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. Lions for Lambs
    It does not feel good to report that a movie with Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise makes the eyelids droop. But that's what Lions for Lambs does.
  2. P2
    Amid the dumbness and disgust for paying customers, the movie does manage to cough up something I didn't expect: a performance so terrible you can't quite believe it's happening: Bentley's.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    War Dance
    This War/Dance is among the most affecting films I've seen all year; it cuts to the core of being and gives individual faces to sorrow and to hope.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Life of Reilly
    This charming, bittersweet 90-minute monologue consists of the actor telling tales of his childhood and early years, when he was an ugly duckling from an uglier family. The anecdotes are bruisingly funny and delivered with clarity and light mockery.
  5. American Gangster
    The result is kitschy entertainment that wants to celebrate Lucas's chutzpah and acumen while loosely condemning what they wrought: "Scarface" with a ghost of a conscience.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bee Movie
    The movie's not even close to Pixar standards - the animation is slapdash and the story construction's a mess - but the vibe is loose-limbed and fluky, and the gags have an extra snap that's recognizably Seinfeldian.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Darfur Now
    Slick, impassioned, and guardedly upbeat, Ted Braun's film is a morale booster aimed at US audiences rather than the 2.5 million displaced Sudanese tribespeople whose villages have been destroyed and families slaughtered. That we need a pick-me-up more than they do is pathetic, but there you are.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
    The triumph of this fond, uncontainable documentary is that it lets you hear that voice again loud and clear.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Martian Child
    One soggy slab of sentimental uplift, but it doesn't pretend to be anything else, and there's some honor in that.
  10. Sharkwater
    Undersea photographer Rob Stewart, who directed, wrote, narrated, stars in, and helped shoot Sharkwater, really, really loves sharks. He also fears for their future on the planet. His lively documentary makes you see why, on both counts.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    Compact, nasty, and altogether wonderful, a tale of brotherly greed and New York comeuppance that shows an old dog dusting off old tricks using new technology.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bella
    In this bilingual morality movie about love, family, and fate, however, the unpredictability turns out to be highly predictable.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dan in Real Life
    There's a great movie to be had in the notion of a busybody whose advice keeps blowing up in his face, but Dan in Real Life merely sets it up and walks away.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
    A documentary that falls somewhere between overlong and compelling as it follows the 39th president on his controversial book tour.
  15. Music Within
    It's everything it ought to be: right-minded, well-intentioned, compassionate. But it doesn't rise above made-for-cable public service announcement, either.
  16. Saw IV
    Getting to the true root of his evil may necessitate "Saw LX."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lynch
    Lynch (one) may be the documentary David Lynch wants, but I'm not sure it's the one he or we deserve.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    30 Days of Night
    A proficient, atmospheric fangfest that does nothing you haven't seen before but still does it passably well.
  19. The Comebacks
    As dumb spoofs go, The Comebacks isn't bad. It takes almost every sports movie of the last five years ("Field of Dreams," too) and blends them into a single slapdash comedy.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gone Baby Gone
    The joke's on us, it turns out; as a director, Affleck has come through with a sharp, morally ambiguous piece of pulp crackerjack.
  21. Rendition
    Rendition is a reminder that, in the wrong hands, political outrage can be a slog.
  22. Reservation Road
    The real problem with this movie isn't its trashy side - the "Death Wish" stuff is actually suspenseful. It's the creepy note of causal judgment that hangs over it.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour
    A dull little PG-rated spook story for tweener girls.
  24. Things We Lost in the Fire
    Were there such a thing as a low-carb melodrama, Things We Lost in the Fire would be it - all the tears, half the guilt.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wristcutters: A Love Story
    Turns out to be a sweetly grim lark: a road film through Limbo. It takes the self-pity associated with ending one's life and uses it for the purposes of mordantly aware comic fantasy.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    O Jerusalem
    Alas, it aspires to be an epic drama but suffers from an acute identity crisis: It can't decide if it wants to be history, drama, or a cry for peace in the Mideast.
