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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    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rocketman
    As long as Rocketman is charting the jet-propelled rise of Elton John in the early 1970s, it is an absolute gas. As soon as it plunges into the burnout years — addictions, betrayals, diva fits — it plays like every other rags-to-rock-to-riches saga you’ve ever seen. Especially “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Cooler
    Looks brilliant while you're watching it and stands revealed as counterfeit only in the strong light of day. What Baldwin does, though, is the stuff of supporting actor Oscars.
  3. Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    When the film ends, we're haunted. We've been driving with a ghost.
  4. Giorni e nuvole
    In American movies, the iconic question usually is, can men and women be friends without the sex part getting in the way? Here it's, can a husband appreciate his wife as a woman? The movie's success in Italy is partly a matter of frustration: Women need their men to grow up.
  5. Frontrunners
    The movie doesn't know what it wants to say about the election or the people who run in it.
  6. Hannah Arendt
    A film that ultimately says more about banality than evil.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Monsoon
    A delicate, observant, and rather too quiescent drama of coming home to a strange land, Monsoon is an interesting change of pace for star Henry Golding (“Crazy Rich Asians”) and another musing on diaspora by the Cambodia-born British filmmaker Hong Khaou.
  10. Duplicity
    Duplicity so thoroughly equates sex and money that, in a manner apt for a recession, the audience is rewired when it's over. You don't care whether they love each other. You just want to see them paid.
  11. The Painted Veil
    Curran is a talented director, especially where his actors are concerned. His previous movie, "We Don't Live Here Anymore," an adaptation of two Andre Dubus stories, was another literary adultery drama featuring Watts. The Painted Veil doesn't achieve the fire that characterized that film.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Outside Story
    Writer-director Casimir Nozkowski has great fun coming up with new exasperations for his main character, and Henry has a slow burn to rival old-time masters like Edgar Kennedy.
  13. It
    Ultimately, cast and crew conjure up horror that’s more efficient than terrifying.
  14. Trading Places
    It's easily the best of the movies I've seen by the various "Saturday Night Live" alumni, and part of the reason it's funny and satisfying is that it doesn't strain. [09 Jun 1983]
    • Boston Globe
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Digging for Fire
    The movie’s a comedy. And while it has its charms, Swanberg is tilling soil here that has been churned since humanity began, and he doesn’t come up with very much that’s new.
  16. Black Gold
    You buy "fair - trade" coffee; you assume you're being socially responsible. But now, along comes Black Gold to tell you that all fair-trade coffee is not created equal, and that Ethiopia, the "birthplace of coffee" and home of some of the world's best beans, may be getting the least fair shake of all.
  17. Cold Souls
    The movie turns what could have been a tedious meta-movie exercise into a sincere dour farce.
  18. How to Build a Girl
    So it’s no small tribute to Feldstein — who really is something — to say that she’s the very best thing in How to Build a Girl despite being so wildly miscast. Her performance is a tour de force, even if it’s too forceful for either its own good or that of the movie.
  19. A Shock to the System
    When a tone is sustained as confidently and with as many delicious flourishes as A Shock to the System manages, and the screen is filled with characterful performances, it's a sign the director is doing something right. [23 Mar 1990, p.46p]
    • Boston Globe
  20. Tuesday
    It felt like I was watching a Wayans Bros. movie instead of one that expected me to take the ideas of dying and grief seriously.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Sleeping Beauty
    At its best, The Sleeping Beauty reclaims fairy tales as a kind of oral folk REM state, chewing over anxieties about adulthood, behavior, sex, and belonging in potent symbolic form.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Just Another Love Story
    A violent, melodramatic, feverishly overplotted tale of midlife crisis and crazy love. It's good, nasty fun until it gets boxed in by its own contrivances toward the end.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Life During Wartime
    Too many of the sequences are two-character dialogues that take place in restaurants; after a while, the film starts to resemble sketch existentialism.
