Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,947 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 1 point 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: 5,229 out of 7947
  2. Mixed: 1,553 out of 7947
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7947
7947 movie reviews
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  1. Point and Shoot
    Despite his neuroses, VanDyke displays self-awareness and humility, and a charisma that ranges from the goofiness of Owen Wilson to the grandiosity of his hero, Lawrence of Arabia.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Photograph
    Another tale of timid souls united by a sweet movie gimmick.
  3. Last Breath
    I doubt anyone will be too bothered by the lack of character depth. The audience for “Last Breath” is there for the dangerous dive developments.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Silkwood
    Fueled by Meryl Streep's performance in the title role, energized by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen's script and tempered by Mike Nichols' understated direction, Silkwood is a brilliant movie that puts art above polemics, and the facts above speculation. [14 Dec 1983]
    • Boston Globe
  5. James' Journey to Jerusalem
    There is a lot to recommend about James' Journey to Jerusalem. Its people are not among them. This searing little parable contains some of the more deplorable folks you're likely to see in a movie about faith.
  6. Close to Home
    This movie just seems like a scattered excuse to make political points without saying much of anything. Worse, it also fails to show us, with any vividness, how Mirit and Smadar think and feel as women.
  7. Outrage
    Outrage succeeds as activism, but it excels as a window into certain political psyches.
  8. The Pillow Book
    The Pillow Book is Peter Greenaway's most stunning and accessible film since "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." Dense, gorgeous and inexorable - once you give yourself over to its logic - it's a boldly erotic explosion of Asian chic, taken to places no film has gone before. [20 Jun 1997]
    • Boston Globe
  9. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    "I've seen the look on people's faces when I've brought them there," Whedon says of the convention. "It's the look I had on my face. 'My tribe, my tribe, I've found my tribe.' "
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Rover
    There’s a thin line between the iconic and the generic, and The Rover, a grim post-apocalyptic drama from down under, wanders back and forth across it in an adrenaline daze.
  12. Marie Antoinette
    As art, the movie is neither shallow nor profound, just inconsequential. Yet Coppola is too clever a filmmaker to dismiss the movie out of hand. If her film is mostly surface then she skims with style.
  13. Dr T and the Women
    A comedy of chaos, an ensemble comedy, with characters swirling around one another unaware, in their uniform desperation, of how funny they are.
    • Boston Globe
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    About Adam
    In a moralistic time, About Adam is something of an anomaly, as it airily sticks to its pro-naughtiness agenda.
    • Boston Globe
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    No one has really been asking for a fusion of "Independence Day," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," and an old Buck Rogers serial, but here it is anyway, and the only thing keeping it from greatness is a good story.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Napoleon Dynamite
    An inspired dead-end stunt that keeps delivering snarky laughs far longer than it has any right to.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cold Weather
    This is a slacker detective story, emphasis on the slack, and if you can downshift into its loping rhythms, it's pretty wonderful.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Suffragette
    The movie, which is both formulaic and powerful, dramatizes a paradigm shift that has been largely smoothed over by history (which is hardly the same as saying all the battles have been won).
  19. Guilty by Suspicion
    Winkler fills the screen with some first-rate actors doing first-rate work. It's a handsomely crafted film as well as an honorable one. But it's also, on the whole, dramatically flat. [15 Mar 1991, p.41]
    • Boston Globe
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Coup de Chance
    The film’s closing is abrupt and maybe too tidy, but “Coup de Chance” is still a clever little thriller. It displays an admirable economy of storytelling, and its jazz-heavy soundtrack helps maintain a jaunty mood.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Interview
    One comes away from Interview exhausted and a little unclean, entertained by the acting equivalent of a pit bull fight but needing a hose-down. The movie confirms that in every relationship "there are winners and losers." True enough, but for the audience this one's a draw.
  22. Sunshine
    If their movie doesn't float your boat as a work of science-fiction, action, philosophy, heliocentrism, or staggering visual spectacle (although, it really should), then it certainly succeeds as a parable for cinematic ambition.
  23. Alien: Romulus
    Despite its overdependence on catering to fans, “Alien: Romulus” is the best “Alien” movie since Cameron’s first sequel.
