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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    • 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.
  3. 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.
  7. 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.
  10. 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.
  13. 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.
  15. 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.
  17. 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.
  19. Margin Call
    In the case of Jeremy Irons playing the aloof English billionaire who owns the bank, that's dinner theater. But it's of the highest caliber.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Mighty Macs
    The Mighty Macs sticks so closely to the underdog-sports-movie playbook that it's practically generic.
  21. Johnny English Reborn
    After a fast, funny start, the new sequel, Johnny English Reborn, proves to be more of the same.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Paranormal Activity 3
    Co-directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman cut their teeth on 2010's glib social-media mystery "Catfish,'' and since they're clever boys, they make the most of the series' new toy. Otherwise, Paranormal Activity 3 is almost identical to, and just as eerily effective as, the first two films in its alternation of cheesy "boo!'' tactics and genuine scares.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Woman on the 6th Floor
    The Women on the 6th Floor is delicate and sensitive and utter bollocks - a bourgeois wet dream made to soothe the souls and stir the loins of powerful men in midlife crisis. But some of us wish we could see this movie told from the maids' point of view.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Toast
    I could pile on the cooking metaphors until you cried "uncle," but the fact remains that there's a very good movie in here that its makers have failed to bring off.
  25. Weekend
    One of the truest, most beautiful movies ever made about two strangers.
  26. Trespass
    One of those movies that an audience knows is terrible the minute it starts.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Blackthorn
    Blackthorn is less interested in realism than in elegy, and in bringing this American folk hero in line with the Latin American places and people with whom he ended his days. Given a choice between the legend and the facts, Gil and Barros make up a new legend - and then gild it with light.
  28. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    Really, all Six is going for, with the generous application of both hardware supplies to the skin and feces to the camera, is a tired commentary on his shallow talents: They're excremental.
  29. The Thing
    The basic story is identical, and when there are fraught, climactic opportunities for the movie to make a gutsy departure, it passes up the chance.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Big Year
    If anything, The Big Year plays like Ron Howard's "Parenthood'' with birds instead of children.
  31. Footloose
    This remake does something less organically fun. It makes kids nostalgic for something they never experienced.
  32. 3
    It's a funny, fearless, suspenseful sex comedy that, in drawing on science and philosophy and art and death, risks accusations of pretentiousness. But, even in its romantic idealism, the movie proceeds according to recognizable rhythms of how some people live.
  33. Margaret
    Who knows what movie Lonergan was searching for in all that footage? But what emerges from the tinkering and legal skirmishes is an occasional marvel, a kind of everyday highbrow social X-ray, Paul Mazursky by way of Krzysztof Kieslowski.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Curling
    A bleakly allusive look at frozen lives, Curling is very much a specialty item - a movie that goes nowhere slowly.
  35. Littlerock
    They're not looking to say anything grand. What they do say - and what we see - is smart and true.
  36. Real Steel
    The movie is corny enough to remind you that boxing rings are square.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mozart's Sister
    It's a lovely dream that, in the end, feels too dreamlike. The director coaxes an intentionally passive performance from his daughter Marie, so that Nannerl's eventual waking to cold patriarchal reality doesn't sting as it might.
  38. Love Crime
    This is a ridiculous movie - a thriller so indifferent to suspense, so above mystery that one character literally stabs another in the front.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Way
    The Way is a good, cheap vacation. At times, you wonder if Estevez isn't creating a cracked therapeutic remake of "The Wizard of Oz.'' He's got the nerve and the heart, all right. I'm less sure about the brains.
  40. 1911
    It swoops, it pans, it noses around. The camerawork is almost as agitated as the editing. The directors seem to be trying to compensate for all the speechifying with as much random motion as possible.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Ides of March
    The filmmaking is shallow but assured, the star charisma thoughtful but undimmed. As for the character, I'd vote for Mike Morris. Actually, I wish I could.
  42. Courageous
    For all Kendrick's stolidity, he delivers a couple of wrenchingly tender scenes.
  43. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    It's an imperfect but ambitious film willing to confront an enormous, complex period in this country.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    It's fast, it's funny, and it works.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Machine Gun Preacher
    Machine Gun Preacher is crude and ham-handed from its ridiculous title on down, but it still gets to some interesting places.
  46. Bunraku
    If Bunraku were serious about subverting or reinventing the genres it's cobbled together, Moore would play the gunslinger or the samurai or the crime boss. But no. All she gets are a couple of scenes that demonstrate that she still looks great soaking wet.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Restless
    A torpidly precious love story about death-obsessed adolescents, the film's becalmed and embalmed in its own sensitive self-pity.
  48. What's Your Number?
    It's that awkward, tedious monster mash of "chick flick'' and romantic comedy.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    50/50
    Kendrick gives a truly bad performance here - she's a self-conscious actress playing a self-conscious person and getting her signals all mixed up - and it's unclear whether she has been hung out to dry by her director or if it's just that the character makes no sense whatsoever.
  50. Happy, Happy
    The movie attempts to both explain everything away and pat itself (and Norway) on the back once we see Noa watching President Obama deliver his Nobel Prize speech.
  51. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    It's slambang in pacing, bald in exposition, and offers cast-of-hundreds spectacle.
  52. My Afternoons with Margueritte
    The film isn't about the actor's intelligence. It's about his emotional radiance.
  53. Killer Elite
    Killer Elite is based on a true story and about a half-dozen Jason Statham movies.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dolphin Tale
    The dolphin is, quite simply, remarkable, and the unstated message of resilience and adaptation ripples easily off the screen to the smallest viewers.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Moneyball
    Moneyball is a hilarious and provocative change-up, entertaining without feeling the need to swing for the fences.
  56. Farmageddon
    The one-sidedness of Farmageddon isn't just an artistic failing. It's an argumentative failing, too.
  57. Rapt
    Rapt is smooth, cool, and efficient. It's a movie with very little wasted motion - or, for much of its length, wasted emotion.
  58. Gun Hill Road
    This is the first movie to make me equate coming home from prison with coming home from war.
  59. The Interrupters
    The immediacy and caprice of violence in The Interrupters are just as strong as in nearly every documentary I've seen about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  60. Straw Dogs
    It's a crude, queasy, ugly remake of a crude, queasy, ugly, yet artistically superior 40-year-old Sam Peckinpah movie.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    I Don't Know How She Does It
    Occasionally veers so far into absurdity that it manages to make its central character - capable, smart, working mom Kate Reddy - look like a nitwit.
  62. Drive
    The movie has you from its nearly wordless opening sequence.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Creature
    Deep in the swampy hearts and minds of some filmmakers, embarrassing stereotypes still fester, gathering moss and slime.
  64. Bucky Larson: Born to Be a Star
    Never thought we'd say this about a movie, but Bucky Larson probably doesn't wring as much out of recurring bodily-fluid gags as it could.
  65. Mr. Nice
    There's too much narration and too many drug-movie cliches.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Higher Ground
    The end result's a muddle and a good argument for why actors shouldn't direct themselves first time out. Farmiga's a generous and observant performer, but she lacks a shaping hand, not to mention the ruthlessness that's probably a necessity for any director.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Circumstance
    A rhapsodic erotic romance that takes place in a cultural prison, and it pulses with a defiance that would be mischievous if it weren't so rip-roaringly angry.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bellflower
    Hardly a consistent piece of work, but even when it falls apart toward the end in a mess of bad acting and amazingly youthful pretentiousness, you may find it hard to look away. Handmade and helpless, it's nevertheless the real deal, an artful blurt of sensitivity and rage.
  69. Contagion
    As a filmmaker Soderbergh requires nothing more of us than a willingness to enjoy ourselves. He had fun. Why shouldn't we? With Contagion, the fun begins with a cough.
  70. Warrior
    This is bench-press melodrama, and it's as manipulative as anything Bette Davis or Jane Wyman ever starred in. You can't abide the shamelessness of any of it.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Apollo 18
    Contains nothing original or over-the-top enough to make it a real scream fest. For most horror fans it will be kind of a snooze.
  72. Shark Night 3D
    Heartlessness, stupidity, cynicism, and greed are a demoralizing combination for movie-going. We pay to see a movie that doesn't respect us for being there at all.
  73. The Hedgehog
    Achache's direction is deft and assured. She lends the film a nice, easy rhythm that conceals the story's alternating whimsy and melodrama and almost compensates for them (almost).
