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. Brick Lane
    Easily, the best character in the film is Nazneen's tubby husband, who's been angling to take the family back to Bangladesh.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    The period ambience, comforting yet urgent, is the best part of Kit Kittredge - that and Breslin, who never once gets actressy.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Happening
    You feel like you're not watching the end of the world but the end of a career.
  4. The Incredible Hulk
    There's a certain pleasure to be had in some of the physical blowouts.
  5. Chris & Don. A Love Story
    As loving and welcome as Chris & Don is, it's not well enough conceived to create equilibrium among its many parts.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Winnipeg
    Maddin's Winnipeg is a rich, funky, funny stew of fears and desires, of mangled civic chronology mashed up with hothouse private emotions. This is a secret history, and it's a wonder.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Beauty in Trouble
    This being a Czech film, drama, comedy, history, and social commentary are served up in equal proportion.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Encounters at the End of the World
    Does Antarctica attract dreamers or create them? It's a thread that runs throughout the film.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kung Fu Panda
    Kung Fu Panda goes nowhere surprising even as its images unscroll handsomely before our eyes. The sound could go out in the theater, and you wouldn't ask for your money back.
  10. You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    Nothing has brought me more cheap pleasure at a movie this year than the sight of shampoo and conditioner bottles falling off a rocking wall while comedian Alec Mapa, as a fellow stylist, tries to keep a straight face. He does a much better job than I did.
  11. Mongol: The Rise of Genghis Khan
    Even at the movie's most ridiculous (and Mongol is not without its ridiculous moments), this is a picture you laugh with more than laugh at.
  12. Mother of Tears
    Argento set a standard a lot of moviemakers are desperate to surpass. It's not simply that he's crazy about gore and supernatural hokum. It's that he understands that storytelling is both an art and a craft. His filmmaking carries you along on the illusion of effortlessness; amusement, suspense, a certain elegance follow.
  13. The Promotion
    A good, occasionally insightful workplace comedy.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Operation Filmmaker
    It spreads the punishment around, from the executive suites of Hollywood to the mean streets of Baghdad. Everyone here comes out smelling bad - that's why the film's so good.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bigger Stronger Faster*
    A hugely entertaining personal documentary about what steroids mean to American pop culture.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Foot Fist Way
    The film itself suggests a sketch video on Ferrell and McKay's "Funny or Die" website, padded out to the dimensions of a character comedy.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Savage Grace
    A chilly inquest into very bad behavior, Savage Grace is presented to us like an entrée at a five-star French restaurant. It's decadence under glass.
  18. Sex and the City
    For the moment, King has restored women to their rightful place in a genre that is nothing without them. But, sadly, that genre isn't romantic comedy. It's the chick flick.
  19. The Strangers
    A horror film with a moral. No matter how nasty a gang of murderers is, the moviemaker calling the shots is ultimately worse.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Unknown Woman
    The movie looks great at least, and the cast includes such stalwarts of Italian cinema as Claudia Gerini and Pierfrancesco Favino.
  21. Stuck
    Gordon made similar lurches all over the map in his previous exercise in grotesquerie, "Edmond," which was based on a David Mamet play and starred William H. Macy as, of all things, a racist misogynist on a grisly bender. Stuck could have used some of that outrageousness.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Children of Huang Shi
    What ought to be the pinnacle of the story - the orphans' odds-defying 500-mile march over snow-covered mountains toward the relative safety of the Mongolian desert - is shunted toward the end of the film and compressed to a near-footnote.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    War, Inc.
    All that's missing is coherence. Call it Blunderbuss Satire.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
    Merely grand old-school fun - a rollicking class reunion that stands as the second best entry in the venerable series.