  24. Frozen II
    With so much going on, it’s easy to overlook that the most profound and moving relationship in either film is the bond between Elsa and Anna. It’s the most human and least-calculated thing in “Frozen” or Frozen II. Their love is the ultimate special effect. Ice is nice. But sisterhood is what’s really powerful.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mother and Child
    Mother and Child glows for a good 90 minutes before an increasing reliance on contrivance and coincidence makes the lamp flicker and then fizzle out.
  26. Examined Life
    Over the course of the film's 88-minutes, Taylor cuts away to what's happening around her subjects (the unexamined life, I suppose). Perhaps she's attempting to make connections the thinkers don't.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Beautiful Country
    The filmmakers bank against their impulse toward melodrama and deliver a reconciliation that is heartbreakingly understated.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Disconnect
    Disconnect is far from a bad movie. It’s just better at melodrama than drama.
  29. Goat
    John Landis’s “Animal House” (1978) this is not.
  30. The Tic Code
    Reveals real feelings.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Frailty
    Murder should either be unsparingly real or kitschy like the ''Texas Chainsaw Massacre.'' This is neither.
  32. 8 Women
    Even if some of the references are inscrutable, a lot of 8 Women is a riot. Here and there Ozon finds the key to a level of farce that would have amused Bunuel himself.
  33. Joe the King
    Whaley's self-effacing but strongly etched and wrenchingly effective film.
  34. Herod's Law
    Incisive, highly entertaining political farce.
  35. Sleeping with Other People
    The movie grows easier to like in the later, straighter going, as it stops pushing so aggressively to be naughty and lets its characters try on some introspection.
  36. Soundtrack for a Revolution
    The music is the occasion, and it’s stirring. What linger, though, are the images — and the ideals and emotions they convey.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wanted
    Preposterous, luridly entertaining.
  38. Wes Craven's New Nightmare
    Cleverly mixing shamelessness and panache, Wes Craven's New Nightmare is easily the most dazzlingly self-referential seventh installment in a horror series ever. [14 Oct 1994, p.60]
    • Boston Globe
  39. Enola Holmes 2
    Enola doesn’t just break the fourth wall. She tickles it, winks at it, and tugs at its sleeve. With another actress, this would be annoying. With Brown, it’s charming.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Adoration
    Watching Adoration is like juggling three tennis balls, a porcupine, and a graduate thesis, but eventually it finds a unifying theme, that of tolerance melting away racial and intergenerational hatreds.
  41. Outbreak
    it's an OK genre movie, providing an honest quota of scares and carried by Hoffman's way of alternating stoniness and warmth as the guy in the anticontamination suit. [10 Mar 1995, p.49]
    • Boston Globe
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    JCVD
    JCVD may not be the first meta-musclehead movie, but it's certainly the most surprising.
  43. Girls Town
    Jim McKay's funky, spunky "Girls Town" is a refreshing girls-who-fight-back film that succeeds in being political without ever being didactic. [30 Aug 1996, p.F4]
    • Boston Globe
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Captain Marvel
    In fact, without in the least playing like an agenda-driven blockbuster, Captain Marvel posits that female superheroes don’t have time for bullroar and might just be better at taking care of business.
    • 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.
  46. 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.
  47. Hot Shots! Part Deux
    Hot Shots! revels in absurdity. At times it's as surreal as the Marx Brothers. [21 May 1993, p.26]
    • Boston Globe
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Notorious Bettie Page
    It's a handsome, often funny piece of work with a nearly fatal inability to settle on a tone.
  49. Rental Family
    Rental Family is the kind of movie that should not work at all. It takes an unusual premise, one ripe for oversentimentality, and then strikes the perfect balance between heartwarming and heartbreaking.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
    The movie is almost willfully dull, for its real subject is everything we never say to our parents, or they to us.
  51. Clockwatchers
    Clockwatchers may not be perfect, but it's on to something. [22 May 1998, p.D5]
    • Boston Globe
  52. Pooh's Heffalump Movie
    A fine afternoon at the megaplex. And it will make a welcome addition your home library when it's released on video.
  53. 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Northfork
    This is very much the bargain that Northfork offers an audience: Buy into the brothers' elegiac meditation on angels, Eden, and the death of American innocence or sit back and scoff at it as so much David Lynch lite.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    One Hour Photo
    Thriller fans might remember a terrific 1987 B flick called ''The Stepfather.'' One Hour Photo is that film, directed by an art student.
  56. Father and Son
    Where a lesser movie from a lesser director might sink into its own ponderousness, Sokurov uses the ambiguity of the father and son's relationship to craft a sort of erotic puzzle.
  57. Confess, Fletch
    The journey is always more entertaining than the destination, and this one’s a lot of fun.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Quartet
    Quartet is a sweet-tempered, rather fuddly drama about retired opera singers, and compared to a slick crowd-pleaser like "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," with whom it shares a star and a sentimentalized view of old age, it's a mess.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Prometheus
    Watching Prometheus is like opening a deluxe gift box from Tiffany's to find a mug from the dollar store.
  60. Orgasm Inc.
    Canner is either overwhelmed by so much impressive access to so many alarming business opportunities or lacking the investigative rigor to drive home the moral problems of these drugs and the existential problems of these women.
  61. Paper Clips
    Inspirational.
  62. Goon
    The movie's unlikely sincerity can't completely offset its ugliness for less bloodthirsty viewers, but it helps, and it does smooth over some narrative rough edges.
  63. The Lost Bus
    McConaughey and Ferrera have chemistry and serve their roles well. The endangered children all start to blur together, though Nathan Gariety stands out as Toby, a scared 7-year-old who bonds with McKay. But you’re not watching “The Lost Bus” for deep characterizations. You’re watching it for the action. On that basis, Greengrass and company deliver the goods.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Teenage
    Regrettably, it’s terrible poetry: a roughly chronological jumble of archival footage, unconvincing period reenactments, gauzy voice-overs, and half-baked ideas that makes one yearn for the stolid dullness of a History Channel documentary.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Patience Stone
    A startling fantasy of Muslim feminist empowerment that allows the Iranian-born actress Golshifteh Farahani to put on what amounts to a one-woman show.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Renoir
    Renoir may be too decorous, but it’s about decoration — the intense beauty of surfaces.
  67. Grateful Dawg
    The pure joy of music-making is what this gem of a film is all about.
    • Boston Globe
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Pursuit of Happyness
    I don't think I've seen a mainstream movie get fatherhood so right since "Kramer vs . Kramer": the fear, the indulgence, the snappishness, the pre-occupied "uh-huhs" as a child natters about his day, the steamrolling waves of love.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In Praise of Love
    At one point in ''Praise,'' Godard mentions that the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian park, is all that's left of the French forests from the time of the Roman conquest. In Praise of Love, glowing like an ember, is all that's left of genius.
  70. Eight Below
    It's the most touching love story about tragically separated sexy beasts since "Cold Mountain."
  71. The Bad Guys 2
    Directors Pierre Perifel and JP Sans keep the action moving while allowing the performers and the animators to shine.
  72. Bombshell
    If there’s any way that Roach slips back into a creative pigeonhole, it’s by being overly keen on sticking his actors in prosthetic makeup. Richard Kind’s Rudy Giuliani, for one, elicits an unintended chuckle. And while Theron’s makeover is, again, uncanny, Kidman’s cleft chin is needlessly distracting. We’d buy her performance without it.
  73. Belle
    Belle has the pace and sumptuous cinematography of a Merchant and Ivory production, but none of their memorable characters, subtle performances, or literate dialogue.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Suspiria
    When art-minded film directors stoop to genre-minded filmmaking, it’s generally a good idea to duck. Despite sequences that may lodge in your memory forever, Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria is no exception to this rule.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Avenue Montaigne
    Aside from pretty people behaving cutely, there's just not much here, and even devoted Francophiles may nod into their cafe crèmes.
  76. 1408
    As thrillers go, 1408 leaves too much room for fun.
