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 1.1 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: 5,229 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. Not Without My Daughter
    Not Without My Daughter creeps up on you like an icy chill. Not since Midnight Express in 1978 has imprisonment in a foreign country been so alarmingly and intimately conveyed on film. [11 Jan 1991, p.69]
    • Boston Globe
    • 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.
  3. Forks Over Knives
    The film delivers a concise history of Western eating habits, with graphs and charts punctuated by entertaining real-life experiences.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Them That Follow
    The snake stuff is riveting — how could it not be? But Poulton and Madison Savage’s treatment of the rural community tilts toward the anthropological: A few corny bits of dialogue can make the parishioners feel like types instead of characters.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    One from the Heart (re-release)
    The movie looks great and sounds better, and its status as a pioneering work of cinematic eye candy seems secure. For one thing, it's hard to imagine ''Moulin Rouge'' without it. As a movie about recognizable human beings, however, One From the Heart remains a failure.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dark Blue
    In the end, the problem with movies like Dark Blue is that they willfully ignore the systemic, historical, cultural, and class causes of racism in favor of pinning it all on a few bad apples. Sure, that's entertainment. It's also a lie.
  7. Bread and Roses
    The reason Bread and Roses works as well as it does is that as didactic as it sometimes gets, its heart is always bigger than its ideology.
    • Boston Globe
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Flash of Genius
    The problem with Flash of Genius isn't that the subject is dull but that the movie is.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Brother to Brother
    A very good drama about the difficulties of being young, black, and gay. With a bigger budget and a sharper focus, it might have been a great one.
  10. You've Been Trumped
    The biggest problem with the documentary, besides the overexposure of its namesake, is length.
  11. It's Complicated
    Streep is in movie star mode, and she’s irresistible. But Baldwin achieves something not many men have been able to with Streep: You notice him.
  12. Back to the Future Part II
    The sequel goes down the tubes by spreading itself across four time zones and inviting comparison to the original by spending most of its time back in 1955, where another mess must be set right. [22 Nov 1989, p.35]
    • Boston Globe
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I Origins
    As a director, Cahill’s a capable and sometimes breathtaking stylist, and he accomplishes remarkable things on a modest budget, topping up the visuals with patterns, rhymes, and concordances.
  14. Unfinished Song
    [Terence Stamp] and Vanessa Redgrave, as well as supporting actors Christopher Eccleston and Gemma Arterton, raise Paul Andrew Williams’s entry in the golden age genre from mawkish to genuinely heartwarming.
  15. Casanova
    The movie treats trysting as comedy and yet is stingy with the laughs.
  16. War Dogs
    Hill’s braying-bro performance is indelible. Unfortunately. Go ahead, try to forget his more-more-more grin as he fires away, testing those Chinese bullets. He’s so grotesque you can’t take your eyes off of him. He’s also so grotesque you really want to.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rubberneck
    What’s good about Rubberneck is also what makes it tough to watch: Karpovsky burrows under the skin of this repressed romantic nebbish until the frame seems ready to burst.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Equalizer
    This Equalizer is a brooding, brutal origin tale, one that starts well but steadily caves into genre clichés. It’s a B-movie sheep in A-movie clothing, acceptable meathead mayhem as long as you know what you’re paying for.
  19. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    Slick, loud, assured, overplotted (way overplotted), fairly diverting, and pretty much empty.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sherlock Holmes
    It pleases me to report, then, that Downey brings his brain, his wit, and his gift for intelligent underplaying, even as he understands he has been hired to play Sherlock Holmes, action hero.
  21. Skins
    Maybe the redemptions offered are simplistic in the context of this place, but they make for a dramatic (if heavily foreshadowed) conclusion.
  22. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    A zestful genre outing, and then some, right up its final overkill.
  23. Cecil B. DeMented
    It's the cinematic equivalent of one of those prop guns where you pull the trigger and a little flag comes out of the barrel, waving gaily.
