Boston Globe's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Bergman Island
    Among the virtues of Bergman Island is how uncluttered it is generally, as well as its consistent quietude and Hansen-Løve’s keenness of observation.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Bourne Legacy
    The best thing that can be said about The Bourne Legacy is that Renner will survive it.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    One of the director’s more superficial efforts; it’s watchable but glib.
  4. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    Best when it's playful, toying with the fact that the Mafia has in a single generation been transmogrified from myth to joke.
  5. xXx
    As Diesel says, ''I like something fast enough to do something stupid in.'' Mission accomplished.
  6. Boiler Room
    Derivative and flawed. But it does throw off a few sparks.
  7. Swimming with Sharks
    Swimming with Sharks is fine when it puts Buddy into outrageous play. But it stumbles in a few other places, requiring a pretty hefty suspension of disbelief - first at Guy's making it into his miserable job that many would kill for, then when he finds himself on the receiving end of romantic attentions. [09 June 1995, p.57]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Honeydripper
    Has John Sayles finally lost his mojo? How anyone could take a subject like the moment the Delta blues went electric and suck the joy and fury out of it is anybody's guess, but the talky, dull "Honeydripper" represents playwriting rather than filmmaking. And didactic playwriting at that.
  9. Torque
    Invites you not simply to identify with its low IQ but to cheer it on. This is a movie that knows you know it's dumb, and that's enough to make the whole thing worth tolerating.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tabu
    A black-and-white fever dream, and, like all dreams, its meanings are elusive. It’s opaque, maddening, often pretentious, yet the pretensions may be on purpose, to push us away from the adulterous colonials at the story’s center and reveal the Africa they’re too obsessed with each other to see.
  11. Don't Worry Darling
    Darling never quite ignites. The closest it gets to ignition is Pugh’s performance. Styles is perfectly fine, but it’s her movie.
  12. National Treasure
    National Treasure even has a rough time approaching the heart of ''The Amazing Race," a show that manages, in 44 minutes, to make you care about average folks as they follow clues across the globe.
  13. 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.
  14. Bride of the Wind
    Botches the chance to delve into the personality of a complex, alluring, and free-spirited woman.
    • Boston Globe
  15. Romeo Must Die
    The reason to sit through its uninspired, formulaic moves, however, is its half-dozen spectacular fight sequences.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lake House
    How deeply silly is The Lake House? As silly as a movie about two letter-writing lovers separated by a wrinkle in time can be. How much sweet, dumb fun is it? More than you might want to admit.
  17. Land of Mine
    One appreciates the desire of the filmmaker to let the audience fill in the back story, but Rasmussen’s behavior reflects badly on the Danish and heightens sympathy for the POWs.
  18. Despicable Me 3
    The laughs here are more about the colorfully zany action than the ho-hum material the cast gets.
  19. Now You See Me 2
    “2” is as flashy and splashy as the original. Both also register right up there on the implausibility scale — that’s like the Richter scale, only with head scratching — but “2” has a lighter touch and more interesting settings. Macau and London, here we come.
  20. 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.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    A Quiet Place: Day One
    The film includes the standard escalating horror set pieces — one occurs on fiery scaffolding, another inside a different flooded subway — that grow repetitive in their oscillating bouts of tension and release. But Nyong’o and Quinn manage to keep the film anchored in connection.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Down in the Valley
    The performances are deep and rich -- Wood is coming to seem like a smarter Chloe Sevigny, Rory looks to be the Culkin with talent, and Norton's portrayal of Harlan aches with ambiguity.
  23. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    Powell never achieves the absurdist, uncanny poetry of that scene in Herzog’s film where a “demented” penguin marches into oblivion, but he does arouse wonder at nature’s sublimity.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Year of the Fish
    At its best, Year of the Fish makes a virtue of naivete - its heroine's, its director's, and the fragile fairy-tale belief that everyone deserves a happy ending.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Japanese Story
    Best taken as a dazzling showcase for Collette, an actress who fits none of Hollywood's ideas of glamour or artistry, yet who grows like a beautiful outback weed with each new role she takes.