  74. The Whistleblower
    Larysa Kondracki's impressive debut achieves its aim to shine light on an international human rights issue as well as signaling a new director to watch.
  75. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    It has a sense of small-town America that feels special even without great specificity. Some of the music on the soundtrack places it in 2007 or 2008, but, really, the film occurs outside of time, virtually outside of place (it's suburban Detroit), and in a void of cultural chic.
  76. Magic Trip
    It's the movie "Yellow Submarine'' should have been but didn't know how to be.
  77. Seven Days in Utopia
    The movie is terrible partly because it's badly written, directed, and conceived and partly because it lacks the necessarily thematic coherence to accomplish proselytism of any kind.
  78. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Any originality in this new movie is overwhelmed by its lazy eagerness to embrace the new standard for R-rated comedy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Debt
    The film's a potboiler but a gripping one, and it leaves you chewing on both its nuances and implausibilities.
  80. Colombiana
    It's basically a blaxploitation movie stretched to meaninglessly international proportions that leans on tired Colombian stereotypes. But if Saldana's aiming to be some kind of new Pam Grier, she needs to save more than herself.
  81. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    Wetzel's challenge is to film the experiments so that the process itself is legible. We're made to marvel at slow-cooked, freeze-dried, unappetizingly bagged food, the way some mushrooms, when delicately sliced, evoke fruit and some crustaceans resemble side-sleeping snooze-bar slappers.
  82. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Mysteries of Lisbon brings us far inside oil-on-canvas in a way that isn't imitative. It's simply, magically a moving picture, what a movie in the 1800s would look like.
  83. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    This is a person you'd enjoy spending time with and learning from. That's certainly the case with Dorman's film.
  84. Brighton Rock
    Joffe's biggest mistake isn't visual, it's chronological. What makes Pinkie so terrifying in the novel is that he's just 17.
  85. Chasing Madoff
    Chasing Madoff is mostly that sort of movie, the kind you make when all you've seen is other movies and television shows about crime, when you want someone to know what you can do with a juicy story that takes some effort to ruin.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Griff the Invisible
    As the romance blossoms, our hero is vindicated when Melody accepts his quirks, even enables his fantasy life. But the touches of magical realism begin to feel gimmicky. By the final frame, this romance never feels real enough.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    While there are moments of eldritch atmosphere and a few pro forma jolts, nothing here justifies our attention, let alone the film's inexplicable R rating.
  88. Our Idiot Brother
    It's all emotionally counterfeit, and that bogusness infects the comedy.
  89. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    Alba, meanwhile, is again ridiculously shoehorned into a comedy gig, although she does have an amusing opening bit spying while nine months pregnant. If only diaper bomb gags weren't the inevitable follow-up.
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    How to Live Forever
    A cheerfully rambling documentary that's much more thought-provoking than the sum of its parts.
  92. Fright Night
    The remake isn't openly nostalgic. In a sense, this is another sexy vampire movie. But Farrell does something special with the sexuality: It's simultaneously omnivorous, dangerous, and a hoot.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Names of Love
    Leclerc and company manage to raise serious points and deliver intelligent laughs at the same time, which is no small feat.
  94. Octubre
    Octubre is a quick, quiet movie that distills Lima, Peru, to a downtrodden version of its more dynamic current self.
  95. Senna
    The movie's assemblage of audio interviews poured mostly over astounding race footage is fit for a shrine.
  96. Attack the Block
    The movie's amateurishly made. But the script is full of little surprises.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Conan the Barbarian
    As for the movie itself, it's tolerable.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    One Day
    A miscast, underwritten, drably directed adaptation of a very popular novel, it's the feel-bad film of the summer and an almost perfect example of how not to turn a book into a movie.
  99. Final Destination 5
    Stabs at the dramatic don't amount to anything that makes us care, even for Bell, who has been solid on AMC's "The Walking Dead'' and in the chairlift chiller "Frozen.'' But genre fans who have been thirsting for gore via acupuncture needles or a LASIK machine should get their giddy fill.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    It's a working illustration of what differentiates movie stars from TV stars. When we buy a ticket for a George Clooney movie, it's because we want to see George Clooney (or Emma Stone or Tom Hanks or whomever). The real stars of "Glee," on the other hand, are the characters, not the actors.
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