    • Boston Globe
  24. The First Grader
    You marvel all the more at Litondo's and Harris's performances, considering how much claptrap Ann Peacock's script requires them to put up with.
  25. Dogfight
    At times, there's no escaping the schematic nature of what's unfolding - such as the buddies' horseplay, and an ending that seems tacked on. But Savoca makes it all happen with a charm that overcomes the lapses in the script. [04 Oct 1991, p.44]
    • Boston Globe
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Opal Dream
    The film squeezes out its feel-good messages like toothpaste from a tube.
    • 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Extraction
    A meat-and-potatoes action movie that manages to extract the charisma from one of our most likable sides of beef.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Save Me
    An earnest drama about the futility of "rescuing" gay men back to Jesus, Save Me presents a paradox: It's an issue drama in which the most compassionately drawn character is on the other side of the issue.
  30. A Very Brady Sequel
    A Very Brady Sequel is a little like the meatloaf prepared by Alice, the Bradys' maid - padded, but palatable. It walks a line between evoking the old TV show and kidding it and it's as surprisingly lively a sequel as the original was for a big-screen treatment of an old TV staple. [23 Aug 1996, p.F4]
    • Boston Globe
  31. Mufasa: The Lion King
    The voiceover work is good and, as far as franchise entries go, it’s quite watchable.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Minions: The Rise of Gru
    The movie is fun: The music is unironically good...But with this many characters, the audience doesn’t spend enough time with any of them to allow for the emotional payoff the other movies in the franchise offer.
  33. Buffalo Soldiers
    For all the controversy surrounding Buffalo Soldiers, you'd think the film would at least be interesting.
  34. The Night We Never Met
    Despite the heavy-handedness of "The Night We Never Met," you feel there's a good New York comedy in Leight's future. "The Night We Never Met," although better than "Slaves of New York," isn't quite it. [30 Apr 1993, p.52]
    • Boston Globe
  35. Infinite Storm
    Not to get all Aristotelian about it, but for a plot to be more than just a succession of incidents, it needs some kind of mindful opposition to the protagonist’s efforts. This “Infinite Storm” lacks.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
    Perfume is a pitch-black period epic of squalor and enterprise.
  37. Rising Sun
    The film doesn't match the novel's adrenaline level, but is in every other way more stylish and intelligent...Smart, sexy, provocative entertainment. [30 July 1993, p.25]
    • Boston Globe
  38. The Commuter
    Neeson’s financially strapped character might vent even more convincingly if he didn’t somehow still have a BMW parked back at the depot, but we’re on board with him all the same.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lizzie McGuire Movie
    So who am I to carp that the film trades in the amiable realism of the show for just another watered-down pop star fantasy? Heck, it beats the Olsen twins. But not by much.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Leaving
    The only reason to see Leaving - and it's not a bad reason at all - is for the sight of Kristin Scott Thomas in a rare happy mood.
  41. Die Another Day
    Die Another Day is still as professionally mediocre as its predecessors.
  42. Dark Blue World
    A bittersweet world, and it's frankly one to which we've been before, but seldom do we see it rendered with such exquisite, if pained, craftsmanship.
    • Boston Globe
  43. Breaking Upwards
    The film gets stronger and more involving as the drama gets heavier and the couple’s rift grows.
  44. Take Me to the River
    Flawed as it is, “River” reminds us where all the great music came from.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Last Vermeer
    It’s handsomely filmed, well-acted, and hollower than it wants to be, with a mid-movie revelation that rearranges the moral stakes in ways that dampen the telling.
  46. An Everlasting Piece
    A slight but diverting series of set pieces.
    • Boston Globe
  47. Scream 3
    A lame little flat liner.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Game 6
    It's an inside-the-park home run -- a small, lovingly overwritten comic drama about fate, failure, and primal longing. To put it in words a Sox fan would understand, the movie hurts good.
