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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    • 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.
  2. 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.
  4. 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.
  7. A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop
    It's more like a cartoon with a body count.
  8. White Wedding
    The movie, from South Africa, is charming and its characters' feelings sincere enough. It's just so cluttered.
  9. 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.
  13. Centurion
    The profanity is delightful. And the general atmosphere is grim. The movie just isn't terribly inspired.
  14. 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.
  15. 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).
  16. 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.
  17. 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.
  18. 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.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Tillman Story
    As taut and suspenseful as any fictional mystery.
  20. Soul Kitchen
    This is a party, and you're either having a good time or wondering when Akin is going to get down to business. But for an hour and a half, fun is the business.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Film Unfinished
    It's the only film that exists of the Ghetto, and it's both revelatory and profoundly suspect.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Vampires Suck
    Non-"Twilight'' fans would be better off surfing YouTube.
  23. Eat Pray Love
    Is it a romantic comedy? Is it a chick flick? This is silly, since, in truth, it's neither. It's simply a Julia Roberts movie, often a lovely one.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Expendables
    Expendables is the closest thing to movie Viagra yet invented. It's reprehensible. It's stoopid violent. It's a lot of unholy fun.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    The movie is of this precise moment and you should probably see it now, since it will be dated by next Tuesday.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Animal Kingdom
    You probably won't see a better directorial debut this year than David Michôd's Animal Kingdom.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Step Up 3-D
    Watching this movie in 3-D is very much like sticking one's head in a blender and hitting "pulse."
  28. The Other Guys
    At its core, a perceptive satire of the interpersonal boiling points in buddy-cop pictures.
  29. Cairo Time
    Cairo Time is a kind of bourgeois delusion. It's authentically aggravated but bogusly conceived.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Flipped
    Sweet, smartly acted, and charmingly old-fashioned, Flipped is a minor pleasure that will strike a lot of moviegoers - those who think no one makes movies for them anymore - as a major treat.
  31. The Disappearance of Alice Creed
    Alice Creed isn't as good as Tarantino's directorial debut, or another movie it calls to mind, "A Simple Plan.'' But the genetic resemblance to those two films indicates how good much of this extremely assured picture is.
  32. The Wildest Dream
    The most powerful moment in the film is a tiny one. Anker and his Irvine, Leo Houlding, plan to reenact most of Mallory's climb wearing gabardine and hobnail boots instead of North Face and Gore-Tex.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lebanon
    Lebanon gives us viscerally violent, intensely distressing glimpses into war's annihilation of people, places, and communities.
  34. Patrik Age 1.5
    The cute little domestic comedy gains a slightly rough edge - maybe Sven isn't meant to be a father or a husband.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Sicilian Girl
    Ends with a curious whimper instead of the bang it has been pointing toward; the filmmaker's reverence for his heroine seems to bind his hands.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dinner for Schmucks
    Far from a classic of precision farce, but it's funnier than the trailers make it seem.
  37. Charlie St. Cloud
    It has no pulse, no apparent breath.
  38. Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
    One wants to find enlightenment - or at least entertainment - in this reconsideration of Playboy and of Hefner. But it's tainted.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore
    Stands to delight small children while probably causing their parents' heads to cave in.
  40. The Concert
    A passable, sometimes skillful farce.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Extra Man
    Everyone in the film is an uninteresting grotesque.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Get Low
    A charming, spiky period piece that might be called "Boo Radley: The Final Years."
  43. Salt
    Jolie doesn't seem entirely bored with the routine. She has a laugh or two at her bionic image: Evelyn is a woman who uses a maxi pad as a bandage.
  44. Ramona and Beezus
    Ramona and Beezus the movie, should not be confused with "Beezus and Ramona'' the book.
  45. Countdown to Zero
    An earnest, alarmist new docu-plea for nuclear disarmament, concludes with an orgy of such destruction. Mushroom clouds. Infernal white light. Obliterating energy blasts. It's all here, and mostly beyond the pale.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Farewell
    It's a bizarre, provocative story and a moving one, but it doesn't access the richer levels and themes of the film the publicity campaign obviously wants you to think of: 2006's "The Lives of Others."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Life During Wartime
    Too many of the sequences are two-character dialogues that take place in restaurants; after a while, the film starts to resemble sketch existentialism.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
    Some of the most honest and tender observations come from Basquiat's girlfriend at the time, Suzanne Mallouk.
