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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  1. A Better Life
    This isn't a case of a liberal-minded movie inflicting goodness upon a character but a man radiating goodness because, well, he is good.
  2. Just Like Us
    The idea that self-mockery makes people relax is tricky. One man's disarmament is another's minstrelsy, and the fine line is well worth another documentary.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Trollhunter
    What Trollhunter isn't is particularly scary, but in its defense, it's not trying to be.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Viva Riva!
    Writer-director Djo Tunda Wa Munga deplores the corruption, gunplay, and oversexed misogyny plaguing his country - and he's going to show you as much of it as possible before the end credits roll.
    • 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.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Another Earth
    Another Earth is being sold as an indie sci-fi drama, but that does both the movie and its proper audience a disservice. This muted story of atonement, forgiveness, and parallel universes is more of an extended metaphor - a work of earnest poetry rather than science.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Terri
    The movie struggles to find its shape throughout. Jacobs favors observational moments rather than linear narrative, and that's fine, but you still sense he's drifting toward a point that never quite coheres.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Like Crazy
    Like Crazy gets the evanescence of young passion right - the way it ultimately has to burn off, leaving us standing in an unfamiliar adult world. But it never convinces us of the fire itself.
  9. Sarah's Key
    Luckily, the movie has Scott Thomas. She knows her radiance can't be helped, so she uses it here like a searchlight.
  10. Life in a Day
    Macdonald knows plenty about crafting something evocative from unscripted material.
  11. L'amour fou
    The movie Thoretton's made, L'Amour Fou, is ironic. It's a term that conveys wild, passionate love. But there's nothing "fou" about the movie.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    Inventive and enjoyable but ultimately shallow.
    • 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.
  16. Free Birds
    At an hour and a half, the action in Free Birds gets stretched thin. It’s Thanksgiving fare, sure, but it only partly satisfies our hankering.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
    A fond, uncomplicated love letter to two irrepressible good-time Charlottes.
  18. Think Like a Man
    It's not much of a part for Henson. None of these characters makes real-world sense. They're walking chapter outlines.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Guilt Trip
    The movie's silly, predictable, and surprisingly sweet - the sort of thing you can and probably should take your mother to.
  20. Hotel Transylvania
    Some might say there isn't enough that's fresh here to recommend the movie in a big way, except that every generation of trick-or-treaters deserves its monster mash.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Elysium
    It’s a letdown, but this director’s still a talent to be reckoned with.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    The downside is that "The Hobbit" no longer looks like a movie at all. It looks like a video.
  23. Jig
    Jig is involving, if at times overly slick.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Man of Steel
    Snyder knows how to put on a show, and Man of Steel has a massive scope that’s hard to resist... But what’s missing from this Superman saga is a sense of lightness, of pop joy.
  25. Donnie Darko
    The debut feature from 26-year-old director Richard Kelly shows plenty of promise, but it's somewhat self-involved and won't appeal to audiences who like a straightforward -- even if fantastical -- narrative.
    • Boston Globe
  26. Attack the Block
    The movie's amateurishly made. But the script is full of little surprises.
  27. Oblivion
    Oblivion is a lot like its star: clean, cold, efficient, increasingly overblown, and not a little inexplicable.
  28. Vincent Wants to Sea
    This is a bright, broad, silly, harmless movie whose sweetness is a means to an end.
  29. Bully
    Bully contains some moments of real alarm and, in the school bus, one nightmarish motif.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    J. Edgar
    That J. Edgar never ultimately convinces - that at times it's quite entertainingly bad - can be blamed on both an unfocused script and the project's very bigness. Somewhere in this ambitious, meticulously produced epic is a small love story struggling to get out.
  31. Septien
    A microscopic piece of shoestring weirdness-slash-hipster regionalism that the actor Robert Longstreet delivers into some odder, funkier, altogether mysterious place. I don't know what he's doing or what he's going for. But unlike the rest of the movie, his bizarreness seems authentic rather than forced or put on.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Host
    The Host will make perfect sense to 12-year-old girls, while their college-age sisters will probably laugh themselves sick and their mothers will look at Hurt and wonder when he got so old.
  33. The Tree
    This is an easy movie to watch. If only Julie Bertuccelli had more trust in her most interesting stuff.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    This Is 40
    The best scenes - the only time This Is 40 taps into genuinely messy comic anxiety - feature Brooks, who shpritzes shabby false confidence as Pete's pop, saddled with a younger wife and triplets he can't tell apart. Otherwise, the movie never quite comes to a point.
  35. Turbo
    Turbo makes an entertaining go of it by borrowing very liberally from the “Fast & Furious” franchise — Michelle Rodriguez even voices a character — and sticking a slime trail onto “Rocky” for the rest.
  36. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    How to Train Your Dragon 2 recaptures those lyrical highs. But returning writer-director Dean DeBlois also aims to layer on more poignancy for Baruchel and his castmates to play. At points, we’re left feeling a little detached.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mozart's Sister
    It's a lovely dream that, in the end, feels too dreamlike. The director coaxes an intentionally passive performance from his daughter Marie, so that Nannerl's eventual waking to cold patriarchal reality doesn't sting as it might.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Revenge of the Electric Car
    The follow-up, Revenge of the Electric Car, arrives today and it's a lesser animal, more hopeful but also more complex and lacking the focused urgency of the original.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Outrage
    The filmmaking is cool, watchful, and ultimately too distanced. Outrage isn't outrageous enough, and it hurts.
  40. The Hedgehog
    Achache's direction is deft and assured. She lends the film a nice, easy rhythm that conceals the story's alternating whimsy and melodrama and almost compensates for them (almost).
  41. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    It's slambang in pacing, bald in exposition, and offers cast-of-hundreds spectacle.
  42. Undefeated
    The movie charts its nine-game winning streak and post-season. If there's a problem, it's that there are too few moments like that one with Chavis in the locker room.
  43. Les Miserables
    After 2½ hours, the movie's become a bowl of trail mix - you're picking out the nuts you don't like and hoping the next bite doesn't contain any craisins. All the carefully crafted misérables turns into a pile of miz.
  44. The Three Stooges
    How could the Farrellys not? It pleases me to report that the movie is far from a disaster – on a dozen or so occasions, it's even funny.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Anna Karenina
    The new film staggers under such a weight of self-conscious visual style that the story never connects with a viewer's emotions. Leo Tolstoy's classic novel has been filmed often, but this is the first time it takes place in a snow globe.
  46. The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    The family snapshots are more revealing. The sight of Colby wearing a tie at family picnics really says something about the sort of man he was. But they're not that much more revealing.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wuthering Heights
    If the new Wuthering Heights makes you uncomfortable, that's part of Andrea Arnold's game plan.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Norman
    Norman gets most of its punch from two terrific performances.
  49. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    Director Thor Freudenthal (“Diary of a Wimpy Kid”) finds his groove with a succession of flashy 3-D renderings... They’re digitized riffs on the Sarlacc pit from “Star Wars” and the finale of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” — but as with the “Potter” cribbing, when it’s done well, it encourages “Percy” audiences to forgive the derivative chunks and thin emotion.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    To Rome with Love
    A charming but terribly self-indulgent trifle that's less than the sum of its many parts.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Trouble with the Curve
    The script is by first-timer Randy Brown, but it feels as if it were spit out by one of the assistant GM's computers, so regular are its beats and revelations.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Great Gatsby
    It has in Leonardo DiCaprio — magnificent is the only word to describe this performance — the best movie Gatsby by far, superhuman in his charm and connections, the host of revels beyond imagining, and at his heart an insecure fraud whose hopes are pinned to a woman.
  53. My Reincarnation
    The story and settings hold interest throughout, but at times the very lack of emotional connection that Yeshi laments in his father seems to hinder the film.
  54. The Other F Word
    Full of slick editing and various zippy technical tricks: split screens, sped-up footage, song lyrics and other text (in wild fonts) superimposed on the screen. Sometimes it's fun. More often it's distracting.
  55. Lawless
    Lawless is very bloody - but the scenery and production design are a whole lot nicer.
  56. Footnote
    Footnote culminates with stirring gravity that you wish Cedar had the confidence - in himself, his material, and us - to sustain. Both Uriel's dilemma and his father's are unenviable, even as you understand the deep guilt, sense of conflict, and hubris this mix-up provokes.
  57. Sparkle
    It's a better movie than what's inspired it, but that fails to explain much. It's like preferring the line at the concession stand to the one for the bathroom.
  58. The Flowers of War
    The Flowers of War is the latest movie focused on the Nanking atrocities. Lu Chuan's "City of Life and Death'' was released in the United States last year and presented a far greater, grimmer, and more punishing re-creation of the sacking.
  59. Detention
    The movie itself is never truly clear. If it's also never intentionally bad, its unintentional badness keeps blasting into shockingly clever places.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Chico & Rita
    A likable but cliched star-crossed romance set along the post-WWII Havana-New York jazz axis, the Spanish-made film features terrific music, passable artwork, and characters who stubbornly refuse to become more than sketches.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    We Have a Pope
    Whenever it stays with Piccoli, though, it's mysterious and moving, struck by the humility of a man who's not up to playing God.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Chronicle
    Chronicle will never be mistaken for an artistic breakthrough, but it has a solid gimmick and pieces of it are brilliant.
  63. To the Arctic
    More storytelling and less preaching would have served those messages better.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    See it in the right sick frame of mind, and Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie can be shockingly and terribly hilarious. Or not.
  65. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    The movie doesn't exactly argue anything. It's mostly a collection of scenes and footage, directed by Losier in plumes of abstraction and unified by Megson's voice-over.
  66. Peeples
    Despite the derivativeness, Chism shows talent and shrewd instincts in the timing and direction of the comedy — she handles the requisite dinner table disaster scene with aplomb.
  67. Sinister
    The clichés are still clichés. They've just been renovated.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beautiful Creatures
    It’s all a big, gluey metaphor for a girl’s sexual fears and raging mom conflicts, and, as in “Twilight,” the metaphor itself gets buried under mounting waves of CGI nonsense and a ridiculous back story about reincarnated Civil War lovers.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Salt of Life
    The Salt of Life is about that moment in a man or woman's life when members of the opposite sex stop seeing them, and while the mood is jauntily sensual, the undertow is fierce.
  70. Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away
    It's better to see it on the stage... a moderately enjoyable film that lacks the awe-inspiring visual and aural aplomb of Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil's live shows.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Darling Companion
    Darling Companion would be instantly forgettable if not for Keaton, who imbues Beth with a sorrow, warmth, wisdom, and rage that feel earned.
  72. Whores' Glory
    Glawogger has the good sense mostly to stay out of the way and let the material speak for itself.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Headhunters
    It's crisp entertainment even as plot absurdities gum up the works.
  74. Payback
    Debt is bad, we can all agree, as is its conceptual cousin, greed. It would have been intellectually bracing, though, to have a Gordon Gekko equivalent on hand to argue otherwise.
  75. End of Watch
    The camera is just everywhere, from the point of view of everything. When I left the movie the other night, people complained of seasickness.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Delicacy
    "Unpredictable'' is one adjective you could use to describe the new Audrey Tautou movie, Delicacy. Others might be "charming,'' "offbeat,'' "droll.'' "Unfocused'' and "underwhelming'' also apply.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Face of Love
    The result isn’t a great movie, but it is an excellent guilty pleasure.
  78. Maleficent
    While this is Jolie’s show, obviously — and she’s terrifically arch — the surprising dearth of other compelling characters doesn’t offer much distraction when things get off track.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Noah
    Noah is equal parts ridiculous and magnificent, a showman’s folly and a madman’s epic.
  80. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    You could argue that the only thing that’s automatic about A Dame to Kill For, really, is some of the firepower that its hardcases are packing.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    42
    The ambitious new biopic about Robinson, is better written and produced than those children’s books, but it isn’t any deeper, and that’s a disappointment.
  82. The Good Dinosaur
    A very middling movie, it does have a nifty premise.
    • 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.
  84. White House Down
    Intentionally or not, Roland Emmerich’s White House Down is the comedy hit of the summer. No other film equals its comic sophistication. Each nutty scenario is surpassed by the next, ludicrous story lines coalesce with expert orchestration, and absurd details return with perfect timing to build to a crescendo of hilarity.
  85. Hit and Run
    Put Christian Bale behind the wheel, and Hit & Run would make a billion bucks - except then there'd be no room for Shepard, and that movie would hardly be worth watching.
  86. Pitch Perfect
    The college singing-group comedy Pitch Perfect isn't dumb, but Kendrick's participation implies that it might also be smart. And sometimes it is.
  87. Crooked Arrows
    The story is unique and engaging enough to transcend the uplifting sports-underdog formula.
  88. The Invisible War
    Rules and regulations, which the military is very good at, are about behavior. Law is about justice. The Invisible War makes all too clear that the military isn't very good at justice.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    2 Days in New York
    Chatty, neurotic, maddeningly messy, often very funny, "New York" spins in a lunatic orbit of its own.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cloud Atlas
    Unlike "Tree" or "2001," Cloud Atlas offers more answers than it does questions, and by the end of its nearly three-hour running time - which flies by surprisingly fast, all things considered - it feels like the most feverishly expensive late-night college bull session ever. There are glories here, but they fade in the light of day.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Arbitrage
    Arbitrage is a breezy watch, with good performances that don't cut very deep and an eye for décor but little interest in what it's decorating. What's missing, really, is outrage, or a sense of the 99 percent.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Unforgivable
    Everyone is equal parts emotional victim and villain in Unforgivable, an elegantly rambling Franco-Italian affair about the ways we do each other wrong while trying to do each other right.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Neil Young Journeys
    Neil Young Journeys is easily the least of the three documentaries director Jonathan Demme has made with the legendary rocker; but in its shaggy, eccentric way, it may be the truest.
  94. Farewell, My Queen
    One of the movie's strengths is how we see the revolution - or, rather the anticipation of it - not from the perspective of royal or radical but courtier and servant.
  95. The Well Digger's Daughter
    Say this for Auteuil: He has a sense of movie history. The closing credits include the equivalent of an Easter egg for lovers of film and especially for lovers of French film.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The World's End
    The World’s End is more frantic than funny, but it’s still funny enough — just — to outweigh its own silliness.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Conjuring
    The Conjuring digs up no new ground — indeed, it seems almost proud of its old school bona fides — but it plows the classic terrain with a skill that feels a lot like affection. The ghost that’s really haunting this movie is nostalgia.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Celeste and Jesse Forever
    The movie is sardonic, hip, heartfelt, surprisingly white, and for all its ensemble pleasures, it's squarely about a furiously prim young woman and how she learns to bend.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Avengers: Age of Ultron
    Ultron’s goals never make much sense beyond the basic kill-the-Avengers-and-destroy-the-Earth checklist, nor does he develop as a character over the long haul. He’s just a static baddie, fun to look at and handy with a quip but ultimately as dull as unpolished chrome.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    For Ellen
    It has a sense of drift that both vexes and beguiles.
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