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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    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Woodsman
    An honest, honorable indie chamber drama that, if anything, errs on the side of caution. It benefits from a scrupulously observed performance by Kevin Bacon.
  2. Swept Away
    At its best, Swept Away is like a scrapbook of postcards starring two lovebirds with great tans.
  3. Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
    Alan Rudolph's beautifully burnished, heartache-filled evocation of Dorothy Parker and her Algonquin Round Tablemates bites off a bit more than it can spew. But a couple of things make it special. [23 Dec 1994, p.45]
    • Boston Globe
  4. Flashdance
    Flashdance makes liberal use of jump cuts, strobe lighting and hard-edged, post-punk chic in its dance sequences, it registers as the end product of energy being released by an essentially lyrical temperament. It charms us, makes us want to refrain from scrutinizing it too closely. [31 Jul 1983, p.1]
    • Boston Globe
  5. The Dead Zone
    It never really chills you, but then it never insults you, either, and it's more affecting than you expect any film based on a Stephen King novel to be. [22 Oct 1983]
    • Boston Globe
  6. Scanners
    The film is more interesting as a phenomenon than as a movie. [27 Feb 1981]
    • Boston Globe
  7. Poetic Justice
    While it's altogether smaller in its ambitions and achievements than Singleton's terrific "Boyz N the Hood," it at least allows Janet Jackson to emerge as a sympathetic presence, more credible than most pop singers making movie debuts. [23 July 1993]
    • Boston Globe
  8. Silverado
    Silverado plays like a big-budget regurgitation of old Westerns. Whatkeeps it going is the generosity that flows between Kasdan and his actors. It's got benevolent energies, but not the more primal kind needed to renew the standard Western images and archetypes. [10 Jul 1985, p.26]
    • Boston Globe
  9. Henry Fool
    Writing ignites miracles in Henry Fool, and Hartley's exquisite control over his compositions and pacing makes the outrages, biological and otherwise, funnier than you might believe. [01 Jul 1998]
    • Boston Globe
  10. The Quick and the Dead
    The Quick and the Dead is a sly, savvy Hollywood sendup of Sergio Leone Westerns with Sharon Stone playing the Clint Eastwood righteous avenger role and Gene Hackman the heavy. You'd call it a spaghetti Western, but the budget is too high. Maybe we'd better think of it as Hollywood's first angel-hair-pasta Western. [10 Feb 1995, p.47]
    • Boston Globe
  11. Risky Business
    Risky Business is the sleeper of the summer. It's a refreshing change from the usual dumb teenage ripoffs, the slickest American film since "Trading Places" and "War Games," and a strong directorial debut for Paul Brickman, who knows his way around teen fantasies. [05 Aug 1983]
    • Boston Globe
  12. Last Action Hero
    Last Action Hero is a spectacularly uneven movie. Its action is hectic, but scattershot and mostly pretty empty. On the other hand, it is entertaining in surprising ways. [18 Jun 1993, p.41]
    • Boston Globe
  13. Disclosure
    Disclosure is a classic guilty pleasure. You won't be proud of yourself in the morning for having watched it, but you won't be able to take your eyes off it while you do. [9 Dec 1994, p.53]
    • Boston Globe
  14. Sixteen Candles
    Screenwriter John Hughes, making his directing debut, is at his best when he empathizes with the sensitivity in the ugly-duckling Ringwald and Hall characters. [04 May 1984]
    • Boston Globe
  15. Boomerang
    The result is a megabudget "House Party" -- amiable, colorful, filled with glamour and style. [01 Jul 1992]
    • Boston Globe
  16. Renaissance Man
    It's a little too long, a little too corny, a little too packaged, but its warmth and regenerative energies make it a winner. [03 Jun 1994]
    • Boston Globe
  17. Traveller
    Traveller is a little too rosy and pat, but it clambers its way to entertainment value all the same. [2 May 1997]
    • Boston Globe
  18. Southie
    Juicy acting and an intense individual and communal commitment that seems to boil up from the streets carry Southie past its structural and technical limitations. [28 May 1999]
    • Boston Globe
  19. Coming to America
    The romantic stuff is tepid. Luckily, his onscreen buddy, Hall, never strays far. Coming to America is at its best when they're playing off each other, and not just as the prince and his buddy. [29 Jun 1988, p.69]
    • Boston Globe
  20. Empire of the Sun
    Empire of the Sun is an imperfect film, but at its best it's grand and haunting in ways that only a movie can be. [11 Dec 1987]
    • Boston Globe
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Metroland
    Bale and Watson make most of the film more interesting and watchable than it might otherwise be, finding flesh and blood in a script that isn't always equal to their talents. [23 Apr 1999]
    • Boston Globe
  22. Lethal Weapon
    The skies are thick with whizzing bullets and strings being pulled by Shane Black's crude script and Richard Donner's cement-mixer direction. Predictably, the chicks-and-ammo stuff is punctuated by TV cop show repartee. [6 Mar 1987, p.36]
    • Boston Globe
  23. Wall Street
    Oliver Stone's Wall Street plays like "Platoon" in civvies. It's a good bad movie, unable to muster the moral firepower of the earlier film, but entertaining on the level of a big, bold, biff-bam-pow comic strip that likes high-profile high-rolling more than it perhaps realizes. [11 Dec 1987, p.45]
    • Boston Globe
  24. Twins
    The attempts to supply heart are never more than synthetic, but Schwarzenegger, as the good guy with the good genes, and his goofy sweetness lift Twins into the win column. [9 Dec 1988, p.33]
    • Boston Globe
  25. Red Heat