  77. The Low Down
    Captures the ensemble quality it was after and the provisional look and feel are perfect stylistic analogues to the lives - the male lives, anyway - that it's portraying.
  78. Mondays in the Sun
    Loach makes a working metaphor of the old ant-and-grasshopper story, but the film's images are what echo the loudest.
  79. Blackboards
    Like so much Iranian cinema, Blackboards is a work of lyrical propaganda. But its metaphors are opaque enough to avoid didacticism, and the film succeeds as an emotionally accessible, almost mystical work.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Enigma
    Snoozy, plodding film that never captures the inherent suspense of its subject.
  81. Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
    Penn's Kumar could become Jeff Spicoli for the generation of college kids who've never seen "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" but always seem to have a copy of "Dude, Where's My Car?" cued up at a moment's notice.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Swiss Army Man
    This is a buddy movie in which one of the buddies is dead. Yet, if anything, the emotional bonding is — or wants to be — more resonant than ever.
  83. 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.
  84. XX
    The creepiest part of XX, a quartet of short horror films by women, might be the Jan Svankmejer-like stop-action segments between each of them. Sofia Carrillo’s animated antique dolls and little furniture walking on stilt-like legs are the stuff of nightmares.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Keep an Eye Out
    There’s not a lot of depth to Keep an Eye Out, but there is a singular vision at work and at play.
  86. Che
    The labor applied to Che is apparent, but it would be wrong to characterize the movie as laborious the way it was in, say, 2006's "The Good German," where Soderbergh took great pains to re-create 1940s Hollywood wartime glamour.
  87. Wolke Neun
    This isn't just physical love, warts and all, but warts, liver spots, saggy parts, and all. Still, the thing that ultimately keeps your head turned is how persuasively filmmaker Andreas Dresen ("Summer in Berlin'') argues that desire can create just as much emotional tumult in golden years as in youth.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Youth
    Youth is, among many other things, a lovely valentine to both Caine and Keitel, two performers who have seen it all and know what to do with it.
  89. Look Both Ways
    The debut live-action feature of Australian animator Sarah Watt has several other things to recommend it as well, including a black-humored screenplay, realistic performances, eye-catching artwork, and a few creative turns on some well-worn themes.
  90. Born to be Blue
    For the next two decades, the end notes reveal, Baker made the best music of his career. The film does its job if it encourages people to give that music a listen.
  91. Muppet Treasure Island
    Miss Piggy may not be Babe, but she sure packs a good oink. Her garish performance in the last third of "Muppet Treasure Island" is one of the highlights of this pleasant, cuddly addition to the world of Muppet fantasy. [16 Feb 1996, p.55]
    • Boston Globe
  92. Elvis
    When Elvis is good, it’s quite good, in an awful sort of way. When it’s awful, it’s quite awful, in an entertaining sort of way. The movie can’t make up its mind if it’s chronicling a struggle for the soul of America (spoiler alert: bye-bye Beale Street, hello, Vegas) or it’s just a tabloid schlockfest.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pick of the Litter
    “Pick” often feels like a project that has been overly groomed. Will you still be moved to tears? Most likely.
  94. Kaboom
    Kaboom lets Araki play with carnality as opposed to cautioning against it.
  95. Mongolian Ping Pong
    In Mongolian Ping Pong the point is to look under the majestic vistas and see value in ordinary things -- ping-pong balls included.
  96. Vénus beauté (institut)
    It's all glossy urban fairy-tale stuff, laid on with style to spare, given added resonance by a mini-pantheon of French movie goddesses.
  97. American Psycho
    In both senses of the word, American Psycho wastes its women.
    • Boston Globe
  98. Identity
    It's an exasperating exercise in B-movie hokum and screenwriter's gimmickry.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Intermission
    Could fairly be described as a Robert Altman ensemble movie without the flab, or "Magnolia" with a mean streak and bigger laughs.
  100. Team America: World Police
    Stuck between point-blank ridicule and the obligations of a weary plot. Surprisingly, more than an hour of watching marionettes fight, curse, and fornicate turns out to be as dull as watching Michael Dudikoff do the same thing in one of his unremarkable soldier movies.
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