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 point 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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    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Grazia's Island
    If you prefer your domestic clashes sunnier and more strenuously poetic, Respiro may be your respite. If nothing else, it's a reminder of how severely underutilized Valeria Golino is as both actress and cinematic glory.
  2. Horns and Halos
    The film means to provoke a closer look at the faces of good and evil. It questions whether we really live in a world that can be divided neatly into black hats and white hats.
  3. Psycho Beach Party
    A little Hitchcock and some good Psycho fun at the beach.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Bread, My Sweet
    Think low-budget ''Moonstruck'' but think again: A regional dish in the most heartwarming sense.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Austin Powers in Goldmember
    The most consistently funny of the ''Austin Powers'' films.
  6. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
    Give your brain the night off, and Myers will make you smile too.
  7. Shattered Glass
    Shattered Glass, with its dumb title, is smart about good vs. evil. Incidentally, the good is Lane, who now works at The Washington Post and was a consultant on this picture.
  8. Hannibal
    ''The Silence of the Lambs'' was a classic; Hannibal is only a good movie of its type.
    • Boston Globe
  9. Songcatcher
    Somewhat sanitized but gorgeous Americana, with another impressive turn by McTeer.
    • Boston Globe
    • 35 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pokémon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back!
    The Japanese animation is beautiful, and the script adaptation for the English-speaking audience is well-paced, clever, and absorbing enough to keep parents from squirming.
  11. Kate & Leopold
    It's a charmer.
    • Boston Globe
  12. Small Time Crooks
    It's the kind of movie you can settle into, secure in the expectation that you can steal from it more than a little vintage Allen fun.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hollywood Ending
    A small film, but its ease and grace are virtues that can't be overrated.
  14. Tupac: Resurrection
    The movie is like an extra-strength episode of MTV's ''Diary,'' which is like ''A&E Biography'' in the first person. Only ''Resurrection'' has a subject who's been dead for six years.
  15. Harry Is Here to Help
    A sleek little poison pill of a movie.
    • Boston Globe
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Spartan
    When Spartan is good, it's surprisingly gripping and fresh, and when it's bad, it's just another overcooked Hollywood paranoid thriller.
  17. The Truth About Charlie
    The closer you get to sorting out the truth, the less likely you are to believe it, let alone comprehend it. The latter half of this movie is as outlandish as a Mexican soap opera.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Agronomist
    Smartly filmed (aside from a few distracting editing fripperies), but it's so dazzled by its subject and saddened by his martyrdom that it never moves past the heroic politics of dissent.
  19. Girl on the Bridge
    I'd take a chance on it anyway, even if it stumbles and loses its way.
    • Boston Globe
  20. Katakuri-ke no kôfuku
    If there's one image that sums up the filmmaking style of Takashi Miike, it's the close-up of a bubbling hot pot on the family dinner table.
  21. Knafayim Shvurot
    This intimate, warmly made family portrait always feels true. The performances are particularly good.
  22. 8 Women
    Even if some of the references are inscrutable, a lot of 8 Women is a riot. Here and there Ozon finds the key to a level of farce that would have amused Bunuel himself.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Seabiscuit
    In the end, Seabiscuit gets right the things that matter.
  24. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey don't simply star in this movie; they tag-team it out of the Freddie Prinze Jr. --Julia Stiles puppy-love ghetto.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Independent
    A charming and funny look at the independent filmmaking business and the thin line between a masterpiece and a $9 nap.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    The joy is in the details, and they are unrelentingly comic.
  27. The Italian Job
    Norton is unapologetic and unflappable in his part. Slimy and vaguely nerdy, he's become the thinking man's thug, even if this character's Armani-wear is better tailored than his psychology.
  28. Zoolander
    Isn't always on the money, but when it is, it really is.
    • Boston Globe
  29. Joe the King
    Whaley's self-effacing but strongly etched and wrenchingly effective film.
  30. Wonderland
    Give it a chance and you'll probably share the cast's collective impulse to dive in and embrace it.
  31. The 6th Day
    Puts the fun back into going to Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. He said he'd be back, and he is.
    • Boston Globe
  32. The Vertical Ray of the Sun
    Made of a serene dynamite that's all but unknown to American film audiences.
  33. En la ciudad sin límites
    A tidy soap opera. But it's a discreet, warmly made one, too. In a show of restraint, the intrigue never rises above mildly juicy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Secretary
    Love hurts in Secretary -- but not too much. It's not impossible to imagine adventurous young couples seeing this movie and rushing home to try out the handcuffs and paddles.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    Sometimes it gets into arcane talk of equipment that makes more sense for a Berklee College of Music engineering class than for a mass-market movie -- but as a probing look at a really nice-guy genius in the studio world, it succeeds admirably.
  36. The Story of the Weeping Camel
    The mother-child dynamic here is the fraught stuff of any worthy melodrama.
  37. Bus 174
    Engrossing, smartly made documentary.
  38. Siddhartha (re-release)
    Apologies to Conrad Rooks, but the only reason his 1972 film, Siddhartha, is getting a 30th-anniversary rerelease is the appeal of seeing Sven Nykvist's amazing cinematography restored to its full splendor.
  39. Joy Ride
    It's a snazzy, smartly made, and even hip little scarefest. As a jump-start to Halloween, it's all you could hope for.
    • Boston Globe
  40. The Green Mile
    There's almost too much there, but the three-hour-plus film permits the kind of detailing that not only brings the storytelling to life, but sometimes persuades us we're breathing to its rhythms.
  41. My First Mister
    Risks seeming too earnestly therapeutic for its own good. But what makes My First Mister a successful feature directing debut for Lahti is the emotional veracity it summons.
    • Boston Globe
  42. Millennium Mambo
    If Millennium Mambo is the only chance to see Hou Hsaio-hsien's work at a movie theater, you'd better take it.
  43. Iron Monkey
    They're as special as special effects get.
    • Boston Globe
  44. Last Life in the Universe
    There is no plot in Pen-ek Ratanaruang's exceedingly mellow situation comedy, and that's preferred, frankly.
  45. Bad Boys II
    Bay's movie is also a confident mega-production that feels it doesn't need to lean on its visual frills if it has Smith and Lawrence -- it's a natural-born buddy flick.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Sleepy Time Gal
    Stunning performances help make The Sleepy Time Gal a thoughtful, moving piece that faces difficult issues with honesty and beauty.
  47. Shadow Magic
    Shadow Magic isn't interested in psychology or character study. It's a series of tableaux and on that level succeeds admirably.
    • Boston Globe
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bright Leaves
    Where most documentaries offer us facts to hold on to, his (McElwee's) are obsessed with the mystery of things we don't know and never will.
  49. The Station Agent
    Mercifully, The Station Agent is not about how these misfits heal one another -- they're not that miserable, for one thing. It's about the unlikely ways proximity, need, and coincidence create friendships.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Solaris
    To appreciate Solaris, the new film by Steven Soderbergh, it helps to downshift your moviegoing metabolism to a level approaching the cryogenically frozen: The movie's that cerebral, that contemplative, that slow.
  51. Calle 54
    Filled with affection and verve and will do very nicely until the next shipment of Latin jazz comes along.
    • Boston Globe
  52. Glengarry Glen Ross
    If Foley's strategies don't quite regenerate the caged-animal urgency of the play, the tradeoff of some verbal fireworks for piercing closeups isn't all bad. [16 Sep 1992, p.72]
    • Boston Globe
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Runaway Jury
    The closest cinematic approximation to a beach novel that money and skill can buy.
  54. Shallow Hal
    You can't help cheering on Shallow Hal. That and the fact that it's not at all politically correct. It's something better. It's big-hearted, and it's funny.
    • Boston Globe
  55. Storytelling
    Cleverly mocks the modern chronicler, raising questions that linger long after the film is finished.
    • Boston Globe
  56. Go
    "Pulp Fiction" wannabes don't get much slicker or edgier than Go.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bon voyage
    This is a film lover's film, and as if to underscore the point, Bon Voyage opens and closes in a movie theater.
  58. The Curse of the Jade Scorpion
    There's nothing major here, certainly nothing on the order of my favorite among Allen's retro workouts of the past decade, ''Bullets Over Broadway.'' But it's entertaining all the same.
    • Boston Globe
  59. Carandiru
    Angry and tragic, Carandiru is finally, in its own way, uplifting.
  60. State and Main
    Good clean dirty fun.
  61. Beyond the Mat
    Wrestling gets in America's face and Blaustein gets in wrestling's face. It's a fascinating tango.
    • Boston Globe
  62. Charlie's Angels
    A babe-athon, pure and simple.
    • Boston Globe
  63. The Whole Nine Yards
    Light on its feet and reveling in its deviousness, it stays one step ahead of us .
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi
    ''Bonjour" is especially lucky in having Shlomi Bar-Dayan, the 16-year-old misfit of the title, played by a young actor named Oshri Cohen, who's able to convey the impossibility of ever making sense of the world with a single bruised gaze.
  65. Secret Window
    A jokey, junky potboiler.
  66. Wattstax (re-released)
    Wattstax is a disorienting and ironic moviegoing experience. It's a film about the curative powers of rhythm-and-blues music that sets out to frustrate your sense of rhythm in its insistence on the blues.
  67. Antwone Fisher
    Corny. But it's corny in a way that a Hollywood movie about a boy who just wants to go home ought to be corny. Plus when it's done with this much care, corny works for me.
