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. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    It's hard to tell whether this is a tribute to female solidarity or a lamentation.
  2. The Tree
    This is an easy movie to watch. If only Julie Bertuccelli had more trust in her most interesting stuff.
  3. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    On the one hand, welcome to the music business. On the other, if A Tribe Called Quest can't stay together who can? It's a worry that eventually gets at the eccentricity of both the music and the movie.
  4. The Arbor
    An innovative hybrid of documentary, staged reading, fictional feature, and confessional, The Arbor defies categorization not merely for art's sake - although its artistry is without question - but because conventional forms seem inadequate for such a harrowing story.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Friends with Benefits
    That it works like a charm - that it mostly keeps its manic energy in check, and that it plays to chick-flick formulas without ever groveling - is due almost entirely to the leads.
  6. Captain America: The First Avenger
    This is what the ongoing onslaught of comic book movies lacks: stars. Real stars. Robert Downey Jr. is the exception when he should be the rule. It's possible we take these movies for granted because the marketing tells us we should.
  7. Vincent Wants to Sea
    This is a bright, broad, silly, harmless movie whose sweetness is a means to an end.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Terri
    The movie struggles to find its shape throughout. Jacobs favors observational moments rather than linear narrative, and that's fine, but you still sense he's drifting toward a point that never quite coheres.
  9. Septien
    A microscopic piece of shoestring weirdness-slash-hipster regionalism that the actor Robert Longstreet delivers into some odder, funkier, altogether mysterious place. I don't know what he's doing or what he's going for. But unlike the rest of the movie, his bizarreness seems authentic rather than forced or put on.
  10. A Better Life
    This isn't a case of a liberal-minded movie inflicting goodness upon a character but a man radiating goodness because, well, he is good.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tabloid
    It's a guaranteed good time at the movies.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Project Nim
    An engrossing and enraging drama of one chimpanzee and his life's journey across a landscape of human folly.
  13. Winnie the Pooh
    Zooey Deschanel shows off her singing on a couple of generically pleasant soundtrack ditties.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    A fitting, expertly made final chapter, freighted with hard-won emotions, shot through with a sense of farewell, and fully aware of the epic stakes involved.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Viva Riva!
    Writer-director Djo Tunda Wa Munga deplores the corruption, gunplay, and oversexed misogyny plaguing his country - and he's going to show you as much of it as possible before the end credits roll.
  16. Just Like Us
    The idea that self-mockery makes people relax is tricky. One man's disarmament is another's minstrelsy, and the fine line is well worth another documentary.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ironclad
    As history it's bunk; as inappropriate historical fiction, it's awfully close to comedy.
  18. The Ward
    Even by the standards of mental-institution-movie misogyny, what an accidental but predictable creepshow this is.
  19. Zookeeper
    As for other voices, the most notable are Adam Sandler, whose capuchin monkey wears out his welcome pretty quickly; Maya Rudolph, whose jivey giraffe comes perilously close to aural blackface; and Nick Nolte's gorilla.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Horrible Bosses
    I say kill off everybody else and bring back Farrell for the sequel.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Trollhunter
    What Trollhunter isn't is particularly scary, but in its defense, it's not trying to be.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
    A fond, uncomplicated love letter to two irrepressible good-time Charlottes.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    As eye-opening as this movie is, the real story is outside the Times building, in the browser windows and iPads of me and you and everyone we know.
  24. Larry Crowne
    Larry Crowne isn't a movie for adults. It's a movie for adults who don't like things with screens and keyboards.
  25. Monte Carlo
    Honestly, the whole movie is from 1960-something.
  26. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    He concocts a climactic war that flattens downtown Chicago. Bay is such a little boy's director. You know he picked that city because it's the one with the best rock-'em-sock-'em street names. Wacker! Wabash!
  27. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    The first step in getting beyond preaching to the converted is letting the other side show how wrong it might be.
  28. The Last Mountain
    The Last Mountain is that sort of movie, the sort that sends a Kennedy into the West Virginia wilderness to press for change. It's sincere. It's misguided. It feels like a stunt.
  29. Armadillo
    Metz is another artist more interested in war's side effects than combat itself, although he and his crew are embedded for battle.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cameraman: The Life and Work of Jack Cardiff
    The movie clips are luscious, as you'd expect, and Cardiff's own "home movies," shot on various movie sets with a 16mm camera, catch the gods during downtime.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Buck
    The man's mythology precedes him, and it's the movie's failing that we don't understand how or whether he uses that mythology because he knows it's good business.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
    Too much of the show, though, feels like frenetic movement for its own sake, as though Conan were one of those cartoon characters who runs off a cliff and stays in the air through the ceaseless pumping of his legs.
  33. Cars 2
    This is an action movie that nods to Hayao Miyazaki and those sleeky dumb European chase thrillers with guys like Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson.
  34. Bad Teacher
    You don't want to think, what would Preston Sturges or Alexander Payne do with this material? But there is a seed of satirical cynicism in this movie that a smart, clear mind could have finessed. Jake Kasdan is not that director. He doesn't appear to know what to do.