  26. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    It’s not especially filling, but it leaves a pleasant aftertaste.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ray
    He (Ray) was, a more complicated man than this film, or perhaps any film, dares allow. Foxx is not at fault here.
  28. Kill the Irishman
    The best thing about the picture (unless you like exploding cars, in which case the rest of the movie is just so many interruptions between getting to see all these big old '70s boats going boom) is its proudly hammy supporting cast.
  29. Bowfinger
    Just enough laughs to keep you watching.
  30. The Count of Monte Cristo
    Wolpert and Reynolds seem to be aiming for the ''Titantic'' audience at the expense of sophistication and historical relevance. It's too bad. The able cast, not to mention Alexandre Dumas, deserves better.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beloved
    At 40, Mastroianni is looking more and more like her father, Marcello Mastroianni. She has his eyes and that air of existential befuddlement, and she's beginning to suggest the magnificent ruin he became in his later career.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Chalk
    The results are about what you'd expect: friendly, unfocused, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
  33. Death Race
    Smartly, Anderson makes some eclectic casting choices that keep the story from feeling as though it's populated by video-game characters.
  34. Random Harvest
    It's nearly over the top in the compassion department, but Random Harvest nevertheless has its satisfactions. [16 Oct 1992, p.38]
    • Boston Globe
  35. Miracle
    You might cheer. You might cry. For a minute, you might even wish it were you on that medal stand.
  36. Jerichow
    As ridiculous German suspense dramas go, you could do worse than Jerichow.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Crash
    Its characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do. You can feel its creator shuttling them here and there on the grid of greater LA, pausing portentously between each move.
  38. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    On most levels his performance is as flat as his abs: very early Wahlberg.
  39. A Letter to Momo
    Though it touches on the usual themes of youthful innocence and imagination challenged by misfortune, and on occasion achieves moments of supremely subtle, sublimely exquisite detail, “Momo” strains when it comes to evoking whimsy and magic.
  40. Freejack
    There are two entertaining small characters in Freejack - Amanda Plummer as a gun-toting nun and Johansen as Estevez's exploitive pal. As the lead, Estevez is appealing, if bland. He takes his future shocks in stride. [18 Jan 1982, p.12]
    • Boston Globe
    • 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.
    • 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.
  43. Mondovino
    The movie feels incomplete and uncentered. It's like a grand magazine profile that's all reportage and absolutely no prose.
  44. Happy Endings
    The cast is strong. Kudrow and Gyllenhaal provide the movie's emotional center.
    • 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.
  46. First Love
    So expect the upending of expectations: visual, emotional, tonal, generic. Especially generic. Is First Love a comedy? A crime thriller? A love story? An advertorial for subscriptions to Guns and Ammo?...Yes.
  47. Ask the Dust
    After an hour or so, Ask the Dust seems to have said everything, and the air starts to seep out of its hermetic atmosphere.
  48. Southland Tales
    Richard Kelly's Southland Tales isn't just a movie. It's an apocalyptic piñata that's been bazooka-ed open.
  49. Street Kings
    Street Kings is nonsense, and yet the crooked, racialized world underneath the soulless mayhem is pretty fascinating.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sex Drive
    Three things and three things only keep Sex Drive from being teen-comedy landfill. The first is James Marsden, hilarious as the hero's bully-boy big brother. The second is Seth Green, beyond droll as an Amishman with attitude. The third is the Mexican doughnut costume.
  51. Beautiful People
    It's a spirited and essentially optimistic film, but it's also simplistic.
    • Boston Globe
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jojo Rabbit
    There’s no question this exuberantly directed coming-of-age tale — a peppy slapstick drama, if you can get your brain around that — is a sight to see. Whether you want to see it is something you may not be able to decide until halfway through.