  49. Adrift
    As he did with his "Everest" cast, Kormákur draws a strong, pathos-rich performance from Woodley, filled with moments of her character confronting her own mortality and looking back on safe choices not made. It’s solid drama, but also very slow going.
  50. Fever Pitch
    Effortlessly entertaining romantic comedy.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In the Land of Blood and Honey
    Like Jolie's public persona, Blood and Honey is both strong and headstrong, equally invested in grit and glamour with a hazy understanding of the line separating the two.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Monster
    It’s solid, well-acted, thought-provoking fare, if rarely rising to the level of inspired.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Winter Passing
    Winter Passing plays like two indie movies trapped in one film, and Zooey Deschanel is in the better of them. Will Ferrell is in the other one.
  54. Tag
    What’s most unexpectedly gratifying is how much energy veteran standup director Jeff Tomsic and his splashy cast pour into ensuring that this is legit entertainment, packed with gonzo wit and even some sentiment.
  55. Heart and Souls
    Heart and Souls is a sweet but wispy little comedy of ectoplasm that doesn't give its engaging stars quite enough to do. After a while, you're grateful for the special effects that let the film's quartet of suspended souls fade smoothly in and out while Robert Downey Jr. pretends to let them take turns inhabiting his body. [13 Aug 1993, p.45]
    • Boston Globe
  56. Migration
    Parents will be tortured by this film. If the whiny adult ducks and their even whinier kids don’t give them a headache, the garish animation will.
    • 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.
  58. Harsh Times
    The real problem with Harsh Times is Jim himself. Bale goes at the part with his usual intensity, but the character still seems like a psycho without psychology or a soul.
  59. Jackass 3-D
    What's astonishing is that the movie is not a half-baked production. The spectacle now LOOKS spectacular.
  60. A Knight's Tale
    A Knight's Tale, will either repel you or win you over. It won me over.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Human Nature
    It's just weirdness for the sake of weirdness, and where ''Human Nature'' should be ingratiating, it's just grating.
  62. A Dirty Shame
    A big, lascivious punch line about America's peculiar, embarrassed, hypocritical relationship with sex.
  63. Falling Down
    Slickly directed by Joel Schumacher, who sees that each and every button in this unabashedly manipulative film is pushed hard, Falling Down could have been deeply disturbing if it weren't so cartoony, so determined to glibly escape the moral consequences of the vicarious white-rampage fantasies to which it caters. [26 Feb 1993, p.25]
    • Boston Globe
  64. Posse
    In both senses of the word, Posse is a colorful outing that fills a real gap, a film you can respect as well as enjoy. [14 May 1993, p.45]
    • Boston Globe
  65. Transporter 2
    A sequel that makes it clear that the outrageous antics of the first movie had a one-time-only charm.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Million Dollar Arm
    An unusual story and sharp talents have been put through the Disney family-film machinery and come out flattened into formula. It’s an average movie, and that isn’t bad — just average.
  67. American Violet
    American Violet feels less like life and unreasonably more like the movies.
  68. God Bless America
    Some of this vigilante-fantasy misbehavior is wickedly funny.
  69. Three Stars
    Maybe because Hachmeister has a background in journalism, his movie endeavors to educate by covering a lot of ground in its 90-plus minutes, which is certainly commendable, it's just not that satisfying.
  70. Religulous
    The film has a habit of cutting away from interviews for Maher's commentary during the drive to the next location. You can see him trying to work the car for a laugh.
  71. Jumping the Broom
    It's a self-conscious, inherently absurd tale of a rich black family invaded by secrets, lies, working-class loudmouths, and one or two pairs of pants found down around the ankles.
  72. The Family Stone
    The movie is a holiday romantic comedy that wants to put the holiday romantic comedy out of business.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Glass Castle
    It’s a watchable disappointment that leaves mostly frustration in its wake.