    There's always something touching about the diligence with which Schwarzenegger soldiers through his assignments. There's a play of intelligence and decency in his eyes that exists quite independently of his bashing. Of the Hollywood tribe of virile fists, he's the one who seems most sensitive. [17 Jun 1988, p.31]
    • Boston Globe
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Little Shop of Horrors
    Obviously, it wasn't the plot that has given Little Shop such a long life. In the case of this film, it's the music, the sets and the comic sketches that make this remake mostly successful. [19 Dec 1986, p.77]
    • Boston Globe
  27. A Chorus Line
    Richard Attenborough's film version of the long-running Broadway musical hit A Chorus Line not only avoids the disaster that many had predicted for it, but is often surprisingly effective and enjoyable, transcending its troubled history. [20 Dec 1985]
    • Boston Globe
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    North Face
    It’s a literal cliffhanger and the next worst thing to being there.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Knight and Day
    The movie’s a piece of high-octane summer piffle: stylish, funny, brainless without being too obnoxious about it, and Cruise is its manic animating principle.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dinner for Schmucks
    Far from a classic of precision farce, but it's funnier than the trailers make it seem.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Get Him to the Greek
    If the movie’s all too predictable in its broad outlines, it’s scurrilously funny in the details, and it pushes its two leads and one of its supporting actors in entertainingly fresh directions.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Micmacs
    Micmacs is the equivalent of a circus troupe setting up a tent in a war zone: You're entertained, even delighted, but after a while you suspect there are more serious matters at hand.
    • 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.
  34. Too Much Sleep
    There are moments when faltering levels of energy and inventiveness threaten to turn Too Much Sleep into a nonevent. But it signals the arrival of a promising filmmaker and is worth sticking with.
  35. Barenaked in America
    Insights run more along the lines of which ''Sesame Street'' character each of them identifies with.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Group
    Is it one of Oprah's book club meetings?
  37. Empathy
    At the very least, some of the answers and observations offered up in this hybrid documentary/drama/thesis project will surprise you.
  38. Made-Up
    It wants, as Kate says about her documentary, to be a "seminal work on beauty and aging." But it wears like a gauzy romantic comedy.
  39. Red Trousers: The Life of the Hong Kong Stuntmen
    Fills you with a healthy respect for the men and women gladly risking their lives for your entertainment. The film itself works best with its into-the-camera reminiscences and on-the-set mishaps.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Trouble Every Day
    A success in some sense, but it's hard to like a film so cold and dead.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Evergreen
    An earnest, simplistic, affecting slice of low-watt indie filmmaking that goes where few American movies bother: below the poverty line.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Ciao America
    Eventually blossoms into a snappy piece about understanding yourself by listening to the personal triumphs and defeats of the past.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Last Dance
    Rehearsals are frequently more fascinating than the results. Last Dance, whatever its flaws, fulfills one facet of its mission in making me want to find out whether, in this case, that's true.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam
    A vanity film refreshingly lacking in vanity.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    39 Pounds of Love
    '39 Pounds of Love is a heartwarmer that looks away from darker, deeper, and more troubling matters.
  46. Drawing Restraint 9
    Slow but rarely tedious.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sisters in Law
    Despite the lack of an especially defined narrative arc, the people are what make the movie -- as they should in a tale like this.
  48. A/k/a Tommy Chong
    This isn't a great piece of nonfiction filmmaking, but it has its moments.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Heading South
    Cantet does something that educated, upscale audiences may find exasperating in the extreme: He takes a tinderbox of racial and sexual exploitation, pours gasoline all over it, and refuses to light the match.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Family Law
    It's a deceptively small film, one whose observations may continue to detonate quietly in your mind after the lights have come up.
  51. Stolen Childhoods
    As moviemaking, it's monotonous. But its insistence on breaking our hearts proves a reliable weapon.
  52. In the Pit
    It's an interesting, if dissatisfying rumination on the working people of industry -- how they labor, how they rest, what they think and feel.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Glastonbury
    As with most rock festivals, you had to be there, and if you're British you probably were, one year or another. In that case, Glastonbury is a pointed but essentially nostalgic tour of one country's more noble pop impulses. Otherwise, it's as muddy as Yasgur's farm back in the day.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Live Free or Die
    This isn't a great movie -- it's barely good, really -- but it gets something about New Hampshire I've rarely seen onscreen: a defiant pride in the way things don't work out. Live Free is a comedy of vastly diminished criminal expectations. That's the fun of it, and the frustration, too.
    • 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.