  53. Al Franken: God Spoke
    Neither a profile nor a critique, though, the film's only focus is its subject's mild self-regard.
  54. Ready to Rumble
    Likable performances from its young cast and a better-than-average script add spark to this formulaic fairy tale and make the wrestling mania watchable.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Nocturnal Animals
    I don’t mean it as a cheap shot, but Nocturnal Animals is very like an exquisitely rendered window display. It’s something at which you pause and peer into and catch your breath — and then move on.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Open Water
    Open Water is a stunt, one you either buy into or not.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Nightmare
    Less a straight doc than a psycho-cinematic inquiry into unknown territory, it’s really something to see. Whether it’s something to believe is another matter.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam
    A vanity film refreshingly lacking in vanity.
  59. Crazy Rich Asians
    Maybe the key is how nicely self-aware the move is. On the soundtrack, for example, we hear both “Material Girl” and “Money (That’s What I Want)” sung in Mandarin. Everything’s so over the top it’s a bit weightless, which in this context is a compliment.
  60. Still Mine
    Though admirable in ambition, McGowan’s decision to broaden his simple story’s scope diminishes an affecting melodrama about the increasingly common, insufficiently acknowledged plagues of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lunacy
    At nearly two hours Lunacy becomes repetitive, at first ingeniously and then with a slowly dulling edge. The meat parade ceases to shock.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Miss Julie
    It’s a handsomely mounted, intentionally claustrophobic film; too claustrophobic over the long haul, with relentless close-ups that constrict the galvanic emotions on display.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Married Life
    Albeit slumming with style and a fairly sharp scalpel. Married Life delights in peeling back the bright postwar social veneer to expose the characters' hidden agendas, and if this is a mystery movie, the mystery is other people.
  64. Bran Nue Dae
    The songs are catchy. The lip-synching, meanwhile, is always a little off, and the dancing is usually average at best.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Road
    Everything about the film is a welcome rebuke to the happy-face apocalypse of “2012,’’ a movie that turns mass extinction into the Greatest Show on Earth. In The Road, what has been lost is recognized as infinitely precious; what’s left is bitter and our due.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Lake Tahoe
    In the end, the sparse dialogue and lengthy scenes make the film feel as leaden and listless as Juan's sputtering engine.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dark Phoenix
    For a series supposedly dedicated to the pleasure of superhero movies, Dark Phoenix somehow ends up illustrating their limits.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Results
    What happens when a rigorously non-mainstream filmmaker tries to reverse-engineer a mainstream romantic comedy? The result, in all its charming perversity, is Results.
  69. Armadillo
    Metz is another artist more interested in war's side effects than combat itself, although he and his crew are embedded for battle.
  70. The Look of Love
    Although Raymond’s career extended over five decades of London sleaze, decadence, and celebrity, neither director nor actor provide much insight into the man or his times, not to mention the significance of Raymond’s prime product.
  71. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
    Broad and badly made but sporadically inspired, "Chuck and Larry" is still an amazing improvement over "License to Wed," this month's other wedding comedy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Week with Marilyn
    The point of "My Week'' appears to be that Colin is the one person in Monroe's life who isn't using her, but if squeezing two books and a movie out of one brief encounter isn't exploitation, I don't know what is.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Delivery Man
    Delivery Man is predictable but likable, schmaltzy but sweet.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cold in July
    You may be put in mind of HBO’s recent “True Detective” — the low-down Southern locations, the time period (here the mid-1980s), some truly horrible crimes, a general air of diseased moralism — but Cold in July, while stylishly done, isn’t close to that good.
  75. The Peanut Butter Falcon
    For all of its engaging performances, this thoughtful yarn from the filmmaking tandem of Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz is limited by a quaintly straightforward story line. Every choice the characters opt for, every bit of self-discovery they make, is as scripted as a rasslin’ baddie’s folding-chair cheap shot.
  76. Birthday Girl
    This bizarre, uneven comedy is notable mostly for the unsettling presence of Nicole Kidman in full, kinky, sex-kitten mode.