  74. Rabid
    A characteristic early offering from horror icon David Cronenberg, rough production values and all. [30 May 2004]
    • Boston Globe
  75. Genius
    The film is surprisingly light on conflict and definitely goes a bit heavy on period bromantic bonhomie. Even so, it’s an intriguing study of the personalities and torturous process behind some of the early 20th century’s great writing.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Crazies
    Does what an exploitation movie should: It gets in, it scares you silly, and it gets out, all while playing fair by the audience.
  77. Adam
    Is a man with Asperger’s boyfriend material? It’s difficult to determine how we wind up here, but it’s strange that a movie ostensibly about a man and his lack of social options left me depressed about a woman and hers.
    • 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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cabin Fever
    Doesn't have the gonzo wit of ''Re-Animator'' or ''Evil Dead 2,'' nor is it flat-out terrifying like ''The Texas Chainsaw Massacre'' or even a zombie-come-lately like this year's ''28 Days Later.''
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    The result is a revenge thriller that's too taken with its own ambience to actually thrill.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Greedy Lying Bastards
    The film’s zippy graphics are a treat, but its zippy arguments are slipshod.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Radioactive
    Pike understands the woman she’s playing was a genius and that genius is rarely likable; her performance bristles with charismatic impatience.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Race
    Race wants so badly to get every last bit of the big picture that it dashes past the little details that actually tell a story. Like an over-trained athlete who pulls a hamstring in the big race, the movie tries to do it all and comes up short.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    On the Road
    A straightforward and rather sane version of the events described in the book and, against all odds, a surprisingly effective movie.
  85. The Indian Runner
    It's got flaws, but, more important, it's keenly felt and it boils off the screen with urgency. [13 Dec 1991, p.66]
    • Boston Globe
  86. The Details
    Manages to be both compelling and unsatisfying. But what limits it isn't lack of execution. The movie is many things, but a mess isn't one of them. Estes knows exactly what he wants. Whether it's worth wanting is another matter.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Nightbitch
    Nightbitch is a satire that needed to be more fearless and dangerous. Instead, its bark is far worse than its bite.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Watchmen
    The best moments in Watchmen, then, work as delirious music-videos.
    • 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.
  90. Saints and Soldiers
    For a certain kind of moviegoer, Saints and Soldiers provides above-average nostalgia. Others, more hardened, might call it child's play.
  91. The Chorus
    The crime of The Chorus isn't that it's corny. (I like corny.) It's that its corniness seems programmed.
  92. Deadpool & Wolverine
    Ridiculous even by superhero standards, it remains more or less coherent.
  93. Mermaids
    Frankly, Mermaids is the kind of movie that needs the strong personalities of Cher and Ryder, and is lucky it has them. They put the movie over. It has a weak script, and the direction by Richard Benjamin - who had two predecessors on this project - is so reticent as to be almost absent. There's almost no pacing or shaping to speak of. [14 Dec 1990, p.53P]
    • Boston Globe
  94. Lords of Dogtown
    The movie is like a daydream, and it's most infectious when the characters are in motion or misbehaving, which is often.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Diary of a Wimpy Kid
    Diary of a Wimpy Kid the movie returns Kinney's tale to live-action reality, and the party's over.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Focus
    There’s a terrific popcorn movie in Focus — a con-game romantic comedy that bubbles along on a playful high and that keeps the audience guessing in a state of delighted suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately, that movie is over after 40 minutes, and Focus still has another hour or so to go.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    How to Eat Fried Worms
    The movie has a pleasing skinned-knee innocence that makes you wish everything else about it wasn't so shoddy.
  98. Leatherheads
    The film moves slowly and steadily, but it's never exactly dull, just mild.
  99. Paper Towns
    Will miracles never cease? Alas, they do. Pausing pregnantly between clauses to add to their trite profundity, Quentin recites the moral of the story, and it’s as phony as the towns of the title.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tom of Finland
    In a subtle but wily performance, Strang never loses sight of his character’s innate sense of resistance. By drawing his way out of the closet, Tom of Finland drew a door for others to come out as well.
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