Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,964 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: 5,240 out of 7964
  2. Mixed: 1,556 out of 7964
  3. Negative: 1,168 out of 7964
7964 movie reviews
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    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Afternoon Delight
    The results feel a little life lesson-y but also well-earned and well-observed, and Hahn takes advantage of a rare lead role to locate both the ugliness and beauty in her character.
  2. The Family
    Not known for subtlety, Besson gets the expected laughs, and then some. He also exercises an unwonted finesse, not only with the allusions, but also with variations on the “f” word that, if not poetic, are at least funny.
  3. Viola
    Viola owes much of the pleasure it offers to the sorts of things one looks for in any good movie: an attractive cast, attractively photographed in an attractive location, and plotting that manages to feel relaxed without being lazy.
  4. Portrait of Jason (re-release)
    Artistically, though, you can’t help but trust him. Like any star turn, Holliday’s performance rings utterly true. It’s that indefinable but unmistakable reality-beyond-reality called art.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Riddick
    This is back-to-basics stuff, which turns out to be not such a bad idea.
  6. Terraferma
    The story gets both complicated and predictable.
  7. Hell Baby
    As a five-minute sketch it would have been so-so. But as a 93-minute slog through witless puerility, it seems like an eternity in hell, baby.
  8. Ain't in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm
    Unfortunately, Hatley chooses not to offer much context or background history regarding that or other aspects of Helm’s half-century career, other than archival footage of Helm and the Band in their prime, press clippings, and comments from the Band “biographer,” Barney Hoskyns.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Short Term 12
    He (Cretton) just loves this place and these people so much, he wanted to give us more of them. For that, we should be grateful.
  10. The Grandmaster
    Who knows what they’re fighting about, but given the ecstatic ballet of fists and water, tossed bodies and smashed decor, centered by Leung’s majestic impassivity, it doesn’t really matter.
  11. I Declare War
    Imagination is what these filmmakers could use more of, as their ingenious concept doesn’t develop much beyond a gimmick.
  12. Thérèse
    The film looks great, boasting all the elegant period details that are expected in tasteful French adaptations of treasured national literature, with beautifully photographed Bordeaux landscapes and luxurious interiors. As for the human element, however, the mood is more apathetic than tragic.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lifeguard
    Writer-director Liz W. Garcia depicts Leigh’s quandary with a heavy hand that gets heavier as the movie goes on, ending with one of those portentous freeze-frames that worked in “The 400 Blows” and never since.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Austenland
    Hess has made a classic rookie director mistake: Any spoof has to be at least as smart as the thing it’s spoofing, and this one’s twice as dumb.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    One Direction: This Is Us
    The problem is that the movie offers no way of differentiating between them beyond their hairstyles.
  16. Getaway
    In the end, it’s hard to remember another action entry that expends so much energy on frenetic blacktop choreography and attention-deficit editing with so little to show for it.
  17. Closed Circuit
    Instead of all-seeing, it’s more like seen it all before.
  18. Cutie and the Boxer
    In this alternately whimsical and grim documentary, Zachary Heinzerling relates the couple’s down-and-out, inspiring saga, which slyly comments on the evolution and ironies of the past half century in contemporary art.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    It’s a secondhand vision, when all is said and done, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing when the craft is rapturous.
  20. You're Next
    Like [The Purge and The Conjuring], Adam Wingard’s sly, diabolical, and oddly moral You’re Next draws on the home invasion/haunted house scenario, but outclasses them with its wit, irony, and technically proficient terror.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The World's End
    The World’s End is more frantic than funny, but it’s still funny enough — just — to outweigh its own silliness.
  22. The Attack
    Though director Ziad Doueiri’s uneven treatment of this provocative premise suffers from contrivance and implausibility, it nonetheless arouses profound questions about fanaticism, cultural identity, and the essential mystery of other people, even those we think we know best.
  23. Jobs
    If one were to compare this film to one of Jobs’s own products, it would be more like the Cube than the iPod.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kick-Ass 2
    Kick-Ass 2 is a special kind of crap: the kind smart people make for audiences they think are stupid.
  25. In a World...
    In addition to being very funny, In a World . . . also makes a case for women to be, well, heard. But in terms of cohesion and narrative, it doesn’t quite come together as a movie.
  26. I Give It a Year
    Though Mazer’s ambition is laudable, he has not yet integrated the comedy of manners into the comedy of no manners.
  27. Prince Avalanche
    It’s a surprisingly humorous and humane film — a lyrical little oddity that stands as a welcome return to form.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Spectacular Now
    A cleareyed, disarmingly tender adolescent romance that bears comparison with the best of its genre.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lee Daniels' The Butler
    The Butler is a remarkable, even exhilarating movie not for its inherent Gump-itude but for the social portrait that gimmick allows.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Le Pont du Nord
    Le Pont du Nord is not one of Rivette’s greatest works — honor goes to “Celine and Julie” or 1991’s “La Belle Noiseuse” — but it’s a useful compendium of his themes and it captures a very specific time, place, and sensibility.
  31. Lovelace
    Epstein and Friedman may have the best of intentions, but in the end they’re exploiting Lovelace, too.
  32. In the Fog
    As remorseless in style as it is in message, In the Fog offers little hope and few pleasures, but earns admiration for its elegant exploration of the lowest depths of the human condition.
  33. Planes
    Planes has some wonderfully goofy, even ineffable, touches.
  34. Europa Report
    Technique largely does the work of imagination. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The nuts and bolts of Europa Report may feel very familiar, but the movie doesn’t look quite like anything else.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Blue Jasmine
    Jasmine is a creation to stand with this filmmaker’s best, but Blanchett makes it better. She finds the grace notes in a disgraceful woman and leaves us stranded between horror and pity.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Elysium
    It’s a letdown, but this director’s still a talent to be reckoned with.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    We're the Millers
    It’s an August dog-day special, in other words: a few easy laughs, one or two flashes of inspiration, and enough sentimentality to ensure that no one actually gets hurt.
  38. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    Director Thor Freudenthal (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid”) finds his groove with a succession of flashy 3-D renderings... They’re digitized riffs on the Sarlacc pit from “Star Wars” and the finale of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — but as with the “Potter” cribbing, when it’s done well, it encourages “Percy” audiences to forgive the derivative chunks and thin emotion.
  39. The Act of Killing
    The Act of Killing is one of the most extraordinary films you’ll ever encounter, not to mention one of the craziest filmmaking concepts anywhere.
  40. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    Silva doesn’t resort to any fancy tricks to depict his characters’ inner experiences. But something happens nonetheless, a bonding of sorts that is almost, if not quite, convincing.
  41. The Look of Love
    Although Raymond’s career extended over five decades of London sleaze, decadence, and celebrity, neither director nor actor provide much insight into the man or his times, not to mention the significance of Raymond’s prime product.
  42. Still Mine
    Though admirable in ambition, McGowan’s decision to broaden his simple story’s scope diminishes an affecting melodrama about the increasingly common, insufficiently acknowledged plagues of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    2 Guns
    The movie has style but increasingly little sense.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner
    Kleine's film is rambling and unfocused but mostly charming, and it steps into deeper waters almost in spite of itself.
  45. Blackfish
    What’s on camera is both damning and expertly assembled, a filmmaking effort worthy of standing with 2009’s Oscar-winning documentary about dolphin abuse, “The Cove.”
    • 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.
  47. 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.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fruitvale Station
    Writer-director Coogler could easily have turned Fruitvale Station into a work of agitprop — a film to work you into a froth of anger — but he’s after things that are harder to grasp: the measure of a man’s life and the smaller struggles, satisfactions, and injustices that can fill it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The To Do List
    In its exuberantly smutty way, The To Do List is a revolutionary development: a teen sex comedy where the girls get to play nasty and the boys stand around looking vaguely terrified.
  50. The Wolverine
    Jackman spends enough time compellingly playing stranger in a strange land that you’ll put up with a few unwanted doses of the old familiar.