  27. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Historians might demand a little more history from Elizabeth: The Golden Age. But soap opera loyalists could hardly ask for more soap.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Final Season
    The movie is decent and heartfelt, and it eventually settles into some sharp diamond action, but the small-town homilies are dropped like an anvil. If you thought 1993's "Rudy" was too spare and unsentimental, Final Season is for you.
  29. Lars and the Real Girl
    When a movie about a guy who orders a sex doll off the Internet can turn vice into virtue, something miraculous has occurred. Lars and the Real Girl achieves that kind of miracle.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sleuth
    The new version is a shiny piece of hardware that might as well be called "Sleuth 2.0," and it's exactly what you would expect from Pinter: very clever, extremely cold. Maliciously entertaining, too, until the halfway point, when you suddenly start wondering why anyone should care.
  31. Terror's Advocate
    Outrageous controversialist meets brilliant attorney, and fact intertwines with fiction.
  32. Why Did I Get Married?
    The most disappointing thing here, besides Perry's ongoing visual impairment (he deserves better cinematography and editing) is Scott.
  33. We Own the Night
    The movie's climactic car chase is as absurdly thrilling as it is innovative. Set almost silently in a blue-gray daytime downpour, it has a tough, improvisatory danger that makes the movie. If John Coltrane went in for action sequences, he'd have dug this one.
  34. King Corn
    It's fair to say that a meaner documentary might have packed more punch. But it's hard to imagine Michael Moore turning out anything that feels as pleasantly nourishing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Control
    The result is both a surprisingly lucid portrayal of clinical depression and dramatically a bit stiff.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Feel the Noise
    Old story, new beat: That sums up Feel the Noise, an acceptable if resolutely average low-budget drama set in the New York/Puerto Rican musical melting pot known as reggaeton.
  37. The Heartbreak Kid
    This remake is ultimately content to be repugnant.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Michael Clayton
    Michael Clayton is about the gap between predatory professionalism and the sins of real life - about how those sins can corrode the hardest business suit of armor.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
    The producers - Fox Films and the usually reliable Walden Media - have tried to gin up the story for multiplex audiences. They've succeeded in making a movie for no audience at all.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lake of Fire
    After 152 epic minutes, ‘Lake of Fire’ comes down to this: If you’re not living this woman’s life, maybe you shouldn’t tell her what to do.
  41. Kurt Cobain About a Son
    A lovely piece of filmmaking, a gripping, minimalist marriage of sound and image.
  42. The Darjeeling Limited
    You have to admire that someone thought it’d be cool to assemble three of the movies’ most fascinating noses for a 90-minute romp.
  43. Trade
    Human trafficking is an awful societal issue, and Trade happens to be an awful movie about human trafficking.
  44. Feast of Love
    The bodies are athletic, young, and white, and yet this is not the sport sex we usually see in Hollywood movies. It's the sex of adulation. Sometimes the director Robert Benton goes heavy on the hydraulic positioning, but his movie is scarcely mechanical.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Game Plan
    It's painless, especially if you have a small child in tow, and the Rock, bless his heart, acts like it's all new to him. The star should do more comedy - he's got quick reflexes and a face that lends itself to cartoon double takes, and he's not afraid to look completely ridiculous.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Kingdom
    The movie ends on a plaintive can’t-we-all-get-along note, but at heart it’s a Charles Bronson flick. It mashes the revenge button the real world won’t let us push.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lust, Caution
    Lust, Caution is a disappointment coming from director Ang Lee, but it's a watchable one, and it rattles around in your head for a long time after you've seen it, as much for what it does right as for where it goes wrong.
  48. 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.
  49. Outsourced
    A sweetly acted and neatly executed social comedy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Into the Wild
    One such paradox, which Into the Wild doesn't note, is that those who flee civilization more often than not bring it with them. The bus in which Christopher McCandless died is now a tourist destination.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Last Winter
    The Last Winter sounds like a genre-movie platypus - a little bit of this, a little piece of that - but it stops short of laying an egg. In fact, it works eerily well.
  52. Good Luck Chuck
    This is less an affront to women than it is to comedy.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Resident Evil: Extinction
    This version 3.0 needs an upgrade.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sydney White
    Sydney White makes "Mean Girls" look like Shakespeare.
  55. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    The movie dreamily conjures up the outlaw's last months, and it's gorgeous, but long, cumbersome, and slightly shallow.
  56. The Jane Austen Book Club
    It's a lot like a pumpkin spice frappuccino with extra sugar and extra cream. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll leave with foam on your nose. So cute. As a friend said on the way out: At least no books were harmed in the making of this movie. And he's right. But that's only because no one really tried.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Across the Universe
    Hobbled by its vaguely insulting comic-book version of the '60s and by a humorlessness that can only come from talented people convinced they're creating work for the ages.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    December Boys
    A problematic memory play, shot through with honey-colored nostalgia, that backs nervously into darker matters.
  59. Dragon Wars: D-War
    You don't have to hand the folks behind Dragon Wars much (the acting, directing, costumes, editing, props, music, etc: They're all off). But when they decide to sic that giant snake and those prehistoric dino-birds on downtown Los Angeles, the movie turns shockingly watchable.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Eastern Promises
    This is the first time, though, his (Mortensen)performance seemed so much bigger than the film surrounding it. That he manages the feat with so few wasted gestures puts him in line with the greats.
  61. In the Valley of Elah
    Paul Haggis switches from the problem of racism to the problem of Iraq. The war is a better fit. None of the exasperating guilt on display in "Crash" has made it into In the Valley of Elah, a solidly made genre movie: the Army mystery.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    King of California
    A flaky, tedious, intermittently likable fable about being crazy in a crazy world.
  63. Mr. Woodcock
    The film logs almost all of its laughs when it's at its crudest, meanest, and most unfiltered. Everything else - and that is to say most of the movie - is a big, fat, derivative waste of time.
  64. The Brave One
    The movie itself isn't nearly as interesting as whatever it is Foster is trying to work out for its two hours.
  65. The Rape of Europa
    Here the result is often disjointed and frustrating. That 2,000 people lived in the cellars of the Hermitage during the siege of Leningrad is certainly remarkable but not altogether germane to the fate of art during the war.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pete Seeger: The Power of Song
    So there's a hole at the center of "Pete Seeger" that the movie fills with loving remembrances, testimonials, and new interview footage of the singer at his hand-built cabin in upstate New York.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    3:10 to Yuma
    Both actors are among the best, most intuitively creative we have, and whatever transpires offscreen in Crowe’s case, onscreen they only serve their characters. Neither man showboats here, and it’s a thrill to watch them work.
  68. Fierce People
    The platitudes in this gratuitously sentimental movie are taken a lot more seriously than the people.
  69. In the Shadow of the Moon
    It's so simple, so obvious - and a revelation.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Romance & Cigarettes
    A hilarious, touching, and (except for a dip into melodrama near the end) skillful blend of subtle emotional depths and a dazzlingly playful surface.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Shoot 'Em Up
    Absolutely not for feminists, lovers of period films, and anyone whose sensibilities are bruised by over-the-top stuntwork, it's a cocktail made up of three parts testosterone to one part brains.
  72. The Brothers Solomon
    This new goof might have been funnier still if the premise weren't so derivative, so just been there, done that.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hunting Party
    Genocide is hard to decorate with the trimmings of dark farce. The Hunting Party wants to get at political truths through audaciousness, but it keeps bumping into that problem of taste, only to back down.
  74. Milarepa
    Despite timely and worthwhile subject matter, there is nothing very inspired or inspiring in what makes it to the screen. Maybe they're saving all of that for the sequel, too.
  75. I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With
    Garlin's movie is beautiful in its own way. It also suggests that David's show would still be brilliant without the aggravation. I'm not saying that David should renounce misanthropy. But maybe he could curb less of Garlin's apparent enthusiasm for people.