  25. The Edge of Heaven
    With impeccable skill, Akin has made a film roiling with cruelty but guided by tough political optimism. No, we can't all get along, but some us of are trying.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Jihad for Love
    Director Parvez Sharma, a gay Muslim himself, takes pains to show the wide range of Islam's attitudes toward homosexuality.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
    Take away the storming music and grand vistas, and it's all a standard sword-and-sorcery adventure; director Andrew Adamson is more than a journeyman but much less than the visionary Peter Jackson is.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Reprise
    Reprise is exceptionally smart about the crushing expectations brought to the table by those who love us.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Speed Racer
    The movie demands you be a glutton for sensation and then has the nerve to ask why you're not hungrier.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Fall
    The Fall is what you'd get if you told a fiendishly gifted graphic illustrator the plot of "The Princess Bride" and sent him off to come up with his own version.
  31. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
    An arch espionage comedy that's never as amusing as it thinks it is.
  32. Surfwise
    The movie feels exhaustive in its loaded 90-something minutes, showing and telling us much while leaving the meaning of the tangles and twists in this family open to interpretation. For once, the tip of the iceberg is enough.
  33. What Happens in Vegas
    When it was over I felt vaguely embarrassed. I wasn't just leaving a movie theater. I was taking a walk of shame.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Before the Rains
    The competent, at times suspenseful Before the Rains orbits us along a trajectory of innocence corrupted, domesticity infested by politics, and local tradition messed with by a powerful Westerner. Unfortunately, that trajectory feels routine.
  35. The Tracey Fragments
    Formally, the effect is like watching really cinematic confetti.
  36. Iron Man
    Downey appears to like all this make-believe. Even the clunky dialogue sounds witty out of his mouth. This is not a part that makes great demands on his talent, and his slummy approach to it is amusing.
  37. Fugitive Pieces
    The movie does offer intriguing, perceptive glimpses of the everyday difficulties of being both a survivor and the child of a survivor.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Made of Honor
    In Made of Honor, the leads are beautiful and everyone else is a freak. So where does that leave us?
  39. Mister Lonely
    Korine is finding his way toward artistic greatness by searching his soul. It's possible that the man in the mirror is him.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Redbelt
    What Redbelt reminded me of more than anything else was a modern version of a classic film noir, particularly 1950's brilliantly seedy "Night and the City," with its pro-wrestling subplot.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Son of Rambow
    In many ways, Son of Rambow plays like a pint-size, even cheekier version of the recent Michel Gondry film "Be Kind Rewind." Both are stories about people making movies not because it's their job but because doing so brings a vast sense of play into their lives.
  42. XXY
    The grown-ups in Lucia Puenzo's XXY are a glum lot.
  43. Baby Mama
    In this era of Apatow and Ferrell and Rogen and Wilson, of men monopolizing movie comedy, Baby Mama feels absurdly momentous, and even political. Fey and Poehler aren't just taking back control of their bodies. They're taking back control of their profession.
  44. Deception
    The movie actually does feel like an Americanized work of Hong Kong moviemaking. But the desperate, derivative style, the nonsense plotting, and leggy, horny women are applied like too much MSG.
  45. Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay
    Is a truly political stoner movie even possible? The entire point of getting high is to take some of the sting out of life. The movie goes after easy targets and goes soft on the harder issues.
  46. Roman de gare
    The 70-something director puts us back in luxury's lap with Roman de Gare, which looks just like the high-roller ads you get in the first 40 pages of Vogue or Vanity Fair but feels vaguely more emotional. Lelouch wants to tie a Hermès scarf around our hearts.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Standard Operating Procedure
    In Standard Operating Procedure, Errol Morris does something inconceivable and, at first glance, ill-advised. He gives the US soldiers of Abu Ghraib back their humanity.
  48. Then She Found Me
    What ought to be a bittersweet movie about a woman's momentary unraveling feels like a workout class: Cardio melodrama.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Up the Yangtze
    In his masterful and haunting documentary Up the Yangtze, Yung Chang shows the old China drowning helplessly under the weight of the new.
  50. Deal
    Deal doesn't really care about the characters as much as it does the World Poker Championships, where Tommy and Alex end up. Once we get there the movie becomes interesting because Cates understands the game and its dramas a lot better than he understands people and theirs.
  51. 88 Minutes
    I've seen Pacino over the edge. This is not it. He looks pooped and pickled. Maybe being the only thing standing between a megaplex opening and a trip straight to the $4.99 bin at Target wiped him out.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Forbidden Kingdom
    Unashamed about giving its audience a good time, and the high spirits go a long way toward counterbalancing the cliches.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Forgetting Sarah Marshall
    Predictable but still keeps you laughing along the way.
  54. The Life Before Her Eyes
    When the big twist is revealed at the end of The Life Before Her Eyes, you might think the only way to appreciate its cleverness is to see the film again. I did that. It didn't help.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pathology
    Even squeamish viewers are apt to be captivated by the tight, credible scripting; these 20-somethings talk and behave like today's irony-clad young sophisticates. And whatever your opinion of the subject matter, you can't fault the filmmaking.
  56. Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?
    I was not a fan of Albert Brooks's "Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World" (2005), but Brooks, at least, seemed willing to concede before it was over that his movie was a terrible idea. Spurlock seems opportunistically optimistic.
  57. Zombie Strippers!
    Shouting the title never quite prepared me for either how stripping zombies aren't as hot or as funny as I thought they would be or how quickly the movie's eager intelligence collapses on itself.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts
    The lack of a credible external perspective beyond the narrative provided by Glass, his friends, family, and associates, makes the film feel too cozy.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The First Saturday in May
    A compelling look at the price paid by the men who devote their lives to these extraordinary animals.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dark Matter
    The final act of Dark Matter is grim but unconvincing, and the shortfall leaves an ugly, exploitive taste in your mouth.
  61. Prom Night
    When Jamie Lee Curtis ran from a killer in 1980's "Prom Night," she was 22 and had a unique gift for belting out fear. She was the Beverly Sills of slasher flicks. That "Prom Night" was dumb, but it wasn't insulting in the way this remake is.
  62. Street Kings
    Street Kings is nonsense, and yet the crooked, racialized world underneath the soulless mayhem is pretty fascinating.
  63. The Visitor
    This is a film of our times - paranoid, heartbroken, disillusioned - and the rare recent American movie whose characters react the way actual people might.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Chaos Theory
    "Maybe" was watchable and blandly pleasant; "Theory" is a smidgen better than that, if not the cruelly funny farce the movie's best impulses and its own trailer would have you believe.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bra Boys
    Bra Boys uses reenactments to make the case that Jai acted in self-defense, but the tactic comes off cheap and unconvincing. Worse, the director never bothers to talk to anyone outside the tight coterie of insiders. Why should he when his brothers' freedom is at stake?
  66. Smart People
    Mostly, Smart People is a failure of imagination.
  67. Body of War
    To say the least, the film is awkward, like a piece of badly assembled Ikea furniture. Still, editor Bernadine Colish weaves together all that C-SPAN footage into a disturbing procedural indictment. Legislators use the same language - often the president's - to justify the rush to war. The repetition is comical until it's scary: They're parroting.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Young@Heart
    Sloppily made at times and it comes close to wearing out its welcome, but you can't blame Walker for not wanting to let his subjects go. And as the movie progresses, a viewer begins to understand why: These people are literally singing for their lives.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Flight of the Red Balloon
    The subject is the privileged state of childhood itself - how we're all lucky to have had it and how it so easily floats away from our grasp.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Meduzot
    In spite of the entropy, Jellyfish is close to a comedy, with a gentle sense of absurdism and a welcome generosity toward its characters.
  71. Leatherheads
    The film moves slowly and steadily, but it's never exactly dull, just mild.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Blueberry Nights
    Music and nostalgia are what fuel all this filmmaker's movies, though, even a half-baked translation like this one.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Nim's Island
    8- to 12-year-olds will have a good time, and you'll have a good time watching them have a good time. Otherwise, the film's an oddity.
