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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    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
    In short, “Imaginarium’’ is a Terry Gilliam movie and it’s a mess, which over the years have come to mean much the same thing. It’s one of his better messes, though, or at least this critic was won over by its ramshackle whimsies.
  2. It's Complicated
    Streep is in movie star mode, and she’s irresistible. But Baldwin achieves something not many men have been able to with Streep: You notice him.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sita Sings the Blues
    The film, dazzling and poignant and five years in the making, retells the ancient Indian epic "The Ramayana" from a gentle but insistent feminist perspective.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel
    Almost but not quite as obnoxious as its title. Little kids will love it. You’ll need a hazmat suit.
  5. Police, Adjective
    The usual emphasis in a detective film is upended so that procedure, thrillingly, is more important than action. In its own way, this is one of the most intense cop movies you'll see.
  6. Did You Hear About the Morgans?
    Grant and Parker stand around as if they're waiting for someone to yell, "Cut.'' He's in one movie. She's in another. Neither is any good.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Avatar
    An entertainment to be not just seen but absorbed on a molecular level; it's as close to a full-body experience as we'll get until they invent the holo-suits. Cameron aims for sheer wonderment, and he delivers.
  8. Nine
    The movie is full of risible pontifications about the nature of art but falls well short of capturing the angst of creative frustration.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Young Victoria
    It’s a muddled but plush experience overall, and if you’re a royalist completist or a historical romantic, you’ll probably have a decent time.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The New Daughter
    Buried under a mound of haunted house cliches is a creepier, more sophisticated movie about the sexual power of teenage girls, and their fathers’ inability to comprehend, clambering to get out.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Crazy Heart
    The music is terrific, as it should be in a movie where T Bone Burnett wrote the songs with Stephen Bruton.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Town Called Panic
    A proudly Calvinist work - I mean the comic strip character, not the philosopher - that understands the delights of deep play.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Invictus
    Freeman portrays Mandela not as a saint but as a man who knows he has the political freedom of being seen as one; it’s a majestically two-dimensional performance with glimpses of a third dimension peeking through.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lovely Bones
    The Lovely Bones, then, is something special: A spectacular, cringe-inducing failure as both a book adaptation and a film.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Single Man
    There’s a lot, in fact, that keeps this film from greatness. One performance alone recommends it. That’s enough.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Slammin' Salmon
    When is a comedy not a comedy? When it’s not all that funny.
  17. Up in the Air
    At its best, Up in the Air invents new realms for old Hollywood sophistication.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Last Station
    The movie’s a chocolate box of nougaty performances, from Christopher Plummer’s delightful depiction of Tolstoy as a ribald old naïf to Paul Giamatti twirling his waxed mustache and playing to the gallery as Vladimir Chertkov.
  19. Transylmania
    Lowbrow vampire spoof.
  20. Brothers
    This is a corny tale, told with both generous helpings of deli-sliced cheese and a brief stretch of chilling tumultuousness.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Armored
    A movie like Armored has been done better in the past. But it has also been done much, much worse, and Antal knows enough not to mess with the sturdy bones of the thing.
  22. Everybody's Fine
    Once it’s clear the movie won’t be deviating at all from its formula, Frank’s journey gets tedious.
  23. The Strip
    The Strip makes you appreciate what hard work effortless comedy is.
  24. Until the Light Takes Us
    Talking heads are overused in documentaries, but in this case a dose of perspective, a point of view or two, would have a gone a long way toward turning a pageant of unreliable voices and morbid images into a portrait of the artists and their deadly scene as something more than misunderstood.
  25. Home
    Meier’s soft touch with the offbeat material is surprisingly mature, to the point of maybe being a bit too reserved.
    • 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.
  27. The Princess and the Frog
    The voice actors are also excellent, especially Michael-Leon Wooley as a bouncy trumpet-playing alligator and Jim Cummings as a lovelorn Cajun firefly.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Old Dogs
    It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a turkey, and in Old Dogs, we have the season’s blue-ribbon gobbler.
  29. Ninja Assassin
    It’s like Bob Fosse night at the martial-arts studio. Most of the killing here is done with bladed throwing stars that, like the ninjas themselves, arrive from nowhere. They appear to have been used to edit the film as well.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Me and Orson Welles
    The British actor Christian McKay resurrects the young Welles as a magnificent mountain of talent, ego, and unsliced ham. He, and he alone, is reason enough to see this movie. The problem is the “Me’’ - Zac Efron.
  31. The Blind Side
    Bullock’s levelheaded acting frequently saves the movie from emotional garishness.
  32. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call - New Orleans
    Frankly, the story isn’t remotely as interesting as Cage. Nothing is. In Ferrara’s movie, Keitel emptied himself out. But there’s a hellion’s joy in Cage’s cop.