  76. Death Sentence
    The cynics will slap their foreheads, the squeamish will cover their eyes, but the revenge movie fanatics should be nice and satisfied after the whole ordeal.
  77. Halloween (2007)
    As with Zombie's two previous schlock horror features, "House of 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects," the atmosphere here isn't so much tense and jolting as unnervingly weird and gory, but it's effective.
  78. Exiled
    This intriguing story, like many tales of mid-20th-century American art, is fueled by testosterone.
  79. 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.
  80. Balls of Fury
    The movie flaunts its ridiculousness and offers a relentless string of jokes about blindness, groin-bashing, and bodily odors.
  81. Dedication
    Unlike most of what Moore has been in, Dedication is unlikely to delight retirement homes on movie night. But it's not imaginative, lively, or true enough to speak to its intended audience of American Apparel shoppers, either. It's a slog.
  82. Deep Water
    Deep Water, which had seemed like a sort of Conrad novel, takes on the aspect of Dickens at his darkest.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Illegal Tender
    The movie's a genuine oddity: a Latino action drama with one foot in bullet-spitting genre flicks -- '70s blaxploitation and '80s coke-kingpin films are the primary reference points -- and the other in raggedly personal family melodrama.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mr. Bean's Vacation
    Either you'll find the man hilarious -- or he'll seem like one of those awful, tedious comedians who only THINKS he's hilarious.
  85. The Nanny Diaries
    The movie's banal fantasies badly chafe any anthropological consideration of what a girl should do with her career. This isn't life. It's Lifetime.
  86. Resurrecting the Champ
    If most boxing movies are about redemption, Resurrecting the Champ is a boxing movie that goes to exasperating lengths to redeem its boxing writer.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Right at Your Door
    The film is low budget but puffed with self-importance, and it offers proof that Hollywood filmmakers should probably steer clear of topics that actually matter.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    September Dawn
    The movie isn't THAT bad -- it's just made-for-TV historical treacle that has somehow found its way to the big screen (and barely that; if you want to be moved or outraged by the film, you'll have to travel to Danvers or Revere).
  89. War
    Fun here is fleeting.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hottest State
    When Laura Linney turns up about an hour into The Hottest State, you can see the movie that might have been.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hannah Takes the Stairs
    Shot with intentionally banal anti-style - minimal soundtrack music, found sound, jitter-cam - the movie achieves a wisdom that's bigger than it seems.
  92. Superbad
    As films about the young and the horny go, I preferred the smarter approach director Jeffrey Blitz takes in "Rocket Science."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Death at a Funeral
    Death" builds slowly and inexorably to a comic explosion that's just too good -- too insanely, impossibly mortifying -- to spoil here. Let's just say it dwarfs everything that has come before it.
  94. Them
    Technique is all you have to admire. There's nothing underneath the formal exercise. The film's coyness about what's happening is cheap.
  95. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet)
    The title is Portuguese for "send a bullet" and the clever American tag line is "the rich steal from the poor; the poor steal the rich."
  96. The 11th Hour
    The word bears repeating, so everyone from Andrew Weil to Stephen Hawking to Mikhail Gorbachev is here to speak the still-inconvenient truth. The filmmaking, however, is far more relentless than in that Oscar-winning Al Gore slide show.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Invasion
    Buried somewhere within the bipolar extravaganza that is The Invasion is an awfully good movie that got away.
  98. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    A portrait of two different men whose compulsion for Donkey Kong is hilarious.
  99. The Last Legion
    The film is nothing to be ashamed of (especially if you're Kingsley). But it's as if everybody involved knows what the deal is.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Delirious
    Everyone here is obsessed with finding "the real thing" - the next hot actor, the next revealing paparazzi shot, the lover or the friend who'll make it all worthwhile. Everyone settles for the illusion of reality instead. It's prettier, and it doesn't hurt so much.
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