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. The Losers
    The amusement it provides is cheap, disposable, and hardly worth the number of quarters you fed into the slot in a frenzy not to go home empty-handed.
  2. Best Worst Movie
    It captures a version of our best worst selves.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Good, the Bad, the Weird
    It’s a lot of fun before it wears you out, and it wears you out sooner than it should.
  4. Oceans
    Unlike in “Winged Migration,’’ the majestic imagery fails to tell a story or advance a message.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kenny Chesney: Summer in 3D
    In occasional vignettes voiced over home movies and old photos, Chesney talks with humble conviction of reaching people in the cheap seats.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Death at a Funeral
    The new version is completely unnecessary and sloppier than it should be. It’s also still funny, partly thanks to smart casting in a few key roles and partly because farce this ironclad cannot be denied.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kick-Ass
    Fusing teen comedy, bad-boy raunch, Tarantino-style gonzo mayhem, and tossing in a bloodthirsty little girl vigilante who swears like Steve Buscemi in a Coen brothers movie, the film has its moments of high-flying, low-down style. It’s also nowhere near as subversive as it thinks it is.
  8. The Joneses
    It’s cute and clever to a point -- especially if you don’t know much about the film’s premise going in -- but then the cleverness runs on like the one-note punch line of an interminable “Saturday Night Live’’ sketch, sponsored by Audi.
  9. The Cartel
    Actually, everything in Bowdon’s rant about America’s woeful public school system is important, including Bowdon.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The City of Your Final Destination
    What was intended as a tart elegy for a vanished way of life becomes a valedictory to a certain kind of filmmaking: beautifully appointed, intelligently played, and civilized into inertia.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Exit Through the Gift Shop
    One of the best, most karmically satisfying comedies of the year, much to the chagrin of the people who are in it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    No One Knows About Persian Cats
    Whenever a band plays in “Persian Cats,’’ the director treats us to a fast, vibrant montage of Iranian faces and street scenes -- as if to say, look, this is who we REALLY are.
  13. The Perfect Game
    Much like a Sox starter struggling for the first couple of innings before settling down, The Perfect Game takes a while to get to the parts worth cheering.
  14. The Secret in Their Eyes
    The secret here is that the movie is rather tasteless. It has the high, slightly nauseating stink of perfume on garbage.
  15. Date Night
    Date Night manages to live down to its store-brand title.
  16. The Black Waters of Echo's Pond
    In 10 years, this movie could easily take its place among cult classics like “The Room.’’ For now, it’s better left in the bowels of a Turkish cave.
  17. Everyone Else
    Everyone Else is not about hurricanes and earthquakes and knives in the back. It's about private, emotional phenomena: the tiny tremors and imperceptible shifts that bring a couple closer together or drive them apart, almost without their noticing.
  18. The Square
    The surprise here is how thrillingly bad things get.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    When You're Strange
    The man inside that legend has yet to come into focus 40 years on. Morrison wanted the world and he wanted it now, and he got it. What When You’re Strange can’t admit is that he had no idea what to do next.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Women Without Men
    Shirin Neshat's film, a magical-realist cry from the heart, is as up-to-date as last year's pro-democracy protests.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    It Came from Kuchar
    The movie makes the case that the best American filmmakers may be the uncelebrated ones who helplessly turn life into art simply as a means to get out of bed every day.
  22. The Misfortunates
    The movie has to twist your arm to get you to feel for these people. But you wouldn’t be wrong to think it’s been broken.
  23. Don McKay
    The only person in Don McKay having a better time than Shue is Melissa Leo, who plays Sonny’s insinuating housemate. She’s too much by half, in an Agnes Moorehead sort of way.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Greatest
    The filmmaker’s uncertainty shows itself in drably functional camerawork and an over-reliance on Christophe Beck’s tasteful piano-and-violin score.
  25. Why Did I Get Married Too?
    If Perry’s cinematic vision remains less than 20/20, his sagacity gets stronger by the movie.
  26. Warlords
    It’s all lavish, if disposable. But in a nifty change of pace, the warriors in The Warlords are interesting.
  27. Breaking Upwards
    The film gets stronger and more involving as the drama gets heavier and the couple’s rift grows.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Clash of the Titans
    The results are -- there’s no other word for it -- a disaster.
  29. The Last Song
    A more convincing star could make this a degree more tolerable, although in Cyrus’s defense not much more.
  30. The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom
    While never heavy-handed about its politics, the film makes no effort to disguise its strong anti-Chinese bias.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hot Tub Time Machine
    Depressingly, and in keeping with the stringent rules of bad-boy shock-comedies, all the women here are bimbos, shrews, and slutburgers except for one cool chick -- Cusack’s love interest, played by Lizzy Caplan -- who acts like a guy.
  32. Chloe
    It can’t be recommended even to people who mostly just want to see Amanda Seyfried naked.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Eclipse
    Above all, the film is lucky to have one of the better character actors in recent movies in a lead role: Ciarán Hinds as Michael Farr.