  35. Beautiful Boy
    There's just very little in Beautiful Boy that feels fresh or new or truly raw. The houses, that title, every emotion, even the false moves: They're all generic.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Art of Getting By
    If the director had brought any toughness of perspective - or at least the self-lacerating humor of 2002's "Igby Goes Down,'' still the reigning champ of screwed-up-Manhattan-prepster films - we might be able to digest George's follies without cringing.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mia and the Migoo
    Where Mia and the Migoo triumphs is in the art department alone, with rich brown charcoal outlines, majestic pastel washes that give depth to the landscapes, and riotous colors that are more vivid than the story line.
  38. Bride Flight
    Bride Flight is pretty predictable once the basic situation gets established.
  39. Jig
    Jig is involving, if at times overly slick.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    !Women Art Revolution
    It's affecting, and the tone, which is polemical, is also rueful and realistic.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Stake Land
    This doomed world may feel familiar, but Stake Land remains one of the genre's smartest entries in years.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Submarine
    Submarine has its own specific miseries and darkly funny vibe. It makes quirkiness briefly seem like a good thing again.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Trip
    What on earth is The Trip, besides hugely enjoyable?
  44. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    This is a flavorless adaptation of Richard and Florence Atwater's 73-year-old children's book.
  45. Green Lantern
    The film is remarkably stunted.
  46. Beginners
    The movie is foggy with reverence and uncertainty. This is the passive work of a man nervous to touch the third rail of his parents' discontent.
  47. Nostalgia for the Light
    What starts out as a beautifully depopulated filmic exercise - it's 14 minutes into the movie before Guzman introduces any people - becomes toward the end a nearly unbearable examination of good and bad in the human heart.
  48. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    Mosteller might be the movie's real discovery. He twists his lisp and slurry speech around the dialogue in a way that exudes far less attitude than the kids.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The First Beautiful Thing
    The First Beautiful Thing is the kind of movie - that escapes the sick room to cavort at carnivals and eat cotton candy until the inevitable relapse.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Super 8
    There's a thin line, though, between honoring what came before you and replicating it, and Super 8 occasionally wobbles over that line into predictability.
  51. The Tree of Life
    The movie is church via the planetarium. It's as if Malick set out to paint the Sistine Chapel and settled for a dome at the Museum of Natural History.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Louder Than a Bomb
    Think of it as "Glee" without music. Without a net, too.
  53. City of Life and Death
    Here the Japanese senses of honor and of shame are particularly entangled. Later in the film, Lu mounts an Imperial Army parade through the Nanking ruins. It's something to see.
  54. Hey, Boo: Harper Lee and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'
    Hey, Boo is the documentary equivalent of a group hug, right down to the segments showing middle schoolers in Westchester County, N.Y., and Birmingham, Ala., discussing the book in class.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    X-Men: First Class
    Perfectly fine summer folderol, epic enough on its own terms if not quite big enough to expand beyond its genre and matter to people who find it difficult to care about characters who spit gobs of flaming phlegm. I realize there are fewer and fewer of us, but we're a hardy band and stubborn.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hobo with a Shotgun
    Hopefully the last, of the fake trailer spinoffs of 2007's "Grindhouse." It makes last year's "Machete" look like "The King's Speech."
  57. L'amour fou
    The movie Thoretton's made, L'Amour Fou, is ironic. It's a term that conveys wild, passionate love. But there's nothing "fou" about the movie.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Midnight in Paris
    A sweet-natured trifle, as flavorful and as thin as a crepe.
  59. Kung Fu Panda 2
    It's still Black's franchise, though. And part of the problem with this sequel is how little it lets its star just riff with silly abandon, as he did throughout the original.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hangover Part II
    If not better, a Part II always has to be bigger. In the case of The Hangover Part II, that means raunchier, nastier, darker. It also means much more predictable, which is ruinous.
  61. The First Grader
    You marvel all the more at Litondo's and Harris's performances, considering how much claptrap Ann Peacock's script requires them to put up with.
  62. The Princess of Montpensier
    There is a great and perhaps unique French cinematic tradition of braiding together love and manners and the past. Think of "Children of Paradise," "Casque d'Or," "The Earrings of Madame de . . .," "Elena and Her Men." Now one can think of The Princess of Montpensier, too.
  63. Priest
    Priest is based on a series of Korean graphic novels. What it's really based on, though, is other movies - a whole lot of other movies.
  64. Forks Over Knives
    The film delivers a concise history of Western eating habits, with graphs and charts punctuated by entertaining real-life experiences.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    To press the point, there is absolutely no need for a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean.
  66. Last Night
    It's the sort of movie that thinks cutting between two different stories makes it art. Usually, it feels like an exercise in art. There's a lot of calisthenics but very little beauty or truth or whatever it is the movie is going for.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Everything Must Go
    A comparison to Carver's original story - called "Why Don't You Dance?," easily Googleable, and all of 1,600 words long - is instructive.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hesher
    It's a fearsome and giddily unhinged performance in a movie that isn't entirely sure what to do with it.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Incendies
    A mystery, a melodrama, a prison film, and a love story, Incendies is foremost a scream of rage at a society destroyed by religion and by men.
  70. Bridesmaids
    Bridesmaids openly, comfortably turns the stress of being girlfriends into comedy. It's really about the single friend backing away from the edge of temporary insanity. This isn't the greatest such movie. That would be Nicole Holofcener's "Walking and Talking" (1996), with Catherine Keener and Anne Heche.
  71. There Be Dragons
    In fairness, putting holiness onscreen is an enormous challenge. It can be done, as several directors have shown, most notably Dreyer and Bresson. Bad enough that Joffe is the poor man's Lean. He's also the nonbelieving man's Dreyer and Bresson.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Queen to Play
    For all the talk, there's not a lot of chess here, and the game remains stubbornly on the level of metaphor. You don't feel rooked, exactly, but by movie's end you're more than ready for the check.
  73. The Beaver
    The most provocative thing about The Beaver is the adult-movie title. The film itself is alternately fascinating and dull, though mostly the latter.
  74. Jumping the Broom
    It's a self-conscious, inherently absurd tale of a rich black family invaded by secrets, lies, working-class loudmouths, and one or two pairs of pants found down around the ankles.
  75. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    Cinema's greatest caveman meets his ancestors. For us, it's a reassurance: The creative process is astonishingly old and its fruits still surprisingly fresh.
  76. Beautiful Darling
    As fascinating as the material is, like so much of popular culture it doesn't hold up well out of context.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Meek's Cutoff
    There's nothing out there remotely like Meek's Cutoff, for which some viewers may be thankful. The ending seems calculated to drive the literal-minded screaming out of the theater and yet it's the only possible way out.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    13 Assassins
    Epic in scope, ambition, and execution, it's a classic swords-and-samurai film with postmodern blood and guts, and it's completely satisfying.
  79. Something Borrowed
    I don't know whether she's (Hudson) drunk, stoned, or simply out of her mind, but if it weren't so sad watching her pick away at this skimpy, overlong romantic lie, she might be entertaining.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Thor
    For a holding maneuver, Thor itself turns out to be diverting enough - not close to a sharp-edged romp like "Iron Man" but not the B-movie roadshow some of us were expecting.
  81. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
    Some entertaining inventiveness, before nagging limitations finally drag it down.
  82. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    By the time the giant, snarling spider shows up - the most boggling of the movie's various "holy schnitzel" touches - parents of the littlest "Hoodwinked" fans may be feeling hoodwinked themselves.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rubber
    The carnage is cartoonishly graphic, but the onlookers watching through binoculars from a nearby sandy bluff are impressed.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Prom
    That Prom plays as pleasantly and inoffensively as it does is due to the performances, particularly McDonell as the rebellious Jesse.
  85. Immigration Tango
    Neither the comedy nor the romance is strong enough in Immigration Tango to offer any improvement on Peter Weir's similar, and better, 1990 film "Green Card."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Double Hour
    What appears at first to be a Euro variation on David Lynch's patented mind games, though, ultimately settles for more conventional pleasures. The movie makes sense, more's the pity, although you may need to see it twice to figure out how.
  87. Carancho
    Carancho is a particularly jaw-dropping example of what this great, cunning city - on film, anyway - is capable of: an exhilarating bummer.
  88. Fast Five
    As is par for the course in a "Fast and Furious'' movie, the only persuasive physical intimacy is between the men.
  89. Circo
    Circo offers a fascinating mix of backstage drama and family dynamics.
  90. African Cats
    Scholey, Fothergill, and crew do impressive work, but we're also reminded that wild animals don't know from cues, marks, and scripts. That's part of what makes them so compelling.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Henry's Crime
    Occasionally too pleased with itself, it's also pleasantly unpredictable, and it has a trio of sweet hambone performances at its center.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold
    Much like reality TV, nothing much of consequence happens.
  93. Water for Elephants
    The camera, costumes, and art direction do everything right. Too much so. The movie strips away both the grand weirdness of the circus and the dire desolation of the Depression. Diane Arbus and Dorothea Lange are exchanged for Vanity Fair.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Four Times (Le Quattro Volte)
    There's humor in "Le Quattro Volte," and then a deep, abiding sadness, and beyond that a larger, more graceful comedy that extends to the horizons.
  95. Rio
    Makes the surprising and seemingly inarguable assertion that, if we're not all Brazilian, then, at the very least, Brazil is a state of mind.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Conspirator
    An important film, on an important subject, that has had the life beaten out of it by Robert Redford, a man who should know better.
  97. In a Better World
    The movie is swept up in earnest self-importance.
  98. Atlas Shrugged: Part I
    With a plot devoid of suspense and characters without complexity, Rand's iconic line elicits merely a yawn, or a shrug.
  99. Scream 4
    Scream 4 has a smart beginning, featuring Anna Paquin and Kristen Bell, and one well-delivered line at the end that would have brought down the house in a better movie.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Winter in Wartime
    Well-mounted and expertly played, Winter in Wartime is a class act that lacks only focus and originality to raise it above the ordinary.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »