Boston Globe's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Arthur Newman
    The closest most people will get to that state of existential freedom is watching actors in a movie about it, and the pleasure usually comes with a price — a reminder that identity, though arbitrary, is also inescapable. In movies like Dante Ariola’s debut feature, Arthur Newman, so, too, are the cliches and platitudes.
  2. The Big Wedding
    Quaint and crass get together — or would that be “bump uglies”? — with awkward, thoroughly flat results in The Big Wedding, an ensemble comedy with a tonal cluelessness as surprising as the name cast that signed on for it anyway.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pain & Gain
    Pain & Gain, a jokey but fatally tone-deaf true-crime caper, plays like “Fargo” for idiots.
  4. A Fierce Green Fire
    Melding history, science, and up-to-the-minute urgency, A Fierce Green Fire is a clarion call that’s passionate and provocative.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Room 237
    Watching Room 237 is like being stuck on an airplane next to a stranger hellbent on convincing you of his very detailed, very paranoid theory of the universe. Actually, it’s like being stuck on a plane full of those guys, each with a different yet compellingly insane take on reality. And the in-flight entertainment features only one movie: “The Shining.”
  6. Girl Rising
    The idea behind Girl Rising is strikingly simple and even more strikingly imaginative.
  7. The Lords of Salem
    There are echoes of Roman Polanski’s “Rosemary’s Baby” in all of this that are impossible to miss.
  8. Oblivion
    Oblivion is a lot like its star: clean, cold, efficient, increasingly overblown, and not a little inexplicable.
  9. Scary Movie 5
    Not that there’s all manner of comedy craftsmanship demanding study here, but the movie does seem to be a funny jumble of contradictory impulses.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Trance
    With Trance, story becomes just another element in Boyle’s commercial pop-Cubism, and the results are nearly fatal.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    To the Wonder
    The director’s first real misfire, a meditation on love and lost paradise that starts with breathtaking assurance and slowly crumbles into self-parody.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Disconnect
    Disconnect is far from a bad movie. It’s just better at melodrama than drama.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Company You Keep
    LeBeouf may yet mature into an American James McAvoy — a charismatically spineless leading man — but Sarandon and her character have him and his character for lunch.
  14. Koch
    The documentary nicely mixes vintage news footage and photographs, talking-head interviews with journalists and Koch associates, and lots (and lots) of Koch.
  15. Upstream Color
    Henry David Thoreau plays an enigmatic role in Shane Carruth’s hypnotic thriller — an oxymoronic term to describe a film that is truly sui generis.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    42
    The ambitious new biopic about Robinson, is better written and produced than those children’s books, but it isn’t any deeper, and that’s a disappointment.
  17. Evil Dead
    Are we really looking to Evil Dead for gnarly possessions played straight? That’s what Alvarez gives us for an overlong stretch, until his reinterpretation of the malevolent-hand gag kicks off a last act that’s more freewheelingly, twistedly grisly. (Don’t skip the credits, because the fan-energizing momentum peaks at the very end.)
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beyond the Hills
    It’s a deceptively impersonal style, because Beyond the Hills seethes with astonishment and rage at a broken society marooned between the 21st century and the 16th.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gimme the Loot
    Mostly it’s a footloose tour through the noise and sun of a summer metropolis and an unassumingly wise portrait of a friendship.
  20. Free Angela & All Political Prisoners
    A description of Davis’s post-trial life would have been welcome. Twice Communist Party candidate for vice president, she now teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz. That raises one more question. Santa Cruz is less than a hundred miles away from San Rafael. How many lifetimes away does it feel like?
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    From Up on Poppy Hill
    Poppy Hill doubtless plays most strongly to Japanese audiences — especially the musical score made up of old-timey jazz and early-’60s pop that sounds like corn syrup to Western ears — but its central conflict is gentle, unyielding, and universal. Which is to say that it turns out to be a Hayao Miyazaki movie after all.
  22. High Tech, Low Life
    High Tech, Low Life has a nice easy rhythm. It feels neither hurried nor emphatic. There’s no narration. Zola and Tiger do most of the talking.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Place Beyond the Pines
    It’s very much a film about men, their yearnings and discontents, and about the way sins tumble down from one generation to the next. It’s a bank-robber movie, too, as well as a drama about the pressures teenagers face from parents and peers. You can feel Cianfrance biting off more and more until his mouth is too full to chew.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Reality
    The movie’s a funny, dark, increasingly razor-sharp inquiry into the metaphysics of modern fame — how the dream of “being seen” and thus validated on some primal level can completely unhinge the average schmo.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    War Witch
    War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Sapphires
    The movie has the indulgent fondness of a gift from a son to his talented mum and aunties. But it also feels the funk, and that’s what counts.
  27. Starbuck
    Bertrand does his jelly-belly best to keep Starbuck a comedy. But even the broadest shtick can’t prevent a movie that features a Busby Berkeley-style group hug from becoming a male weepie. Or a testimonial to Planned Parenthood.
  28. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    How funny that Pryce, a tweedy Brit playing a bad guy, should be the one person doing anything remotely heroic for this dud.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Host
    The Host will make perfect sense to 12-year-old girls, while their college-age sisters will probably laugh themselves sick and their mothers will look at Hurt and wonder when he got so old.
  30. The Silence
    The Silence is a victim of over-plotting, clunky narrative, gratuitous stylization, and too many points of view. When any character quirk or story turn shows promise, depend on some ill-considered directorial decision to put a stop to it.
  31. Olympus Has Fallen
    Butler serves the cause well, considering. Think that cause is a thankless one? Shhh, don’t tell Secret Service agent Channing Tatum or president Jamie Foxx, headed your way in June with, yes, “White House Down.”
  32. The Croods
    Some of the exotic landscape the group trailblazes looks imported from “Avatar” — happily, bringing that immersively dimensionalized, eye-catching quality along with it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Admission
    Cheerful, skittish entertainment that never takes its subject seriously enough.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    On the Road
    A straightforward and rather sane version of the events described in the book and, against all odds, a surprisingly effective movie.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ginger & Rosa
    In Fanning, Potter has found the perfect vessel, and the miracle is that the actress doesn’t even seem to be trying. She just is.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Spring Breakers
    Korine wants to give us a portrait of our nation’s children — the girls, especially — as beautifully depraved sharks, pleasure-seeking killers oblivious to the comedy and horror of their existence. And damned if he doesn’t pull it off, or come close enough.
  37. Stars in Shorts
    The performances in tandem with the writing take most of these seven movies to interesting places.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    The actor/walking disaster known as Charlie Sheen gives a perfectly credible performance here. It’s the rest of the film that tries your patience.
  39. Upside Down
    Solanas’s daring takes the form of ambition. Upside Down has a visionary look that has affinities with everything from “Metropolis” to “Blade Runner” to “Children of Men.” Solanas has the temerity to split the screen horizontally in many shots. Usually, this works, though “Upside Down” is not recommended for anyone subject to visual dislocation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    West of Memphis
    While the “Paradise Lost” films captured events as they unfolded in the heat of battle, West of Memphis has the luxury of at least partial closure.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Like Someone in Love
    The new film is slender, and it plays obliquely with the style of the 20th-century Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu: simple shots of simple people revealing universal truths.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Call
    You’ve seen pieces of this movie in “Psycho,” “Silence of the Lambs,” and 2004’s “Cellular.” Still, the early scenes in the Hive give The Call a needed novelty: It’s a workplace drama, and the work is responding to other people’s desperate worst-case scenarios.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The hair is funny, in part, because not much else is. “Burt Wonderstone” is a lazy, underwritten imitation Will Ferrell movie.
  44. Downeast
    An elegy for a vanishing emblem of what once characterized this country's vitality.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Night Across the Street
    The arrival of Raúl Ruiz’s final work, Night Across the Street, brings the total to four, an elegant, clear-eyed bridge game of artists playing their last trump cards.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lore
    I’m not sure Lore holds up to repeated viewings — Shortland’s style is so feverish it could quickly turn precious — but it demands to be seen at least once.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    No
    No is a comedy, but of a dangerous sort. Its eyes are open and the laughs tend to stick in your throat.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    In the end, that debate might not matter, anyway. What makes Don’t Stop Believin’  work is that we’re along for every step of Pineda’s journey, from his not-so-stunning first day of auditioning to his performances in front of huge crowds to his backstage massages from a masseuse (presumably the band’s).
  49. Little Fugitive (re-release)
    This is a world where people still put out wash to dry on fire escapes, watermelon has seeds, amusement park rides cost 9 cents. Joey is the little fugitive of the title, of course, but at the heart of the movie, as its makers could never have imagined 60 years ago, is a much bigger fugitive: time itself.