  34. How to Train Your Dragon
    Finds DreamWorks Animation looking to Viking territory for its next Shrek-sturdy comedy tentpole. By Odin, they make it work.
  35. Waking Sleeping Beauty
    Vividly captures a period of movie history. It’s just that the period seems less vital -- sleepier, if you will -- than it once did.
  36. Blue Beard
    Breillat’s film can seem at times like a far less opaque version of another story set in the 17th century about sex and power: Peter Greenaway’s “The Draughtman’s Contract.’’
  37. Dancing Across Borders
    Well-meant though it may be, the movie has an advertorial gloss.
  38. Lbs.
    The movie Bonifacio and Famiglietti have made is much better as a bittersweet family portrait. But those in search of a mirror for their own weight issues will find a deluxe one here.
  39. Repo Men
    There is a mild pleasure in the sight of Jude Law pirouetting with a hacksaw through gangs of extras, but the amusement is notional. I actually don’t find him terribly interesting as a kinetic object.
  40. The Bounty Hunter
    The Bounty Hunter does give Christine Baranski, as an Atlantic City entertainer and Mama Aniston, another opportunity to enthrall us with her drag-queenliness.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    Diary of a Wimpy Kid the movie returns Kinney's tale to live-action reality, and the party's over.
  42. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    The movies rarely gives us a woman as fascinatingly complex as Lisbeth Salander, and the happiest news about the two sequels is that she’ll be back.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Greenberg
    Noah Baumbach makes nature documentaries disguised as indie comedy-dramas.
  44. IMAX: Hubble 3D
    Is it being a spoilsport to suggest that the Hubble’s original 2-D images are a lot more stupendous than all the IMAX 3-D hurly-burly?
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Runaways
    In rock, it's about the attitude as much as the music. In some cases, more so. And the Runaways were all attitude.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    City Island
    A strident, contrived, surprisingly lovable Noo Yawk City family farce.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Neil Young Trunk Show
    The movie’s not all glorious noise.
  48. Vincere
    Setting aside, just for a moment, his general loathsomeness, there is a case to be made for a less apparent aspect of Benito Mussolini: He was once really hot.
  49. Mid-August Lunch
    The movie is a perfect blend of calm execution and uninflected farce.
  50. She's Out of My League
    While Baruchel is fun to root for and watch flail about like a pipe-cleaner in the wind, this movie encourages a sick desire in me -- to see Michael Cera and all the runners-up in the Mr. Puniverse Contest knocked down a peg by a bully with a neck the size of a tree trunk.
  51. Green Zone
    Green Zone is somewhere between a blockbuster and a tract -- a traction movie. It whizzes and bangs and sizzles as it chases the truth like a dog off its leash.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mother
    You never know where Mother is going to go next. All you know is that you're in the hands of a master with an appreciably bent sense of humor.
  53. Our Family Wedding
    The movie is made livelier by its bit players -- King, Murphy, Lupe Ontiveros as Lucia’s bigoted grandma, Anna Maria Horseford as Marcus’s grandmother, Shannyn Sossamon as one of Whitaker’s airhead girlfriends, and, best of all, Anjelah Johnson as Lucia’s car-mechanic sister.
  54. Remember Me
    The movie crassly repurposes tragedy to excuse its cliches.
  55. Children of Invention
    This is not “Death of a Salesman’’ or “Save the Tiger’’ (in the case of the latter, thank God). But how refreshing to see a movie about a mother’s struggles that doesn’t culminate in her lying on her back to make ends meet.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Alice in Wonderland
    Where Burton and his screenwriter, Linda Woolverton, go astray is turning this new 3-D version - a sequel, really, about a grown Alice returning to the psychic dreamworld of her childhood - into a fantasy adventure that looks like every other CGI epic out there.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Brooklyn's Finest
    What’s missing is the assurance of tone that a Lumet would provide.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Secret of Kells
    A visually overwhelming labor of love, a hand-drawn medieval adventure tale that seeks and finds cosmic connections.
  59. Harlan: In the Shadow of Jew Suess
    For a few years, Veit Harlan must have felt he was the right filmmaker at the right place at the right time. Did he ever stop to think that his luck also meant the doom of millions? Moeller’s documentary can’t supply an answer. It does, however, make the rest of us wonder.
  60. Cop Out
    Cop Out seems aptly named. It’s not personal. It’s barely even a movie. It’s a fire hydrant that the director and his stars use for exterior shots.
  61. A Prophet
    It’s imperfect, but it’s daring, bold, and from a director who isn’t scared of anything.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Crazies
    Does what an exploitation movie should: It gets in, it scares you silly, and it gets out, all while playing fair by the audience.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Yellow Handkerchief
    The performances are what put it over -- that and the observant camera of director Udayan Prasad.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Art of the Steal
    The movie’s never less than entertaining, but you often feel like arguing with the screen, and not in a good way.
  65. Formosa Betrayed
    As a political thriller, Formosa Betrayed has enough suspense and intrigue to pull viewers along willingly. It doesn’t try too hard, which is refreshing.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Prodigal Sons
    There’s still enough to chew on to recommend the movie, not least the oddly touching sight of two siblings whose very identities have been altered by surgery.
  67. Shutter Island
    This is a long, heavy film, in which Scorsese’s aerobic moviemaking turns mannered and uncharacteristically passive.
  68. The Good Guy
    It’s network television drama, starring actors best known for their TV work and full of the petty gripes and mild worries of characters who really have nothing compelling to worry about.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Ghost Writer
    In Polanski’s hands, it’s an unholy pleasure: a diversion that stings.
  70. Phyllis and Harold
    Phyllis and Harold is really about Phyllis and how discontent has a way of spilling, then spreading. Kleine never quite says so, but her mother’s life was a tragedy.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Wolfman
    The movie is by no means good but it’s surprisingly enjoyable: a misty, moody Saturday-matinee monster-chiller-horror special.
  72. Valentine's Day
    This is many lousy movies for the price of one.
  73. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
    Very little of it is as persuasive or enveloping as its beloved English counterpart. But it works very hard to distract 11-year-olds from thinking about the November arrival of “The Deathly Hallows.’’
  74. October Country
    What results is both real and surreal, giving and self indulgent. That’s the country we all live in.
  75. From Paris with Love
    This is the sort of asinine action exercise that needs a star to blow up cars and leap from rooftop to rooftop with gusto.
  76. Dear John
    Unfortunately for Tatum and Seyfried, Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams did a far more convincing version of this same basic dance in “The Notebook.’’
  77. District 13: Ultimatum
    There’s no reason a conspiracy this outlandish should work twice. But it’s so hilariously within the realm of plausibility that it does.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Frozen
    An effective, no-frills gruel-a-thon if that’s your cup of Swiss Miss, and it explores such burning questions as: What happens if you’re dumb enough to leave your bare hand on a metal safety bar overnight?
  79. Terribly Happy
    The characters are intended to be slightly stupid, but the writing isn’t necessarily smarter.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ajami
    It’s much too easy to call Ajami an Arab-Israeli “Crash,’’ but it’s a pretty good place to start.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Edge of Darkness
    The movie’s weaknesses include the overuse of grainy flashbacks of Craven’s daughter as a child, and the conversations he has with her after she is gone. Both are tremendously moving ideas but eventually succumb to bathos from repetition.
  82. When in Rome
    It winds up being predictably charmless and forgettable, even as a travelogue or iPod download.
  83. Saint John of Las Vegas
    The best thing about Saint John of Las Vegas is that it makes you really appreciate guys like David Lynch and Joel and Ethan Coen.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Off and Running
    A patient, slightly stiff, often intensely moving portrait of a girl who believes her choices are literally black and white.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    North Face
    It’s a literal cliffhanger and the next worst thing to being there.
  86. Extraordinary Measures
    The screenplay by Robert Nelson Jacobs affirms life and jerks tears with welcome degrees of humor and muscle.
  87. The Girl on the Train
    Duvauchelle is actually the best thing in the movie.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Creation
    There are good performances and fleeting moments of exquisite moviemaking, but the experience as a whole is an evolutionary dead end.
  89. Tooth Fairy
    For what it’s worth, Tooth Fairy is a somehow dimmer cousin of those Tim Allen “Santa Clause’’ movies.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Book of Eli
    The Book of Eli is “The Road’’ with twice the plot, four times the ammunition, and half the brains; it’ll probably make 10 times the money.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fish Tank
    Fish Tank should be seen for what it does well and for what it hints may come, if Andrea Arnold and her audiences are lucky.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Spy Next Door
    The film’s so formulaic your 6-year-old will be ticking off the plot points as they lope by.
  93. 44 Inch Chest
    It’s a stagy, half-entertaining, half-tedious acting competition between five excellent Englishmen.
  94. Daybreakers
    Daybreakers has unexpected flashes of brilliance.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Youth in Revolt
    There are some good, sharp, surprising laughs in Youth in Revolt. So why does it feel so dreadfully familiar?
  96. Leap Year
    It’s unclear what Amy Adams did to deserve Leap Year, but all that’s missing from the movie is a set of jailhouse bars over her scenes.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Waiting for Armageddon
    The movie could have used a little fire and brimstone itself. It’s a little too cautious.
  98. In Search of Memory
    There are many indicators of star power. Not the least of them is unforgettability. On screen, no less than in the laboratory, Eric Kandel has star power.
  99. The White Ribbon
    The ends remain loose in The White Ribbon.’ But that lack of closure is thrilling. Haneke lays his movie and its mysteries at our feet, leaving us to ask, “What in tarnation?’’
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sherlock Holmes
    It pleases me to report, then, that Downey brings his brain, his wit, and his gift for intelligent underplaying, even as he understands he has been hired to play Sherlock Holmes, action hero.
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