Boston Globe's Scores

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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
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  1. Gone
    Hand it to Amanda Seyfried - she seems to have a knack for underplaying unstable characters in a way that lets their nuttiness creep right up on you.
  2. Addiction Incorporated
    Once it finds its footing in old-fashioned journalism, the film packs a wallop.
  3. Bullhead
    Roskam appears more interested in trying to combine genres that don't easily cohere. On one hand, the film's a crime-thriller and police procedural. On the other, it's about the lingering trauma of Jacky's personal misfortune. The other hand is much stronger.
  4. Act of Valor
    Peculiarly entertaining exercise in bare-bones, Hollywood-style action heroism.
  5. Wanderlust
    This movie has no teeth. It does not want to say anything, other than the unprintable word for penis, over and over.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Coriolanus
    Coriolanus leaves an acrid, unfinished taste. Fiennes, making his directorial debut, gets into the meat of the thing, and he takes advantage of the bluntness of the text; even Shakespeare newcomers will be able to follow along.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Secret World of Arrietty
    At the technical level, The Secret World of Arrietty isn't as ambitious as the studio's finest work, and the animation is stronger on texture than detail.
  8. Declaration of War
    As ponderous and overwrought as a film hogged by a couple of young hipsters named Roméo and Juliette can be.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rampart
    Something to see and little to remember, an acrid character study undone by narrative implausibilities and its own lack of purpose.
  10. This Means War
    It's got both a soap opera plotline and a Chuck Norris-load of taxpayer-financed gadgets and gear. It also has Reese Witherspoon in another terrible part.
  11. Hell and Back Again
    Dennis's film attempts something few documentaries have: to inhabit the psyche of its subject.
    • 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Vow
    It's quite watchable date-night cheese - the kind of movie you can simultaneously snort at and enjoy.
  14. Safe House
    I'm not getting the most of his (Washington) charisma or enough of that million-dollar dental work. I'm not getting the joy, and I miss that.
  15. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    Even by the unambitious standards of some children's movies and many movies that star Caine, this one has a difficult time making a case for itself as anything other than an adventure in baby-sitting.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    W.E.
    W.E., her second effort after 2008's "Filth and Wisdom,'' tries awfully hard. In the end it tries our patience.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Crazy Horse
    His abiding interest is in the ways that human beings work together, his famous fly-on-the-wall shooting style revealing the constant struggle to connect and create. Wiseman's are the movies to show to the aliens when they arrive.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Look
    Her chattiness here is unexpected and disarming, and if the film's overindulgent, it puts you in a forgiving mood. How often do we get to hear a lioness speak?
  19. The Innkeepers
    For too long, this movie asks us to be interested in something that rarely in the history of the service industry has been sustainably entertaining: how dull certain jobs can be.
  20. Big Miracle
    It needs only to entertain. And that it does thoroughly, leaving us both charmed and enriched without feeling very preached at. Praise be.
  21. The Woman in Black
    Janet McTeer provides a little ham to the role of a woman who dresses up her dogs because she misses her dead twin sons. But there's not nearly enough of her. Nor is there enough legitimate suspense.
  22. One for the Money
    The biggest problem One for the Money faces is trying to have it both ways: gritty-ethnic inner city vs. girly-girly comic.
  23. A Separation
    This is a trenchant emotional thriller that you watch in dread, awe, and amazing aggravation. It's entirely predicated upon the outcome of bad decisions - and it is not a comedy. The situation that unfolds approaches the absurdity of farce but denies the relief and release of humor. It's a tragic farce. No option or choice is to be envied.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Albert Nobbs
    As the title character in Albert Nobbs, Glenn Close skulks through Edwardian-era Dublin like a eunuch on a stealth mission.
  25. Miss Bala
    Miss Bala signals the rise of a director to watch, as Naranjo offers a grim subject with neither flash nor sentiment. It is a sober film done with style.
  26. The Grey
    It's cheap the way The Grey wants to be both a Liam Neeson "Quit Taking My Stuff'' movie and an existential thriller about survival.
