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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  1. You've Been Trumped
    The biggest problem with the documentary, besides the overexposure of its namesake, is length.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Won't Back Down
    The issue is contentious, messy, prone to wishful thinking. Some see a corporate plot to privatize schools. Others see a last chance to save them. Won't Back Down is on the latter side, obviously, and it has the boilerplate urgency of a TV movie that has been blessed with a high-end cast.
  3. Pitch Perfect
    The college singing-group comedy Pitch Perfect isn't dumb, but Kendrick's participation implies that it might also be smart. And sometimes it is.
  4. Hotel Transylvania
    Some might say there isn't enough that's fresh here to recommend the movie in a big way, except that every generation of trick-or-treaters deserves its monster mash.
  5. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower finds an unexpectedly moving freshness in the old clichés by remaining attentive to the nuances of what happens within and between unhappy teenagers.
  7. How to Survive a Plague
    We're now far enough from that era that seeing it all again feels like a slap to the face in the same way that watching certain moments in the civil rights epic "Eyes on the Prize" chills your bones. This doesn't have that series' stately magnitude. It's smaller and crasser, but it's comparatively galvanic.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Looper
    With Looper, Johnson proves he can finesse the most complicated notions and visual setups his mind can imagine. It's the simple things that still elude him.
  9. House at the End of the Street
    This is a terrible little movie even by the standards of the genre.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Ambassador
    A sociopolitical prankumentary in which the prank blows up in the filmmaker's face, exploding-cigar style.
  11. 10 Years
    An inconsequential high-school-reunion comedy that gets better when it stops trying to make you laugh.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Trouble with the Curve
    The script is by first-timer Randy Brown, but it feels as if it were spit out by one of the assistant GM's computers, so regular are its beats and revelations.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    For Ellen
    It has a sense of drift that both vexes and beguiles.
  14. End of Watch
    The camera is just everywhere, from the point of view of everything. When I left the movie the other night, people complained of seasickness.
  15. Step Up To The Plate
    The movie's patient in the way of "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" or "Jiro Dreams of Sushi." That's where culinary nonfiction is now - sleepy, observant. And, for the most part, that's OK.
  16. Liberal Arts
    Radnor's script is more bittersweet than laugh-out-loud funny.
  17. 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.
  18. The Master
    Nothing as big and strange and right as The Master should feel as effortless as it does. That's not the same as saying that it's light. It's actually heavy. It weighs more than any American film from this or last year. It's the sort of movie that young men aspiring to write the Great American Novel never actually write.
  19. Dredd
    Pretty clearly determined to deliver the antidote to Stallone's movie, the filmmakers take their cues from Christopher Nolan's Batman filmscape, dropping Dredd into a fictional concrete sprawl (actually South Africa) that's relentlessly grounded, visually and dramatically. In a generic way, the environment works.
  20. China Heavyweight
    Where Wiseman excelled in respecting the broad rhythms and pure storytelling of the ring, Chang's new documentary focuses on the stories of three boxers and weaves them into a compelling narrative that rivals anything Hollywood could script.
  21. Detropia
    The title is an imagined word to describe a hard-to-imagine (but very real) place. Combine "Detroit" and "dystopia" (the opposite of utopia) and Detropia is what you get.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Knuckleball!
    The movie's a must for baseball fans in general and Red Sox fans in particular - if nothing else, it will help remove the battery-acid taste of the season now stumbling to a close.
  23. Three Stars
    Maybe because Hachmeister has a background in journalism, his movie endeavors to educate by covering a lot of ground in its 90-plus minutes, which is certainly commendable, it's just not that satisfying.
  24. Resident Evil: Retribution
    Funny about retribution, though - it's a tricky thing to make time for when you've still got mutant zombie hordes after you. The real premise turns out to be a busy rehash of the first movie's story line.
  25. Last Ounce of Courage
    The problem with this numbskull travesty isn't that it's fatuous and smug (which it is). It's that it's slack and dull.
