Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,964 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: 5,240 out of 7964
  2. Mixed: 1,556 out of 7964
  3. Negative: 1,168 out of 7964
7964 movie reviews
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  1. Flanders
    A powerful film of suffering and sacrifice and desperation. But it's vacuous, banal, and, where its mix of sentiment and grisliness is concerned, rather despicable.
  2. 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.
    • 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hollywood Dreams
    Meant to be an insider's tale, but it feels like it comes from the cinema of hangers-on.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Once
    Once is the first rock musical that actually makes sense. People don't burst into song in this movie because the orchestra's swelling out of nowhere. The guy and the girl are working musicians -- or they'd like to be, if they could make a living at it -- and they're played by working musicians.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    28 Weeks Later
    The script is biting and timely.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Delta Farce
    Consider this the sequel to "Ernest in the Army " that the late Jim Varney never got around to making. It's not very good but at least it's not evil.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Georgia Rule
    For proof that some actresses can take on a misconceived role and get out alive, there's Huffman as Lilly.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Casting About
    Voyeurism is central to the cinema and to acting, of course, and you'd better believe these women know it. Still, Casting About feels oddly disingenuous.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hip Hop Project
    And while the young director tends to skip over many of the larger societal issues plaguing many of the HHP participants, his desire to honestly platform the emotional heartbeat of his subjects still rings true.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Chalk
    The results are about what you'd expect: friendly, unfocused, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny.
  12. The Ex
    The next time Grodin attempts a comeback, it would be so great if he avoids movies where he might be upstaged by a sandwich stunt.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Provoked: A True Story
    There's an interesting movie in here, too, about the isolation of Indian brides brought to a new country by strange new husbands and mistreated, but Provoked rarely ducks below its glossy surface to go there.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    ShowBusiness: The Road to Broadway
    The film's slick and entertaining, an obvious must-see for musical hounds.
  15. Duck
    Writer-director Nic Bettauer can't decide whether to play Duck for tears or laughs.
  16. Day Night Day Night
    Astonishing.
  17. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
    The movie is a block of paper that, when Tsai's finished with it, becomes a chain of snowflakes. Loneliness doesn't often get such a gorgeously ornate tribute.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Brand Upon the Brain!
    How often are psychosexual lunacy and classic cinema combined so fiendishly well?
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Away from Her
    With a tranquil fearlessness, it goes beyond the death of memory, to see what might be found in the unexplored country beyond. The answer is both frightening and comforting: More love. Unspecified love. Universal love.
  20. Spider-Man 3
    Raimi, who shares script credit with his brother Ivan and Alvin Sargent, strikes an exquisite balance between pop and woe, drama and whooshing adventure.
  21. Lucky You
    Playing the character with this much girlish innocence is risky. Barrymore can seem dumb, but as Lucky You unfolds, we realize that the character is just a device to bring viewers into the parallel universe of poker.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Civic Duty
    Faced with a limited location and concept, Renfroe points his camera everywhere: The movie's seriously overshot, never settling for one angle when five would do.
  23. Paris, je t'aime
    As an ad for the city's charms, Paris couldn't have asked for a more sweetly jaundiced love letter.
  24. The Treatment
    The Treatment fails to do anything interesting with Jake.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Waitress
    Waitress isn't a great film, but it is great, deep-dish fun, with a generosity of spirit that extends first to the sisters on the screen and in the audience, then to the rest of humanity.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jindabyne
    Where it works best is in the domestic dance of death between a husband and a wife. Linney flutters with increasingly panicky intelligence throughout the film, while Byrne sinks further into his own bulk.
  27. The Condemned
    Just watch Austin on "WrestleMania" instead, avoiding the shower this movie leaves you wanting.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Invisible
    A fully felt, decently crafted teen B-movie melodrama, plenty preposterous in places but alive to the vibrant miseries of being young and misunderstood.
  29. Kickin It Old Skool
    Probably as tolerable as it can be for a comedy with no obvious creative aim. You can imagine the crew cracking up on some outtake reel, which honestly is what this movie feels like.
  30. Next
    A watchably absurd popcorn flick about a man who can see two minutes into the future.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Snow Cake
    Snow Cake is dazlious, too: overly forced, a shade too whimsical, but filling a void other words and other movies haven't the nerve or errant taste to confront.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Election
    Mostly Election tracks the shifting of power among men for whom power is all that matters, no matter how much lip service they pay to loyalty. The final sequence is a shocker but it's also completely logical.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Wedding Weekend
    The dialogue is brightly self-conscious, and sometimes it clicks. Just as often it curdles into an entitled whining.
    • 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.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ta Ra Rum Pum
    A tasty diversion from the usual Hollywood fare.