  27. Man on a Ledge
    You could cast this movie with potato chips and still get cheers when one of the bad guys is cuffed. It doesn't matter that none of it is to be believed.
  28. How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
    A treatment of Foster so reverential it verges on camp.
  29. Underworld: Awakening
    A sequel seemingly eager to assert that monster mashes are about B-movie chills not "Twilight'' melodrama. Eager to a fault, ultimately.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Young Goethe in Love
    What it is is watchable, a thoroughly professional piece of Great Man hackwork that lacks the invention and spirit of its obvious model, "Shakespeare in Love.''
  31. Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos
    Just because a Japanese animated film is screening at the Museum of Fine Arts doesn't mean that you can count on Miyazaki-caliber artistry.
  32. The Flowers of War
    The Flowers of War is the latest movie focused on the Nanking atrocities. Lu Chuan's "City of Life and Death'' was released in the United States last year and presented a far greater, grimmer, and more punishing re-creation of the sacking.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pina
    Where Pina excels - where it resembles no previous dance film - is in the staging of several of Bausch's signature works for Wenders's cameras.
  34. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    So all the handsome shots that turn the city into a toyland and all the superb editing and vibrant art direction - all the formal tricks Daldry uses to whip you up and work you over - risk being too much. After 45 minutes, it can feel like junk on a sundae. But the movie has a human coup.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Silent Souls
    Silent Souls is a road movie, a guy movie, a treatise on burial customs in northern Russia. Mostly it's a sigh at the way entire cultures can slip away in the flow of time. It's lovely and slow and melancholic and short - 75 minutes, yet you feel you've been gone for an epoch or two.
  36. Haywire
    The pleasure of this small, eccentric movie is the natural way Carano hurts people - by, say, walking partway up a wall and climbing onto a man's back, by sprinting toward the camera and flying into the human target standing in the foreground.
  37. Red Tails
    The movie is so desperate to be palatable, to appeal to everybody that it doesn't taste like anything.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Carnage
    The film's an even four-hander, with awful behavior spread evenly among the characters and spellbinding performances by the quartet of co-leads.
  39. 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.
  40. My Reincarnation
    The story and settings hold interest throughout, but at times the very lack of emotional connection that Yeshi laments in his father seems to hinder the film.
  41. The Iron Lady
    It's a parade float atop which Streep can pose and impose. Sometimes her showmanship amounts to shamelessness. She wants us to watch her sack another part.
  42. The Divide
    It's doom that we're meant to feel here. And repulsion. I hate to say, but I shrugged.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Joyful Noise
    Hot gospel singing and earnest family squabbles are all that distinguish Joyful Noise.
  44. Contraband
    I don't know that a lot of Contraband makes sense. But I'm not sure that it has to. The director Baltasar Kormákur carries the movie off with efficiency, brutality, and humor.
  45. The Devil Inside
    No one onscreen was actor enough to make us believe we were watching actual people commit or require actual exorcisms.
  46. Pariah
    This is a movie that feels in all its vividness, specificity, and honesty - and in its amateurish screenwriting, too - like something found from the early- to mid-1990s, when American independent moviemaking encouraged far more conversations about the sexuality of young, brown girls in movies like "Just Another Girl on the I.R.T.'' and "I Like It Like That.''
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In the Land of Blood and Honey
    Like Jolie's public persona, Blood and Honey is both strong and headstrong, equally invested in grit and glamour with a hazy understanding of the line separating the two.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Paul Goodman Changed My Life
    As documentaries go, it's an able introduction that doesn't make its subject nearly as relevant to our current discontents as it could.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Darkest Hour
    Once upon a time, you'd go to see a grade-C genre movie like this willing to trade consistency and artfulness for a few stray thrills or oddball charm. But Darkest Hour doesn't have even as much character as those Discover commercials.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Artist
    Michael Hazanavicius's love letter to classic cinema isn't perfect but it's close enough to make just about anyone who sees it ridiculously happy - and that includes children and grown-ups who have never come across a silent film.
