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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    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Beauty in Trouble
    This being a Czech film, drama, comedy, history, and social commentary are served up in equal proportion.
  3. The Square
    The surprise here is how thrillingly bad things get.
  4. Born on the Fourth of July
    Oliver Stone's Born on the Fourth of July is a knockout, a huge angry howl of movie that uses a crippled Vietnam veteran's disability as metaphor for a country's paralysis. [5 Jan 1990, p.67]
    • Boston Globe
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Whitney
    A family affair, a family failure. The life of Whitney Houston seems like a cage match between competing egotists who call one another relatives. No doubt a certain pall hangs over the film, perhaps inevitable with the subject, and aided by the cathartic candor of most interviewees.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Catch Me If You Can
    Nothing if not a celebration of our willingness to be gulled by life's charming strangers.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    X-Men: Days of Future Past
    “Days” is fast, smart, well-acted, and intermittently inspired, and if you don’t know or care who Beast or Blink or Storm are, you can safely skip it.
  8. 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.
  9. Polite Society
    Polite Society is a tale of smashing the patriarchy through martial arts and a bit of science fiction, featuring gorgeously shot scenes of action, comedy, and outright terror.
  10. Thoroughbreds
    A story steeped in emotional remoteness manages to command our attention in Thoroughbreds, first-time filmmaker Cory Finley’s darkly satirical portrait of the young and disconnected in old-money Connecticut.
  11. The Bob's Burgers Movie
    At 102 minutes, The Bob’s Burgers Movie feels more like five continuous episodes stitched together than something new that’s been abstracted from its origins. The one place it dares to outshine the show is in its emotional moments, where it allows the heart that has always been beating under its surface to grow three sizes bigger.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Treeless Mountain
    Feels both masterful and hesitant - it’s the work of a born filmmaker who’s still not quite sure what she wants to say.
  13. The LEGO Batman Movie
    The movie is sufficiently in touch with current comic books that it’s keen to explore Batman’s psychology — breezily, but still.
  14. A Prairie Home Companion
    Kline's combination of pratfalls and urbanity is funny, but it rubs against the rest of the movie's effortless rustic charm. He's like Errol Flynn on a hayride.
  15. Mid-August Lunch
    The movie is a perfect blend of calm execution and uninflected farce.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Microbe and Gasoline
    Charming, melancholy, and, in the end, not terribly memorable.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Baadasssss!
    A much better movie than the one it honors.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Trainwreck
    A very entertaining romantic comedy, conventional on the surface while standing all sorts of genre clichés and gender assumptions discreetly on their heads. Its subversions are lower-case, embedded in the laughs, but they’re there and they matter.
  19. Secret Ballot
    Ride it out, and you will find the rewards modest but meaningful.
    • Boston Globe
  20. The Believer
    An amazing and incendiary movie that dives straight into the rough waters of contradiction.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    About a Boy
    Renders what should have been a wholly entertaining film into a timid, soggy near miss.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In This World
    A tremendous human drama, with each stage of its characters' journey a white-knuckle thriller in miniature.
  23. Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst
    It does manage to put a somewhat complex human face on the domestic troublemakers, if not their exploits.
  24. This Film Is Not Yet Rated
    The filmmaker doesn't exactly let anyone off the hook.
  25. Origin
    It’s not a fun time at the movies, but it’s an informative and worthy one.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Bastard Out of Carolina
    Huston's direct style and subtle touch keep Bastard from becoming a sociological treatise. Not for a moment can we forget that these are people hurting people. [13 Dec 1996, p.C28]
    • Boston Globe
  27. Peace Officer
    Lawrence is an impeccable, commanding subject, not just because of his credentials but because of his presence and demeanor.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Point Blank
    What the movie doesn't do, oddly, is leave much of an impression after it's over.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
    In its occasionally over-gentle way, the documentary testifies to the ego necessary to be a great star and to live a great life.
  30. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    Perhaps Fiennes’s intent is to draw the viewer into the solipsistic intensity of what it is to be Grace Jones. It is a bracing experience, because she is hedonistic, exultant, funny, and fierce.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A House of Dynamite
    Despite its intent to scare viewers into thinking about the possibility of a nuclear attack on a major American city, the screenplay structure of “A House of Dynamite” robs most of its power. The same events are seen from three different perspectives, a narrative device that becomes an instantly forgettable gimmick.
    • 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.
  33. The Great Flood
    At its best, The Great Flood is hypnotic — at its worst, numbing.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Omar
    The movie lands like a punch.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Maurice
    The team of producer Ismail Merchant and director James Ivory has created another classy film of a classic novel with their stunning adaptation of E.M. Forster's Maurice. [24 Sep 1987]
    • Boston Globe
  36. Titane
    Titane is deeply unpleasant, and its narrative borders on the inexplicable — not just the sex and pregnancy — but Ducournau knows what’s she’s doing, even if the audience doesn’t know why she’s doing it.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    Rogue Nation unfolds with fluid, twisty, old-school pleasure — you settle into it like a favorite chair.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Purple Rose of Cairo
    The Purple Rose of Cairo, Woody Allen's tender Valentine to the movies, features poignant performances by Jeff Daniels and Mia Farrow. In the critical rush to canonize Allen, it's easy to forget how far Farrow has come as an actress. [31 May 1985, p.27]
    • Boston Globe
  39. Frozen
    Frozen could also leave its mark as the next step in the Disney Princess feminist revisionism championed by last year’s “Brave.” Where that film staunchly pushed a men-don’t-define-me theme throughout, here it’s the requisite fairy tale ending that gets tweaked.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    On the Run
    This payback-revenge storyline, told mostly at night with minimal dialogue, is tense but familiar, and Bruno's quick-draw costume changes are fun to watch.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      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.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Waitress
    Waitress isn't a great film, but it is great, deep-dish fun, with a generosity of spirit that extends first to the sisters on the screen and in the audience, then to the rest of humanity.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Prodigal Sons
    There’s still enough to chew on to recommend the movie, not least the oddly touching sight of two siblings whose very identities have been altered by surgery.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Skeleton Twins
    The bitter, funny dialogue by director Craig Johnson and co-writer Mark Heyman gives the two stars room to work both comic and dramatic sides of their gifts.
  45. Terribly Happy
    The characters are intended to be slightly stupid, but the writing isn’t necessarily smarter.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
    The oddest moment in this riveting documentary comes when Marina Abramovic, the performance artist, meets David Blaine, the illusionist.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Bridesmaid
    The film reveals its secrets slowly, and Chabrol tightens the screws not according to the rules of Hollywood suspense but with a cool, level gaze.
  48. Natural Born Killers
    Natural Born Killers is going to be a love-it or hate-it film. But it's an important film. Pumped up, jumped up, yet asking the right questions, [it] is more than an attention-grabber. It's a grenade pitched into the media tent. [26 Aug 1994, p.51]
    • Boston Globe
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      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.
  50. Dancing in Jaffa
    “So how are you going to get them to dance together?” Dancing never explains how. Instead, as in similar films such as “Hoop Dreams,” it focuses on the contest, reducing the participants to a handful of representative kids who end up learning something about themselves and others.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sicko
    Sicko is Moore's best, most focused movie to date -- much more persuasive than the enraged and self-righteous "Fahrenheit 9/11."
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Monster
    A gruesome, helpless spiral barely saved by an actress locating humanity where few would have cared to bother.
  53. The Lady and the Duke
    Rohmer's style saps the film of the drama that flows directly from the subject matter.
  54. Daddy Longlegs
    Any normal mother or father, seeing how the movie’s protagonist, Lenny, ostensibly supervises his two sons (Sage and Frey Ranaldo), is likely to suffer cardiac arrest.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Bigger Splash
    The performances are expert.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tabloid
    It's a guaranteed good time at the movies.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    What Maisie Knew
    What Maisie Knew flirts with sentimentality but mostly keeps it at bay until the very end, at which point the filmmakers and we realize the kid has probably earned it.
  58. The Watermelon Woman
    Although Watermelon Woman is at times rudimentary and slight, it's saved by its humor and its way of tweaking political correctness. [9 May 1997, p.C6]
    • Boston Globe
  59. The Women's Balcony
    Rendered heartfelt and compelling by an outstanding cast.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Janis: Little Girl Blue
    I’d like to think of the singer watching this movie somewhere, nodding in thanks at what it gets right and howling with laughter at what it misses.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Frankenweenie
    The movie, a simple yet immensely pleasurable tale of a little boy and his undead dog, is good enough on its own. If you know the back story, it's even better.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Divine Intervention
    The Academy accepts submissions only from real countries, and Palestine isn't one. This is as good a joke, and as dark, as anything in the movie.
  63. Black Hawk Down
    Character is almost wholly subordinated to a blast-furnace rendering of the hell into which they're dumped. Seldom will you see so many US military body parts strewn around a movie screen.
    • Boston Globe
  64. Strawberry Mansion
    Strawberry Mansion is a very strange movie. It’s at times beguiling, at other times so wackadoo inscrutable you want to groan. Either way, it’s always inventive. It’s very much its own thing, and in this movie day and age that is no small accomplishment.
  65. Southside with You
    Their non-specific excursion unfolds like a blithe Woody Allen movie without all the name-dropping.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rize
    There's a delicate balance here between expression and belligerence.
  67. Bottoms
    Bottoms has a devil-may-care approach to its satire that might have made Jonathan Swift proud. Director Emma Seligman, who co-wrote the script with this film’s star, Rachel Sennott, are unconcerned about offending audiences. If you’ve seen their last film, the 2021 cringe comedy, “Shiva Baby,” you know what you’re in for here.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wild
    Where Wild disappoints is in the didactic, show-and-tell approach of Vallée’s direction and of the screenplay.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Ground Truth
    The documentary any American with an opinion on our involvement in Iraq owes it to his or her conscience to see.
  70. The Sea Beast
    High-seas adventure meets message movie. The adventures are good. So’s the message. The problem is that they’re sailing in different directions.
  71. Iron Island
    Like the great Iranian filmmakers, Rasoulof has no use for the artificiality of heightened drama.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Humpday
    Serves up some caustic laughs before fizzling out.
  73. The Burial
    Though it plays fast and loose with several details, The Burial remains true to its focus on race, class, and how capitalism exploits both regardless of a person’s color or financial means. The message is not subtly delivered, but it’s still effective.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Mother's Smile
    It's a bit of a mess but strong stuff nevertheless -- a mournful, often wickedly funny religious satire that suggests what Kafka might have come up with had he been raised Catholic.
  75. Polisse
    The entire movie is pitched at a scream. But the screaming is more Janis Joplin, Axl Rose, or Mary J. Blige than Jamie Lee Curtis. All the tears I shed were hard-earned. So were all the laughing and clapping and eye-covering. In each case, it was involuntary.
  76. The Sea Inside
    You want the movie to stir your soul, push your intellect, or at the very least, break your heart. But it's such a repetitive and thinly constructed piece of filmmaking that the scope and complexity of Sampedro's case are turned to porridge.
  77. The Others
    Has everything you want in a supernatural thriller except thrills.
    • Boston Globe
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
    Some of the most honest and tender observations come from Basquiat's girlfriend at the time, Suzanne Mallouk.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Flushed Away
    Parents will while away the time in moderate boredom until the film unexpectedly springs to life in its midsection, then just as abruptly goes back to sleep.
  80. Awakenings
    Director Penny Marshall's choreography encompasses emotional as well as physical ebbs and flows. Awakenings lives up to its title. [11 Jan 1991]
    • Boston Globe
  81. Catherine Called Birdy
    Ramsey is close to a force of nature, equally skilled at conveying Birdy’s curiosity, humor, orneriness, and not-infrequent bewilderment. In other words, she’s a 14-year-old.
  82. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    Resonates with intelligence and a poignancy made more sorrowful by what happened to all of us, but especially to New Yorkers, on that terrible day.
    • Boston Globe
  83. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
    This is classic Disney in the traditional mold - cute, but also pushing into dark territory, fueled by elemental passions. [21 June 1996, p.47]
    • Boston Globe
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Duck Season
    It's one of the small, pitch-perfect treasures of the movie year.
  85. Inception
    One of the best things about Nolan as a director is that he’s not self-conscious. His movies unfold and fold in on themselves without the strain of labor or flash. But that lack of self-consciousness is also Nolan’s downside.
  86. Serenity
    For folks like me, who missed "Firefly," the short-lived TV show on which the movie's based, watching Serenity is like showing up for a big lecture course at the end of the semester. And yet, after an hour of intense disorientation, the movie's arch sarcasm becomes oddly entertaining.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Computer Chess
    Computer Chess is deeply strange and occasionally impenetrable, yet it’s also surreally funny, with touches of science fiction that bedevil the proceedings with outré possibilities.
  88. The Last King of Scotland
    The Last King of Scotland joins the ranks of nightmarish innocents-abroad movies, from "Midnight Express" to "Hostel," where the disillusioned hero fights to return to civility.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    After Innocence
    After Innocence isn't bravura filmmaking, and it doesn't have to be -- this is one of those documentaries where the subject is compelling enough to do the legwork.
  90. Cast Away
    The film's most remarkable achievement, in this culture of clamor, simply may be its decision to keep the volume down, drawing us in as opposed to pummeling us, as most films do.
    • Boston Globe
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tomboy
    Tomboy is as visually beautiful as its 10-year-old heroine is defiantly plain.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Farewell
    It's a bizarre, provocative story and a moving one, but it doesn't access the richer levels and themes of the film the publicity campaign obviously wants you to think of: 2006's "The Lives of Others."
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Orphanage
    The Orphanage gets by on mood and a mournfulness that's not easily soothed. Sadness and loss, it says, are the threads connecting the spirit world and our own, and women, who bring life into the world, understand that far better than men ever will.
  94. Dune: Part One
    Everything is leaden, solemn, portentous. When the writing’s not wooden, it’s clumsily demotic.
  95. Cheatin'
    Plympton will be cheated if Cheatin’ doesn’t at least get nominated for a best animated feature Oscar.
  96. The Invitation
    Kusama’s handling of point of view is diabolically shrewd. She maximizes the terror potential of the vapidly ostentatious modernist mansion without fetishizing it. She intensifies the monstrosity of some of the characters by making them all too human. And as for guessing the ending — good luck.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    End of the Century
    Unearths the expected footage from the crypt -- including a hilarious live video of the band arguing onstage over what to play next. The anecdotes are pungent and revelatory.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Red Lights
    Primarily a one-man show for Darroussin, and the actor, a longtime pro in the French film industry, comes through with a scarifyingly believable portrayal.
  99. Ocean's Eleven
    It's slick, sleek, and stylish, and if it doesn't quite redefine cool, it certainly offers a snazzy update.
    • Boston Globe
  100. They Shot the Piano Player
    While uncertainty remains about Tenório’s horrible fate, it’s never in doubt how much he was beloved. “They Shot the Piano Player” is a tribute to the musician and to those who knew him best. See it more than once, and hope the theater plays it loud.
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