  56. 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Diggers
    The movie is strong and holding as long as it's shambling about in the Montauk dusk; when Dieckmann has to bring things to a resolution, Diggers turns ordinary -- sweet, but you've seen it many times before.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fay Grim
    Fay Grim falls victim to its own worried hyperactivity; it shuts you out with chattery paranoia. Hartley wants us to see the big picture, but he forgets we need artists like him to bring it into focus.
  59. The Method
    The movie doesn't trust that an illuminating comedy of pathetic people can be entertaining for long, so it sprinkles some hormones on the proceedings.
  60. Self Medicated
    It's worth noting that the movie's spiritual underpinnings are sometimes fairly subtle and other times veer into "Touched by an Angel" territory. The third act is downright Bible-thumping.
  61. The Price of Sugar
    Offers yet another example of how a lot of what we consume is produced at somebody else's expense. In this case, it's sugar.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Tuya's Marriage
    The film has an ending that anyone who has watched a movie in the last 15 years will see coming half an hour into the film. But even with that, the weight of the performances from Yu Nan and Bater is enough to make for a satisfying, if uneven, film.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    CSNY/Déjà Vu
    The film, like the tour it documents, wallops you in the face with politics.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    What We Do Is Secret
    One for the fans, even though writer-director Rodger Grossman and co-writer Michelle Baer Ghaffari labor mightily to spin it into something larger.
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Allah Made Me Funny: Live in Concert
    The point of "the official Muslim comedy tour" is that these guys are ordinary Americans just like you and me. Unfortunately, that extends to a lot of the jokes.
  67. How About You ...
    It's all terribly sentimental without being truly terrible.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mesrine: Public Enemy No. 1
    By the end, Mesrine: Public Enemy #1 has turned nearly as flabby as its aging antihero.
  69. American Casino
    It’s a relief to see a minimum of huffing and puffing on such a hot-button subject.
  70. Araya
    While it insists that everyday lives in Araya are full of drudgery and toil, the film fails to produce a single ugly image.
  71. 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.
  72. Daddy Longlegs
    Any normal mother or father, seeing how the movie’s protagonist, Lenny, ostensibly supervises his two sons (Sage and Frey Ranaldo), is likely to suffer cardiac arrest.
  73. October Country
    What results is both real and surreal, giving and self indulgent. That’s the country we all live in.
    • 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.
  75. 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.
    • 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.
  78. 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.’’
  79. 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.
  80. Why Did I Get Married Too?
    If Perry’s cinematic vision remains less than 20/20, his sagacity gets stronger by the movie.
  81. Warlords
    It’s all lavish, if disposable. But in a nifty change of pace, the warriors in The Warlords are interesting.
    • 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.
  83. 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.
  84. Oceans
    Unlike in “Winged Migration,’’ the majestic imagery fails to tell a story or advance a message.
    • 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.
  86. Iron Man 2
    Robert Downey Jr. looks as hung over in Iron Man 2 as he seemed drunk in “Iron Man.’’ He does his share of drinking this time, too. And the sequel makes more out of his insobriety. It has an early stretch where it fizzes and slurs, with the stars stepping on each other’s lines and feet. The movie feels drunk, too.
  87. Anton Chekhov's The Duel
    It just feels like playacting.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Just Wright
    Just Wright is as formulaic as they come, but at its core is a surprisingly tender romantic drama.
    • 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.
  90. OSS 117 - Lost in Rio
    Gallic humor translates splendidly when it comes courtesy of Moliere. The drop-off from that height is very, very steep.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Agora
    At the very least, Agora finally gives Rachel Weisz a role that almost exactly matches her intense, humorless, but undeniable star charisma.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    The film's lack of focus is almost criminal, but schadenfreude energizes Stone.
  93. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
    The result is sometimes charming and always visually astonishing.
  94. Never Let Me Go
    Amazingly, Never Let Me Go could have been assembled from the Merchant-Ivory kit. It's stale with suppressed anguish.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jack Goes Boating
    This is one of those rare movies that genuinely likes its characters and wishes them the best; as agonizing as it can be to watch Jack fumble toward human connection, Hoffman knows the fumbling's the point.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector
    A fascinating shambles of a documentary - fascinating because its subject is so influential and so deranged, a shambles because its filmmaker can't decide which approach to take and so takes all of them.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Girl Who Played with Fire
    Whenever The Girl Who Played With Fire threatens to stall, Lisbeth whips out her Taser and tortures another sleazy, abusive man into vomiting forth his dirty secrets. In Sweden, I believe they call this "light entertainment.''
  98. Winnebago Man
    The only real tension the documentary has, once Steinbauer has his first meeting with Rebney, is whether the filmmaker is celebrating him more than exploiting him.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Farewell
    It's a bizarre, provocative story and a moving one, but it doesn't access the richer levels and themes of the film the publicity campaign obviously wants you to think of: 2006's "The Lives of Others."
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Valhalla Rising
    Fascinating for its gonzo formal daring and brooding attitude, "Valhalla'' is still a trial for audiences seeking characters, plot, and things happening.
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