love.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Hamilton
    Hamilton stands as a reminder of how hard it is to get a democracy right, and how necessary it is to keep trying, as long as it takes.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    The Fallen Idol (re-release)
    Formally, the movie's a lasting pleasure: Reed's incisive direction; Greene's easy yet weighted dialogue; the farseeing deep-focus photography of Georges Perinal; Vincent Korda's luxuriant sets.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    The Father
    As Anthony, a blustery London widower whose grip on reality slowly comes unglued over the course of the film, Hopkins does it again. This is a magnificent and harrowing performance: A lion in winter slowly coming to ground.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Foxtrot
    Writer-director Maoz is best known for his 2009 film “Lebanon,” based partly on his own experiences as a tank gunner during the 1982 Lebanon War. Like that film, Foxtrot brings a coolly critical, occasionally surrealist eye on the assumption that Israel’s military efforts have made for a better, wiser people.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The King's Speech
    The movie isn't badly done, just overdone - a cozy art-house crowd-pleaser coasting on the expectations of its genre.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Hell or High Water
    The dialogue is terse and funny while hinting at much larger matters, such as the way poverty can be handed from generation to generation like a bad gene or a disease.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Up
    On the most basic level the new film is pure vaudeville: a loopy flyaway fantasy that's hysterically funny if only to keep the darkness at bay.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Aquarius
    Braga has hardly stopped working since, on either continent, but Aquarius is a comeback, a homecoming, and a character film in which both the heroine and the actress playing her are characters of the first order.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Black Panther
    No, Black Panther isn’t the greatest movie ever made. It’s probably not even the greatest superhero movie ever made. But it’s very, very good — in its best scenes, exhilarating.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    The Human Voice
    The Human Voice is a banquet disguised as a light lunch, heady with flavors; you come away blissfully sated and hungry for more.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Brooklyn
    Crowley and his creative team — cinematographer Yves Bélanger, designer François Séguin, composer Michael Brook, costume designer Odile Dicks-Mireaux — build a cinematic snow-globe of nostalgia, a portrait of two worlds that aches with family lost and freedoms found. It is a beautiful film to experience.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Nobody Knows
    Spare and elegant and harrowing, it's an ode to childhood trust being stretched until it snaps.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    The miracle is that 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is better: tighter, smarter, funnier.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    If Beale Street Could Talk
    Baldwin knew that hope is the engine that takes us to the future, to a changed and better day, and whether that hope is embodied in action, in expression, or in a child is immaterial. If Beale Street Could Talk is a stained-glass window looking out onto what could still be.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    Birdman finds Iñárritu in the mood for play, and with a mighty cast that fields every pitch he throws.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    In addition to its other strengths — serving as a reminder of the kind of small, satisfying movie they don’t make anymore, showcasing the depths of Melissa McCarthy’s talents — Can You Ever Forgive Me? celebrates a hardy but endangered species: the Nasty New Yorker. It’s been a while since I’ve enjoyed spending so much time with someone so unpleasant.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Imitation of Life
    Laugh if you want at Imitation of Life or any of Sirk’s primal cinematic operas. Although if you can laugh at the film’s end, when Mahalia Jackson herself sings “Trouble of the World,” I can’t help you. Just understand that when you laugh, you’re really laughing at yourself, and you’re laughing to keep from crying.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Ty Burr
    Four Christmases
    Four Christmases is essentially "Meet the Parents" quadrupled.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Familiar Touch
    Familiar Touch will probably stymie viewers who like their films moving with appointed speed, and I imagine audiences in the bloom of youth will shrink from it in horror. Yet others may see themselves in the character of the son, Steve (H. Jon Benjamin) — a middle-aged architect and a good man — who serves as the film’s anchor of sorrow, concern and deep, abiding love.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Ty Burr
    Lord of War
    Lord of War is advocacy entertainment -- an act of mainstream provocation -- and, for the most part, it works unusually well.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Elsa y Fred
    Elsa & Fred does graze against an interesting idea: that the vitality of our youths lives on in the prison of aging bodies.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Ty Burr
    Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    Not just one of the best but, at its best, an exercise in pure action-movie propulsion and an essay in how to get from Point A to Point B in the most ingenious and exhausting way imaginable.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    Boseman makes the character’s eyes glitter with humor and rage and fear; Levee knows what he deserves and how far it remains out of his reach, and maybe so did the man playing him. It’s a magisterial performance.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Jaws
    Steven Spielberg overcame the lumpy plotting of Peter Benchley's novel to create an efficient, graceful fright machine in Jaws.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    We Are the Best!
    A messy, congenial empowerment story that knows how aggravating adolescence can be when you refuse to fit in.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    About Endlessness
    The film has an epic sense of devastated wonder that can only come from standing as far back from the parade as one possibly can while still holding on to one’s empathy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Nomadland
    Nomadland balances with spine-tingling grace between respect for that restlessness of spirit and longing for a society that has any notion of how to care for it.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Hope
    Writer-director Sødahl expertly balances the sentimental and the acerbic, the grave and the altar. But Hope lives or dies on its central performances, and they are perfectly realized.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    Even more than "Chicken Run," Were-Rabbit is a tiny plasticine masterpiece.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    The heroine’s voice-overs, delivered into the microphone of a Bell & Howell tape recorder in Minnie’s bedroom, are the movie’s motor. They’re proud and insecure, profanely comic, dripping with adolescent wisdom and self-absorption.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Lincoln
    It makes politics exciting again.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Elena
    Elena reveals a filmmaker in full command of his art and not much interested in catering to an audience. If you want this film, you have to meet it more than halfway.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    All Is Lost
    All Is Lost works quite brilliantly on its most basic narrative level.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Love & Friendship
    The performances are uniformly excellent, but pride of place goes to Bennett’s Sir James, an upper class twit of Pythonesque proportions. Rarely has a character this moronic been this happy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 75 Ty Burr
    Hereditary
    It’s an eerie mood piece that slowly and surely tightens the thumb screws before all hell breaks loose; that and the fact that much of Hereditary takes place in one rambling dark house is evidence that Aster has spent a lot of time studying “The Shining,” “The Exorcist,” and “Rosemary’s Baby.” It’s nice to have a classicist back in town.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Listen to Me Marlon
    The result is something that feels fresh, even revelatory — a work of elegiac bio-doc impressionism. Listen to Me Marlon gets under the skin of the most mysterious performer of the 20th century and forces us to recalibrate all our feelings about him.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    On Becoming a Guinea Fowl draws a portrait of a culture with one foot in a 21st century of iPhones and laptops and the other in a crushing patriarchal hierarchy that goes back millennia and that proves nearly impossible to upend.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Fateless
    Fateless looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Ty Burr
    Brokeback Mountain
    Brokeback may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    The Kid with a Bike
    The Dardennes achieve lyricism without seeming to try.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    One of the wittiest and most creatively exuberant movies of the year, and maybe one of the best.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Flow
    There’s a message here, and the great good grace of “Flow” is that it trusts us enough not to spell it out. Even adults will figure out what’s going on; the kids will be way ahead of them, as they usually are.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    Murderball
    Murderball is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Ty Burr
    The Shape of Water
    Fairy tales hew to time-honored story lines, and some may fault The Shape of Water for the traditionalism that underlies its phantasmagoric surface. It’s the getting there that bewitches, though, and a performance by Hawkins that’s smart, scared, furious, profoundly erotic, and regal — all without saying a word. Love doesn’t speak in this movie. Instead, it swims with unparalleled style.
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