  68. Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
    Despite its conceptual shortfall, is worth seeing, if only to update yourself on what can emerge from a keyboard these days.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Blue Car
    It's that central dance between teacher and student that makes the movie both hard to watch and worth your attention - a subtle waltz of power in which it's difficult to tell who's leading until too late.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Good Thief
    The actor is magnificent -- ravaged, desperate, aware -- and no more so than in a scene toward the end when Bob's cardsharp cool finally breaks. It's a risky scene, the one note of corn, but Nolte brings it home. Too bad the movie doesn't.
    • 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.
  72. Erleuchtung garantiert
    Likable, go-with-the-flow comedy.
    • Boston Globe
  73. Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over
    In a summer in which every blockbuster is zealous to be a video game, Rodriguez, with a wink, has produced his own.
  74. The Yes Men
    This movie could have been a nagging, preachy headache had either man exhibited a tendency for self-righteousness. But both are friendly, almost humble about their mischief.
  75. The Legend of Leigh Bowery
    It takes almost an hour for The Legend of Leigh Bowery to make a case for Bowery's sort of genius, and in the last third, the movie gives a real sense of what made him him.
  76. The Shape of Things
    The cast helps enliven what could otherwise come off as a treatise. All four actors played these roles during the play's off-Broadway run.
  77. Casa de los babys
    Sayles seems to be trying, single-handedly, to correct centuries of First World self-centeredness in Third World contexts.
  78. The Fast and the Furious
    Turbo-charged wallbanger with the IQ of a tire iron. But it jumps off the screen with the mindless panache of a good bad movie.
    • Boston Globe
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Rage in Placid Lake
    For every line of dialogue that's truly, glitteringly acid, though, there are five that are merely clever, and Lee, likable as he is, never really taps into the misery of the teen misfit.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Down with Love
    This is all far beyond silly, of course - the most inconsequential sort of winking, meta-movie in-joke.
  81. Drumline
    A bonanza of pop uplift. It wraps the up-from-nothing drama of ''Flashdance'' in the sassy, interracial pep rallying of ''Bring It On'' and the military romance of ''An Officer and a Gentleman.''
  82. The Five Obstructions
    Part of what hooks you to this movie is how Leth outsmarts his taskmaster, and how the two men have divergent, almost incompatible aesthetic ideals.
  83. Tying the Knot
    It makes a sane, civil, humanist case for marriage for all.
  84. The Devil's Backbone
    A seductively corrosive horror story that also potently suggests the ways war can shatter childhood.
    • Boston Globe
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism
    A hardly fair, not especially balanced broadside that has the advantage of being correct.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Dog Skip
    The film's vintage setting is as much a character as any other. Some of the best moments evoke the best parts of easygoing small town life in a bygone era.
  87. Criminal
    Just as exciting and socially vivid as Bielinsky's. Yet, somehow it's more stressful. The American characters practically sweat desperation.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tuck Everlasting
    These actors offset the modern-day ordinariness of the leads -- Jackson, especially, seems as if he's just driven over from a mall tour -- and so, ultimately, does the exquisite moral dilemma of Tuck Everlasting.
  89. Drowning Mona
    Executed on a pretty broad level, but if characterization is slighted, the ensemble is so rich, with such depth, that every few minutes another juicy turn keeps coming our way to divert us.
  90. Intolerable Cruelty
    The film is often at odds with itself as a sincere work of romantic comedy, as Wilder's sometimes were, too. Nonetheless, it's determined to keep Clooney's considerable comedic skills front and center. He's never been looser, sexier, or more antic.
  91. No Man's Land
    From beginning to end, it bristles with ironies in classic Eastern European absurdist style.
    • Boston Globe
  92. Superstar
    Part of the reason for the comic surehandedness is the obvious chemistry between Shannon, Ferrell, and director Bruce McCulloch.
  93. The Golden Bowl
    What Merchant, Ivory and Co. arrive at is a sort of handsomely illustrated Cliffs Notes version of the novel.
    • Boston Globe
  94. Shrek
    Suggests a summit meeting between ''The Princess Bride'' and ''Bridget Jones's Diary,'' it has a decided charm of its own.
    • Boston Globe
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Barbershop
    A broad, very funny, unexpectedly graceful comedy of character and community.
  96. Love & Sex
    Brightly sidesteps the cliches that cling to the genre like barnacles and reinvents a lot of the old moves.
  97. Such a Long Journey
    While no individual plot strand is vividly compelling, their interplay makes for a hearty and humanistic mix, carried by the performances.
  98. Mona Lisa Smile
    The reliable Mike Newell directs Mona Lisa Smile with such assurance that the important moments are never mawkish or dull, and he encourages the women to act with absolute conviction.
  99. Anna and the King
    A big, handsome throwback to star-powered historical costume movies.
  100. Ride with the Devil
    It's one of the few films that persuades you that it went out to meet the war and bring it to us with verisimilitude.
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