  74. The Ruins
    A surprisingly effective little horror nightmare.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Shine a Light
    Shine a Light did something I didn't think was possible. It got me caring about the Rolling Stones again.
  76. Water Lilies
    A distant thematic and artistic cousin of Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and Lucrecia Martel's "The Holy Girl."
    • 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.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Flawless
    It's assured and neatly crafted - the time zips by while you're watching it.
  79. Run, Fatboy, Run
    Might as well have been written by a rushed piece of software. The program calls for a surprise engagement, a street fight complete with crotch punches, an apartment eviction, and a runaway child - all in about five minutes. As an obstacle course, this is mighty efficient. As comic storytelling, it's painful, not too far from being socked in the crotch.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    21
    The movie's chief audience, consequently, will probably be gullible and young, responding to the cliches only because they haven't seen them before. They have a word in Vegas for these people: Suckers.
  81. My Brother Is an Only Child
    Ripe, ferociously acted comic drama.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Priceless
    Priceless is a bauble - an art-house diamond made of paste that somehow still gives you good glimmer for the money.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stop-Loss
    Heavy metal, alt-pop, southern rock, orchestral swells, wailing Middle Eastern tunes all vie for our attention, but none of this noise drowns out the sound of good intentions twisting themselves into an impotent knot.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Superhero Movie
    How can you tell the target age for Superhero Movie is exactly 13 1/2 years? Because most of the jokes are Internet-related.
  85. Alexandra
    Alexandra is a pleasure to watch, but it's also one of those lovely, unclassifiable movies that flourishes better with repeated or prolonged exposures.
  86. Drillbit Taylor
    Drillbit Taylor sounds like a rediscovered blaxploitation movie or a name near the top of the NFL draft.
  87. The Grand
    A defective poker comedy where the poker is a lot more interesting than the people playing it.
  88. Shelter
    Shelter is a gay movie like other American gay movies. Boy meets boy. Boy comes out. Boys fight opposition. Opposition caves. If there's life beyond the closet, too few movies know it exists.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Meet the Browns
    The women of Perry's army will come out feeling they've been well-served, and for the rest of us there's Bassett, getting her groove back after a spate of less than worthy roles. Perry's getting his groove, too - I give him two more films and an A-list cameraman.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Shutter
    If Shutter is any indication, the reputation of professional photographers is still on the wane. Not only are photographs creepy, the film suggests, but so are photographers.
  91. Love Songs
    Sings in the key of life.
  92. Planet B-Boy
    It looks great and the dancing is the kind of stuff that would upstage the average pop star.
  93. Irina Palm
    Doesn't deliver on a lot of fronts. But then again it gives us full-on Faithfull, who manages to bare herself completely without ever actually getting undressed.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Under the Same Moon (La misma luna)
    The result is a genuinely cathartic night at the movies - which is one of the reasons we go to them in the first place. Art it ain't, but popcorn is rarely this skilled or seductive.
  95. Doomsday
    Marshall reveals himself to be a terrific showman of chaos and comic savagery. This is Baz Luhrmann's "Mad Max."
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Horton Hears a Who!
    It's a tough balancing act and probably a futile one. As greedily as Hollywood looks upon these books as a franchise to strip-mine, the hard fact remains that what's good about them - Ted Geisel's untrendy gentleness, humor, and intelligence - resists translation to the big screen.
  97. Never Back Down
    The movie is just a cheesy, preposterous, semi-eroticized way of yelling, "Fight! Fight!," when two people go at it in the school cafeteria.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    On Broadway
    The heart of On Broadway is in the right place. But when the story behind a film is more interesting than what's on the screen, that's a problem.
  99. Sleepwalking
    The movie seems terrified of true psychological complexity or perversity. It's less a family tragedy than a lousy country dirge.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Funny Games (2008)
    If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.
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