Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,945 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: 5,227 out of 7945
  2. Mixed: 1,553 out of 7945
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7945
7945 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    War for the Planet of the Apes
    War for the Planet of the Apes plays like a mash-up of about five different movies, but at least one of them feels like a masterpiece.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Touch of Sin
    The time for poetry is past, the director seems to say, as his camera looks deep into the eyes of the mob in the film’s final image. The chaos may be just be getting started.
  3. The Women's Balcony
    Rendered heartfelt and compelling by an outstanding cast.
  4. The Little Hours
    The film manages to be both crudely hilarious and bluntly satiric while also establishing sympathetic characters, a sharp contemporary wit, a sly, dry absurdism.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Spider-Man: Homecoming
    Spider-Man: Homecoming, a superhero movie is adolescent in all the right ways: limber, reckless, full of youthful brio and uncertainty. Trying on new identities, overreaching, doubting, starting over again.
  6. Chaplin
    Richard Attenborough's Chaplin is little more than an illustrated crash course on Charlie Chaplin. But, while superficial, it at least avoids disgrace. [08 Jan 1993, p.25]
    • Boston Globe
      • Posted Jun 30, 2017
  7. Patriot Games
    While Harrison Ford brings all you could hope for to the role of Clancy's hero, CIA analyst Jack Ryan, Patriot Games is a pretty routine, generic and on the whole pedestrian film. Considering the talent and obvious care taken, it's surprisingly flavorless. [5 June 1992, p.25]
    • Boston Globe
      • Posted Jun 29, 2017
  8. Hot Shots!
    It starts with a flyboy roasting franks in the exhaust of a combat jet and never lets up, giddily puncturing all those wartime flying hero movies and throwing in a heap of movie parodies besides. Either way, the pacing is jetstreamed and the level of inventiveness is sky-high. [31 July 1991, p.25]
    • Boston Globe
      • Posted Jun 29, 2017
  9. The 'Burbs
    The 'Burbs begins promisingly, as if Joe Dante is going to yank a Steven Spielberg film into Blue Velvet depths. Once the premise is laid down, however, the film deflates and empties with alarming speed. [17 Feb 1989, p.88]
    • Boston Globe
      • Posted Jun 29, 2017
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Okja
    No one, but no one, makes movies like Bong, a South Korean master who combines baroque concepts, epic visuals, international casts, and a sense of humor that can make you laugh out loud in the middle of the darkest doings.
  11. Maudie
    The story offers many opportunities for glibness and sentimentality. Walsh falls for none of them. She enhances the grimness of Lewis’s surroundings, but does not exploit it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Big Sick
    Trust me on this: Go.
  13. Despicable Me 3
    The laughs here are more about the colorfully zany action than the ho-hum material the cast gets.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Beguiled
    For all its smarts, however,the film feels the slightest bit impersonal and risk-free. Coppola has been faulted in various quarters for dropping a female slave from her remake.
  15. Soapdish
    Soapdish should have been a laugher. But this new spoof of TV soaps isn't nearly as funny as the real thing. Soapdish holds only the merest sliver of entertainment. [31 May 1991, p.28]
    • Boston Globe
      • Posted Jun 28, 2017
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Baby Driver
    Baby Driver is the best time I’ve had at the movies in months, and, if the world is too much with you (as it is for many of us these days), you may feel the same. It’s a dazzling diversion, a series of cinematic highs that achieve the giddiness of not great art but great entertainment (and thus art through the back door).
  17. The Exception
    In other words, it’s hopeless tosh — but expertly done hopeless tosh.
  18. The Journey
    It is a contrived, bombastic, well-intended failure.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Bad Batch
    Amirpour has the potential to see things as no other filmmaker does, but she doesn’t yet have a vision, and she may not as long as she keeps fiddling around with genre conventions laid down by others. She’s an eccentric magpie of a director, and this time the pieces she collects glitter but never quite cohere.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Transformers: The Last Knight
    The plot is a canvas on which to bludgeon the audience with action sequences that have been shot for maximum overstimulation.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rough Night
    What’s nice about this movie, actually, is that you can get a few shameless laughs out of it and then forget you saw it at all.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Book of Henry
    The plot proceeds from the charming to the manipulative to the shameless to the demented in gentle steps that may lull some audiences the way a frog can be boiled to death by degrees.
  23. Cars 3
    This is the rare movie that might benefit from silence. Partly that’s because of the squeezed syrup of Randy Newman’s score.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      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.
  25. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    Some of the best scenes show the family gathering after court sessions to discuss strategy, support each other, and vent.
