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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Rango
    You can feel the actors tossing energy, one-liners, and limbs off each other with gusto.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Daddio
    Daddio may stay too long at the fare, but its maker is hardly a hack.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Joker: Folie à Deux
    With more daring than success, Joker: Folie à Deux says that anyone who takes the Joker for a hero to be emulated is as delusional as Arthur Fleck, and it serves up its comic-book cake at the same time it stuffs it with rat poison.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    A.C.O.D.
    Scott’s probably the perfect actor for this, since he’s too likably lightweight to suggest any emotion more crippling than exasperation.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Elegy
    Elegy drifts helplessly into melodrama, and it loses its bearings and its head in a ridiculous final act.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Knight and Day
    The movie’s a piece of high-octane summer piffle: stylish, funny, brainless without being too obnoxious about it, and Cruise is its manic animating principle.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Micmacs
    Micmacs is the equivalent of a circus troupe setting up a tent in a war zone: You're entertained, even delighted, but after a while you suspect there are more serious matters at hand.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Snow White and the Huntsman
    Just feels like it was made from the pieces of every fantasy-action movie ever made.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Bad News Bears
    The remake is stranded between pushing the scatological envelope and caving in to the formulas the 1976 movie established, and until the well-nigh foolproof ending, it comes up gasping for air.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Battle: Los Angeles
    The Duke is not only name-checked in passing, but Eckhart (who's excellent) even bears a squinty resemblance by the final scenes.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    I'm So Excited
    I’m So Excited! is probably its director’s most forgettable work. But it has its trashy pleasures, and it beats an in-flight movie — the one place you can bet it will never be seen.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    By the end, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 has turned nearly as flabby as its aging antihero.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Invisibles
    The Invisibles favors quantity of remembrance over quality of any one experience.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Sibyl
    Aided by Simon Beaufils’s luxuriant wide-screen photography and Laurent Sénéchal’s alternately swooning and plinking suspense music, “Sibyl” is a vacation for the senses and a gathering headache for the brain. The screenplay, by Triet and Arthur Harari (David H. Pickering supplied the English-language dialogue spoken on the island’s film set), piles a lot on the unstable heroine’s plate and then adds even more.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Laundromat
    All these segments are well made and engaging, but their lack of interconnectedness reduces The Laundromat to a sketch comedy, and random guest appearances by actors like Sharon Stone (as a Vegas real estate saleswoman) and David Schwimmer (as a small-time lawyer) only add to the scattergun atmosphere.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Last Vermeer
    It’s handsomely filmed, well-acted, and hollower than it wants to be, with a mid-movie revelation that rearranges the moral stakes in ways that dampen the telling.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Dinner for Schmucks
    Far from a classic of precision farce, but it's funnier than the trailers make it seem.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Broken Hearts Gallery
    A tart, eager-to-please screenplay by first-time director Natalie Krinsky and a cast skilled at verbal badminton hook a viewer from the start, and “Gallery” especially stands as a welcome showcase for Geraldine Viswanathan.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes
    A brisk and reasonably thorough dog trot through a life that was simultaneously invisible and all powerful, and it’s goosed along with slick production techniques that more than once get in the way.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    My Life Without Me
    It has a naive, heartfelt selfishness that may offend some viewers, and a resolve that others will find intensely soothing. ''Dying's not as easy as it looks,'' cautions Ann's doctor (Julian Richings), but here it's as easy as a movie can make it.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Missing
    The movie runs into its deepest trouble with its depiction of Lilly's captors. After years of Hollywood wooden Indians and a more recent run of tribal angels (as in "Dances With Wolves"), movies like "The Last of the Mohicans" have acknowledged the historical truth that Native Americans could be as bloody-minded as their white conquerors.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    In Her Shoes
    Entertaining enough, but it's more pat than provocative -- this is what makes it a bona fide audience pleaser while keeping it from drawing real blood.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Lonesome Jim
    Humor in 'Jim' is a little too dry.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Wendy
    Wendy feels like a holding maneuver — a way for a gifted young storyteller to keep one foot in the innocence of childhood while figuring what he’s really going to do next.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Phoebe in Wonderland
    Phoebe in Wonderland gradually loses its grip on tone and believability, climaxing with a show-must-go-on moment that's just plain silly. Thankfully, Barnz knows exactly where to end his film: on the face of a girl, and an actress, at the crossroads.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    On the Basis of Sex
    Watchable, illuminating, and ultimately unmemorable — inspiring without being inspired.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Greed
    A scattershot satire about the vulgar, privileged one percent, British division, that’s almost as funny as it is furious.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Eclipse
    Above all, the film is lucky to have one of the better character actors in recent movies in a lead role: Ciarán Hinds as Michael Farr.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Jarhead
    All writers are entitled to tell the story of their own war, whether it's on the battlefield, in their head, or -- as is usually the case -- somewhere in between. Like it or not, Anthony Swofford did just that. Mendes, by contrast, tells the story of a Hollywood war, and it's simply not the news we can use.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Deepwater Horizon
    A taut, engrossing action movie about real-life heroes, so why is it a disappointment? Because director Peter Berg is telling the wrong story.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Rumours
    Rumours is too slap-happy to function as the fine-tuned political satire one might want it to be, and too often the gags hit a nonsensical dead end.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Watchmen
    The best moments in Watchmen, then, work as delirious music-videos.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Wolfman
    The movie is by no means good but it’s surprisingly enjoyable: a misty, moody Saturday-matinee monster-chiller-horror special.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Waiting for Armageddon
    The movie could have used a little fire and brimstone itself. It’s a little too cautious.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
    A fascinating shambles of a documentary - fascinating because its subject is so influential and so deranged, a shambles because its filmmaker can't decide which approach to take and so takes all of them.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Don't Move
    A paranoid male fantasy about cheating, with surface similarities to Hollywood movies like ''Fatal Attraction" and ''Unfaithful." This one's Italian, though, and its attitude toward adultery is more European.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Beauty Shop
    Formulaic but extremely good-natured comedy.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Beneath the Harvest Sky
    While the climax of Beneath the Harvest Sky is a jumble of crosscutting, thunderstorms, and an inconveniently collapsing house, the movie never loses the pulse of people and tragedies it knows too well.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Three... Extremes
    Gore fans will want to bump the two-and-a-half-star rating up a star, whereas those who can't handle on-screen violence will want to stay the hell away.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Femme Fatale
    Fatale is, truthfully, a mess - an absurdly overwritten Eurotrash thriller that beggars an audience's suspension of disbelief. It's also great over-the-top moviemaking if you're in a slap-happy mood.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Horton Hears a Who!
    It's a tough balancing act and probably a futile one. As greedily as Hollywood looks upon these books as a franchise to strip-mine, the hard fact remains that what's good about them - Ted Geisel's untrendy gentleness, humor, and intelligence - resists translation to the big screen.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    An Amazing Couple
    Turns what sounds suspiciously like a gimmick into a concept that holds water. Or, in this case, the sparkling wine of comedy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Informant!
    The movie’s fun to watch, but you can tell it was a lot more fun to make, and that’s a problem. The party stays up on the screen; down here, it’s been over for a year.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Barney's Version
    A smart, well-acted two hours at the art house, full of witty observations and fellow feeling. But, really, it has no business being a movie.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    Inventive and enjoyable but ultimately shallow.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Kick-Ass
    Fusing teen comedy, bad-boy raunch, Tarantino-style gonzo mayhem, and tossing in a bloodthirsty little girl vigilante who swears like Steve Buscemi in a Coen brothers movie, the film has its moments of high-flying, low-down style. It’s also nowhere near as subversive as it thinks it is.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    American Hardcore
    A sloppy mosh note to the genre, with its own excesses and oversights. It's like a flier for a band you've never heard of: torn, soaked with beer, itchy with aggression.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Dumb and Dumber To
    Everyone has piled into this dumber, sillier, more consistently funny reprise with an enthusiasm that’s infectious, and not in a low-grade medical way.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Babysplitters
    The setup is ridiculous, but the playing is pure comedy of mortification and watch-through-your-fingers funny.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    All or Nothing
    Grueling, heavy-handed, and surprisingly insight-free. For once, a gaggle of Leigh characters hasn't jelled beyond the level of its cast's conceits.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Great Gatsby
    It has in Leonardo DiCaprio — magnificent is the only word to describe this performance — the best movie Gatsby by far, superhuman in his charm and connections, the host of revels beyond imagining, and at his heart an insecure fraud whose hopes are pinned to a woman.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Rider Named Death
    Shakhnazarov's film effortlessly captures the times and the author's conflicted yet unyielding attitude, yet it never draws any conclusions -- the film remains under glass.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Climb
    As The Climb wends its way through the years, and as the friends’ relationships with each other and their girlfriends and families take multiple turns, each “chapter” is presented in smartly thought-out single takes. Except when they’re not; it’s a tough gimmick to sustain and the filmmakers don’t seem too intent on trying.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    While Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues is a disappointment — how could it not be? — it’s not for lack of trying. If anything, the movie tries too hard.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    On My Way
    Emmanuelle Bercot’s amusingly rambling drama hits the expected rest stops with a Gallic shrug and a lot of Gauloises.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Monsoon
    A delicate, observant, and rather too quiescent drama of coming home to a strange land, Monsoon is an interesting change of pace for star Henry Golding (“Crazy Rich Asians”) and another musing on diaspora by the Cambodia-born British filmmaker Hong Khaou.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Green Book
    It’s the kind of movie that hammers on your heart even as it’s tripping over its feet, hobbled by unexamined notions of race, ethnicity, and class. Don’t look too closely, and you’ll have a very good time.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Time
    Kim is a hard director to pin down. This is the first time the inconsistency has spilled onto the screen, though.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
    Simple without being simple-minded, warm without worrying too much about being cool. It's agreeably silly fare for the very small set and not so noisy that parents can't either follow along or take a quick nap.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Potiche
    What the movie utterly fails to resolve is what François Ozon is up to here and where he's going next.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Nativity Story
    In a real sense, Nativity Story is the female other to Gibson's "Passion": Dedicated to life rather than death, it's suffused with a sense of the womanly divine.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Naked Gun
    The early scenes are so shamelessly, stupidly funny, with a hit-to-miss gag ratio of about 75 percent, that you can’t help be disappointed as that ratio steadily sinks over the course of the movie.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    The movie’s dramatically uneven, as anthology movies tend to be, but is it worth watching on the big screen? If the idea of Monument Valley peopled with classic Coen misfits hits your sweet spot, by all means go.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    The title itself is a marquee-buster that bites off more than it can chew. So does the movie’s main character and so does the movie. But the chewing’s interesting and there’s food for thought here, not to mention a central performance that may stick to your ribs for quite some time.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Fay Grim
    Fay Grim falls victim to its own worried hyperactivity; it shuts you out with chattery paranoia. Hartley wants us to see the big picture, but he forgets we need artists like him to bring it into focus.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    The downside is that "The Hobbit" no longer looks like a movie at all. It looks like a video.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    On Swift Horses
    As a director, Minahan knows his way around a track, but on the evidence of this film, he’s not yet ready to run wild.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Powerpuff Girls
    Forgoes that split-level wit to concentrate on mere rock 'em sock 'em mayhem.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Fault in Our Stars
    Intelligent and earnest, The Fault in Our Stars works well enough to keep a doubter from feeling mugged by sentiment.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Live Free or Die