  50. Yossi
    Knoller manages to make even a withdrawn character compelling, and worth rooting for as Yossi struggles to shed his shell.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The ABCs of Death
    Do your tastes delve into the sick, ultra-violent, and disturbing? Then you may find The ABCs of Death, an anthology of about two dozen short films, inventive and funny. Otherwise, as you consume this serving of alphabet soup, “A” may as well stand for “atrocious,” “B” for “bloodbath,” and “C” for “check, please.”
  52. Emperor
    When MacArthur stands side by side with Hirohito (Takatarô Kataoka), it’s the ultimate in victor-vanquished encounters. That’s also true whenever Jones shares a scene with Fox.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Exorcism Part II
    Once the “what is real, what is fantasy” questions are answered, and exorcism part deux commences, The Last Exorcism Part II abandons its half-intelligent, tender exploration of Nell’s vulnerability and desirability
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dead Man Down
    Before this urban revenge melodrama falls apart in a clatter of plot absurdities and pretensions, it has its loopy charms.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Greedy Lying Bastards
    The film’s zippy graphics are a treat, but its zippy arguments are slipshod.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Oz the Great and Powerful
    Which is precisely what’s missing from Oz the Great and Powerful: that sense of emotional journey.
  57. 21 and Over
    Among the ingredients “21” is missing: the infectiously random silliness of a Zach Galifianakis, the smug hunkiness of a Bradley Cooper, and any sort of Vegas-y gloss whatsoever.
  58. A Place at the Table
    As morally engaged as the movie is, it’s also argumentatively slack. Precisely because it’s so easy to agree that hunger is bad, it’s hard to agree what to do.
  59. Phantom
    The crew doesn’t much look the part either, save for Schaech’s Stalin ’stache. Yet the movie does show the ability to get past this, even with the weight of all its narratively risky conspiracy theorizing. It’s a shame the intrigue has to get torpedoed by elements that mostly feel correctable.
  60. Let My People Go!
    You don’t have to be Jewish to love borscht belt humor, or gay to love camp, or French to love farce. But when all three are thrown into a blender with a dollop of generic family dysfunction, as is the case in Let My People Go!, oy vey doesn’t begin to address the result.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rubberneck
    What’s good about Rubberneck is also what makes it tough to watch: Karpovsky burrows under the skin of this repressed romantic nebbish until the frame seems ready to burst.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stoker
    The performances are excellent, but it’s the direction that lifts the movie up and spins it around. Like Hitchcock, Park storyboards everything ahead of time, and while that level of control might seem claustrophobic in theory, it ends up freeing Stoker to sail into zones of malevolent visual sensuality.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Gatekeepers
    It’s about spycraft, but it goes to the source. If for no other reason, it deserves to be seen for arranging decades of events in the Middle East into a chronology that, to an outsider, makes dreadful sense.
  64. Jack the Giant Slayer
    A giant chef character is an icky bit of inspiration (complete with booger humor to soothe any shell-shocked young’uns in the audience), and the monsters are key to an epic-scale third act. If you thought the tale ended when Jack clambered back down from the skies, then you haven’t given it as much thought as Singer.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tristana (re-release)
    As much as this tale of bent love runs in the ruts of its maker’s obsessions, it has an undertow that’s impossible to shake. [22 Nov. 2012]
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    John Dies at the End
    This loopy slacker horror farce is so intent on playing with your head — and time, and space, and paranoid conspiracy theories — that it doesn’t care about making sense. Which doesn’t stop the film from being a pretty good bad time.
  67. Snitch
    Snitch gets a decent amount of drama (and action, of course) out of the argument that there’s paying for a crime, and then there’s overpaying.
  68. Escape from Planet Earth
    Colorful as the 3-D aliens-among-us comedy is to look at, though, Corddry is handed a role that’s beige as can be, and so are his castmates.
  69. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    “Happy” isn’t meant ironically. Herzog, who narrates, clearly loves, and envies, the trappers’ elemental existence and connection to nature.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tabu
    A black-and-white fever dream, and, like all dreams, its meanings are elusive. It’s opaque, maddening, often pretentious, yet the pretensions may be on purpose, to push us away from the adulterous colonials at the story’s center and reveal the Africa they’re too obsessed with each other to see.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Good Day to Die Hard
    There are two problems with A Good Day to Die Hard: It’s terribly filmed and nothing in it makes any sense.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beautiful Creatures
    It’s all a big, gluey metaphor for a girl’s sexual fears and raging mom conflicts, and, as in “Twilight,” the metaphor itself gets buried under mounting waves of CGI nonsense and a ridiculous back story about reincarnated Civil War lovers.
  73. Safe Haven
    A movie that passably ambles along in generic-melodrama mode before finally insulting audience intelligence one time too many.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    56 Up
    The attitude of many “UP” fans hovers between voyeurism and concern, between cherishing these people as distant friends and as extensions of ourselves. They’re canaries in the coal mine of human existence.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Side Effects
    A sleekly clever murder mystery, the film plays as many games with the audience as it does with its characters, and for the majority of the running time — the challenge comes from matching wits with what you’re seeing.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Identity Thief
    Unfunny, predictable, and vulgar, it’s the generic equivalent of a Judd Apatow movie. As always, you get what you pay for.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stand Up Guys
    We get it: Stand Up Guys is supposed to be cutesy criminal magic realism. But Stevens, an actor turned director, never finds the right vibe, and the movie's genuinely creepy misogyny sours the attempts to go sentimental in the final act.
  78. Parker
    The best we get here are modest action diversions.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Movie 43
    The line between gross-out humor that's inspired and the kind that's witless is fine indeed, and Movie 43 obliterates it with poop and movie stars.
  80. Bullet to the Head
    It's a surprise that Stallone is as funny as he is playing a hit man paired with a cop in Bullet to the Head. He's man-cave witty in a way that his "Expendables" movies have strived for but haven't really managed.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Warm Bodies
    I don't know if the first zombie date flick is a step forward or backward for civilization as a whole, but I can say that Warm Bodies pulls off a pretty impressive trick: It has its "Twilight" and goofs on it too.
  82. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    Wirkola tears through Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters with such giddy abandon, it ends up being splattery fanboy fun. Preposterous, clearly, but fun.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    The results are exactly as patchwork as that sounds, with sequences of rowdy, sacrilegious invention punctuated by long spells of tedium.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Quartet
    Quartet is a sweet-tempered, rather fuddly drama about retired opera singers, and compared to a slick crowd-pleaser like "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," with whom it shares a star and a sentimentalized view of old age, it's a mess.
  85. 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.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Amour
    What happens between two people? Only the chemistry that keeps us from stumbling through the chaos by ourselves. Is that an illusion, too? Amour says it doesn't much matter. There is no dignity in life except love.
  87. Mama
    The frustration, though, is how much the movie leans on made-ya-jump scares and contrived plot devices when its quieter chills and already fraught setups are so potent.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Broken City
    As the implausibilities and conspiracies and double-crosses pile up, Broken City paints itself into a corner. A plot can be confusing as long as the filmmakers themselves don't seem confused, but that's not the case here.
  89. Fairhaven
    O'Brien and his castmates seem to play loose with his script a bit more than they should in an effort to give the material a lived-in feeling.
  90. Gangster Squad
    Gangster Squad is an almost movie. It's almost terrible. It's almost entertaining. But it's missing the shameless insanity of a wonderfully bad movie, and the particular vision, point of view, and coherence of some very good ones. So it sits there in between - loud, flashy, and unnecessary.
  91. Texas Chainsaw 3D
    All the makers of Texas Chainsaw 3D cared about was getting your $16.
  92. Hitler's Children
    The moral weight of Hitler's Children is unmistakable. So is that weight's inertness.
  93. Bestiaire
    The images are meant to accumulate shame, and they do. But they also might be too much.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Impossible
    An earnest, extremely grueling, prodigiously crafted true-life drama that takes one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history and reduces it to a bad day at Club Med.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Zero Dark Thirty
    It's a movie made with the same coolly fanatical attention to craft the lead character displays in her work. Bigelow is now recognized as one of our true filmmaking naturals.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Not Fade Away
    It's both achingly affectionate and a terrible mess.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Promised Land
    It's a fine line between interesting characters and "Northern Exposure" quirk, but the movie mostly stays on the right side of it.
  98. Parental Guidance
    Parental Guidance is overly generous with regard to the silliness. However, it's not clueless. Crystal seems determined to give as generously as he gets. When a bully whacks him, Crystal covers the bully in vomit. Good for him.
  99. Django Unchained
    The movie Quentin Tarantino has written and directed is corkscrewed, inside-out, upside-down, simultaneously clear-eyed and completely out of its mind.
  100. Les Miserables
    After 2½ hours, the movie's become a bowl of trail mix - you're picking out the nuts you don't like and hoping the next bite doesn't contain any craisins. All the carefully crafted misérables turns into a pile of miz.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »