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. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
    Not only does the movie look like it's set somewhere, it feels, cinematically, to have arrived from someplace - early John Cassavetes, the French New Wave, Eastern Europe.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The King's Speech
    The movie isn't badly done, just overdone - a cozy art-house crowd-pleaser coasting on the expectations of its genre.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Tempest
    A comparison to Baz Luhrmann is useful: Where Taymor self-consciously aestheticizes pop vulgarity, a movie like "Moulin Rouge!" just dives right in.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Yogi Bear
    Picture Timberlake in the booth recording his lines and you have the best joke in the movie. Everything else is actively painful, a frenetic, unfunny mix of action, romance, dud dialogue, and icky things popping out of the screen.
  5. TRON: Legacy
    Tron: Legacy gives us a dud stud named Garrett Hedlund as Sam Flynn, the hero of this petrified sequel to 1982's "Tron." None of what he sees impresses. The feeling is mutual.
  6. How Do You Know
    The experiment in the new movie is this: What happens when his Type A's are forced out of their comfort zones? If only Brooks had managed to leave his. How Do You Know feels like a collection of scenarios he's done better.
  7. Megamind
    The bliss of Megamind is the way it pursues solutions for tired problems.
  8. Due Date
    A rather pat, occasionally desperate road comedy.
  9. Cool It
    Cool It arrives having been labeled the anti-"An Inconvenient Truth." It is. But not in the philistinistic way you'd expect.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Unstoppable
    Unstoppable is edited for maximum impact without showboating. The central situation sustains the drama and the way it's filmed, and when that situation is over, so's the movie. More films should be this enjoyably functional.
  11. Saw 3D
    The dismemberment and torture are now shtick. The filmmakers - "Saw" veterans - struggle to imbue this movie with the usual righteousness.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    White Material
    What sustains the film is its tone of almost hallucinatory foreboding. White Material isn't about the calm before the storm but the seconds before the deluge.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Love and Other Drugs
    If product proves especially difficult to swallow, take with a grain of salt and three or more alcoholic drinks, or wait until such time as active ingredients Hathaway and Gyllenhaal have been more effectively utilized elsewhere.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Faster
    Faster is meat-and-potatoes action with a side of crazy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Monsters
    Monsters is a genuine curio: a moody, low-budget road-movie romance that takes place against a background of alien invasion.
  16. Waste Land
    Waste Land is just what the film's website says it is: "stirring evidence of the transformative power of art and the alchemy of the human spirit."
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Strange Powers: Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields
    In inviting us along to peek into the life, filmmakers Kerthy Fix and Gail O'Hara don't give us quite enough about the art.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 0 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Nutcracker
    This is first-degree cultural homicide.
  19. Tangled
    The movie has a field day with thousands of airborne lanterns, a troop of Neanderthal thugs (one is a mime), some surprisingly fleet camerawork, and good editing. I can't think of a cartoon more confident about how to use jump cuts for comedy. Those senses of cleverness and innovation merely underscore how shopworn the rest of this movie is.
  20. Burlesque
    It's entertaining enough, like watching a celebrity workout film with a plot. But never once is it believable.
  21. The Warrior's Way
    While the movie seems designed to be a breakout for Jang, it's Lee whose work actually makes an impression.
  22. The Tourist
    A slow and silly action-comedy romantic-thriller.
  23. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    The Dawn Treader, like its predecessors, has no real struggle or drama. We're dealing with kids for whom everything comes too easily for us to care.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tiny Furniture
    Dunham has been justly praised for her determination in getting Tiny Furniture made, but the movie itself has been overpraised as a result.
  25. Queen of the Lot
    It's one of the funniest things I've seen in a movie, and the closest Jaglom has come to brilliant satire. It also explains why this woman is just chatting on a countertop and not Jay Leno's couch.
  26. I Love You Phillip Morris
    The performance often errs on the side of cartoon, but it's laced with flashes of remorse and chagrin, with sincerity. When Carrey tries to do "dramatic acting'' the life always goes of out him.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Fighter
    The Fighter is this close to a triumph: a movie that steeps us in the grit of its time and place - Lowell, Mass., in the 1990s - and electrifyingly dramatizes Ward's battles with the family that almost loved him to death.
  28. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    For a studio so clearly willing to take risks with so many of its movies, this particular movie has a whiff of exploitation. Rowling wrote one epic funeral that Warner Bros. requires us to attend twice.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Marwencol
    A strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art.
  30. Black Swan
    Some girls fight over men. Ballerinas fight over parts. But the occasional brilliance of Black Swan is that it's a one-way fight. Nina battles herself.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Made in Dagenham
    The movie moves, but it doesn't breathe.
  32. Today's Special
    A modest but extremely enjoyable movie.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Next Three Days
    Haggis finally finds the movie's groove late in the game, and the escape sequence itself is hectic, suspenseful, and enjoyably ridiculous.
  34. Skyline
    The Strauses don't care about how to keep an audience. Their movie has no sense of suspense or dread - Skyline is an apocalypse movie that plods like one of Romero's zombies.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    127 Hours
    The scene appalls but doesn't offend; it's a "Worst-Case-Scenario Survival Handbook'' nightmare that resonates on the metaphysical level.
  36. Boxing Gym
    Wiseman has made several films about both disability and dance, but this new one might be his most hypnotic, rhythmically assembled observation of corporeal expression.
  37. Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer
    Gibney has too much information, too much material, and too many people to shape a mystery or a drama or even a farce out of it all. His movie has elements of all three without ever sustaining one.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Morning Glory
    Morning Glory is itself a work of extreme fluff, a lightweight bauble about the morning-show wars that floats on the updrafts of character comedy until it charmingly self-destructs in the final act.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Four Lions
    Real satire must be savage, and Four Lions, for all its daring, finally doesn't dare enough.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fair Game
    Fair Game takes one of the more shameful sub-chapters in modern US politics - and turns it into a strident, condescending Hollywood melodrama.
  41. For Colored Girls
    It's too much too-much. The audience I saw it with didn't seem to know whether to clap when it was over or start taking Lipitor.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Welcome to the Rileys
    All three actors come at this gloomy, borderline-preposterous tale from different directions; that they meet up at all - and they do - is a tribute to sincerity and craft.
  43. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
    This native send-off is robotic enough to leave you eager to see what an artist might do with a reboot.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Carlos
    Carlos moves like a greyhound out of the gate, fleet and assured and focused on the business at hand. It's a subtle, ultimately staggering portrayal of a bloody-minded ideologue who convinced only himself.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Paranormal Activity 2
    And again things go bump and eventually yarrrragghhh in the night.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hereafter
    A multi-character melodrama about the supernatural that's affecting both in spite of and because of its flaws.
  47. Conviction
    What Conviction lacks in characterization (the people here are monochromes - bright ones, but monochromes nonetheless) it makes up for with personality.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tamara Drewe
    A frolic that keeps tripping over its own gorgeous feet.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stone
    So few Hollywood movies go here that this one's oddly welcome, even in its most turgid moments, of which there are many.
  50. Air Doll (2009)
    For 75 minutes or so, Air Doll is the lightest of Kore-eda’s movies, which include the superb “Nobody Knows’’ (2004) and “Still Life’’ (2008). Gradually, though, the tender music-box score — by one-man Japanese band world’s end girlfriend — is tinged with foreboding.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    RED
    "The Expendables" trotted out the concept this summer, and it was good dumb fun - a nudge-nudge wink-wink '80s movie on steroids. RED is more self-consciously wacky, more stridently in your face, and more disappointing.
  52. Jackass 3-D
    What's astonishing is that the movie is not a half-baked production. The spectacle now LOOKS spectacular.
  53. Secretariat
    Grace is grace, and however it arrives, there's no denying its presence.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    It's Kind of a Funny Story
    What's largely missing from It's Kind of a Funny Story: genuine emotional pain. Still, the movie's an often charming example of "Cuckoo's Nest'' Lite.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Life as We Know It
    Life as We Know It gives bland and predictable a good name.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Nowhere Boy
    As sympathetic and well-turned as it is, Nowhere Boy only gives us more mythology.
  57. My Soul to Take
    I watched at least a quarter of My Soul to Take, the worst horror movie Wes Craven's made perhaps ever, with the glasses off. It was shot - and is available - in a standard format, and, like many conversions, the 3-D gimmick is like watching a movie through an ashtray.
  58. Inside Job
    The result is a masterpiece of investigative nonfiction moviemaking - a scathing, outrageous, depressing, comical, horrifying report on what and who brought on the crisis.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Case 39
    Introduce the supernatural, and anything goes. Here, everything does. And that's a problem no one can solve. At least it wasn't called "Case 666."
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Social Network
    On the level of craft, the movie's just absurdly enjoyable. Sorkin's dialogue dazzles; the photography is burnished and sleek; the editing confidently sorts out a complex narrative.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Let Me In
    It's an honorable attempt, but there's still no genuine need for this film to exist.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Freakonomics
    An attempt to turn the 2005 nonfiction bestseller into a high-energy docu-romp, Freakonomics is a misconceived botch.
  63. Hatchet II
    Every boogeyman and slasher cliché this movie borrows was better somewhere else. Although it probably wasn't grosser.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    The film's lack of focus is almost criminal, but schadenfreude energizes Stone.
  65. You Again
    This is another miserable movie about women at war over nonsense.
  66. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
    The result is sometimes charming and always visually astonishing.
  67. Buried
    Buried works better as an evocation of "Twilight Zone'' eeriness. Even then, it's silly and gimmicky.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Howl
    Well intentioned on every level, the movie is successful only on some, and it falls flat when trying to visualize the innards of the poem itself.
  69. Waiting for 'Superman'
    This is a patient, simmering movie. It's contemplative but without his usual smitten indulgences.
  70. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
    Shopworn to the bone.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jack Goes Boating
    This is one of those rare movies that genuinely likes its characters and wishes them the best; as agonizing as it can be to watch Jack fumble toward human connection, Hoffman knows the fumbling's the point.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Easy A
    Until it spins manically out of control in the last act, Easy A is a charmer: a high school satire with a lethally sharp script and a big, smart, adorable star performance from Emma Stone.
  73. Alpha and Omega
    Alpha and Omega is sweet, if not fresh.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Town
    A pretty decent crime drama - not a patch on the best parts of his directorial debut, 2007's "Gone Baby Gone,'' but it's moody and grim and engrossing if you approach it with the right expectations.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Catfish
    It seems to play as vastly different movies depending on who's looking at it.
  76. Never Let Me Go
    Amazingly, Never Let Me Go could have been assembled from the Merchant-Ivory kit. It's stale with suppressed anguish.
  77. Kings of Pastry
    Kings of Pastry, goes inside an intense event that few Americans know much about - a kind of tradesmen's Olympics.
  78. Bran Nue Dae
    The songs are catchy. The lip-synching, meanwhile, is always a little off, and the dancing is usually average at best.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Legendary
    You'll come away from Legendary with no sense of what amateur wrestling is about.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Virginity Hit
    It's more like "Porky's for Dummies," a thoroughly depressing teen farce in which Internet voyeurism has replaced human intimacy and where privacy is SO 20th century.
  81. Heartbreaker
    This is a movie whose cynicism in the name of idealism might have appealed to Billy Wilder.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I'm Still Here
    Parts of it are close to genius; most of it is actively torturous to watch.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Resident Evil: Afterlife
    So nonchalant is Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth movie in Paul W.S. Anderson's dystopian franchise, that its overarching premise isn't explained.
  84. The Romantics
    It's hard to care about people this generic - even when they're naked.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    By the end, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 has turned nearly as flabby as its aging antihero.
  86. Going the Distance
    Going the Distance earns its R rating, often by daring to say what goes frequently unsaid by women in raunchy comedies. It's not a very good movie. The entire second half is a sitcom.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Machete
    The movie's an unexpected end-of-summer tonic: a trash guilty pleasure with a healthy (if really violent) sense of outrage. It's also Rodriguez's freest movie yet, and possibly his best.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Last Train Home
    A miniature masterpiece of documentary observation.
  89. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    It's more like a cartoon with a body count.
  90. White Wedding
    The movie, from South Africa, is charming and its characters' feelings sincere enough. It's just so cluttered.
  91. The American
    The film is overripe with erotic symbols.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Takers
    Takers might have made a perfectly decent little B heist movie, but someone had to go and forget to give the cameraman his Ritalin.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    The enjoyment of the film comes from watching Mesrine's ambitions grow slowly but exponentially; the shock is in being reminded and re-reminded of his sadism.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last Exorcism
    There may once have been a good and a bad film fighting for the soul of The Last Exorcism, but in its final moments, cinema's dark forces triumph emphatically.
  95. Centurion
    The profanity is delightful. And the general atmosphere is grim. The movie just isn't terribly inspired.
  96. Piranha 3-D
    The film's centerpiece is a massacre at a wet T-shirt contest, which the horror director Alexandre Aja has a good time staging (yes, Eli Roth, we see you with the water gun). But it feels like an imitation of B-movie beach schlock and John Waters. The visual humor lacks wit or nerve.
  97. Lottery Ticket
    There are some amusing looks at the elation - and panic - that come with winning big, from the praise-Jesus swooning of Kevin's grandma (underutilized Loretta Devine).
  98. Mao's Last Dancer
    The ballets are badly filmed. The camera shoots them often from the point of view of the patrons in the auditorium or in a way that dishonors the choreography.
  99. Nanny McPhee Returns
    The initial close-up of Thompson - all sourly snaggletoothed and begoggled - is as funny as anything in the original. And just that one quick glimpse would have been perfect.
  100. The Switch
    The romantic comedy has never had a star as depressing as Jennifer Aniston. It's not the movies - well, it isn't simply the movies.
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