    This isn't a great movie -- it's barely good, really -- but it gets something about New Hampshire I've rarely seen onscreen: a defiant pride in the way things don't work out. Live Free is a comedy of vastly diminished criminal expectations. That's the fun of it, and the frustration, too.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Leto
    Little of this comes through in the film, which is about the mayfly moment and three people at its center. For those who don’t have enough information to connect the dots, that may not be enough. Maybe you had to be there, but it’s a movie’s job to take us, and this one gets only partway.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Four Brothers
    A faux-low-budget revenge thriller, pure and simple. There's nothing special about it, and that's what's refreshing.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Fly Me to the Moon
    Fly Me to the Moon strains to achieve liftoff, sometimes quite amusingly. But in the end, it’s just too heavy to get off the ground.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Auto Focus
    Uplifting? Not bloody likely. Mesmerizing? Very, thanks to Greg Kinnear's eerie performance as Crane and director Paul Schrader's lucid depiction of the character's happy-go-lucky descent into hell.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Connection
    It’s an easy film to watch and become engrossed in, and it’s just as easy to forget, despite a true-life twist that darkens the final minutes without making much of an impact on the whole. Expertly shot, excitingly edited, smartly acted, The Connection never quite connects.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    My Summer of Love
    At its most interesting, the movie offers us the sight of people desperately embracing faith in the hopes it will pull them through.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Little Things
    The movie’s a watchable affair for most of the running time, not so much subverting cliches of the serial-killer genre as keeping the audience in suspense as to how, if, and when those cliches will be observed.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Get Smart
    The movie errs by turning Max into a figure of hangdog sympathy: "The 40 Year Old Virgin" with a shoe phone.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Hitch
    James has the forward drive of a trash-compacted Ralph Kramden with some of Ed Norton's random gentility and, here at least, he has a knack for fine-tuned physical comedy that gets you laughing even when the script's not there.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Kajillionaire
    July may have lost all faith in the strategies of the parents' generation but holds out hope for the future. I think this may be her idea of a family film.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Goodbye Christopher Robin
    A stuffy, treacly, overproduced slab of High British twaddle, it nevertheless reduced most of a recent preview audience to what the film itself calls “blubbing.” Even a flinthearted movie critic could be seen to dab his eyes from time to time.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
    If you want state of the art anime that comes within spitting distance of escaping the limits of its genre, this might be your cup of bootleg sake.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Mufasa: The Lion King
    Mufasa at least has the grace to offer audiences a fresh story, but children and parents may find it surprisingly difficult to tell one exquisitely rendered lion from the next.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Water Horse
    If you want to take the kids to a cockle-warming tale of humans and computer-generated critters, do yourself a favor: Skip the singing rodents and head for the baby Loch Ness Monster in The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Hunting of the President
    It's the old-fashioned verities of documentary filmmaking that serve Thomason and Perry best.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    North Face
    It’s a literal cliffhanger and the next worst thing to being there.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Nice Guys
    For a movie predicated on slapstick forward momentum, we spend an awful lot of time driving backward.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Hot Chick
    Faris is delightful, in fact, and she steals the movie right out from under Schneider.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Journey to the Center of the Earth
    For a harmless "Indiana Jones" knock-off, Journey to the Center of the Earth has an awful lot riding on it.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Boys Are Back
    Tidily arranges its raw feelings about fathering and manhood into a decent, intelligent melodrama meant to soothe audiences and provoke no one.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Fountain of Youth
    It’s a movie designed as functional entertainment, and for lack of a better word it functions.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    We Have a Pope
    Whenever it stays with Piccoli, though, it's mysterious and moving, struck by the humility of a man who's not up to playing God.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Thor
    For a holding maneuver, Thor itself turns out to be diverting enough - not close to a sharp-edged romp like "Iron Man" but not the B-movie roadshow some of us were expecting.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Tales of the Night
    Tales, which (as the title suggests) is an "Arabian Nights"-style omnibus, has similarly eye-bending backgrounds but a creatively monochromatic foreground that comes to feel like a limitation.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    By itself, the new "Pelham" is a solid, suspenseful tale all over again, so long as it stays in the subway tunnels and airless offices of the transit department.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Rubberneck
    What’s good about Rubberneck is also what makes it tough to watch: Karpovsky burrows under the skin of this repressed romantic nebbish until the frame seems ready to burst.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Delicacy
    "Unpredictable'' is one adjective you could use to describe the new Audrey Tautou movie, Delicacy. Others might be "charming,'' "offbeat,'' "droll.'' "Unfocused'' and "underwhelming'' also apply.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Vow
    It's quite watchable date-night cheese - the kind of movie you can simultaneously snort at and enjoy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Salt of Life
    The Salt of Life is about that moment in a man or woman's life when members of the opposite sex stop seeing them, and while the mood is jauntily sensual, the undertow is fierce.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Get Him to the Greek
    If the movie’s all too predictable in its broad outlines, it’s scurrilously funny in the details, and it pushes its two leads and one of its supporting actors in entertainingly fresh directions.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Shooter
    A stylish but essentially businesslike smash-and-crasher.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Live Free or Die Hard
    Sorry, boys. After two decades, the first film still does more with one skyscraper than Live Free or Die Hard does with an entire country.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Kingdom
    The movie ends on a plaintive can’t-we-all-get-along note, but at heart it’s a Charles Bronson flick. It mashes the revenge button the real world won’t let us push.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Words and Pictures
    Enjoyable, occasionally grueling, and overstuffed with incident and agenda.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Clerks II
    With Clerks II, the director retreats to home turf, but is Smith playing it safe or is he really interested in seeing how the old nabe has changed? Bit of both, actually.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Love Me If You Dare
    French films have long specialized in depicting the impassioned, go-for-broke infatuation known as l'amour fou. Yann Samuell's Love Me If You Dare may be the first to investigate l'amour annoying.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Valhalla Rising
    Fascinating for its gonzo formal daring and brooding attitude, "Valhalla'' is still a trial for audiences seeking characters, plot, and things happening.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Running with Scissors
    There's grace here if the movie were willing to dig for it. Occasionally it does.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas
    Brad Pitt and Michelle Pfeiffer? Great to look at. Astonishingly dull to listen to.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Heaven Is for Real
    While Heaven Is for Real asks a lot of questions, it ultimately has no doubt whatsoever about the answers. Take it on faith or not at all.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Wordplay
    Sweet, indulgent, and surprisingly soft in the center; the most minor entry in the brainiac-doc genre to date, it's nevertheless a perfectly entertaining hour and a half for crossword adepts.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    In inviting us along to peek into the life, filmmakers Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara don't give us quite enough about the art.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Time Traveler's Wife
    At its best, The Time Traveler’s Wife does suggest the preciousness of a life that’s too often beyond our control. At its worst, it’s more than a little nuts.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Pieces of a Woman
    The best moments are cinematic or actorly; the former come early and the latter are concentrated in the poised, agonized figure of the title character.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Music and Lyrics
    In the end, the movie's just the kind of enjoyably empty-headed fluff it celebrates and mocks. It sits up, it begs, eventually it plays dead, and still you want to pat it on the head. It's a good dog.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Black or White
    Despite the best of intentions, a career-best performance from Kevin Costner, and outstanding work by Octavia Spencer and child actor Jillian Estell, Black or White succumbs to some of the same stereotypes it tries to dispel.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Transit
    This is a movie that wants to reflect the limbo of war refugees and the greater limbo of life itself — the circles we run in while believing we’re walking a straight line. It does so with a precise, observant tone that’s cool, sometimes cruel, and ultimately coldly reductive.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Protocols of Zion
    May be the most successful forgery in the history of hate.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Aftermath
    Throughout, Knightley gives this genteel silliness conviction, grace, heart, and nerve. Sarsgaard gives it smolder and sex appeal. And sometimes, dear reader, that’s all a movie needs.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Jurassic World Rebirth
    Rebirth recycles elements of the earlier movies, and, other than the news that T. Rexes can swim, it makes no claims to originality. It just wants to leave you thoroughly, happily wrung out by the end.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Devil's Rejects
    A blood-smeared and almost completely scurrilous love letter to anyone who ever appeared in the junk movies of the '60s through '80s.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Bubble
    Bubble is a stunt in search of a movie, and it almost finds one.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Ghost Town
    Someone once said about W.C. Fields that he had the rare ability to despise amusingly. I can imagine no greater compliment than to say that Ricky Gervais seems, at his best, like a young Fields.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Cote d'Azur
    A broad, bawdy, silly French farce set on the Riviera in high season, it's a diversion at best and a strained souffle at worst, but it rings enough Gallic changes on the old family-summer-gone-horribly-wrong genre to deliver some unexpectedly sharp laughs.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Pick of the Litter
    “Pick” often feels like a project that has been overly groomed. Will you still be moved to tears? Most likely.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Good, the Bad, the Weird
    It’s a lot of fun before it wears you out, and it wears you out sooner than it should.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Honey Don't!
    The film is spiked with moments of gleeful violence, but Coen and Cooke understand that the primal reason we go to the movies is to look at beautiful people in nice clothes, and on that score ‘Honey Don’t!” is a rousing success. On every other score, it’s a short, shambling, surprisingly horny mess — amusing if you’re in an indulgent mood, obnoxious if you’re not.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Grace Card
    More drama than tract, it's a low-budget Christian indie that just clears the runway on the sincerity of its performances and inclusiveness of its message.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Wackness
    Disappointingly, the movie runs along the track of many earlier coming-of-age dramas, with appointed station stops at Cynicism, Puppy Love, Puppy Sex, Puppy Heartbreak, and Greater Wisdom.
    • Boston Globe
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Kite Runner
    I'm of two minds about this. A movie that held on to all the breathless tearjerkery of the novel would probably have to star Bette Davis as Amir, but as amended by Forster the story is now touching and somewhat dull.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Monsters vs Aliens
    If you have to see Monsters vs. Aliens - and if you're a parent, you will have to - make sure it's the 3-D version.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Pirate Radio
    Writer-director Richard Curtis (“Love Actually’’) has made a party, not a movie, and if the party goes on much too long, at least the guests are great company and the host’s taste in music is impeccable.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    It’s a secondhand vision, when all is said and done, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing when the craft is rapturous.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Lizzie McGuire Movie
    So who am I to carp that the film trades in the amiable realism of the show for just another watered-down pop star fantasy? Heck, it beats the Olsen twins. But not by much.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Definitely, Maybe
    Maybe writer-director Adam Brooks has made a fluffy Woody Allen pastiche here, but it's arguably more pleasing than anything Allen himself has done lately.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Once Upon a Time in the Midlands
    Pure bangers-and-mash realism: a spotty yet ingratiating working-class farce that suggests a Mike Leigh movie with opera buffa tendencies.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Kitchen Stories
    If you've ever staggered out of IKEA oppressed by the clean, inhuman lines of a thousand affordable dinette sets, you may get a kick out of Bent Hamer's comedy Kitchen Stories.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    It’s a simple story, really, but Nair mucks it up with the hot-button suspense of the framing scenes: surging crowds and rooftop standoffs, panicky cellphone calls and crackling walkie-talkies.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Brats
    The movie, airing on Hulu, is a strange but worthy watch: cringey here, unexpectedly revelatory there, sincere and blinkered and articulate and dumb.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Neil Young Journeys
    Neil Young Journeys is easily the least of the three documentaries director Jonathan Demme has made with the legendary rocker; but in its shaggy, eccentric way, it may be the truest.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Steve Jobs
    We don’t go to Hollywood movies for hard facts, but it’d be nice to think we’re getting some kind of truth with our entertainment. Maybe Aaron Sorkin thinks we can’t handle the truth.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Bank
    Handsomely shot and edited, The Bank benefits greatly from the brutal ministrations of LaPaglia,
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    King Arthur
    King Arthur does to this legend what "Troy" did to Homer, with one important difference: It's a better movie.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Face of Love
    The result isn’t a great movie, but it is an excellent guilty pleasure.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Ballad of Wallis Island
    Shot on Ramsey Island and other locations along the coast of Wales, the movie is gorgeous to look at, and it’s endearing enough to warm one’s hands and heart on a cold entertainment evening.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Crimson Peak
    This is a film that believes deeply in ghosts, and half of them are in its director’s head.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Evergreen
    An earnest, simplistic, affecting slice of low-watt indie filmmaking that goes where few American movies bother: below the poverty line.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Tom of Finland
    In a subtle but wily performance, Strang never loses sight of his character’s innate sense of resistance. By drawing his way out of the closet, Tom of Finland drew a door for others to come out as well.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Beach Bum
    Thus the hapless hordes of college kids who went to see “Spring Breakers” hoping for a mindless good time and were appalled when the fun got spit back in their faces with candy-colored brio. That movie was and is a conceptual masterpiece, a movie specifically built to cross an audience’s wires. The Beach Bum, by contrast, isn’t close to that level.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Beautiful Creatures
    It’s all a big, gluey metaphor for a girl’s sexual fears and raging mom conflicts, and, as in “Twilight,” the metaphor itself gets buried under mounting waves of CGI nonsense and a ridiculous back story about reincarnated Civil War lovers.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Unforgivable
    Everyone is equal parts emotional victim and villain in Unforgivable, an elegantly rambling Franco-Italian affair about the ways we do each other wrong while trying to do each other right.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Anna Karenina
    The new film staggers under such a weight of self-conscious visual style that the story never connects with a viewer's emotions. Leo Tolstoy's classic novel has been filmed often, but this is the first time it takes place in a snow globe.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Holes
    Holes functions as a film, but just barely: Readers familiar with the book may negotiate the film's antic crosscutting, but newbies will need to pop a Dramamine before the lights dim.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Departures
    This is the kind of tastefully poignant drama that asks its audience to confront taboos and then pats them on the back for doing so.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Beautiful Boy
    It’s an earnest and compassionate treatment of a story that is, by necessity, grueling as hell. It’s graced with sincere performances by Steve Carell (as David) and Timothée Chalamet (as Nic) that strive to steer clear of Actorly Moments. And there are mysteries here — of parenting, of human experience — that director Felix Van Groeningen looks at sharply before looking away.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Meet the Browns
    The women of Perry's army will come out feeling they've been well-served, and for the rest of us there's Bassett, getting her groove back after a spate of less than worthy roles. Perry's getting his groove, too - I give him two more films and an A-list cameraman.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    A Perfect Getaway
    A Perfect Getaway may not play fair by the audience but at least it cheats honestly. These days that's something.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Paris
    The best armchair holiday going - the cast is lovely to behold and the plot dips in and out of the arrondissements with panache. You almost don’t mind that none of it adds up to terribly much.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Ellie Parker
    Eventually the energy of the original short runs out and the movie coasts on fumes, but it remains surprisingly enjoyable for all that.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Memoirs of a Geisha
    The film version of Memoirs of a Geisha is very like a geisha itself: a thing of exquisitely refined surfaces beneath which beats an ordinary heart.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Railway Man
    Throughout, Firth compellingly plays a man struggling to make sense of the ordeal that his life has become. Too often, though, you can feel the movie struggling right along with him.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Notebook
    An elegantly made, almost unbearably depressing tale of WWII-era deprivation and survival.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Man Who Copied
    What could have been an effervescent 90-minute experience is so in love with the sound of its own voice that it develops genre trouble and piddles on for two-plus hours.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Ghostbusters
    The movie is genial, sloppy, slightly above average summer movie fun.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    On the Rocks
    It’s an agreeable diversion.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    True History of the Kelly Gang
    He (Kurzel) wants this “true history” to be a Rorschach blot of Australia’s national psychology, but he’s made something closer to splatter art instead.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Monsters
    Monsters is a genuine curio: a moody, low-budget road-movie romance that takes place against a background of alien invasion.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Little
    It’s silly-sweet rather than silly-stupid, the script has enough snap to count, and – really, now – it allows us to spend time with Issa Rae.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    A Tale of Love and Darkness
    She (Portman) has filmed the book according to its emotional meaning to her, and that’s fine. What she hasn’t done is whip it into shape as a compelling movie.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    For Ellen
    It has a sense of drift that both vexes and beguiles.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Two Lovers
    The storytelling here is at times as awkward as its hero, and since it is a Gray film Two Lovers takes itself dreadfully seriously. Yet it's one of the few movies I've seen recently that improves on a second viewing, in part because Phoenix does such remarkably subtle work.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Freakier Friday
    Freakier Friday is an inoffensive product with good intentions and a cardboard heart, but, these days, watching Curtis strut her stuff is an out-of-body experience all on its own.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story
    Just rent the kid ''National Velvet" when you get home. That movie's proof you don't need a true story to be inspired.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Trouble with the Curve
    The script is by first-timer Randy Brown, but it feels as if it were spit out by one of the assistant GM's computers, so regular are its beats and revelations.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Apprentice
    It has the era’s soundtrack down, from Studio 54 disco to Suicide’s “Ghost Rider.” But it doesn’t have much of a point.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Extraction
    A meat-and-potatoes action movie that manages to extract the charisma from one of our most likable sides of beef.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    I Will Make You Mine
    A sweet, slight drama of midlife readjustment, I Will Make You Mine is the belated final film in a trilogy about a struggling indie rocker and the three women in his life. The first two movies are “Surrogate Valentine” (2011) and “Daylight Savings” (2012), and they haunt the new film like a phantom limb. Do you need to have seen them to take in I Will Make You Mine? Yes, but that’s OK.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Young Victoria
    It’s a muddled but plush experience overall, and if you’re a royalist completist or a historical romantic, you’ll probably have a decent time.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    In Good Company
    Cheerful and easy to watch but surprisingly inept in the telling.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Cloud Atlas
    Unlike "Tree" or "2001," Cloud Atlas offers more answers than it does questions, and by the end of its nearly three-hour running time - which flies by surprisingly fast, all things considered - it feels like the most feverishly expensive late-night college bull session ever. There are glories here, but they fade in the light of day.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Cherry Blossoms
    It's a strained but heartfelt work of muted sentimentality, obvious in its symbolism but grounded in a sense of life's preciousness and brevity. Depending on your mood and indulgence, you may weep or you may be left out in the cold.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Bad Shabbos
    In all, it’s a movie to please undemanding fans of Woody Allen movies (the “old, funny ones”), “Only Murders in the Building” die-hards and your nana, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Click
    If it doesn't quite represent the new, improved Adam Sandler, it shows him almost desperately trying to figure out who that might be.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    In other words, this movie isn’t just about an adolescent boy — it pretty much is an adolescent boy.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Black Bear
    With Black Bear, Plaza pushes her talent into raw new places.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Flags of Our Fathers
    You come out of the theater impressed by the scope of Eastwood's reach and frustrated by how little remains in his grasp. As gifted as this filmmaker is, this isn't the sort of thing he does best.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    No Reservations
    The movie's pleasant and light, though, and its emotional crises are the crust on an acceptably edible crème brulee.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Wife
    What unites the film’s two halves — what makes it worth watching, period — is the road Close’s Joan travels as she decides whether to reclaim authorship of her own life. It’s a diamond forged under pressure — a performance of great fury that only finds its voice at the end.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Molly's Game
    It’s tempting to think of Molly’s Game in poker terms: Sorkin’s holding a queen, a king, and at least a couple of aces, but the tell is that he talks too much, and in the end you realize he’s bluffing.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Meduzot
    In spite of the entropy, Jellyfish is close to a comedy, with a gentle sense of absurdism and a welcome generosity toward its characters.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Armored
    A movie like Armored has been done better in the past. But it has also been done much, much worse, and Antal knows enough not to mess with the sturdy bones of the thing.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Red Doors
    Think of Red Doors as a promise, and hope that Georgia Lee keeps it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Tolkien
    Tolkien gives us the passing of a vanished England and the loss of a generation but not quite enough about what was won, by him for us, nor the mystery of how he won it.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Everything Is Illuminated
    Everything Is Illuminated hasn't been adapted so much as gutted, stuffed, and mounted.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    A straight-up combat film. Not a very good combat film — it wallows in genre clichés and makes a hash of its action scenes — but one that does get you to empathize with its grunts, the “secret soldiers” of the title.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Company
    Robert Altman's gossamer, tension-free meditation on the ballet life, never quite recovers from a performance scene that arrives about 20 minutes in.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Hard Candy
    Hard Candy is the rare movie that may be worthiest for the arguments you'll have after it's over.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    10 Items or Less
    10 Items or Less is nearly an acting class exercise, except for the fact that these two have long since graduated.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Marguerite
    Marguerite strives for ambiguity and settles for a muddle. It piles too much on its serving plate, and at 129 minutes it’s definitely overlong.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Hero
    The Hero may not be a great movie but it’s a welcome tribute to a lanky, taciturn presence — a love letter to an actor that reminds us of why we ought to love him, too.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Higher Ground
    The end result's a muddle and a good argument for why actors shouldn't direct themselves first time out. Farmiga's a generous and observant performer, but she lacks a shaping hand, not to mention the ruthlessness that's probably a necessity for any director.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Jakob's Wife
    Believability takes a back seat here, obviously, and the special effects are so over-the-top bloody as to be more comical than scary; unlike In the Earth, a much slicker British horror film opening in theaters this week, Jakob’s Wife proudly embraces its inherent B-ness. But it’s the star who makes this a low-down hoot while rooting it in some tart and deserved observations about the battle of the sexes.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Wicker Park
    Movies that are entertainingly nuts don't come around very often, and when they do they need to be given their due.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Ladder 49
    Predictable, square, and honorable all at once.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Dancer Upstairs
    Far from perfect but completely unique, the film could best be described as a paranoid South American metaphysical political thriller -- you heard me -- and whatever its failures, they're not ones of nerve or imagination.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Straight Up
    It’s worth a look, if only to get in on the ground floor of a comic mind who will hopefully continue to grow. And it’s worth a listen, if only for observations like “You know what’s ironic? Arguing about Alanis Morissette with your gay boyfriend.”
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Dreaming Lhasa
    It's a Tibetan film -- a rare thing -- made by Tibetans, starring Tibetans, and set in the increasingly desperate exile community of Dharamsala .
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Art of the Steal
    The movie’s never less than entertaining, but you often feel like arguing with the screen, and not in a good way.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Rules of Attraction
    If there's one thing Avary gets right, it's the brutal use-or-be-used approach to interpersonal relations that Ellis laid out with numbing detail, and James Van Der Beek is down to the challenge as Sean Bateman: horndog, cokehead, ceramics major, and all-around jerk.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Adventures of Tintin
    Quite simply, The Adventures of Tintin is a model of modern movie craftsmanship. It's also, I'm afraid, rather dull.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Neil Young Trunk Show
    The movie’s not all glorious noise.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Ghostlight
    Made without stars or much of a budget but with a lot of heart and good vibes, it’s an exemplary and moving independent film.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Passion of the Christ
    Seems to be exactly the movie Mel Gibson wanted to make as an abiding profession of his traditionalist Catholic faith. On that score it is a success.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Concussion
    I wish the movie were so good that I could say you have to see it; while Smith’s performance takes on a life of its own, the movie seems locked to its talking points.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Lynch
    Lynch (one) may be the documentary David Lynch wants, but I'm not sure it's the one he or we deserve.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    The Host
    The Host will make perfect sense to 12-year-old girls, while their college-age sisters will probably laugh themselves sick and their mothers will look at Hurt and wonder when he got so old.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Emma.
    It’s still a clever-clever cartoon version of the book, with broad physical business in place of wit and Austen’s insights on gender roles and social hypocrisy tossed overboard. But I guess if the Empire waists are high enough and the male leads strappingly repressed, nothing else really matters.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    You can go see Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom or you can save yourself the time and money by chugging a six-pack of Red Bull and running through the dinosaur exhibits at the Harvard Museum of Natural History until you can’t breathe. As experiences go, they’re equally adrenalizing and equally ephemeral.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    Yet for all the gags that fall flat and scenes that don’t quite play, there are enough that fuse shock humor and sly moral commentary to combust in your face.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Joy
    The movie’s a shambles, alternatingly agreeable and aggravating, held together by our interest in its heroine and by Lawrence’s tremendously sympathetic performance.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Martian Child
    One soggy slab of sentimental uplift, but it doesn't pretend to be anything else, and there's some honor in that.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Lone Survivor
    The actors are excellent, as are the bruising re-creations of the firefight and the uncountable injuries sustained.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Jurassic World
    Jurassic World is a roadworthy retread, a summer blockbuster that has more than its share of absurdities and bald patches but gets by anyway because dinosaurs.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Southpaw
    This is a genre with especially sturdy bones, and when Southpaw connects, which is more often than you might expect, you feel it down to your toes.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Another Earth
    Another Earth is being sold as an indie sci-fi drama, but that does both the movie and its proper audience a disservice. This muted story of atonement, forgiveness, and parallel universes is more of an extended metaphor - a work of earnest poetry rather than science.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Glastonbury
    As with most rock festivals, you had to be there, and if you're British you probably were, one year or another. In that case, Glastonbury is a pointed but essentially nostalgic tour of one country's more noble pop impulses. Otherwise, it's as muddy as Yasgur's farm back in the day.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Ty Burr
    Keanu
    If you’re in the right mood and seeing it with the right crowd, Keanu can put you close to a giggle coma, even as you realize the material’s far beneath the talents of its stars. They’re Key and Peele, but the movie treats them like Abbott and Costello.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 58 Ty Burr
    Bride of Re-Animator
    The original Re-Animator was made by an artist working on a wicked, energetic high. Bride of Re-Animator is a smart piece of hack work. In the end, it’s best left standing at the altar.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Ty Burr
    Kiss Me, Guido
    If writer-director Tony Vitale ladles on the cliches with extra sauce, Guido still has a hey-Ma-I'm-makin'-a-movie enthusiasm that's more infectious than it has a right to be.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 58 Ty Burr
    Dark City
    It's a little short on coherence and long on comic-book sensationalism -- dig the hokey, climactic Battle of the Minds between the hero and a cadaverous Mr. Big -- but there's no denying the nightmarish pull of the film's aesthetic.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 58 Ty Burr
    Dr. Dolittle 2
    Murphy gives a reined in performance that, every so often, shows a spark of the ''Shrek''ish donkey within.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 58 Ty Burr
    Jennifer 8
    A lukewarm thriller.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 58 Ty Burr
    The Relic
    If you can stagger around the plot holes (how'd a Brazilian cargo ship with a dead crew get to Lake Michigan?), the last 30 minutes are pure, dumb monster-movie fun.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 58 Ty Burr
    Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    Judging by the title, though, Sprecher made the movie she wanted to make, and if you're in the right damp-wool mood, you may connect with it too.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 58 Ty Burr
    Lionheart
    By never fessing up to its own bloodlust, Lionheart is, at bottom, chickenhearted.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 58 Ty Burr
    Alive
    As engrossing as it is, the movie still tells only half the story: the other, nobler half.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 58 Ty Burr
    The Joy Luck Club
    A sumptuous two-and-a-quarter-hour emotional epic built on one lachrymose climax after another. What little plot there is exists only to set up the next Big Cry.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    The Rover
    There’s a thin line between the iconic and the generic, and The Rover, a grim post-apocalyptic drama from down under, wanders back and forth across it in an adrenaline daze.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    The Hard Word
    Wonderful characters, these three, and The Hard Word never figures out what to do with them.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Ghosts of Girlfriends Past
    Ghosts is better-than-average McConaughey swill, but not by much - that's its pleasure and its curse.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Meet the Fockers
    What a waste.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    Genial, silly, and instantly forgettable, Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is just another piece of product from the larger “Saturday Night Live” universe, a way for a former cast member to try to prove he’s capable of carrying a movie.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Catch That Kid
    Flatters its audience by dividing the grown-up world into mean idiots and nice idiots, which might be interestingly subversive if the movie had anything on its mind. Instead, it's just a Hollywood crash course: Heist Films 101.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    The Witches
    It’s rated PG, but trust me, it’ll give younger kids the screaming meemees.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Everything Must Go
    A comparison to Carver's original story - called "Why Don't You Dance?," easily Googleable, and all of 1,600 words long - is instructive.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Monogamy
    Monogamy sets up a nifty idea that it doesn't follow through.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    The Smurfs
    The bottom line: Any movie that gives Jonathan Winters work is doing something right.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Young Goethe in Love
    What it is is watchable, a thoroughly professional piece of Great Man hackwork that lacks the invention and spirit of its obvious model, "Shakespeare in Love.''
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Johnny English
    Adding to the general air of ''What the hell?'' is Australian pop singer Natalie Imbruglia as Lorna, the beautiful superspy who falls for our hero. With Lorna's help, Johnny discovers that Sauvage is plotting to take over the British throne -- the Battle of Hastings wasn't good enough, it seems.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Ong Bak
    A sizable amount of national pride is on display in Ong-Bak.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    9 Songs
    It's a smart, provocative idea for a movie. I wish 9 Songs was that movie.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Magic Mike XXL
    The first hour of Magic Mike XXL is deadly.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    S.W.A.T.
    Those who love police overkill, guns, jingoistic race-baiting, guns, macho smugness, and guns will be well served.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Knight of Cups
    Lubezki is arguably this movie’s secret star, and he invests the movie’s Los Angeles settings with the strangeness and newness of a NASA rover traveling across Mars.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Casino Jack
    Glib, fast-paced entertainment that barely leaves a mark - which, given the subject, is just plain wrong.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    MaXXXine
    The problem with making homages to junky genre movies is that sometimes you just end up with a junky genre movie.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Downsizing
    The film’s ultimate message — help other people, basically — is, while useful and necessary, dramatically rather slack, and you notice with a shock that the film’s central conceit has almost entirely dropped off the table by the final third. Payne’s microcosm is so like our macrocosm that after a while he simply forgets to make the distinction.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    The Dark Tower
    The movie makes me finally want to test-drive one of the “Dark Tower” novels, if only to see what King himself was able to bring to the party. Maybe that’s been his evil plan all along.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Frankie
    Ira Sachs’s muted family drama has locations to make a moviegoer swoon, rich music and cinematography, acting that’s attentive and wise. All that’s missing is a story.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Everything's Gone Green
    It's a charming disappointment that retains the elements that make the writer's novels so good without ever bending them into cinematic shape.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Live by Night
    Affleck the screenwriter seems to have dumped the story onto the kitchen table and pushed it around like dough, hoping for some shape to emerge. It resists.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Slingshot
    The tension on the ship keeps accelerating in a straight and dramatically unsurprising line until the final scenes of “Slingshot,” at which point the twists come piling in, one after another, each shocker nullified by the next.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    The Extra Man
    Everyone in the film is an uninteresting grotesque.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Life as We Know It
    Life as We Know It gives bland and predictable a good name.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Paris Can Wait
    Paris Can Wait is Coppola’s feature solo writing-directing debut, filmed in her 80th year. It would be cheering to report that it’s a great movie, but you can’t have everything.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    September Dawn
    The movie isn't THAT bad -- it's just made-for-TV historical treacle that has somehow found its way to the big screen (and barely that; if you want to be moved or outraged by the film, you'll have to travel to Danvers or Revere).
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    Is Anybody There?
    Writer Peter Harness has based his screenplay on his own childhood experiences, but personal doesn't necessarily translate to fresh.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    To the Wonder
    The director’s first real misfire, a meditation on love and lost paradise that starts with breathtaking assurance and slowly crumbles into self-parody.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Ty Burr
    The Catcher Was a Spy
    How do you make a boring movie about this guy? Beats me, but director Ben Lewin has managed to pull it off. Based on Nicholas Dawidoff’s 1994 biography of the same title, The Catcher Was a Spy is a decorous, dutiful dogtrot that tells Berg’s story with excellent production values and a conspicuous lack of energy. In its tastefully dull fashion it wastes not only a fascinating subject but the mercurial actor playing him.
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