  51. A Dangerous Method
    This is the best thing Mortensen's ever done. His slow, paunchy, hairy Freud has a cavalier authority and a capacity for drollery. He's also seductively wise in a way that makes both Fassbender and Knightley, as very good as they are, also seem uncharacteristically callow.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    War Horse
    War Horse is the best film of the year. The year, unfortunately, is 1942.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    We Bought a Zoo
    A sweet-natured, terribly unthreatening drama about redemption and renewal, and it may matter more to the man who made it than the audiences who see it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Adventures of Tintin
    Quite simply, The Adventures of Tintin is a model of modern movie craftsmanship. It's also, I'm afraid, rather dull.
  55. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    I don't think I've seen an actor do more with deadpan expressions than Mara does in this movie. Her face doesn't move but, whether she's tasing a man or standing in front of a mirror watching a cigarette dangle from her mouth, we respond to her.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    Whatever character they bring to their lines, the actors' voices are mostly unrecognizable after being digitally 'munk-ified.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    It's an enjoyably demented meta-finale, the rivals showing what they could do if they ever bothered to actually do it.
  58. Young Adult
    Diablo Cody wrote Young Adult, and it's an improvement over "Juno," her first script.
  59. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    Bird also really punches up the ensemble playing. I imagine one of the upsides of being the director of nonhuman beings is that you're trained to respond to characters as much as stars.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    In its attention to detail and awareness of betrayals both political and human, "Tinker Tailor'' is a movie for grown-ups.
  61. Eames: The Architect & The Painter
    The Eamery, as some called it, was highly successful as a business - and, more important, as an exercise in tastemaking. "We wanted to make the best for the most for the least,'' the Eameses like to say.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Outrage
    The filmmaking is cool, watchful, and ultimately too distanced. Outrage isn't outrageous enough, and it hurts.
  63. Shame
    There's a misery in Fassbender that's spellbinding. I rolled my eyes for most of Shame. But never at him. That face tells the story of addiction: the joylessness of sex.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Sitter
    The Sitter pushes the envelope with such sloppy gusto that you have to give in occasionally, and its comic timing finds its rhythm about every fifth joke.
  65. New Year's Eve
    New Year's Eve is fun in the way that eating at a buffet is fun. It's two hours of foods that have nothing to do with each other piled high on a plate because it was too cheap to resist.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Burke and Hare
    If anything, Burke & Hare is a slaphappy mess that recalls Landis's earliest work on 1970s midnight movies like "Schlock'' and "The Kentucky Fried Movie.''
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tomboy
    Tomboy is as visually beautiful as its 10-year-old heroine is defiantly plain.
  68. Answers to Nothing
    None of what we see is at all credible.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Week with Marilyn
    The point of "My Week'' appears to be that Colin is the one person in Monroe's life who isn't using her, but if squeezing two books and a movie out of one brief encounter isn't exploitation, I don't know what is.
  70. Arthur Christmas
    The film's indefatigable holiday spirit is infectious.
  71. The Muppets
    I've never seen a movie so perfectly balanced between unabashed nerdiness and hipness.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hugo
    An exhilarating tale of magic, machines, memories, and dreams, Martin Scorsese pulls off the neatest trick of all. He marshals the marvels of modern movie technology - up to and including the dreaded 3-D - to create a love letter to the earliest of movies and, by extension, to every movie from then to now.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Happy Feet Two
    Little kids, of course, will swallow it whole without thinking twice.
  74. The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    The family snapshots are more revealing. The sight of Colby wearing a tie at family picnics really says something about the sort of man he was. But they're not that much more revealing.
  75. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    The most interesting part of this lively, likable documentary is the journey.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Descendants
    I can't think of another movie this year that made me laugh or weep harder for the whole lumpy business of being - the compromises and connections that get us through the day and somehow add up to entire lives.
  77. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    The movie is long and uniquely bad, the last of Stephenie Meyer's four books greedily tortured into two installments.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Melancholia
    Watching Melancholia is like being stuck next to a brilliant depressive at a dinner party. The food is exquisite, the conversation scintillating, and the longer you sit there the more trapped you feel in another man's all-encompassing gloom.
  79. Janie Jones
    The actors also acquit themselves well singing the film's numerous tunes. Breslin's voice is pleasantly melodic, while Nivola sounds like someone who's been grinding it out on tour for years.
  80. The Other F Word
    Full of slick editing and various zippy technical tricks: split screens, sped-up footage, song lyrics and other text (in wild fonts) superimposed on the screen. Sometimes it's fun. More often it's distracting.
  81. Jack and Jill
    What's more genuinely wacky is what a kick the movie can sometimes be, completely in spite of its big, flat stunt.
  82. Le Havre
    The achievement of this movie is that Kaurismäki manages the seemingly impossible task of making a farce about farces. In other words, this is a very good movie in quotation marks and a very good movie.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Into the Abyss
    What Herzog almost accidentally captures in his viewfinder is profound and unsettling: an entire American underclass where at least some prison time is the norm and where only luck and the grace of God keep a person from either wrong end of the shotgun.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    J. Edgar
    That J. Edgar never ultimately convinces - that at times it's quite entertainingly bad - can be blamed on both an unfocused script and the project's very bigness. Somewhere in this ambitious, meticulously produced epic is a small love story struggling to get out.
  85. Oranges and Sunshine
    Oranges and Sunshine is like a Mike Leigh movie drained of all its bodily fluids.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Revenge of the Electric Car
    The follow-up, Revenge of the Electric Car, arrives today and it's a lesser animal, more hopeful but also more complex and lacking the focused urgency of the original.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Like Crazy
    Like Crazy gets the evanescence of young passion right - the way it ultimately has to burn off, leaving us standing in an unfamiliar adult world. But it never convinces us of the fire itself.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    Because the "Harold & Kumar'' universe seesaws so delicately between the subversively smart and the ineffably stupid, even the lamest jokes get a witty spin - and even the cleverest ideas can turn into groaners.
  89. Tower Heist
    Smoothly made and smart enough. It's not going for too much, but I laughed a lot.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Martha Marcy May Marlene
    This doesn't feel like art, it feels like a cop-out, as though Durkin couldn't decide how to end his movie, so he didn't. He's a mature filmmaker - a natural - but he's still thinking in shorts.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Puss in Boots
    The movie has a devilish wit that works for parent and child alike, and it moves like a bobsled. It's funny and fun, and if it's not up to Pixar level, it still represents the best of what the competition has to offer.
  92. The Skin I Live In
    The Skin I Live in is Almodóvar reaching back to his sickest, kinkiest self, and it's nice to see him trying to luxuriate in sleaze again.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    Inventive and enjoyable but ultimately shallow.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Norman
    Norman gets most of its punch from two terrific performances.
  95. Anonymous
    The moviemaking is proficient, if unremarkable. I like the idea of an Elizabethan action movie apparently more than I enjoy watching one.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Puncture
    This story of how corporate interests collude against the common good is surely worthy. But you might ask if the facts of the case might have made a better documentary, not a drama.
  97. In Time
    The movie tries to do for forearms what the loosely similar science-fiction romance "The Adjustment Bureau'' attempted for men's hats: make them chic.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Rum Diary
    The Rum Diary has been retroactively Hunter S. Thompson-ized. And not for the better.
  99. The Mill and the Cross
    The Mill and the Cross captures the wish that some of us have had while standing in front of a great painting. What hangs before us is so striking, beautiful, strange, vast, horrifying, ethereal, lifelike - so alive - that we're desperate to enter the other side of the canvas, to be inside the painting.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Take Shelter
    Take Shelter plays Curtis's unraveling at daring length. The film will be too slow and dark for some, and it's definitely overlong.
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