Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,946 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 54% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 0.9 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 Autumn Tale
Lowest review score: 0 Argylle
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 5,228 out of 7946
  2. Mixed: 1,553 out of 7946
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7946
7946 movie reviews
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  1. Pixels
    Pixels may feel flatter to kids of the ’80s than it does to moviegoers too young to have known Pac-Man from Ant-Man.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Holidate
    In trying to play up the naughty, witty side of the rom-com equation, the movie settles for snarky. It’s an acrid fairy tale, if not without a few pleasures, and it arrives on Netflix just in time for — wait, Christmas?
  3. Under Siege
    Under Siege is dumb formula stuff, sensory jolts by the numbers. [09 Oct 1992, p.89]
    • Boston Globe
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stoned
    All the pieces are in place for an incisive tale of Brit-pop ego and madness, but filmmaker Stephen Woolley -- a celebrated UK producer ("The Crying Game") making his directing debut -- lets the story get away from him.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Dead Don't Die
    Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die may not be a gifted filmmaker’s worst movie, but it’s certainly his most cynical — a unique cinematic worldview reduced to schtick.
  6. Get Over It
    Comes off more like a series of painful cliches than a comedy or a love story.
    • Boston Globe
    • 63 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    loudQUIETloud: A Film About the Pixies
    Even a fan, however, might prefer the excellent, recently released concert DVD "Pixies: Live at the Paradise in Boston" to this tepid behind-the-scenes experience.
  8. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    What I found more disturbing was the casual misogyny of the convoluted story line.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jersey Boys
    Behind the familiar hits, Jersey Boys is a story about the pressures and rewards of professionalism. Far too little of that has made it into this biopic. It’s just too mediocre to be true.
  10. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    Alba, meanwhile, is again ridiculously shoehorned into a comedy gig, although she does have an amusing opening bit spying while nine months pregnant. If only diaper bomb gags weren't the inevitable follow-up.
  11. Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties
    Though Murray and Curry gamely deliver some chuckle-worthy one-liners along the way, they're mostly leashed to material as moldy and uninspired as the "Jeffersons" theme song.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Return
    As B-level suspensers go, though, The Return isn't actively awful -- just slow and cursed with a lead who acts with her t-shirt.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    MirrorMask
    Aggressive visual invention is rarely its own reward, and this movie does nothing to better the odds.
  14. The X Files: I Want to Believe
    The truth is, indeed, still out there. And when Carter finds it, may he heed its wisdom: Let go.
  15. Back to the Future Part II
    The sequel goes down the tubes by spreading itself across four time zones and inviting comparison to the original by spending most of its time back in 1955, where another mess must be set right. [22 Nov 1989, p.35]
    • Boston Globe
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Insidious
    The crazy train of Insidious runs fully off the rails when the filmmakers go logical and some of the strange gets explained away as a double shot of demonic possession and astral projection.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    White Irish Drinkers
    All the good intentions in the world can't save White Irish Drinkers from playing like the baldest of retreads.
  18. Him
    I’m not implying that a horror movie needs to be coherent to deliver the chills — watch any J-Horror movie for proof that this concept can work. But “HIM” doesn’t even try to be scary. It’s too busy bombarding us with nonsensical, quickly flashed images that divulge nothing.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Watch
    It's another one of those loud, penis-obsessed bro farces, lazily written (by actor Seth Rogen, among others) and haphazardly directed.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hollywood Dreams
    Meant to be an insider's tale, but it feels like it comes from the cinema of hangers-on.
  21. The History of Sound
    The History of Sound is even more repressed than its characters, and at over two hours, that’s far from entertaining.
  22. Playing for Keeps
    This isn't a genre-less character study, it's myopic romantic comedy, and watching a woman of Catherine Zeta-Jones's easy carnality and fathomless beauty compete for the attention of Gerard Butler, who's pining for Jessica Biel, is dismaying, like spotting Anna Wintour in line at a soup kitchen.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    See No Evil
    Generic teen dice-and-slice with interior design by way of ''Saw." The movie's tight and reasonably well shot, though, and there are flashes of nasty invention between the ritual guttings.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sydney White
    Sydney White makes "Mean Girls" look like Shakespeare.
  25. Monster Trucks
    Monster Trucks might not be a complete lemon, but it’s hardly cherry.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Deadfall
    Wilde is stuck with the harder job of simultaneously playing sexy, innocent, conniving, and heartsore, and the effort appears to give her a headache. "This is kind of like an old movie," Liza says to Jay in one scene. Lady, don't you wish.
  27. The Strip
    The Strip makes you appreciate what hard work effortless comedy is.
  28. Session 9
    You couldn't ask for a better setting for a horror movie. What you could ask for is a better script.
    • Boston Globe
  29. Mother Mary
    The back and forth between the two actors becomes fraught with confusing allusions and muddled metaphors before ceding control to some unsuccessful supernatural elements.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dopamine
    There are rich issues at play here, about the nature of attraction and whether individual will is or isn't pinned to the wheel of physiology. But Decena hasn't dramatized them; he's used them as talking points set to an indie-film guitar strum, and the result is both earnest and passionless.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sex and the City 2
    A dunderheaded comic melodrama with clothes to die for and dialogue to shrink from. It’s downright depressing.
