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. 35 Shots of Rum
    I liked these characters, and suddenly not having them in my life anymore, simply because Denis has decided to start the closing credits, devastated me.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
    Ends on a note of triumphant populism, but the film’s bitter aftertaste hints that when we ignore the details, we only ensure they’ll be repeated.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I Can Do Bad All by Myself
    It’s the best Tyler Perry movie to date - the writer/director/actor/mogul’s most confident and competent mixture of uplifting black middle-class melodrama and low-down comedy.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    No Impact Man: The Documentary
    It’s like Sinatra said: If you can make (do without) it there, you can make (do without) it anywhere. The movie leaves it up to you.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Sorority Row
    Follows the imaginatively bankrupt trend of remaking slasher films from the 1970s and ’80s. This time, it’s a regurgitation of Mark Rosman’s “The House on Sorority Row.’’
  6. 9
    Any optimism in 9, which is bound to try the fortitude of meeker children, feels hard-won. It actually ends in a bittersweet mystery.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Crude
    So, yes, something needs to be done, and if it takes Sting reuniting the Police in-concert to sing “sending out an SOS’’ on behalf of the plaintiffs (among other worthy causes), so be it.
  8. Gamer
    For long stretches of the PlayStation-minded Gamer, the action does drag.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 0 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    All About Steve
    Easily the worst movie of the week, month, year, and Bullock’s entire career. It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.
  10. Black Dynamite
    Before an hour has passed tedium overtakes Black Dynamite - one corny martial-arts sequence turns out to be plenty - and all the good jokes dry up.
  11. Extract
    All we have here are bits, so many, in fact, that Extract’ feels more like a collection of crumbs.
  12. Amreeka
    It’s one of the richer movies you’re likely to see about average Arabs in America.
  13. American Casino
    It’s a relief to see a minimum of huffing and puffing on such a hot-button subject.
  14. The Final Destination
    The writers don’t write, the director doesn’t really direct, and the actors don’t exactly act. They wait for the movie’s contraptions to impale them.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mystery Team
    Mystery Team is a guilty pleasure - a deeply dumb movie made by pretty smart people.
  16. The September Issue
    What the movie unfolds is how the magazine is inextricable from Wintour’s vision of it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    We Live in Public
    Fascinating, like a car wreck seen through a rearview mirror.
  18. St. Trinian's
    Sadly, the movie is a zoo.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Big Fan
    A bleakly funny character study of a very particular species of urban fauna - the sports radio call-in fanatic - Big Fan’ is compulsively watchable.
  20. 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.
  21. Play the Game
    Fienberg’s film spends most of its time trying to convince us that true love starts when you stop playing games. Then, in the final minutes, it reverses itself and puts gamesmanship back up on another wobbly pedestal. The result is hard to cheer.
  22. Halloween II (2009)
    The copious violence, as always, is an assault - even aurally, as every thudding knife strike is made to sound like a boulder dropping on the theater.
  23. Taking Woodstock
    This is as safe and sweet a movie as you could make about America’s sex-drugs-and-rock ’n’ roll-est event.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Inglourious Basterds
    A manically playful revenge fantasia made from the spare parts of Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns and strapping World War II action flicks.
  25. World's Greatest Dad
    It takes a while for the movie to build to its wicked possibilities and only a few scenes to squander them.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Post Grad
    A disjointed patchwork of zany character sketches lacking in coherence and credibility.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Shorts
    Be warned, though: This is the multiplex equivalent of ADD.
  28. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    Swift, brutal, lurid, often overheated, and occasionally comical, but it’s also a serious, well acted, and unromantic exploration of the rise and demise of a terrorist gang whose radicalism ultimately reached beyond the young men and women who set it in motion.
  29. Fifty Dead Men Walking
    A richer movie might speculate on McGartland’s life now. How does a local hero survive in an anonymous void?
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Five Minutes of Heaven
    Five Minutes of Heaven’reduces Northern Ireland’s troubles to a gimmick, but it’s an interesting gimmick, and the two men hoisted on its petard work at vivid cross-purposes. If nothing else, the film’s worth seeing as a demonstration of opposing acting techniques.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    X Games 3D: The Movie
    You’d think the 3-D effects would bring the action closer, but the kooky optics often have the opposite effect, turning the athletes into GI Joe and Boba Fett action figures zipping around a dollhouse set.
  32. My One and Only
    The movie has a jolly, half-remembered quality, as though it were adapted from a particularly rose-colored memoir.
  33. Still Walking
    There’s nothing static about Still Walking.’ The presence of three kids sees to that, as does the eloquence of Kore-eda’s framing and compositions.
  34. The Headless Woman
    This is also the first of Martel’s films to build in a direction other than up. The film’s lateral movement continues a kind of class commentary.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    District 9
    The last time I felt the sort of outrageously kinetic action-movie high District 9 delivers, it was 1981 and George Miller, Mel Gibson, and "Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior" had just come roaring out of Australia.
  36. Ponyo
    A movie loaded with strange delights.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Time Traveler's Wife
    At its best, The Time Traveler’s Wife does suggest the preciousness of a life that’s too often beyond our control. At its worst, it’s more than a little nuts.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bandslam
    Bandslam is “Camp’’ with rock ’n’ roll instead of show tunes, but its roots go back to the Busby Berkeley backstagers and Mickey-and-Judy let’s-put-on-a-show musicals of the 1930s.
  39. The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
    You put up the cash, the movie clunks.
  40. Earth Days
    The rare ecological documentary that doesn’t nag us to run out of the movie theater and change the world.
  41. It Might Get Loud
    As documentary, it’s low concept. But it’s never dull.
  42. The Way We Get By
    Watching them issue hugs produces an involuntary response. You want to hug them, too.
    • Boston Globe
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Perfect Getaway
    A Perfect Getaway may not play fair by the audience but at least it cheats honestly. These days that's something.
  44. Julie & Julia
    This is blissful moviemaking. Much of the pleasure we have in watching it comes from seeing Tucci and, obviously, Streep connect.
  45. Cold Souls
    The movie turns what could have been a tedious meta-movie exercise into a sincere dour farce.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
    A loud but proficient slab of explode-o-rama summer blockbuster nonsense, perfectly entertaining if you like that sort of thing, extremely skippable if you don't.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beeswax
    It all feels studiously artless - some people huffily insist that Bujalski’s movies aren’t movies at all - but the more you contemplate his landscapes, the more his control over their various elements is revealed. He’s the real deal: a maturing artist obsessed with how and why - and if - his generation will mature.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I Sell the Dead
    A sweet, splattery bit of in-jokery; if it’s not actually a good movie, on some level you have to admire the chutzpah of a film set in 1850s Ireland but shot on Staten Island.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Paper Heart
    The movie’s a platypus: cute as the dickens but what the heck is it?
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Second Skin
    This is a well-made film that will seem revelatory to moviegoers unfamiliar with the huge, worldwide gaming culture. They’re going to be pretty hard to find, however.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Funny People
    What’s best about Funny People, actually, is Sandler, who takes the weird, resentful anger that has always coursed beneath his comedy and puts it right on the surface.
  52. The Cove
    The Oceanic Preservation Society doesn't change the world so much as call attention to something so very wrong with it. And in doing so, The Cove culminates with an image of political agitation that might be one of the most oddly effective public service announcements you'll see.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Thirst
    Thirst is deliriously bonkers and keeps getting more so; you watch it holding your breath, waiting to see where Park will zigzag next.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Aliens in the Attic
    Aliens in the Attic is conveyor-belt family product, an action/adventure/sci-fi/comedy made from the bland corporate DNA of Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. It appears designed for families who never leave the mall.
  55. The Collector
    Another helping of egregious slicing and slashing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lorna's Silence
    The Dardennes resist the expected cliches: The climactic scenes gather force and purpose and the movie seems headed for a breakthrough of some sort, but then it glides softly and unexpectedly to a halt.
  57. Not Quite Hollywood: The Wild, Untold Story of Ozploitation!
    It’s as slickly enjoyable as anything you’d see on VH1.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Flame and Citron
    Through a fluke of release-schedule timing, it arrives as the anti-“Inglourious Basterds’’ - a story about heroic Nazi-killers in which heroism itself sinks under bewildering crosscurrents of motive and uncertainty.
  59. Adam
    Is a man with Asperger’s boyfriend material? It’s difficult to determine how we wind up here, but it’s strange that a movie ostensibly about a man and his lack of social options left me depressed about a woman and hers.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In the Loop
    As a ranking cabinet minister in the brutally funny political satire In the Loop, actor Peter Capaldi unfurls dazzling verbal ribbons of the foulest language imaginable, thunderbolts of vulgarity that carry the force of precision carpet-bombing.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Orphan
    The best part of Orphan is the outstandingly lunatic plot twist that kicks in just as you're checking your watch and hoping they'll wrap things up. This development - I'd love to tell you, but you wouldn't believe me - boosts the movie into overdrive for a final 20 minutes of happy, disreputable mayhem.
  62. The Ugly Truth
    The movie has embarrassingly limited ideas about both the sexes and sex. Like Sandra Bullock’s career woman in “The Proposal,’’ Abby appears to have never heard of intercourse, much less experienced it.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    G-Force
    The general consensus on this one: Rats.
  64. Shrink
    This movie brings to mind much better cable TV shows like the marijuana comedy "Weeds,’" the one-on-one psychodramas of "In Treatment," and the astonishingly cinematic "Breaking Bad."
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    (500) Days of Summer
    It's an "Annie Hall" for the iPod generation: über-designed, pleasing to the touch, making up in generic sweetness what it lacks in bite.
  66. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
    Installment six of the Harry Potter’ series, The Half-Blood Prince, merely gets us one movie closer to the finale, which, apparently is so big (and by big, I mean “$$$$’’) that it’s being split into two parts.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Somers Town
    Somers Town, is a trifle: A short black-and-white lark with sharp edges and a soft center. It has its raptures, though, and then some. A disarmingly slight tale of adolescent friendship, Somers Town is one of those rare movies that seems to discover itself as you watch it.
  68. Bruno
    Brüno is what "Borat’" was too well-done to be: a publicity stunt about publicity stunts.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Humpday
    Serves up some caustic laughs before fizzling out.
  70. Blood: The Last Vampire
    The finale of this tedious piece of Asian-ish action-schlock based on a popular anime series implies an intention to make more. One was plenty for me.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I Love You, Beth Cooper
    Panettiere, I’m sad to report, is a dud as the title character, a supposed wild thang who never rises above the level of runty, obnoxious mall chick, down to the roll-on tan.
  72. Soul Power
    The idea is to share with us that this show happened. But gluttons for these artists and for music festivals in general might wonder, as I have, whether there's any way the filmmakers might share more of the remaining 123 1/2 hours.
  73. Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
    The documentary, like the series, is haimish in the extreme - cozy, warm, homey.
    • 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Girl from Monaco
    Doesn't seem to know whether it wants to be a sprightly sex comedy or an enigmatic little thriller. Unfortunately, it's neither very funny nor very thrilling.
  76. The Beaches of Agnès
    The movie is also more extraordinary than a mere scenic slideshow.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Public Enemies
    The parts, in other words, promise a brilliant whole. So why is this movie one of the signal disappointments of the year? You have to go back to the basics: Public Enemies has everything going for it except a reason and a script.
  78. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
    It's mostly flat, despite being presented in 3-D, and the writing is so unimaginative that at one point a character yells out "yabba dabba doo!"
  79. The Hurt Locker
    In The Hurt Locker, the thrill is unexpectedly contagious. You don't realize how riveted you are until you're back on American soil observing James in civilian life.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Sister's Keeper
    A pall of disaster, in fact, hangs over everyone in this shapeless, hankie-wringing adaptation of the best-selling Jodi Picoult novel.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Afghan Star
    One of the most hopeful and heart-rending movies I've seen this year.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Chéri
    What makes Cheri’ worth your while is that its true subjects are women and age, and its observations apply to both 19th-century France and the modern film industry.
  83. The Stoning of Soraya M.
    Director Nowrasteh seems to think the only way to save lives is to sensationalize death. You could trek to the theater and have this movie whack you upside the head. You could also just mail a check for $10 to the human rights group of your choice.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    2 1/2 hours of tumescence disguised as a motion picture.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Whatever Works
    Whatever Works is very minor Woody, querulous, fitfully funny, and removed from any shared reality.
  86. The Proposal
    Neither (Bullock/Reynolds) brings out anything good in the other, and watching them try hurts the eyes, the tummy, and the libido.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Year One
    Any good will the movie generates, though, is grated right back off by Black, whose obnoxiousness has lost whatever charm it once possessed.
  88. $9.99
    A movie that entertains and enlightens without being preachy - in fact, most of its beliefs are strenuously ambiguous; that’s a key part of the joke.
  89. The End of the Line
    This movie wants to cover every base without thinking very deeply about them. So while a lot of ground is covered in 80 brisk minutes, the information presented is only abstractly useful.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Under Our Skin
    Heartbreaking stories of patients suffering life-shattering illness make Under Our Skin compelling. It would have been an even better movie if the filmmakers had been more diligent in following the money.
  91. Moon
    Moon might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience for fans of Sam Rockwell. Will there ever be more of him in one movie than there is here?
  92. Food, Inc.
    The whole thing is as subtle as a watermelon in a bowl of Cheerios but necessary, nonetheless.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3
    By itself, the new "Pelham" is a solid, suspenseful tale all over again, so long as it stays in the subway tunnels and airless offices of the transit department.
  94. Imagine That
    Eddie Murphy in another mediocre family comedy? Imagine that.
  95. Tetro
    A family melodrama with charm.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hangover
    It's a worst-case-scenario of bachelor party morning-after, and it is howlingly funny.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Séraphine
    What Moreau does with this role is as inscrutably moving as anything Séraphine Louis painted.
  98. Away We Go
    In tone and plotting, Away We Go feels like a fairy tale built on an aggravating collection of attitudes. It's condescending, judgmental, righteous, yet sincerely searching.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Land of the Lost
    Genially terrible, Lost is lazy, sloppy multiplex filler, good for a few solid giggles and not much more.
  100. My Life in Ruins
    The problem with the new movie is the same as with the previous one. Vardalos has this idea that she's a marm. And while it's true that she personifies her movies, I don't quite buy her librarian mode.
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