  33. Broken Embraces
    It’s both ridiculous and ridiculously romantic, which is an apt description of a work shaped like a heart and structured like a pretzel.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Twilight Saga: New Moon
    Where the first film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke, plugged into Meyer’s vision of supernatural teenage lust with abandon, Chris Weitz is stuck with a sequel that’s a morning-after mope-fest.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Planet 51
    Young children and adults with high pain thresholds will enjoy the movie during its brief pause on the way to your On Demand menu.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Defamation
    In its sneaky, cheeky way, Defamation is a mitzvah, an act of kindness.
  37. The Sun
    This emperor verges on dementia, having no apparent clue how to function.
  38. Red Cliff
    Even at 148 minutes (and viewed twice!), you still feel as if you’re watching the longest coming attraction ever for a John Woo movie.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fantastic Mr. Fox
    By forgoing actual human beings, the director has made his most charming, least annoyingly fey film - a thing of lovely comic wisdom.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    2012
    The result is a state-of-the-art multiplex three-ring circus whose special effects stagger the senses and play like a video game, whose human drama aims for the cosmic and lands waist-deep in the Big Silly.
  41. The Messenger
    The scenes between Montgomery and Stone in plainclothes would seem to be tangential to Moverman's movie, but they're very much its point. Only in uniform do these men make sense to themselves.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pirate Radio
    Writer-director Richard Curtis (“Love Actually’’) has made a party, not a movie, and if the party goes on much too long, at least the guests are great company and the host’s taste in music is impeccable.
  43. William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe
    This engrossing and provocative documentary is also about a tragic kind of liberal guilt.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ten9Eight: Shoot for the Moon
    If Ten9Eight brings NFTE to the attention of you, your child, or your school administrator, that’s probably all that matters.
  45. Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire
    This movie catalogs a wealth of human ugliness. It’s even been made to look ugly, presumably to underscore the horror movie that is Precious’s life.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Men Who Stare at Goats
    You can’t make this stuff up, but you can botch the telling of it, and that’s what sinks this satiric drama.
  47. The Box
    The Box is the work of a visionary flirting with commercialism after having so grandly flouted it with “Southland Tales.’’ He doesn’t give in completely. Several trips to the megaplex might be required for The Box to make complete sense.
  48. The Fourth Kind
    The Fourth Kind doesn’t build, instill, or maintain an audience’s fear. It just spends 98 minutes trying to prove that what you’re watching actually happened.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Christmas Carol
    Shockingly, the new film turns out to be very good, at times close to brilliant: a darkly detailed marvel of creative visualization that does well by Dickens and right by audiences - when it’s not trying to sell them a theme park ride.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day
    The result isn’t art but it is an improvement: a scurrilous, lowdown, sub-Tarantino action comedy that, unlike the original, doesn’t make you want to claw your eyes out. How’s that for praise?
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gentlemen Broncos
    A comedy that can’t even admit to its own overwhelming sense of disgust.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The House of the Devil
    An almost fetishistic re-creation of a horror-suspense movie from around 1978.
  53. Skin
    It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.
  54. This Is It
    Watching Jackson pop, lock, rock, writhe, thrust, and clutch his crotch, even at 50 percent, leaves a feeling of woe: This show really would have been major.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Antichrist
    Like a nightmare you recall during waking hours, and then only in its vast outlines, Antichrist has the power to haunt beyond words. For better and for worse, it is exactly the movie von Trier wanted to make and a piece of staggeringly pure cinema.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Amelia
    Inside Amelia is a sharp idea struggling to get out: How does a woman marketed to the public as a star turn herself back into a human being? And at what cost?
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Astro Boy
    Astro Boy alternately soars and sputters through a story line that’s not quite sure who it’s aimed at.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
    Reilly gives it his all, and he’s both very enjoyable and about as scary as a stubbed toe.
  59. Saw VI
    Who knew that the franchise’s creators would eventually find a plot twist that made sense?
  60. (Untitled)
    Walking the line between the movie’s broad strokes and its near-perfect pitch is the art itself, which has been designed and constructed by a team of smart designers.
  61. Motherhood
    Thurman is bespectacled again for Motherhood, and it saddens me to report that neither she nor this comedy turns into more than an argument against procreation.
  62. Killing Kasztner
    There’s no question that Kasztner has vastly more significance for the historian. Eckstein, a grim footnote to history, has much more for the artist.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Where the Wild Things Are
    This version of Where the Wilds Things Are isn’t about childhood at all but about childhood’s end and what’s gained and lost by it. That’s why very young kids, dull Disney princesses, overprotective parents, and self-serious grown-ups should probably stay away.
  64. Law Abiding Citizen
    Like a lot of action-movie directors, Gray lacks the imagination to view the art of cat-and-mouse as more than a chance to play with state-of-the-art war technology.
  65. New York, I Love You
    New York, I Love You wants us to know that the city is a sexy, romantic, thrillingly random place where anything can go down. Sadly, two of those things are your eyelids.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Stepfather
    As such things go, it’s not bad: slick and proficient, The Stepfather 2.0 gets the adrenaline pumping, but the original has the brains.
  67. The Little Traitor
    The mix of mawkishness and polemic is naive. Children, though, will probably leave with a lot of good questions. A better movie would leave them with more.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Maid
    It’s rooted in observed reality and idiosyncratic individuals. It’s possible, Silva is saying, to live among people and still be terribly, crushingly isolated.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    An Education
    Best of all, An Education isn’t alarmist. It knows other people can’t seduce us if we don’t seduce ourselves first and that Jenny is level-headed enough to handle it and learn.
  70. The Damned United
    Hooper, the director, doesn’t include lots of amazing football sequences to upstage his star. He just moves everyone out of Sheen’s way. It’s about time.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Couples Retreat
    Everything about Couples Retreat feels plastic, though: the jokes, the trees, the extras, the attitudes. It’s dumbed-down entertainment aimed at a dumbed-down audience - the comedy equivalent of a McMansion.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bronson
    Bronson isn’t a story in the traditional sense at all. It’s a meditation on the art of rage - an action painting passing itself off as an action movie.
  73. Good Hair
    There’s a lot of Michael Moore’s ambulatory spirit in this film, which the comedian Jeff Stinson directed. There’s also a lot of the damning comedic commentary that made Rock’s old HBO series so urgent.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Visual Acoustics
    Essential viewing for builders, graphic designers, visual artists, and other optically inclined folk, but it’s a bit of a slog for the uninitiated.
  75. Araya
    While it insists that everyday lives in Araya are full of drudgery and toil, the film fails to produce a single ugly image.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Serious Man
    It’s a work of cruel comic genius, in some ways even crueler than “No Country for Old Men.’’
  77. Whip It
    Most crucially, Barrymore encourages Page to just let herself go. The sight of her making her way up residential streets in a pair of Barbie roller skates or screaming “Marco’’ in a game of Marco Polo is simply joyful.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Zombieland
    What Zombieland’ has instead - in spades - is deliciously weary end-of-the-world banter.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Invention of Lying
    With The Invention of Lying, the British comic actor Ricky Gervais has come up with a wickedly funny idea for a movie - and then purged the wickedness right out of it.
  80. More Than a Game
    A missed opportunity is the effect of the school on the boys, and vice versa. Instead of sociology, More Than a Game focuses on personality.
  81. The Horse Boy
    Well-meaning but trying documentary.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Surrogates
    A reasonably watchable sci-fi B movie, a case of a good director and some intriguing ideas struggling to overcome formula plotting, limp dialogue, and a serious case of the sillies.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paranormal Activity
    Even at 85 minutes, the movie contains maybe 50 minutes that scare.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pandorum
    Pandorum is a dark, disquieting dream worth watching out for.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
    Slightly better than it should be. For Tucker Max, this possibly represents a triumph.
  86. Coco Before Chanel
    I could have watched this woman rip a piece fabric and turn it into a dress all day. I haven’t seen a lot of that. I have seen movies about a woman caught between two men, as Chanel is here.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Boys Are Back
    Tidily arranges its raw feelings about fathering and manhood into a decent, intelligent melodrama meant to soothe audiences and provoke no one.
  88. Fame
    It’s not a good sign when the first few minutes of a movie about singing, dancing, rapping, video-camera-wielding teenagers reminds you of a certain grimy horror franchise.
  89. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
    If we learn nothing else about Krasinski as a filmmaker, it’s that he thinks more is more.
  90. Capitalism: A Love Story
    Redundant for a filmmaker whose work has always dealt with the dismaying consequences of this country’s profit motive. Isn’t every Michael Moore film ultimately about capitalism? This one just has a more facetious title.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Irene in Time
    Irene in Time is the initial first-run feature to debut at the Stuart Street Playhouse, Boston’s newest art house cinema. Both the theater and its audiences deserve much better.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    In Search of Beethoven
    Grabsky’s goal appears to have been more circumscribed: an introduction to the composer that speaks to both the classical newcomer and someone who has loved this music for years but pieced together its back story only from hundreds of disconnected program notes.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Informant!
    The movie’s fun to watch, but you can tell it was a lot more fun to make, and that’s a problem. The party stays up on the screen; down here, it’s been over for a year.
  94. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
    It’s not especially filling, but it leaves a pleasant aftertaste.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Love Happens
    One of those sticky dramas.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jennifer's Body
    Jennifer’s Body falls into the dispiriting category of dumb movies made by smart people, in this case a glibly clever writer and a talented director who think a few wisecracks are enough to subvert the teen horror genre.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Paris
    The best armchair holiday going - the cast is lovely to behold and the plot dips in and out of the arrondissements with panache. You almost don’t mind that none of it adds up to terribly much.
  98. The Burning Plain
    The best performance here comes from a Mexican child actress, Tessa Ia, as half of one of the fraught mother-daughter relationships.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Disgrace
    It’s a harsh experience, at times engrossing, at other times stiff and unconvincing, but it asks a necessary question: What happens to the country’s whites after white rule is gone?
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bright Star
    Bright Star is a thing of beauty and a joy for a movie season that needs it.
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