  49. Inception
    One of the best things about Nolan as a director is that he’s not self-conscious. His movies unfold and fold in on themselves without the strain of labor or flash. But that lack of self-consciousness is also Nolan’s downside.
  50. Kisses
    What the writer and director, Lance Daly, means as some kind of transporting urban adventure for them is a disenchanting slog for us.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Standing Ovation
    This low-budget film from writer-director Stewart Raffill (“Across the Great Divide,’’ “Mac and Me’’) is processed cheese molded into a series of loosely related, sloppily choreographed, and inexplicably auto-tuned dance numbers.
  52. Alamar (To the Sea)
    A luminous love letter to the Banco Chinchorro, the largest coral reef off Mexico's coast, and to the tender bonds between a father and son.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Valhalla Rising
    Fascinating for its gonzo formal daring and brooding attitude, "Valhalla'' is still a trial for audiences seeking characters, plot, and things happening.
  54. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    A flavorless family-friendly action-adventure that doubles as memory exploitation. It has nothing to do with either the Mickey Mouse broom sequence of the same name from 1940's "Fantasia'' or the 213-year-old Goethe poem that inspired it.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Kids Are All Right
    Movies like The Kids Are All Right -- beautifully written, impeccably played, funny and randy and true -- don't come along very often.
  56. Predators
    Antal is a professional who respects your dollars. In a season where the blockbusters are as flat as month-old soda, that’s the most romantic gesture a commercial filmmaker can make.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Despicable Me
    Despicable Me has enough visual novelty and high spirits to keep the kiddies diverted and just enough wit to placate the parents.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Girl Who Played with Fire
    Whenever The Girl Who Played With Fire threatens to stall, Lisbeth whips out her Taser and tortures another sleazy, abusive man into vomiting forth his dirty secrets. In Sweden, I believe they call this "light entertainment.''
  59. Winnebago Man
    The only real tension the documentary has, once Steinbauer has his first meeting with Rebney, is whether the filmmaker is celebrating him more than exploiting him.
  60. Great Directors
    Rarely have clips from so many good and great movies been put to such dull use.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Last Airbender
    The Last Airbender' is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film "The Golden Compass,'' a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic.
    • Boston Globe
  62. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    These movies are more about the experience of hearing girls and women who should know better holler at the screen. They could just as well be at a concert.
  63. Love Ranch
    Material this banal needs a madman of David Lynch proportions to incinerate it. Hackford leaves it intact, forcing us to regard a car he doesn't have the guts or skill to crash.
  64. Grown Ups
    In Sandler's movies, men don't cry; they urinate. So the scene in which the stars empty their bladders and change the color of a swimming pool's water might be the weepiest of the year.
  65. Dogtooth
    Dogtooth is slightly less self-congratulatory than the average Dogme movie, a few of which belong to Lars von Trier. This feels, instead, more like an extreme summer at a Dadaist acting camp.
  66. Restrepo
    The movie puts us so close to so much yet keeps its emotional distance -- as if to say, no matter how much we see, we'll never truly know.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wild Grass
    In its refusal to connect the dots, Wild Grass is playful unto tediousness, and between Azéma's overly cutesy performance -- all Harpo Marx hair-frizz and popped eyes -- and Mark Snow's painfully (purposefully?) banal lounge-jazz score, the movie functions as a theoretical irritant rather than a film.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    South of the Border
    Three minutes into the film, we feel the sharpness of Stone's ax to grind. It's dull to be told what to think.
  69. The Law
    The opportunity to see what Lollobrigida could do with a crooked smile or a roll of her eyes -- let alone a simple street dress -- is well worth the price of entry.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Knight and Day
    The movie’s a piece of high-octane summer piffle: stylish, funny, brainless without being too obnoxious about it, and Cruise is its manic animating principle.
  71. Jonah Hex
    The only thing sadder than Jonah Hex is what appears to have happened to his movie.
  72. 8: The Mormon Proposition
    A deeply felt, and numbingly partisan, documentary about how the Mormon Church both bankrolled and masterminded passage of the initiative.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I Am Love
    If you're not in the mood, the whole thing will probably seem pretty silly. But if you are -- oh, if you are -- I Am Love may be the richest, tastiest truffle you're likely to savor all summer.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Toy Story 3
    It’s when Toy Story 3 becomes a jailbreak movie that it comes into its own.
  75. 45365
    For such a small place (officially a city, Sidney sure feels like a town), it's strikingly diverse.
  76. Stonewall Uprising
    "This was the Rosa Parks moment,'' another participant says, "the time that gay people stood up and said, 'No.' ''
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Karate Kid
    The one thing that should have been changed but hasn’t is the title, which makes no sense at all in a movie about kung fu.
  78. The A-Team
    As lifeless and unneeded as The A-Team is, it might have been worse.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    One of the smarter, more unexpectedly touching documentaries of the year, and I recommend it to you whether you love Rivers or loathe the very thought of her.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Winter's Bone
    It's those noir bones that give this social-realist drama its punch, as if Humphrey Bogart had been recast as a 17-year-old girl and dropped into the poorest corner of America.
  81. Splice
    The movie begins to run out of gas as it racks up a body count, but even the mad-scientist and I-created-a-monster clichés are contorted satisfyingly enough.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Get Him to the Greek
    If the movie’s all too predictable in its broad outlines, it’s scurrilously funny in the details, and it pushes its two leads and one of its supporting actors in entertainingly fresh directions.
  83. Killers
    Just as I was beginning to hope that she’d (Heigl) find a part that called for intelligence and sophistication and backbone, she plays another uptight naif.
  84. Marmaduke
    We’ve just been treated like a fire hydrant.
  85. Cropsey
    A chillingly effective documentary.
  86. Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders
    A remarkable look at the people behind an organization that understands its limitations.
  87. Mademoiselle Chambon
    There's a restraint to Mademoiselle Chambon that's more English than French. Emotions get repressed more often than expressed.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Micmacs
    Micmacs is the equivalent of a circus troupe setting up a tent in a war zone: You're entertained, even delighted, but after a while you suspect there are more serious matters at hand.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    Stitched together from so many other movies that it plays like an attack of multiple déjà vu. Stray bits of “Star Wars,’’ “Pirates of the Caribbean,’’ “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,’’ and “Robin Hood’’ pass by like flotsam, and the overwhelming tone is good-natured but alarmingly generic.
  90. Survival of the Dead
    Romero's Hatfields-and-McCoys setup feels more random than creative, and the idea that they're all Irish -- or cowboys! -- is more desultory still.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Agora
    At the very least, Agora finally gives Rachel Weisz a role that almost exactly matches her intense, humorless, but undeniable star charisma.
  92. Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies
    There is much to learn from Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. First, a wealth of sharp professorial minds and great artistic eyes is no guarantee of equivalent documentary moviemaking. Second, when making a sort of thesis statement, it helps to have a thesis.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sex and the City 2
    A dunderheaded comic melodrama with clothes to die for and dialogue to shrink from. It’s downright depressing.
  94. Shrek Forever After
    To see this final installment is to know: It’s time.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    MacGruber
    All thing considered, MacGruber’ is a lot better than it should be. That still doesn’t mean it’s all that great.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Holy Rollers
    Even the portrayal of the Hasidic community comes to feel like window-dressing, welcome for its exoticism but never truly understood.
  97. Perrier's Bounty
    Perrier’s Bounty is all stock material, full of characters that deserve more than the cliched shootouts and showdowns that befall them. Even the movie’s most natural impulses seem to come from a can.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Solitary Man
    Too shapeless and cursorily plotted to fully work as a story, but Koppelman and his co-director, David Levien, generously surround the hero with reliable actors doing solid work; if you can get past the catastrophe of Ben’s behavior, the film’s a genuine pleasure.
  99. Two in the Wave
    The documentary is primarily a work of whimsy.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Robin Hood
    This Robin Hood is mostly a smart, muscular entertainment; it doesn’t breathe new life into a genre as did “Gladiator,’’ Scott’s first pairing with Russell Crowe, but it’s a brawny reimagining of a beloved old myth, a period popcorn movie turned out with professionalism and gusto.
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