  24. The Unknown Known
    “The Fog of War” (2003), about McNamara, won Morris a best documentary feature Oscar. The Unknown Known takes its title from a favorite phrase of Rumsfeld. It also accurately describes its subject, whose smiling inscrutability makes him consistently fascinating and often maddening.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I Am Greta
    It’s clear that Thunberg knows the science and can talk about the Keeling Curve and the Albedo Effect, even if the journalists and heads of states she meets can’t.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Ignorant Fairies
    It's a soapy, simplistic, but surprisingly affecting ambisexual melodrama that plays a little like Pedro Almodovar without the surreal frills.
  27. 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.
  28. 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.
  29. Monster's Ball
    The kind of film that could easily be undone by its own high-minded ambitions and dissolve in a pall of uplift. But it stays the course and gives the season two of its notable performances.
  30. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    The movie has a lot going for it. In less than 90 minutes, it walks us through sketches of Vreeland's private life and the formulation and decades-long execution of her philosophy in the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. The energy here is a selling point.
  31. Julia
    Julia, a brisk documentary survey of Julia Child’s life, is warmly admiring. This makes sense, as there’s lots to admire.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    This Is Not Berlin
    This Is Not Berlin is a relative rarity: a coming-of-age drama in which the student may have more maturity than the teachers.
  33. Blockers
    As nifty as any of it is a witty, touching story thread about Adlon’s trepidatious geek wrestling with her sexual orientation even as she wrestles with peer pressure to hop into bed. And guess what? She and the movie make the smart call.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Green Book
    It’s the kind of movie that hammers on your heart even as it’s tripping over its feet, hobbled by unexamined notions of race, ethnicity, and class. Don’t look too closely, and you’ll have a very good time.
  35. White Reindeer
    Writer-director Zach Clark doesn’t rise much above that level of subtlety in his lampoon of the phony goodwill and soulless commercialism of the Yuletide season. Luckily, he has a cast that elevates the puerility into genuine pathos and absurdity.
  36. Of an Age
    Of an Age successfully captures the fear that the object of one’s queer affection may be straight and unwilling to reciprocate.
  37. Alps
    With "Dogtooth," the point was: Don't try this at home. Now, the expanded lesson is: Don't try this anywhere.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Boy Erased
    Boy Erased is strongest when it simply focuses on Jared as he copes with the trauma of coming out in a repressed society. This includes, in the film’s most shocking scene, a sequence of collegiate gay rape that leaves the boy with PTSD, which goes unnoticed and untreated by parents, authorities, and, to some extent, the film itself.
  39. The Avengers
    You don't need to be a "comic-book person" to find the set pieces exhilarating. But if you are such a person, or a fan of the movies that comic books turn into, The Avengers feels like the moment you've been waiting for.
  40. 5B
    Haggis and Krauss’s desire to use the ward as a vehicle to tell a much larger and more complex story makes sense. Yet it ultimately takes away from the truly remarkable story they have to tell, a story that may actually be more complex than matters of government policy and public opinion.
  41. The Matchmaker
    How does a filmmaker tell a Holocaust story that hasn't been told before? The Matchmaker does it by weaving fable with realism, coming-of-age innocence with adult grief, and guilt with romanticism.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Venus in Fur
    “Venus in Fur,” the 2010 David Ives play that conquered off-Broadway in 2010 and Broadway in 2011, has been thoroughly and maliciously Romanized.
  43. Nurse Betty
    It's lively, edgy, full of zigs and zags, juicy performances, and offbeat fun.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Imelda
    Imelda is at its most acridly useful when comparing the former first lady's recollections with others' less sanguine memories.
  45. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    Powell never achieves the absurdist, uncanny poetry of that scene in Herzog’s film where a “demented” penguin marches into oblivion, but he does arouse wonder at nature’s sublimity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    American Hardcore
    A sloppy mosh note to the genre, with its own excesses and oversights. It's like a flier for a band you've never heard of: torn, soaked with beer, itchy with aggression.
  47. Oh Lucy!
    The message is clear, if not original: stray from the herd and you’re dead. What makes Hirayanagi’s iteration of this familiar theme appealing are the quirky characters, the nuanced performances, and the curious cultural topography of Tokyo.
  48. Zero Motivation
    Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation has more substance than a sitcom, even though it’s broken down into three TV series-like episodes. But it’s no “M*A*S*H” — a film to which some have compared it — either.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Bodies Bodies Bodies
    Capturing today’s twenty-somethings is tricky enough even with a tight script (“You’re a spreadsheet with a superiority complex”), but making Zoomers realistic and ridiculous is all up to the delivery. And the cast of “Bodies” does not disappoint.
  50. Joshua
    Joshua is the sort of movie in which nobody does what you would do: like spank or demand an extra-strength time out.
  51. The Piano Lesson
    This Denzel Washington family affair (Washington and his daughter, Katia, produced it, his son directed it, and his other son plays the lead) is well worth watching. It captures the spirit of Wilson’s magnificent prose, moving the audience the way the author intended.
  52. Octubre
    Octubre is a quick, quiet movie that distills Lima, Peru, to a downtrodden version of its more dynamic current self.
  53. The Last September
    A gorgeous autumnal period piece that catches a vanishing proprietary class on the eve of its extinction in Ireland in 1920.
  54. 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.
  55. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
    Like watching somebody else's flashback and wondering what you were doing then instead.
  56. The Trip to Greece
    What makes Steve and Rob so funny is that they’re so human: petty, insecure, rivalrous, as well as charming and hilarious. Nothing’s more human than sadness, not even laughter, and laughter The Trip to Greece has to offer in plenty. What’s their next destination? Wherever it is, the important thing is that there be one.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Chronicle
    Chronicle will never be mistaken for an artistic breakthrough, but it has a solid gimmick and pieces of it are brilliant.
  58. Arthur Christmas
    The film's indefatigable holiday spirit is infectious.
  59. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
    Gilliam has a vision and a viewpoint, and he puts it on screen with an extravagance, a humanistic generosity and a visual imagination that make it a standout in 1989's virtual cinematic vacuum. [10 Mar 1989, p.32]
    • Boston Globe
  60. Beautiful Darling
    As fascinating as the material is, like so much of popular culture it doesn't hold up well out of context.
  61. The Other Dream Team
    Clearly, there's a story here. The documentary The Other Dream Team tells it in a smart, lively, if somewhat hectic fashion.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Into the Woods
    Into the Woods is forced in some places but exquisitely right in others, and it gains strength as it goes.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    What They Had
    Can a vastly talented cast raise a heartfelt but banal screenplay on their own? The verdict is mixed, to put it kindly.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Leto
    Little of this comes through in the film, which is about the mayfly moment and three people at its center. For those who don’t have enough information to connect the dots, that may not be enough. Maybe you had to be there, but it’s a movie’s job to take us, and this one gets only partway.
  65. I Used to Be Darker
    This sounds like it could be austere and schematic, but the affecting, authentic performances from the first-time actors make these characters thoroughly authentic.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Great Ziegfeld
    A tremendously decorative picture. [13 Apr 1936, p.21]
    • Boston Globe
  67. 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.
  68. Predestination
    His (Hawke) subtle performance also draws attention away from the creaky plot machinery, as does the Spierig brothers’ eye for the seemingly throwaway but pregnant detail.
  69. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    Gremlins 2 is one of the few sequels that improves on the original. [15 Jun 1990, p.33p]
    • Boston Globe
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fan-Fan the Tulip
    What played as glorious period tomfoolery to European festival juries and discerning U S audiences in the early 1950s now just seems quaintly pleased with itself.
  71. Kings of Pastry
    Kings of Pastry, goes inside an intense event that few Americans know much about - a kind of tradesmen's Olympics.
  72. Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    The best thing about Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone is that it really is the story of Fishbone. It's a hearty, thoughtful, smartly assembled, vaguely complete documentary about a rock band that, even by the standards of out-there musical acts, seemed out there both in the mid-1980s and even now.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Asako I & II
    The movie keeps you guessing, mostly in pleasure, at both its meanings and its methods.