  32. It's All Gone Pete Tong
    Isn't all wrong. But even at its very best, it's just all right.
  33. House of Wax
    For Hilton haters, the stupid and grotesque remake of House of Wax will only stoke their schadenfreude.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Horrible Bosses
    I say kill off everybody else and bring back Farrell for the sequel.
  35. Alex & Emma
    The lack of sexual tension is astounding.
  36. Stardust
    Stardust certainly could have gone somewhere fun. But the magic and zip you need to get a blimp like this off the ground is scarce.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Clash of the Titans
    The results are -- there’s no other word for it -- a disaster.
  38. Zookeeper
    As for other voices, the most notable are Adam Sandler, whose capuchin monkey wears out his welcome pretty quickly; Maya Rudolph, whose jivey giraffe comes perilously close to aural blackface; and Nick Nolte's gorilla.
  39. Milarepa
    Despite timely and worthwhile subject matter, there is nothing very inspired or inspiring in what makes it to the screen. Maybe they're saving all of that for the sequel, too.
  40. Prey for Rock & Roll
    The casting alone should warn you about what kind of bottom this movie's going to hit.
  41. Alien Nation
    Alien Nation quickly abandons any possibility of an equivalently fascinating world for the formulas of a routine cop movie. [7 Oct 1988, p.40]
    • Boston Globe
  42. Casanova
    The movie treats trysting as comedy and yet is stingy with the laughs.
  43. If I Stay
    A mawkish, preposterous melodrama riddled with clichés, stereotypes, bad dialogue, and inept emotional manipulation.
  44. Samsara
    The result is like an issue of National Geographic gone mad.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ironclad
    As history it's bunk; as inappropriate historical fiction, it's awfully close to comedy.
  46. Requiem for a Dream
    It's two hours of slumming in a vision of hell hatched from bourgeois comfort. That, and not its unsavory subject matter, is what makes it bummer theater.
  47. The 5th Wave
    It’s tough to stay focused on the provocative bits when soapy talk of teenage yearning and angst keep making us snicker.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Time and Tide
    A desperate, cynical self-parody.
    • Boston Globe
  49. Johnson Family Vacation
    Boring, mediocre movie.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    About Last Night
    Despite a frisky soundtrack that starts off with James Brown’s “Sex Machine” — trust me, it’s downhill from there — this is the visual equivalent of Muzak. You don’t have to see it to have seen it.
  51. L.A. Twister
    Serves up a silly story and clunky dialogue that gets better than it deserves from Jennifer Aspen as Lenny's would-be girlfriend.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Pacifier
    JUST worth your children's time, and hardly worth yours.
  53. The Mastermind
    If only this movie weren’t as slow as a sleepwalkng turtle. The story is constructed like one big, dark joke whose punchline isn’t worth sitting through 110 minutes to hear.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Uptown Girls
    The feel-bad movie of the summer.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Good German
    There's a great movie somewhere in The Good German, but it's buried under three tons of run-amok formalism.
  56. Endless Love
    Though Zefferelli’s version was trashy and downright nuts, at least it made you feel the love. This pallid replay just seems endless.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Elvira's Haunted Hills
    She's like Bob Hope with fake breasts and a wig. Now, that's scary.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Matthew Barney: No Restraint
    As blandly lucid as Barney's is wildly and perplexingly imaginative.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bewitched
    Bewitched presents a phony and cynical look at how Hollywood might make or remake a television show. It's as grating, laughless, and narcissistic (though, to its credit, not as cruel) as that new Lisa Kudrow show-within-a-show-within-a-show, "The Comeback."
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    And So It Goes
    And So It Goes looks like it was shot on outdated video equipment and has a forced, jokey script by Mark Andrus (”As Good As It Gets,” “Georgia Rule”).
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Toast
    I could pile on the cooking metaphors until you cried "uncle," but the fact remains that there's a very good movie in here that its makers have failed to bring off.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Spirit
    The movie's cleverest idea is to give the Octopus identical clone henchmen with names like Phobos, Logos, and Huevos, all played by Louis Lombardi with a marvelous fat-boy idiot grin.
  63. Paul
    Never achieves the exhilarating feat of exemplifying the types of Hollywood movies it wants to unpack.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stuart Little 2
    Sure, go ahead and take the kids. But, for pity's sake, read them the book first.
  65. Here
    Couple the broad acting and cliché-ridden screenplay with the fixed-frame format, and “Here” comes off like a bad sitcom, or even worse, a school play made by a bunch of fifth-graders who decided to tackle Eugene O’Neill or “Death of a Salesman.”
  66. Swing Vote
    Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In the Heart of the Sea
    In the Heart of the Sea plays as if the joke was real and everyone on the production had caved in. The result, as a movie, is a joke.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    Has the distinction of being much dumber and pulpier than the comic book on which it's based -- the ink practically comes off on your fingers as you watch it.
  69. You People
    Director Kenya Barris, who also co-wrote the script with Jonah Hill, intended to make an edgy, race-based cringe comedy; the result is afraid of its own shadow. This Netflix release commits an even bigger sin by wasting the considerable comedic talents of former “Saturday Night Live” castmates Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
  70. How High
    The biggest problem, ironically, is that even though the plot and the action center on smoking pot, it's not enough of a stoner flick. The concept of getting stoned isn't amusing; watching stoned people is.
    • Boston Globe
  71. Saban's Power Rangers
    Power Rangers might be the only movie that directly pays homage to “Transformers.” Sadly, it suffers by the comparison.
  72. Life of Crime
    The cast does capable work, but you’ll wish the movie concentrated more on the comedy, which has some zing, rather than the straighter elements, which quickly start to drag.
  73. The Divide
    It's doom that we're meant to feel here. And repulsion. I hate to say, but I shrugged.
  74. Lymelife
    Like so many of these farm-raised films, this one looks polished, but takes no risks, offers no surprises, and contains a final sequence that's laughable for its lack of courage.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Shark Tale
    Where "Nemo" was clever, soulful, and marvelous to look at, "Tale" is manic and surprisingly ugly, with a script that leans on the shallowest aspects of hip-hop street cred while pimping for corporate product placement at every turn.
  76. Amateur
    Except for a few coups de style, Amateur is a screenful of cool nothingness. [05 May 1995]
    • Boston Globe
  77. Triangle of Sadness
    Precise, expert execution can’t compensate for forced situations and an unenforced imaginative rigor. It’s not so much that all the characters are so unsympathetic. It’s that they’re all so uninteresting. Caricature without gusto is shrink wrap covering . . . shrink wrap.
  78. The Watcher
    Isn't even worth a glance.
  79. Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies
    There is much to learn from Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. First, a wealth of sharp professorial minds and great artistic eyes is no guarantee of equivalent documentary moviemaking. Second, when making a sort of thesis statement, it helps to have a thesis.
  80. Poster Boy
    An overwrought story of American politics and image-making that really only gets interesting in the final act.
  81. Rambo
    Rambo isn't dull. It is, however, often murkily directed, a real shortcoming in an action movie. In the big rescue-the-prisoners sequence, it's very hard to keep track of who is doing what to whom where.
  82. Man on a Ledge
    You could cast this movie with potato chips and still get cheers when one of the bad guys is cuffed. It doesn't matter that none of it is to be believed.
  83. Battleship
    If only there were more genuine rah-rah fun involved, instead of just endless, thudding, seen-it-all-before mayhem.
  84. Skin
    It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.
  85. Village of the Damned
    Village of the Damned has everything you want in a horror movie but the horror. [28 Apr 1995, p.90]
    • Boston Globe
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Mau Mau Sex Sex
    If you are a devotee of sleaze, you'll salivate at the prospect of Mau Mau Sex Sex, a fond and fawning look back at exploitation, or grindhouse, movies from the 1930s through the 1960s.
  87. Snow Day
    Takes a vacation from quality.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Country Bears
    The music and the stars aren't enough to save the movie.
  89. Hellboy
    In the end, the movie leaves us stuck with unmoving drama and increasingly numbing carnage.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Land of the Lost
    Genially terrible, Lost is lazy, sloppy multiplex filler, good for a few solid giggles and not much more.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Abandon
    Abandon is this CLOSE to being good, juicy, bad-movie fun.
  92. Breakfast of Champions
    Consumerism is running more amok than ever, but this satire of it isn't.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Alice Through the Looking Glass
    To watch Alice Through the Looking Glass is to witness an army of smart, creative people dumbing themselves down into delivering what they think the market wants.
  94. Insidious: Chapter 3
    There’s no end in sight, and that’s what’s really insidious.
  95. Planet of Snail
    The Korean documentary Planet of Snail is spare and unemphatic - too much so - with an abiding sweetness of spirit.
  96. Stranger Than Fiction
    Watching the movie made me long for the big , risky ideas and entertainingly fearless filmmaking in David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees " and Spike Jonze's "Adaptation ," which Kaufman wrote. Both were similarly conceptual escapades, but they let it all hang out.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Skinwalkers
    Watching the movie is a little like picking up issue #42 of a comic book after you've skipped the first 41: There's an entire back story mythos hovering in the background like a phantom limb.
  98. Strays
    Strays is a live-action flick about talking canines. As a movie, it is not a good boy; it is a bad dog. But if I were currently 12, I might have reacted in a more positive way.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Limits of Control
    Jarmusch has come up with a dud.
  100. Pet Sematary
    Part of the reason Pet Sematary is so pedestrian is that its leads - Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby - are uncharismatic. And director Mary Lambert, of Siesta and music video fame, doesn't know how to build and pace her material. [21 Apr 1989, p.46]
    • Boston Globe
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