  26. Planet of Snail
    The Korean documentary Planet of Snail is spare and unemphatic - too much so - with an abiding sweetness of spirit.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Little White Lies
    Of the two French films opening in the Boston area today - "Beloved" is the other - Little White Lies is the less ambitious, more watchable, and ultimately more annoying.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beloved
    At 40, Mastroianni is looking more and more like her father, Marcello Mastroianni. She has his eyes and that air of existential befuddlement, and she's beginning to suggest the magnificent ruin he became in his later career.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Shut Up and Play the Hits
    Shut Up is intentionally slapdash, with jumbly hand-held cameras and random bursts of feedback. But there's a beguiling sense of quiet to it, too.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Arbitrage
    Arbitrage is a breezy watch, with good performances that don't cut very deep and an eye for décor but little interest in what it's decorating. What's missing, really, is outrage, or a sense of the 99 percent.
  31. The Inbetweeners Movie
    If nothing else, The Inbetweeners Movie earns itself a footnote in any comprehensive history of local movie exhibition. This has got to be the first time a wedgie has been inflicted onscreen at the Kendall.
  32. Kumaré
    What is offensive is how the masquerade punks these other people - and to no seeming purpose, other than to provide Gandhi with footage for this documentary.
  33. Samsara
    The result is like an issue of National Geographic gone mad.
    • 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.
  35. Bachelorette
    Dunst is the realest, rawest thing in the film.
  36. The Words
    The Words aspires to depths greater than the sex we never see these two have. There's nothing for the eye to do while the ear fills with the banalities of two streams of narration, one by Dennis Quaid, the other by Jeremy Irons, all of it built around a lie.
  37. For a Good Time, Call...
    This movie is basically where some small-screen comedy in the last year has been: "2 Broke Girls," "New Girl," and, their far superior sister, "Girls."
  38. The Possession
    Oh my God, evil. What's with you? Ever since "The Exorcist," it's been the same song-and-crab-dance: Demons don't kill, divorce does.
  39. Sleepwalk with Me
    Birbiglia, who's from Shrewsbury, has done some wonderful things with awkwardness. I'm sad to report that Sleepwalk With Me isn't one of them.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Oslo, August 31st
    The surface of Oslo, August 31st is as cool and crystalline as a Scandinavian lake, but at its core is a benevolence for the life we all share and tears for the man who can no longer share in it.
  41. Lawless
    Lawless is very bloody - but the scenery and production design are a whole lot nicer.
  42. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    Will your preschoolers enjoy it? Perhaps. Is it worth 88 minutes of their lives, or yours? Not in a world where "Sesame Street" is on TV every day. Not even in a world where "Sesame Street" didn't exist.
  43. The Apparition
    To those of us in the audience who might be strangers in paranormal precincts, it looks suspiciously like a séance.
  44. 2016: Obama's America
    Well, fair's fair. George W. Bush got Michael Moore and "Fahrenheit 9/11." Now Barack Obama gets Dinesh D'Souza and 2016: Obama's America. Both films are wildly partisan attack documentaries made by wildly partisan and generally annoying polemicists (D'Souza is more personable, actually, than Moore).
  45. Compliance
    People do stupid things all the time. My friend and I sat through Compliance, didn't we? But there is a level of stupidity displayed by the people in this movie that beggars belief. Their behavior is to stupidity as the Death Star is to a doughnut.
  46. Robot and Frank
    Robot & Frank isn't sure whether it's a comedy or drama, buddy movie or sci-fi fantasy, family melodrama or social satire.
  47. Cosmopolis
    The novel is extremely funny. It's hilarious as well as horrific (all sorts of bad things are going on outside the limo - and a few inside of it, too). Yet whenever the movie is funny, it feels like a mistake. Comedy has never been a Cronenberg strength.
  48. Side by Side
    The directors and distributors can't rely on us. They should be implored to watch their movies in the same theaters we do. It's the only way for them to understand that a crime is being committed.
  49. Premium Rush
    Premium Rush has a lot of energy - too much, it's kind of exhausting.
  50. Hit and Run
    Put Christian Bale behind the wheel, and Hit & Run would make a billion bucks - except then there'd be no room for Shepard, and that movie would hardly be worth watching.
  51. The Expendables 2
    As it stands, The Expendables 2 is lazily satisfied with repeating the first movie's formula, shortcomings and grisly strengths alike.