  74. The Underneath
    Soderbergh's sleekly malignant Underneath is a nasty little winner. [28 April 1995, p.81]
    • Boston Globe
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Absolute Wilson
    Absolute Wilson may not be original, but Wilson absolutely is. And for the glimmers of that originality that shine through here, the film is worth watching.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Last Winter
    The Last Winter sounds like a genre-movie platypus - a little bit of this, a little piece of that - but it stops short of laying an egg. In fact, it works eerily well.
  77. Chicken with Plums
    Chicken With Plums has Iran in common with "Persepolis," but little else. Largely, though not entirely, live action, it's a fairly traditional story about thwarted love - a kind of fairy tale for grown-ups.
  78. Tenet
    Moviemaking doesn’t come any tauter or with more velocity. But that confusion is a warning. It’s going to apply to the entire movie; and the longer “Tenet” lasts, the more of an issue confusion becomes.
  79. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    A lively and affectionate cross between an infomercial and a genuflection.
    • Boston Globe
  80. Le bossu
    The story is a mess. But On Guard was directed by the reliable Philippe de Broca, who imbues the whole affair with high-calorie silliness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sunshine State
    There is almost no drama, nor any surprise, in this long effort.
    • Boston Globe
  82. O Brother, Where Art Thou?
    A clever and satisfyingly abundant entertainment.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Climax
    Climax is the first Noé film, though, to flirt with the novel sensation of boredom.
  84. Wendell & Wild
    Fans of “Key & Peele” will love their latest duet. Much of their dialogue sounds improvised, and the pair work off each other like the pros they are.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Solitary Man
    Too shapeless and cursorily plotted to fully work as a story, but Koppelman and his co-director, David Levien, generously surround the hero with reliable actors doing solid work; if you can get past the catastrophe of Ben’s behavior, the film’s a genuine pleasure.
  86. Shallow Grave
    Black comedy and film noir are around one another smartly and wickedly in Danny Boyle's Shallow Grave, a tense, twisty Scottish-made thriller that's going to break out of Glasgow in a big way. [24 Feb 1995]
    • Boston Globe
  87. The Bank Job
    The movie doesn't hang together as a thriller, and the characters don't hang together as interesting people.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Talk to Me
    Especially wonderful is Taraji P. Henson as Petey's longtime girlfriend Vernell , a vision in Foxy Brown period clothes with a pixie smile, lollipop legs, and a filthy mouth. After "Hustle & Flow ," this is at least the second movie Henson has stolen, and will Hollywood please do something about it?
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Birth of a Nation
    Produced, co-written, and directed by its star, The Birth of a Nation is very much a first film, its hesitancies disguised as bluntness, and the best things about it are Parker’s acting and his ambitions.
  90. Even the Rain (Tambien la Lluvia)
    An ambitious mix of politics, religion, art, and human drama.
  91. Blink
    There’s a bittersweet poignancy in watching the children bond with animals and people during their travels before beginning the next leg of their journey.
  92. William Eggleston in the Real World
    The documentary is elliptical, with a slow, drifty rhythm. It presents an up-close but impersonal view of Eggleston.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Spider-Man: Far from Home
    Spider-Man: Far from Home isn’t really a superhero movie. It’s a wholesome teen comedy disguised as a superhero movie.
  94. Friday Night
    Has a sultry and complex psychological intent all its own, yet it's reminiscent of some earlier Denis works, including ''Nenette and Boni.''
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Zero Day
    Without even trying, Coccio may have stumbled over the truest metaphor for Columbine yet.
  96. The Elephant in the Living Room
    The movie effectively rids you of any notion that owning a cougar or a python is a good idea.
    • 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.
  98. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    Strauch’s orotund prose sounds much like that of Werner Herzog, but without the irony. Herzog’s sensibility is missed here; he could have made a masterpiece about the absurdity of these deluded seekers of Eden.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Patriots Day
    At best, it's unnecessary. At worst, it's vaguely insulting.
  100. Slacker
    Despite a deceptively aimless surface that seems to take off from the initial character's musings on roads not taken, Slacker is more than a gallery of alienated post-collegiates spinning their wheels waiting for something to happen. [4 Oct. 1991, p.47]
    • Boston Globe
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