  51. Museum Hours
    Museum Hours is an unusual film. It lacks a score yet feels like a sonata, intimate and musical. Secret harmonies are being heard.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Girl Most Likely
    One doesn’t really want to beat up on Girl Most Likely, because it means well and everyone in it appears to be having a good time. But so many things are wrong with the film, from a script that’s bright but never sharp to the editing that leaves scenes hanging flaccidly in the breeze.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Only God Forgives
    Only God Forgives is the kind of remarkable disaster only a very talented director can make after he finds success and is then allowed to do whatever he wants.
  54. R.I.P.D.
    There is less eye candy than you would expect, and it’s underwhelming.
  55. RED 2
    A sequel that has some snappy interplay, typically courtesy of Malkovich, but mostly feels like a cast working to manufacture what came naturally the first time.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Conjuring
    The Conjuring digs up no new ground — indeed, it seems almost proud of its old school bona fides — but it plows the classic terrain with a skill that feels a lot like affection. The ghost that’s really haunting this movie is nostalgia.
  57. Turbo
    Turbo makes an entertaining go of it by borrowing very liberally from the “Fast & Furious” franchise — Michelle Rodriguez even voices a character — and sticking a slime trail onto “Rocky” for the rest.
  58. Nicky's Family
    Winton’s inspiring story deserves greater attention but this film isn’t the best representation of it.
  59. Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story
    Bernstein communicates Ungerer’s manic spirit and his irrepressible creativity by punctuating the conventions of talking-head interviews and archival footage with animated snippets of Ungerer’s thousands of illustrations.
  60. A Band Called Death
    In the end Death triumphs, but its allure and obsession remain a mystery.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I'm So Excited
    I’m So Excited! is probably its director’s most forgettable work. But it has its trashy pleasures, and it beats an in-flight movie — the one place you can bet it will never be seen.
  62. Grown Ups 2
    Grown Ups 2 offers a bittersweet paean to childhood and youth and their inevitable loss. Take the case of Adam Sandler. Didn’t he use to be funny?
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pacific Rim
    Pacific Rim is, hands down, the blockbuster event of the summer — a titanic sci-fi action fantasy that has been invested, against all expectations, with a heart, a brain, and something approximating a soul.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sweetgrass
    A meditative and intensely beautiful documentary.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Way, Way Back
    The movie’s a minor pleasure rather than a major work. But minor pleasures have their place, especially in summertime, and at its best The Way, Way Back goes down like a popsicle on a hot July day.
  66. More Than Honey
    Though overloaded with narration, “Honey” triumphs visually, with stunning shots of bees in flight, tracked in slow motion, “Winged Migration”-style, by who-knows-what technical wizardry.
  67. Hannah Arendt
    A film that ultimately says more about banality than evil.
  68. Just Like a Woman
    What might have proven an illuminating perspective on familiar issues disappoints as Bouchareb fails to turn his outsider’s point of view into new insights, and instead takes the easy route, falling back on familiar stereotypes in his tour of US misogyny and xenophobia.
  69. Despicable Me 2
    The scope of the ’toon espionage-adventure goings-on is surprisingly limited. But the filmmakers so clearly love working on these characters, their creative joy is infectious.
  70. 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.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lone Ranger
    The greater embarrassment is that so many millions of dollars have been wasted on an entertainment that feels so smug, so pointless, and so thunderously empty.
  72. Maniac
    This remake, like Frank’s horrible hobby, remains an exercise in empty repetition.
  73. Unfinished Song
    [Terence Stamp] and Vanessa Redgrave, as well as supporting actors Christopher Eccleston and Gemma Arterton, raise Paul Andrew Williams’s entry in the golden age genre from mawkish to genuinely heartwarming.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Hijacking
    A Hijacking tells a simple story whose ripples ultimately turn into tidal waves.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    20 Feet from Stardom
    20 Feet From Stardom may possibly be the happiest time you’ll have at the movies all summer, but it comes with a heavy load of frustration. The joy...is in the sound of women singing their big, beautiful hearts out. The pain comes from the anonymity they’ve spent their lives working under and fighting against.