  52. Restless City
    With Dosunmu, African culture thrives in a demographically shifting but historically African-American part of town. If the idea is that Nollywood could work in Manhattan, this is the director who can show us how.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    2 Days in New York
    Chatty, neurotic, maddeningly messy, often very funny, "New York" spins in a lunatic orbit of its own.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Celeste and Jesse Forever
    The movie is sardonic, hip, heartfelt, surprisingly white, and for all its ensemble pleasures, it's squarely about a furiously prim young woman and how she learns to bend.
  55. The Imposter
    Beverly Dollarhide, Nicholas's mother, says of the period after her son's disappearance, "My main goal in life at that time was not to think." Apparently, the filmmakers have taken a cue from her. At least her unwillingness to think makes sense.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    ParaNorman
    ParaNorman is supposedly for kids, but it's really aimed at their snarky older brothers, and it illustrates the limits of the new family creepshows.
  57. Sparkle
    It's a better movie than what's inspired it, but that fails to explain much. It's like preferring the line at the concession stand to the one for the bathroom.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    It's the sort of thing you'll either find enchanting or an excellent reason to reach for the Scotch.
  59. 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.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Campaign
    It's just another happily idiotic Will Ferrell comedy, ably directed by Jay Roach ("Meet the Parents," "Dinner for Schmucks") and tossing its bawdy jokes at the side of the barn.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Bourne Legacy
    The best thing that can be said about The Bourne Legacy is that Renner will survive it.
  62. Hope Springs
    You feel embarrassed for Streep and Jones (Streep especially) because of the situations, often sexual, they're put in. They're definitely not mailing in their performances.
  63. The Babymakers
    The squirminess stands out here because there's so little going on the rest of the time.
  64. Klown
    It can seem sometimes that Hollywood has a monopoly on stupid, obnoxious comedy. Anyone who sees Klown will learn otherwise. Comedy can be just as stupid and obnoxious in Danish.
  65. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    Compared to the first two movie installments, this one is uncharacteristically scattershot in the life-lessons department.
  66. Ruby Sparks
    Much of the film is pure romantic comedy and a good one. Yet the filmmakers want it to be more.
  67. Easy Money
    In some ways Easy Money recalls Steven Soderbergh's "Traffic." They have drug dealing in common, of course, but also a sense of constant swirl and density of onscreen population.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    Alison Klayman's documentary is one of the most engagingly powerful movies of the year almost completely on the strength of Ai's rumpled charisma and the confusion it creates in the bureaucratic mindset of the Chinese Communist Party.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Total Recall (2012)
    The only laugh to be had in Total Recall, a ripsnorting sci-fi action extravaganza that starts well and works its way down to average, is in the opening credits, where we learn that the movie's primary production company is called Original Film. Really?
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Queen of Versailles
    Queen of Versailles is still worthwhile, not because it questions all-American entitlement but because it prompts us to think hard about what, exactly, we believe we're entitled to.
  71. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    It's superb filmmaking, uncluttered and utterly assured. Miike places us in the household of Li, offering up rich, deep colors, with an almost painterly exploration of fields of depth and volume.
  72. Farewell, My Queen
    One of the movie's strengths is how we see the revolution - or, rather the anticipation of it - not from the perspective of royal or radical but courtier and servant.
  73. The Well Digger's Daughter
    Say this for Auteuil: He has a sense of movie history. The closing credits include the equivalent of an Easter egg for lovers of film and especially for lovers of French film.
  74. Sacrifice
    Sacrifice wants to have it both ways. It's willing neither to give itself up to the goofy sincerity of genre conventions nor to make the demands on viewers that serious drama requires. The sacrifices Chen's characters make would signify that much more if he'd made a sacrifice or two himself.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Step Up Revolution
    Don't roll your eyes just yet. Step Up Revolution, enhanced by 3-D and set in glitzy Miami, is not as cringe-worthy as you would expect from the fourth "Step Up" installment.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Watch
    It's another one of those loud, penis-obsessed bro farces, lazily written (by actor Seth Rogen, among others) and haphazardly directed.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Trishna
    Trishna should move the soul and engage the tear-ducts, yet it passes by as distant as it is lovely. And the blame must fall on the movie's star, Freida Pinto.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Unforgivable
    Everyone is equal parts emotional victim and villain in Unforgivable, an elegantly rambling Franco-Italian affair about the ways we do each other wrong while trying to do each other right.
  79. The Day He Arrives
    The verb in the title of The Day He Arrives doesn't refer so much to a traveler reaching a destination as to a man finding himself - or hoping to.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Dark Knight Rises
    Nolan brings his Batman trilogy to a close with a majestic, almost completely satisfying crash. Everything feels epic about the film: the characters, the effects, the emotional stakes - even the missteps (and there are more than a few).
  81. Ballplayer: Pelotero
    A well-crafted, bravely revealing little film that could be considered essential education for baseball fans. It's just a bonus that the documentary is so entertaining.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sleepless Night
    It's fast, lean, satisfying, and forgettable; nothing special, really, until you realize that the movies have largely lost the knack for brisk mayhem like this.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Neil Young Journeys
    Neil Young Journeys is easily the least of the three documentaries director Jonathan Demme has made with the legendary rocker; but in its shaggy, eccentric way, it may be the truest.
  84. Ice Age: Continental Drift
    It makes you wonder if the series' animators, who took time out for "Rio" just before this, aren't so secretly yearning to sail different creative waters.
  85. Natural Selection
    The movie has elements of road picture, social satire, and odd-couple romance, but mostly it's about lack of pacing and tone. Somewhere very (very) deep in here is a whiff of "Citizen Ruth," and who knows what Alexander Payne might have done with this material. Instead we know what writer-director Robbie Pickering has done with it, and that ain't much.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    To Rome with Love
    A charming but terribly self-indulgent trifle that's less than the sum of its many parts.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Take This Waltz
    The new movie's a visual achievement and a narrative muddle: A color-drenched story of lust, love, and infidelity, it suffers from a vagueness that may be the point but that feels accidental.
  88. The Invisible War
    Rules and regulations, which the military is very good at, are about behavior. Law is about justice. The Invisible War makes all too clear that the military isn't very good at justice.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beasts of the Southern Wild
    She's (Hushpuppy) trying to make sense of this world, and the movie, pitched between realism and fable, is the story of how she finally does. That balance is the key to the movie's magic.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Savages
    Savages is Oliver Stone's strongest work in years - a stylish, violent, hallucinatory thriller with both a mean streak and a devilish sense of humor.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Katy Perry: Part of Me
    Part of Me is one aspect of Perry, but her fans may leave the movie wanting more.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Amazing Spider-Man
    Dumbed down, tarted up, and almost shockingly uninspired, it's the worst superhero movie since "Green Lantern."
  93. Madea's Witness Protection
    Reviewing a Tyler Perry movie is a bit like reviewing the weather report. People who want to watch it are going to do so, regardless of what anyone says about it. And that's not even factoring in Charlie Sheen.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    People Like Us
    People Like Us is neither optimal nor prime.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Magic Mike
    Director Steven Soderbergh is working very near the top of his game here, and if Magic Mike tells an old, old story about a young man, his talent, his rise, and his fall - see everything from "Saturday Night Fever" to "Boogie Nights" - he brings the confidence of a born filmmaker and a cast that's sharper than their characters and ready to play.
  96. Portrait of Wally
    What's most vexing about Portrait of Wally is its lack of nuance.
  97. The Turin Horse
    The Turin Horse is in a very gray black and white. It looks the same way it feels: bleak, pure, forbidding, transfixing. Watching it, frankly, can be a bit of an ordeal. There's hardly anything in The Turin Horse you would describe as entertaining, but there is a very great deal that's beautiful and absorbing.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ted
    A crass, foul-mouthed, mostly hilarious, surprisingly sentimental bromance.
  99. Small, Beautifully Moving Parts
    A bland, insistently amiable comedy that doubles as road movie.
  100. Payback
    Debt is bad, we can all agree, as is its conceptual cousin, greed. It would have been intellectually bracing, though, to have a Gordon Gekko equivalent on hand to argue otherwise.
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