Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,947 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 1.1 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: 5,229 out of 7947
  2. Mixed: 1,553 out of 7947
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7947
7947 movie reviews
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  1. Exit Wounds
    Its pile-driving succession of set pieces comes at you with numbingly relentless efficiency, presumably in the hope that you won't notice or care how dumb it all is.
    • Boston Globe
  2. The Old Oak
    It’s a fable that ties up too neatly to be believed, and it’s a story I’m tired of hearing.
  3. The Big Tease
    What saves it is that it's lighter than mousse and is animated by a handful of engaging performers.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Situation
    Overall the concept is strong and expertly fleshed out; it's just a pity that Hollywood tropes are allowed to invade.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Stop Making Sense
    But as good as it is, the film falls short of translating the exaltation and near-gospel music feel of the band in full flight. [2 Nov 1984]
    • Boston Globe
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hard Word
    Wonderful characters, these three, and The Hard Word never figures out what to do with them.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Meet the Fockers
    What a waste.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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.
  11. Human Traffic
    'Trainspotting'' Lite.
    • Boston Globe
  12. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    The problem is that the heart of the movie is McGowan. He's just not a very compelling figure. He's a bit doughy and inert.
  13. Original Sin
    Despite the heavy-handedness, isn't awful enough to be a hilarious howler. But neither is it good enough to become the tropical noir it could have been.
    • Boston Globe
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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.
  15. The Iron Claw
    Unfortunately, Durkin’s script is so shallow that every character is reduced to a simple sketch.
  16. Romance
    Lots of sex, but little joy.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Witches
    It’s rated PG, but trust me, it’ll give younger kids the screaming meemees.
  18. Crazy People
    Although Crazy People would have been snappy fun in the '30s, or really wacky in the hands of a Preston Sturges in the '40s, it's pretty flaccid and pedestrian in Tony Bill's hands, not crazy enough. Still, it's on to something with those parodies. [11 Apr 1990, p.43]
    • Boston Globe
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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.
  20. Paper Towns
    Will miracles never cease? Alas, they do. Pausing pregnantly between clauses to add to their trite profundity, Quentin recites the moral of the story, and it’s as phony as the towns of the title.
  21. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
    If you walk in with your expectations at a suitably low setting, you won't walk away disappointed.
    • Boston Globe
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ta Ra Rum Pum
    A tasty diversion from the usual Hollywood fare.
  23. Nowhere
    In short, Nowhere needs more humor, more wildness. Its pandemonium is only on the surface - which could have been the premise of a really humorous take on teen chaos. But it doesn't push the envelope as much as Araki's previous films. Although it gives his pop sensibility a vigorous workout, Nowhere is Araki's Mallrats. [06 June 1997, p.D6]
    • Boston Globe
  24. Smart People
    Mostly, Smart People is a failure of imagination.
  25. Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos
    Just because a Japanese animated film is screening at the Museum of Fine Arts doesn't mean that you can count on Miyazaki-caliber artistry.
  26. Ferrari
    Driver and Cruz are perfect surnames for actors starring in a movie called “Ferrari.” That was just one of the many thoughts I had as the minutes slowly ticked by. At least the loud sound mix kept me awake.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paranormal Activity
    Even at 85 minutes, the movie contains maybe 50 minutes that scare.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Jack Frost
    The most amazing thing about Jack Frost may be that it took four writers to come up with a film as insubstantial as tinsel and as leaden as fruitcake. Then again, perhaps none of the writers wanted to bear the blame alone. [12 Dec 1998, p.C4]
    • Boston Globe
  29. Men in Black II
    There's something wrong with this picture, and the problem is there on Smith's face -- Smith looks distressingly I-was-an-Oscar-nominee bored. That goes double for Jones.
  30. Blow Dry
    The characters, in short, are never given enough dimension, enough chance to develop the individual tics and eccentricities on which this kind of comedy thrives.
    • Boston Globe
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Monogamy
    Monogamy sets up a nifty idea that it doesn't follow through.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Smurfs
    The bottom line: Any movie that gives Jonathan Winters work is doing something right.
  33. Waist Deep
    Waist Deep is a cynical excuse for the writer and director (and talented actor) Vondie Curtis-Hall to sock some money away for the kids' college tuition. It's as if he watched "Get Rich or Die Tryin' " and thought, "It needs more palm trees."
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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.''
  35. Blue Valentine
    All the movie's good style goes to waste on a not terribly compelling conceit and loosely sketched characters.
  36. Last Night
    It's the sort of movie that thinks cutting between two different stories makes it art. Usually, it feels like an exercise in art. There's a lot of calisthenics but very little beauty or truth or whatever it is the movie is going for.
  37. Orgasm Inc.
    Canner is either overwhelmed by so much impressive access to so many alarming business opportunities or lacking the investigative rigor to drive home the moral problems of these drugs and the existential problems of these women.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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.
  39. Cheaper by the Dozen
    Martin puts a thankless gloss on the antic role he played in "Parenthood." As his wife, Hunt is the movie's saving grace.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ong Bak
    A sizable amount of national pride is on display in Ong-Bak.
  41. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
    An inferior, though quite respectable, follow-up. [22 Mar 1991, p.73]
    • Boston Globe
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    9 Songs
    It's a smart, provocative idea for a movie. I wish 9 Songs was that movie.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Magic Mike XXL
    The first hour of Magic Mike XXL is deadly.
  44. The Addams Family
    The filmmakers and a nifty cast give the characters some clever, amusing flourishes — it’s definitely diverting seeing the Addamses rendered in state-of-the-art animation, given their cartoon origins — but it ultimately isn’t enough to keep the mood from turning dull.
  45. Regarding Henry
    Nichols is a director who cleanly sculpts his scenes, leaving no intention or action vague. Maybe he should have allowed for a little more ambiguity. [10 July 1991, p.51]
    • Boston Globe
  46. Knockaround Guys
    Likable performances are critically wounded by implausible scenarios and derivative-minded direction referencing everything from ''Reservoir Dogs'' to ''Fargo.''
  47. Closed Circuit
    Instead of all-seeing, it’s more like seen it all before.
  48. Happy, Happy
    The movie attempts to both explain everything away and pat itself (and Norway) on the back once we see Noa watching President Obama deliver his Nobel Prize speech.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    S.W.A.T.
    Those who love police overkill, guns, jingoistic race-baiting, guns, macho smugness, and guns will be well served.
  50. The Wave
    It follows the lead of more recent Hollywood disaster movies like “2012” and “The Impossible.” It features just one family; everyone else is part of the scenery.
  51. The End of the Line
    This movie wants to cover every base without thinking very deeply about them. So while a lot of ground is covered in 80 brisk minutes, the information presented is only abstractly useful.
  52. Company Man
    It's not that the film is devoid of honestly earned laughs here and there. The problem is that there are too few of them and that the film can't connect them.
    • Boston Globe
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    First Blood
    Ted Kotcheff's First Blood is a cute, slick anti-Vietnam war film carefully treated to go down for the pro-war constituency it's made for. [23 Oct 1982]
    • Boston Globe
  54. Hit and Runway
    A mildly diverting gay-straight odd couple comedy that has just enough bright one-liners to carry it past its plot structuring.
    • Boston Globe
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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.
  56. Cop Out
    Cop Out seems aptly named. It’s not personal. It’s barely even a movie. It’s a fire hydrant that the director and his stars use for exterior shots.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Casino Jack
    Glib, fast-paced entertainment that barely leaves a mark - which, given the subject, is just plain wrong.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    CQ
    Triumphs over its own trendiness only by being vapid and superficial.
  59. The Smurfs 2
    That the mushroom-dwelling blue creatures still manage to be endearing even in their second big-screen extravaganza (in 3-D, no less) is about the best that can be said of The Smurfs 2.
  60. Biker Boyz
    It's too long and self-consciously progressive to be entertaining, but it's too well-intentioned to be dismissed altogether.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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.
  62. Assassin's Creed
    The effect is less video-game-turned-movie than zombie movie minus zombies: stilted, static, s-l-o-o-o-w. The ending couldn’t set up a sequel more clearly if “To be continued” appeared on a title card. Don’t count on it. Game on? Game over.
  63. Somewhere
    I can't say why Coppola wanted to spend time with this man. It's like following someone on Twitter who fails to generate many compelling tweets.
  64. Man of the House
    So light it should wind up on the ''diet" shelf of the video store.
  65. The Longest Yard
    Everyone in this overstaffed showbiz sampler has been better somewhere else. An assortment of talented comedians, character actors, professional athletes, sports commentators, one rapper, and two former sitcom stars sit in this movie like too much food on a buffet cart.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Step Up Revolution
    Don't roll your eyes just yet. Step Up Revolution, enhanced by 3-D and set in glitzy Miami, is not as cringe-worthy as you would expect from the fourth "Step Up" installment.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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 Reviewed by
      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 Reviewed by
      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.
  71. Mermaids
    Frankly, Mermaids is the kind of movie that needs the strong personalities of Cher and Ryder, and is lucky it has them. They put the movie over. It has a weak script, and the direction by Richard Benjamin - who had two predecessors on this project - is so reticent as to be almost absent. There's almost no pacing or shaping to speak of. [14 Dec 1990, p.53P]
    • Boston Globe
  72. The Last Stand
    Kim doesn't sweat interweaving his story threads in any tightly controlled way. Just when the need-for-speed stuff really starts to gain traction, he'll shift for a surprisingly lengthy stretch to comic relief with the deputies and local wacko Johnny Knoxville.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sunshine State
    There is almost no drama, nor any surprise, in this long effort.
    • Boston Globe
  74. Sacrifice
    Sacrifice wants to have it both ways. It's willing neither to give itself up to the goofy sincerity of genre conventions nor to make the demands on viewers that serious drama requires. The sacrifices Chen's characters make would signify that much more if he'd made a sacrifice or two himself.
  75. The Inheritance
    The actors give it their best, Thomsen and Werlinder in particular.
  76. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale
    Finnish filmmaker Jalmari Helander's dark-comic expansion on his cult Internet shorts, in which he crafts a back story for Santa that's as black as stocking coal.
  77. Bride & Prejudice
    In attempting to show us a love blind to class, culture, and color, she's (Chadha) also made it bland.
  78. The Words
    The Words aspires to depths greater than the sex we never see these two have. There's nothing for the eye to do while the ear fills with the banalities of two streams of narration, one by Dennis Quaid, the other by Jeremy Irons, all of it built around a lie.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Extra Man
    Everyone in the film is an uninteresting grotesque.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Life as We Know It
    Life as We Know It gives bland and predictable a good name.
  81. Country Strong
    Paltrow makes the part look natural. She's not impersonating an actual singer, so she seems merely like a twangy, alcoholic version of herself. She should be stopped from dancing in enormous arenas, but her thin voice is rather pretty.
  82. Salt
    Jolie doesn't seem entirely bored with the routine. She has a laugh or two at her bionic image: Evelyn is a woman who uses a maxi pad as a bandage.
  83. The Grand Seduction
    Charming, but not seductive.
  84. Kevin Hart: Let Me Explain
    Few comedians talk so much to get a laugh, and sometimes the strain shows... And the directors don’t do him any favors by the annoyingly frequent close-ups of audience members in convulsions of laughter.
  85. Disturbia
    "Rear Window" never comes up in the Disturbia press notes, which is probably just as well since it steals that movie's premise but none of Alfred Hitchcock's wit, finesse, or seduction.
  86. The Last Legion
    The film is nothing to be ashamed of (especially if you're Kingsley). But it's as if everybody involved knows what the deal is.
  87. Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
    One wants to find enlightenment - or at least entertainment - in this reconsideration of Playboy and of Hefner. But it's tainted.
  88. White Sands
    Red blood, white sands and a blue Corvette are the real stars of "White Sands," the slick new Roger Donaldson thriller that's more about its plot convolutions than its characters, and more about its visuals than either. [24 Apr 1992, p.85]
    • Boston Globe
  89. Scooby-Doo
    This dog will inevitably let down purists looking for the elusive combination of smart and funny.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Justin Bieber's Believe
    Where Bieber’s first concert documentary, 2011’s “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” chronicled his rise to fame, his new one is damage control.
  91. Gimme Shelter
    Gimme Shelter is sometimes moving and inspiring, but you have to wonder: Though Kathy and her movement give teenagers shelter, do they give them a life?
  92. Son of God
    For the most part, though, the film maintains its low ambitions; it is mostly inoffensive, only occasionally ludicrous, and at times, at least for me, genuinely moving.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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.
  94. Blow
    Blew its chance to be an epic drug opera. It's only nostril-deep.
    • Boston Globe
  95. Cool Runnings
    It's all prefab stuff, rendered acceptable by the sunny dispositions of the performers and the Jamaican location shots. You really have to love bobsledding, or Jamaica, or both, to love Cool Runnings. [1 Oct 1993, p.55]
    • Boston Globe
  96. What Lies Beneath
    Ford and Pfeiffer deliver craftsmanlike work, but the film steadily unravels as Zemeckis tries to ratchet up the suspense.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      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 Reviewed by
      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.
  99. Happythankyoumoreplease
    The movie is generic and shallow in its glimpse of the love and sex lives of a handful of young New Yorkers.
  100. Monster-in-Law
    By Hollywood standards, a movie carried with such gusto by a 67-year-old woman has to be considered a miracle. And I'm not sorry to say I enjoyed watching her do it.
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