  76. White House Down
    Intentionally or not, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down is the comedy hit of the summer. No other film equals its comic sophistication. Each nutty scenario is surpassed by the next, ludicrous story lines coalesce with expert orchestration, and absurd details return with perfect timing to build to a crescendo of hilarity.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Heat
    If you’re going to make a dopey, bawdy, foul-mouthed, predictable lady-buddy-cop movie, you might as well make it funny. And until it overstays its welcome in the final half-hour, The Heat is shamefully funny.
  78. Berberian Sound Studio
    Though “Berberian” bogs down a bit in its infernal spiral, Strickland proves himself to be a rising talent — a master of sound and fury both.
  79. Fill the Void
    Burshtein has achieved a gripping film without victims or villains, an ambiguous tragedy drawing on universal themes of love and loss, self-sacrifice and self-preservation.
  80. Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    Tom Bean and Luke Poling’s documentary shows that its subject’s true talent may have been for an occupation no less rarefied than the ones he failed at: movie star.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Bling Ring
    The studied impassivity of The Bling Ring feels increasingly like a dodge as the movie progresses; we sense an anger and a moralism that the director’s too cool or too wary or too close to engage.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Much Ado About Nothing
    Joss Whedon’s Much Ado About Nothing is just about the sloppiest Shakespeare ever put on the screen. It may also be the most exhilarating — a profound trifle that reminds you how close Shakespeare’s comedies verge on darkness before pirouetting back into the light.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Monsters University
    This is not a bad movie, and to small children it will be a very good one. But it is closer to average than one would wish from the company that gave us “Up,” “Wall-E,” “The Incredibles,” and “Toy Story 3."
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    World War Z
    World War Z is epically realized entertainment that feeds on our fears of apocalypse, but it’s just fast enough and smart enough — and, more importantly, human enough — to keep an audience on edge from start to finish.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Man of Steel
    Snyder knows how to put on a show, and Man of Steel has a massive scope that’s hard to resist... But what’s missing from this Superman saga is a sense of lightness, of pop joy.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    This Is the End
    [A] crass, patchy, often shamelessly funny farce.
  87. The Purge
    The problem with high concepts like this is cooking up a story and characters to go along with it.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Kings of Summer
    A stylish and very funny teenage coming-of-age story graced with surreal fringes and a mysteriously hushed core.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Before Midnight
    If the first two films belong with the greatest (if talkiest) movie romances of all time, the new film is richer, riskier, and more bleakly perceptive about what it takes for love to endure (or not) over the long haul.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Internship
    It’s the kind of Hollywood formula product that proves why the formula’s so hard to kill: simultaneously easy to like and impossible to respect.
  91. Now You See Me
    The editing of the action sequences is an insult to the idea of narrative clarity.
  92. Leviathan
    It is part Rorschach test and part theme park ride as the filmmakers shoot from the strangest places and from such odd perspectives that much of the film consists of trying to figure out what the heck is going on.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Becoming Traviata
    Becoming Traviata might make you feel you’ve seen Verdi’s opera, or it might make you want to see it.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Painting (Le Tableau)
    Creative, colorful, and unexpectedly wise, The Painting is the latest offshore animation to show to kids burned out on computer-generated Hollywood toons.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    At Any Price
    Bahrani is brilliant at small gestures and the way they can speak volumes, but in At Any Price he’s aiming for grand tragedy, and he doesn’t yet have the knack. The pacing of the final act is uncertain; the epic sweep doesn’t arrive.
    • 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.
  97. Fast & Furious 6
    At more leisurely, less furious moments, meanwhile, the cast shows the easy chemistry that comes with having now done a couple of these all-hands-on-deck episodes.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hangover Part III
    This third go-round for the "Wolf Pack" doesn't bother to Xerox the original 2009 hit comedy, as 2011's witless "Hangover 2" did. Instead, the new movie heads in different, if utterly formulaic, directions. So it's not terrible. It's just bad.
  99. Black Rock
    It’s all a fair attempt, but Aselton isn’t going to make anyone forget Kathryn Bigelow.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stories We Tell
    Stories We Tell is one of those movies you watch on a screen and replay in your head for days, moving between its many levels of inquiry and touched, always, by Polley’s compassion toward her relatives in particular and people in general.
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