  36. Zoo
    Devor's sympathy for both the men and the animals is humane, yet his movie is palpably sad. A sense of shame cuts through all the ambiguity. You know less about what you've watched when Zoo is over than you did when it started. And that's what makes the movie so hard to shake.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Triad Election
    Set two years later, the sequel's the better film.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hot Fuzz
    It's to the "Lethal Weapon" movies what left-hand driving on a country lane is to a freeway chase: pokey, more than a little daft, but with a bloody surprise around every hedge.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Vacancy
    At its worst, Vacancy is merely the kind of taut B-chiller they don't make any more, other than to riff on them in "Grindhouse."
  40. Fracture
    You needn’t actually see Fracture to know that if the charge is acting that winks, these two are guilty.
  41. In the Land of Women
    In the Land of Women sounds like a piece of cheap science fiction about the last man on earth. If you're the lovelorn mother and daughter in Jonathan Kasdan's first movie, a grating romantic drama, that's painfully close to the truth.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Alice Neel
    For all the juicy storytelling, Alice Neel remains, in this film, a cipher: brash, grandmotherly, and beyond understanding.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Valet
    The new movie is tart and weightless, and it entertains without leaving a mark. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but at 85 minutes, The Valet at times feels like a blueprint for a farce rather than the farce itself.
  44. Stephanie Daley
    Tamblyn's surprisingly measured performance commands attention.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Red Road
    The movie trades the paranoia of modern omni-cam culture for a tighter, more personal drama, and while it sticks with you, you feel the missed opportunity like a phantom leg.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    Essentially, an act of terrorism against entertainment. It's inconsequential, potty - mouthed, extremely silly, and -- the worst sin of all -- dead boring.
  47. Pathfinder
    Urban and Bloodgood make the most of their parts, locking eyes and arms, and occasionally using American English as if the snowy 10th century were another way of saying, "Where the après ski?"
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Perfect Stranger
    After "Gothika " and "Catwoman ," a viewer has to wonder: Why does this woman keep making thrillers if she can't bring herself to be thrilled?
    • 24 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Redline
    An action flick loaded with cars, chrome, and silicone, is everything you'd expect it to be, and yet so much less: less character development, less believability, and most unforgivably, less escapist entertainment.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dreaming Lhasa
    It's a Tibetan film -- a rare thing -- made by Tibetans, starring Tibetans, and set in the increasingly desperate exile community of Dharamsala .
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Everything's Gone Green
    It's a charming disappointment that retains the elements that make the writer's novels so good without ever bending them into cinematic shape.
  52. Year of the Dog
    Shannon gives the movie its inner life. Maybe the movie will give her back her comedy career.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Slow Burn
    A veritable rip-off of 1995's "The Usual Suspects," Beach's crime caper not-so-subtly apes Bryan Singer's use of multiple red herrings and flashback-heavy interrogation scenes, but lacks the stylistic flair and sophisticated narrative skills to pull off a similar feat of cinematic intrigue.
    • 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.
  55. Disturbia
    "Rear Window" never comes up in the Disturbia press notes, which is probably just as well since it steals that movie's premise but none of Alfred Hitchcock's wit, finesse, or seduction.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Grindhouse
    Tarantino and Rodriguez want you to cover your eyes in disbelief and get the unholy giggles at the same time. You do, but in two very different ways, and that's the movie's strength.
  57. The Hoax
    The only thing missing from The Hoax might be a couple of songs. It's that breezy and fleet a movie.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The TV Set
    A tart, smart, closely observed satire of the television industry.
  59. The Reaping
    Long-delayed, pitiful excuse for a horror film.
  60. Are We Done Yet?
    The movie needs Richard Dreyfuss .
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Firehouse Dog
    And that dog -- or, rather, that digitally enhanced replicant -- is just plain creepy.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Black Book
    Black Book takes the conventions of the WWII epic -- the prison breaks, the interrogation scenes -- and undermines them with craft and muscle and the ripe lack of restraint we've come to expect from this director.
  63. Killer of Sheep
    Killer of Sheep is a drama that’s hardly at all dramatic, which makes it all the more moving. It’s quiet, unhurried, understated, unblinking. Mood matters more than style, dailiness more than incident. All movies are about other movies. A few are also about life. “Killer of Sheep” is one of them.
  64. Blades of Glory
    The film is quick, painless, and more than a little brave: not since John Travolta, Jamie Lee Curtis, and the aerobicizers in "Perfect" has so much Lycra been so abused for our pleasure.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lookout
    Promises minor pleasures and delivers them. In the process, it's gracious enough to kick in a few extras: a nifty central gimmick, a self-effacing lead performance, and a big slice of ham from supporting actor Jeff Daniels .
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Meet the Robinsons
    Almost as funny as it is hyperactive, the new computer-animated family comedy is luscious to look at and as fizzy as a can of soda popped open in your face.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    After the Wedding
    In After the Wedding Susanne Bier pushes the envelope further, toward operatic passion and the visual symbolism of Ingmar Bergman.
    • 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Shooter
    A stylish but essentially businesslike smash-and-crasher.
  70. The Hills Have Eyes II
    The director, Martin Weisz , doesn't lean on a lot of noise and editing tricks. He can relax, since all the scares are built into the Cravens' script, which invokes both "Goonies" and last year's instant-classic, chicks-versus-cave-dwelling-vampires flick "The Descent."
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Last Mimzy
    For smart kids between the ages of 8 and 12, the movie hits the sweet spot with a satisfying cosmic bang. It's a cross between "A Wrinkle in Time" and a middle-school version of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
  72. Pride
    It's called Pride, and, while it's neither as socially urgent as "Freedom Writers" nor as danceable and soapy as "Stomp the Yard," it's better acted and tougher to resist
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Reign Over Me
    In its best moments, Reign Over Me quietly says that we're our problem friends' keepers. At its worst, the movie IS a problem friend.
  74. TMNT
    The movie is a serviceable way to pass the time: Kids will cheer the bright colors and funny new words ("Kowabunga!").
  75. Air Guitar Nation
    A semiserious documentary about a cult of performance art that until recently was never meant to be taken seriously.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Boy Culture
    It doesn't know if it wants to wallow in its characters' pity or to flesh them out with their own personalities. So it does both, with half-hearted results.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Color Me Kubrick
    Color Me Kubrick digs all sorts of devilish ironies out of this "true...ish story," and it's a fine dark farce before turning sad and, worse, monotonous. The con wears off before the movie does, but while it's in the air, "Kubrick" spins with bogus cheer.
  78. First Snow
    It's a slow, moderately involving descent into the inevitable, with Pearce gamely trying to figure what's going on. Better him than me.
  79. Journey from the Fall
    Even when its wires are showing, the movie's soul is always evident.
  80. Offside
    As funny as it is sharp.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Page Turner
    The stakes in this story seem too low to justify its audience’s attention. If The Page Turner were a novel, it would hardly be a page turner. Why should we hold films to a lower standard?
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair
    It's an angry story, but also a strangely hopeful one, in the sense of new life sprouting through a battlefield. Above all, it's personal and specific, and that IS news we can use.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon
    The movie's a cheeky, low-budget goof on dice-and-slice horror films, but for all the visible seams, it's a lot cleverer than "Scream."
  84. Nomad
    The filmmakers don't appear to know what's important, let alone how to pace an epic for big drama and maximum thrills.
  85. Dead Silence
    This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll.
  86. I Think I Love My Wife
    The movie, instead, is a work of giddy self-sabotage that seems determined to matter and not matter at the same time.
  87. Premonition
    It's a movie only a psychic could love, since a psychic would know to stay home or see "Zodiac" instead.
  88. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    The historical scope of this story, as well as Loach's interest in absolute fairness, seems to have drained some of the life from its telling.
  89. Adam's Apples
    The movie is one long pose. But it develops into an idea slightly greater than its flippancy. The steady frenzy is whipped into a roux of two reasonably developed characters.
  90. 300
    There's a stale, synthetic airlessness about the movie. Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screensavers. It could be ancient Greece. It could be somebody's hard drive.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Host
    Mostly, though, it's "Godzilla" with a severe case of Murphy's Law, and it is never less than bizarrely delightful.
  92. Beyond the Gates
    Sadly, this is the sort of movie in which the white Europeans do all the talking and worrying with each other. The Africans, for the most part, are either terrified, cowering, wincing masses or corpses strewn in the dirt.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit and the Era of Predatory Lenders
    James Scurlock's documentary horror show has a critical message to impart -- your credit cards are out to kill you -- and a naive, ham - handed way of imparting it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Namesake
    The Namesake has a deep, alluvial poetry to it, like a mighty river reaching the sea. It's mysterious and ordinary, insightful and banal, rambling and precise, and it is altogether unexpected.
  95. The Ultimate Gift
    The message is clear almost immediately: charity not vanity.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Exterminating Angels
    Leave it to the French to take the joy back out of sex. The high-minded erotic drama Exterminating Angels has heat but little light; it speaks of pleasure while treating it as a dirty word. The cast huffs and puffs but the exercise, sadly, remains academic.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
    Part of the shoujo genre of gently fantastic romantic dramas about and for young teenage girls, it's also funny and creative enough to charm parents, brothers, cousins, and anyone else looking for an openhearted fable.
  98. Zodiac
    Zodiac is a kind of corrective remake of "Se7en," a renunciation of that earlier movie's psychotic nihilism. That rejection extends to a neat sight gag. Fincher gives us a shot of a cardboard cutout for "Dirty Harry" that mocks the personal abyss that catching Zodiac becomes.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wild Hogs
    The movie is this year's "RV," a rolling tent show of suburban male anxieties: castration, obsolescence, dismissive offspring, fears of gayness. LOTS of fears of gayness. Unlike "RV," though, Wild Hogs is funny. Eventually.
  100. The Cats of Mirikitani
    It takes a special first-time director to stick her neck out, personally as well as professionally. As much as anything else, The Cats of Mirikitani is a testament to good breeding.
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