  26. 47 Meters Down
    Not that the movie’s various shortcomings are all on Moore. British genre director and co-writer Johannes Roberts (“Storage 24”) gives her nothing but trite drama to work with in setting up the story, and an overload of distracting, reductive prattle once she hits the water.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beatriz at Dinner
    Beatriz at Dinner has been directed with subtle but damning chamber-comedy finesse by Miguel Arteta (“The Good Girl,” “Chuck & Buck”) and written by that great deadpan satirist Mike White (“Chuck & Buck,” “School of Rock,” TV’s “Freaks and Geeks”).
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Cousin Rachel
    My Cousin Rachel is a well-turned, well-acted literary adaptation that suffers from a built-in problem: The hero is a twit.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Band Aid
    A clever and heartfelt comedy-drama that remains aloft as long as it retains its sense of humor; when the going gets serious, the dialogue turns therapeutic and heavy. Still, it’s a decent debut and an ambitious attempt to juggle tones.
  30. Megan Leavey
    Perhaps it’s just as well that other issues remain in the background and the film focuses instead on the bond between Leavey and Rex. Not only is it a compelling metaphor for a woman finding independence and empowerment, it dramatizes a primal emotional relationship that proves heartbreaking and triumphant.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    It Comes at Night
    The final scenes are both ambiguous and terrifying, and they left a preview audience as shaken as any I’ve seen. I had the distinct feeling, though, that a lot of them wouldn’t be recommending the movie to their friends. It gets very far under the skin.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Mummy
    Because the movie’s carrying a heavy load of corporate expectations, it gets pulled in different directions by competing agendas before eventually collapsing into incoherence.
  33. Dean
    Stay patient through those Seinfeldian stretches in which Martin isn’t so much acting as performing, and you’ll be treated to the bonus of some surprising emotional depth and poignancy.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Graduation
    It’s the latest from Cristian Mungiu, one of the leading lights of the New Romanian Cinema and the director of “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” by general critical consensus one of the finest films of the new millennium. Graduation is a more quietly damning drama; it doesn’t eviscerate you like the earlier movie but instead sticks with you like a nagging doubt.
  35. Citizen Jane: Battle for the City
    A bit more internal tussle would have both better honored her spirit and made for a better documentary.
  36. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie
    In short, the film owns its immaturity. And the argument it appealingly offers in defense is that it’s healthy, even vital, to be able to laugh at scatological silliness, adults included.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Churchill
    Unfortunately, Churchill the movie is simply dreadful, a stiff, melodramatic “Great Man” travesty that gets both the larger history and the details wrong while encouraging its star’s most overwrought excesses. What Cox serves in this movie is ham, poorly sliced.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wonder Woman
    The first two hours run the gamut from interesting to delightful. The final 20 minutes are roaring, ridiculous business as usual. We should be thankful the tide of mediocrity is held back as long as it is.
    • 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.
  40. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    Much as Bardem enlivens things, the real source of zip is Kaya Scodelario (“Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials”). Charming and spirited, she’s Daisy Ridley dialed up a notch.
  41. Baywatch
    The result is a scattershot comedy that only intermittently nails either tone, finally just bogging down in flatly choreographed mayhem in the late going.
  42. The Wedding Plan
    Consider it the PG-rated, Hassidic version of “Bridesmaids” (2011), and like that movie the comedy is rooted in pain, eroding hope, and triumphant faith.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Obit
    Vanessa Gould’s charming and soulful documentary Obit should convince the doubters and cheer those who already know. As someone who takes great pleasure in both reading and writing valedictions to the recently deceased, I can personally attest that the movie’s dead on.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Everything, Everything
    What separates the good teen romances based on young adult novels from the soppy, ridiculous ones? Emotional conviction, mostly, and committed performances. Everything, Everything is mostly one of the good ones, even if it has everything (everything) that makes these movies head south for everyone (everyone) but the target audience of teenage girls.
  45. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul
    For all her “Clueless” comedy cred, Silverstone just might be at her best conveying a mother’s special knack for witheringly guilting her boys.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Alien: Covenant
    There are a number of reasons “Covenant” works where “Prometheus” struggled to work. The characters are more incisively drawn this time, and their relationships inherently more dramatic.
  47. Chuck
    The film’s casting in general is a strength, however deep the resonance of what the actors are playing. Schreiber’s ex-girlfriend, Naomi Watts, is a brassy, savvy presence as Wepner’s bartender soulmate.
  48. The Wall
    Watching Taylor-Johnson’s character engage the enemy this way is intriguing, but also a bit removed from the realism the film is after. Can you say catch-22?
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lovers
    A lot of the humor, sage as it is, comes from the players, Winger and Letts in particular.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Risk
    Debuting at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and updated in light of recent events, it’s a failed film whose failure makes it interesting; it’s less a portrait of Assange than an account of how the scales fell from one admirer’s eyes as she looked at him.
  51. Snatched
    The movie also plays as an extended reminder of why we love Goldie. It’s enormous fun seeing Hawn up to her old tricks — at 71! — even if they’re tweaked to help sell someone else’s brand of comedy.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    King Arthur: Legend of the Sword is stupid enough to send you back to the one movie that did the saga right by ripping it to shreds, 1975’s “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
  53. Glory
    Like films such as Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005), Glory transforms that realism into metaphors that don’t just criticize a particular system but lay plain the universal exploitation of the weak and honest by the corrupt and powerful.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    According to the closing credits, My Entire High School was six years in the making and is clearly something that Shaw felt he had to get out of his system with his feature film-directing debut. Mission accomplished, and very stylishly, too.
  55. Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary
    The documentary variously consists of archival performance footage, home movies, photographs, pointlessly flashy graphics, and many, many talking heads.
  56. Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent
    Over-stylized and overly re-enacted documentary.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Dinner
    An acrid family affair that has been aggressively over-directed by the talented Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”) and brought to intermittent life by a very good cast.
  58. Buster's Mal Heart
    Smith’s ambitious film at times resembles “Badlands” (1973) crossed with “Fight Club” (1999) as directed by the Coen brothers. Mostly, though, it founders in the complications of its own excess of themes, interconnected story-lines, and multiple personality disorders sketchily connected by an anti-establishment point of view.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    The sharp comic timing and devil-may-care breeziness of the original only return intermittently, and the new film’s emphasis is on family feuds and forgiveness. It’s heavy on the feels. There are hugs.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Circle
    The dialogue is as subtle as a placard, the drama manages to be both cooked-up and dull, and the movie’s fear of brainwashed, tech-addicted millennials is so broad as to be unintentionally funny.
  61. Unforgettable
    It sounds like the movie itself: contrived, implausible, derivative, and — even though both the first-time director Denise Di Novi and screenwriter Christina Hodson are women — misogynistic.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      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.
  63. Their Finest
    At its best, which is often, Their Finest by Danish director Lone Scherfig (“Italian for Beginners;” “An Education”) manipulates appearance and reality, relief and recognition, with exquisite finesse. As befits a film about making films.
  64. Born in China
    Monkeys end up supplying the movie’s real drama. While parentally overlooked mischief-maker Tao Tao gets up to the requisite, well, monkey business, he’s also witness to a stunning snatch-and-fly attack by an opportunistic goshawk. It might not be nature on demand, but it’s some scene.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lost City of Z
    The movie is 141 minutes long but you rarely feel its weight; that’s how confident a filmmaker Gray has become. All The Lost City of Z lacks is a great leading actor, someone magnificent and flawed like a Peter O’Toole.
  66. The Promise
    Too glossy to truly immerse audiences in the horrors it depicts.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Free Fire
    Because Free Fire is a essentially a comedy of bad manners — a bedroom farce that only happens to take place in a warehouse, with volleys of gunfire rather than slammings of doors — it’s a highly enjoyable 90 minutes, especially if your tastes run to the violent, the absurd, and the violently absurd.
  68. Tommy's Honour
    A climactic contest takes place in arctic weather that would rival any New England Patriots playoff game. Had the filmmakers drawn more on this rowdy, hardy spirit, not to mention the hirsute gravitas of Peter Mullan, it might have done justice to its legendary subjects.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Colossal
    About halfway into Colossal you may experience the novel vertigo that comes when you genuinely have no idea where a movie is taking you but understand you’re in competent creative hands. That sensation holds until you’re deposited, happy and a little worse for wear, at the end.
  70. The Fate of the Furious
    Polar chaos notwithstanding, “Fate” delivers action with more consistent visual precision than in the last couple of films, as newly enlisted director F. Gary Gray accesses the flair he brought to 2003’s “The Italian Job.”
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Quiet Passion
    No matter how you feel, we still get the poetry, stitched throughout the film and occasionally soaring above it like an uncaged bird: hard, far-seeing, and waiting for the day it will be understood.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Queen of the Desert
    In no way, shape, or fashion does Queen of the Desert qualify as a good movie, but for fans of Werner Herzog — those of us who have followed cinema’s Teutonic imp of the perverse since the 1970s, when he was staging all-dwarf fables and sending conquistadors across mountains — it is fascinating and something close to a must-see.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    After the Storm
    A small-scale, satisfying human drama that backs gradually into larger matters.
  74. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    Entertainment so generically gentle, it doesn’t compare to last year’s similarly themed, tonally looser “Trolls.”
  75. Your Name.
    Being cluttered isn’t the only problem with Your Name. It also features insipid characters and dippy montage music from the J-pop band Radwimps.
  76. Gifted
    You may find yourself wishing that Webb (“500 Days of Summer”) would just power through court. We’d gladly watch more of Grace and Evans silhouetted against the sunset, their connection evident in his indulgent posing as her makeshift jungle gym.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Going in Style
    The 1979 film was both more casual and much darker about the realities and infirmities of old age, and it had one of George Burns’s better performances. It was a funny, touching experience, and it was a bitter pill. The new movie is a placebo, with Hallmark emotions put over by a cast of solid-gold professionals.
  78. Ghost in the Shell
    Or maybe Major, like Oedipus, is really searching for herself? Do people even have selves? Are identities and souls just a bunch of clichés spun out by teams of screenwriters? If these questions interest you, do yourself a favor and watch the 1995 original movie.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Zookeeper's Wife
    And there you have the problem with The Zookeeper’s Wife: Dialogue and plotting that keep this inspirational, mostly true story earthbound by hitting every note with a hammer.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Frantz
    Frantz is pleasurable slow going, developing its themes at an amble but with a measure of suspense, sympathy toward its characters, and a lasting faith in filmmaking craft.
  81. The Boss Baby
    At least a plot point about “secret formula” is sort of clever. The rest comes across as gibberish.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Personal Shopper
    Personal Shopper is as coolly, beautifully ambiguous as we’ve come to expect from France’s Olivier Assayas, and it contains the kind of mysteries that can leave adventurous audiences tingling pleasurably while others spit out their gummi worms in frustration.
  83. Wilson
    A lot of talent gets wasted in Wilson: not just Harrelson, Dern, and Clowes.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Song to Song
    At times in Song to Song, the effect is mesmerizing, mostly when Mara is onscreen in all her tremulous bioluminescence.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    T2 Trainspotting
    T2 Trainspotting wears out its welcome slowly, like a group of old men running out of stories to tell in an afternoon pub.
  86. Saban's Power Rangers
    Power Rangers might be the only movie that directly pays homage to “Transformers.” Sadly, it suffers by the comparison.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Life
    Like Life itself, this alien is nasty, brutish, and short.
  88. Raw
    When Ducournau keeps the viewer off balance and doesn’t lose her own, she shows signs of being an outstanding stylist and storyteller, balancing mood, composition, startling images, slow-burning suspense, and sardonic humor.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Neruda
    Neruda is a dream of Chile, of what it was and might have been, brought to the screen by a master dreamer.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beauty and the Beast
    In short, there’s plenty of spectacle in Beauty and the Beast, which will be enough for many if not most young audiences. But there isn’t much magic, and what there is coasts on 26-year-old fumes.
  91. The Last Word
    If “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) had mean Mr. Potter standing on the bridge ready to jump, rather than James Stewart’s beaten down hero George Bailey, it still would not have been as namby-pamby as Mark Pellington’s treacly and bromidic The Last Word.
  92. Mr. Gaga
    Slowly it emerges that Gaga is Naharin’s “dance language,” a way of expressing one’s inner being through external movement. Gaga is dada — for dancers.
  93. The Lure
    There is no continuity in narrative or character and it’s all shot in an elliptical, heavily stylized, gaudily lit (much of it looks like it’s shot through an algae-filmed aquarium) collage.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kong: Skull Island
    Kong: Skull Island isn’t a remake or a reboot or a re-anything. It’s just a Saturday matinee creature feature with a smart, unpretentious script, a handful of solid supporting players, and a digital Kong who feels big enough and real enough to provoke the necessary awe. This is all to the movie’s credit.
  95. Land of Mine
    One appreciates the desire of the filmmaker to let the audience fill in the back story, but Rasmussen’s behavior reflects badly on the Danish and heightens sympathy for the POWs.
  96. XX
    The creepiest part of XX, a quartet of short horror films by women, might be the Jan Svankmejer-like stop-action segments between each of them. Sofia Carrillo’s animated antique dolls and little furniture walking on stilt-like legs are the stuff of nightmares.
  97. Table 19
    Kudrow and Robinson are intriguing casting and they get some sharp Bickersons material, but the movie unconvincingly shorthands how they got together. And Revolori’s horndog just feels like the film coasting on his quirky persona from “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Life as a Zucchini
    It’s well worth seeking out for older kids who don’t mind reading subtitles, their parents, and any adults who can appreciate a good story movingly and creatively told.
  99. Before I Fall
    It says something about Deutch’s appeal that she does manage to pull the story from the vexing hole it digs itself into. She takes us on an absorbing journey through the various stages of Sam’s time-stalled predicament.
  100. Logan
    Jackman and Stewart’s fond, easy dynamic helps to balance some very provocative brutality, as the movie pushes Wolverine’s berserk nature to graphic new extremes.
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