  77. 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rules Don't Apply
    This is not a well-made film but it is an enjoyable one, in part because it’s genuinely unpredictable and in part because it’s a pleasure to see one of the great stars of his era on a movie screen once more.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Serenity
    A guilty pleasure that’s guiltier than most, a southern-fried potboiler that seems to be settling in as a camp remake of “Body Heat” before it turns itself inside out and becomes something else entirely.
  80. Uncle Nino
    An effortless heartwarmer that manages to be utterly corny but quite likable.
  81. Ice Princess
    A feel-good but inane Disney production.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Constant Gardener
    A predictable conspiracy thriller that somehow ends up diminishing the real urgency of the West's humanitarian disconnect from Africa. If it sends audiences home to log on to the Amnesty International website, terrific -- but that still doesn't make it a very good movie.
  83. The Smashing Machine
    Living up to her surname, Blunt doesn’t just chew and swallow the scenery, she regurgitates it and chews it again. Along with the bad writing given to her character, she singlehandedly torpedoes “The Smashing Machine.”
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Starter for 10
    It's all breezy and predictable.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Private Fears in Public Places
    Private Fears says that life is a smoldering holding pattern, but Resnais is gracious enough to blanket the embers with eternal snow.
  86. Naqoyqatsi
    A movie that seems to have been made mostly on the hard drive of a Power Mac G4. But whatever, we get it: Technology destroys everything.
  87. Faraway, So Close!
    To get right to it, Wim Wenders' Faraway, So Close isn't anywhere near as sublime and magical as his "Wings of Desire." In fact, his new film about angels is sort of a mess, collapsing under the weight of too much plot and too little poetry. That being said, I hasten to add that it's my kind of mess. [28 Jan 1994, p.47]
    • Boston Globe
  88. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    In the intervening years, they've become pretty good actors, too. Now where's the filmmaker who'll give them more to do than pregnancy scares and falls off donkeys?
    • 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.
  90. The Blind Side
    Bullock’s levelheaded acting frequently saves the movie from emotional garishness.
  91. The Painted Veil
    Curran is a talented director, especially where his actors are concerned. His previous movie, "We Don't Live Here Anymore," an adaptation of two Andre Dubus stories, was another literary adultery drama featuring Watts. The Painted Veil doesn't achieve the fire that characterized that film.
  92. Severance
    Half hearted in its mockery of corporate culture and schlock. The filmmakers want to have it both ways -- the funny and the sadistic -- but rarely do so at the same time with any success.
  93. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    The movie dreamily conjures up the outlaw's last months, and it's gorgeous, but long, cumbersome, and slightly shallow.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Luca
    Luca has energy to spare and it’s certainly easy on the eyes, if not as visually outrageous as, say, the recent Coco. The moral lessons — be true to your friends, overcome your fears — are tidy and shopworn, fresh to young audiences but lacking the jolts of originality that make classic Pixar films an all-ages proposition.
  95. The Last Shot
    Any movie that would think Calista Flockhart to be the sort of high-strung basket case who'd hurl obscenities down at a dog kennel outside her apartment is worth sitting through.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Five-Year Engagement
    Five-Year Engagement alternates between realistic scenes of couples bickering and broad character farce, and the two halves mesh uneasily.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Control
    Takes your angriest thoughts about urban public transportation and magnifies them into a grubby and rousingly antisocial fantasia on post-communist breakdown and bureaucracy.
  98. Saving Grace
    It's funny and charming most of the time, thanks to Brenda Blethyn.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Boxtrolls
    We never know them as characters, particularly father figure Fish, because screenwriters Irena Brignull and Adam Pava have them speak an un-translated, Jawa-Gollum gibberish, not English.
  100. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    A lot of people die, much danger is averted, and we’re once again treated to a grand spectacle at the film’s climax. It’s all wrapped up in a package that’s too neat to leave an impression.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »