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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    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Why We Fight
    An agit-doc of unusual depth. It has a point -- that the primary business of America over the past half-century has been waging war -- and it supports that point with nuance, research, and a willingness to hear the other side of the argument.
  2. End of the Spear
    It's not remotely as luscious or half as bold as Malick's movie, but it is shorter and more educational.
  3. Underworld: Evolution
    They're still fighting in this sequel. But this is a more visually inspired, muscularly made movie than its predecessor.
  4. Glory Road
    This is a movie you could watch in your sleep.
  5. Last Holiday
    Director Wayne Wang and his screenwriters sometimes ape ''Pretty Woman." But Latifah's obvious forebear is Pearl Bailey, who was just as regal and straight-up.
  6. Tristan and Isolde
    Franco can be exhilarating in movies -- tremulous, unhinged, a little wild. Here his jaw never stops quivering and his eyes stay welled up, advertising a breakdown that never comes. Not that Myles has a presence a man would fall apart over. She's too professional to drive anybody crazy.
  7. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye
    Pays high-toned tribute to its subject. How high-toned? Bach and Ravel play on the soundtrack as a honeyed light streams through the windows of Cartier-Bresson's Paris apartment.
  8. Following Sean
    If ''Sean" was about conviction and revolution, Following Sean is about ambivalence and resignation. In either case it's pretty easy for a funny-provocative kid to stand out.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fateless
    Fateless looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror.
  10. Hostel
    Not horrifying enough.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Promise
    Has a daft sweep, and if you're in the mood for empty swordplay in baroque settings, purple dialogue delivered with straight faces, and romantic yearnings that never, ever resolve, The Promise may be your cup of oolong.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Match Point
    The question that should be asked is whether Woody Allen has made a good movie this time out, and the honest answer is "almost."
  13. Wolf Creek
    Wolf Creek is ultimately all about the torture and the trauma. Happy holidays.
  14. Casanova
    The movie treats trysting as comedy and yet is stingy with the laughs.
  15. Rumor Has It...
    An embarrassing romantic comedy from Rob Reiner.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The New World
    The New World is something I don't think I've ever seen before on a movie screen: an epic lyrical dialectic. Self-indulgent, gorgeous, maddening, grueling, ultimately transcendent, it's a Terrence Malick movie all the way, and possibly the director's most sustained work since 1972's "Badlands."
  17. The Matador
    Shepard's Matador demonstrates what an Almodovar picture would feel like without his gonzo sensibility. It's Almodovar for heterosexuals.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Munich
    The director can work wonders within his celluloid universe, but when the time comes to hand us back to reality, he stumbles. With this movie, that hurts.
  19. Caché (Hidden)
    Maurice Bénichou does the most heartbreaking work in the movie, playing a friend of Georges's. It's a character and a performance I'll have a tough time getting out of my dreams.
  20. The Ringer
    Come on. You want to know if it's funny. And the answer is: kind of.
  21. The Intruder
    Enigmatic as it is, The Intruder dares us to see movies as visual marvels tethered to humanity.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cheaper by the Dozen 2
    Noisy, silly, gratingly upbeat, and piously sentimental, 'Cheaper by the Dozen 2 is what passes for wholesome family entertainment these days. It's the sort of movie to send small children and grandparents out of the theater hugging each other and strong men in search of bourbon.
  23. Fun with Dick and Jane
    Writers Nicholas Stoller and Judd Apatow remake is more devilish, hitting its targets with the reckless glee required for a round of Whac-A-Mole.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The White Countess
    A watchable disappointment. Sumptuous to look at, tastefully dull, and ultimately rather silly.
  25. The Family Stone
    The movie is a holiday romantic comedy that wants to put the holiday romantic comedy out of business.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    Tommy Lee Jones makes his feature directing debut here, and the film is as weathered, subtle, and sympathetic as the actor's own face.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Producers
    Susan Stroman directed the show on Broadway and what she has done here is photograph that show -- no more, no less. This is good news for anyone who couldn't afford a trip to New York and $100 tickets, but it's a fairly odd approach to cinema.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hoodwinked!
    One aches to think what the great "Looney Tunes" directors could have done with this material.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    King Kong
    It's not so much a remake as it is a loving re-creation of the 1933 original on extra-strength steroids, with a side order of Botox. You've seen it all before but most assuredly never like this.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Brokeback Mountain
    Brokeback may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Memoirs of a Geisha
    The film version of Memoirs of a Geisha is very like a geisha itself: a thing of exquisitely refined surfaces beneath which beats an ordinary heart.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mrs Henderson Presents
    Mrs. Henderson Presents is a very old hat, and Judi Dench wears it beautifully.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    A gracefully subtle metaphor about life's Deep Magic has become a war film; what was a one-chapter battle toward the end of the book is now a ripsnorting Armageddon that looks like something Hieronymus Bosch might dream up after a heavy meal.
  34. Marebito (The Stranger from Afar)
    It's actually a pretty lousy thriller.
  35. The World's Fastest Indian
    The film is at its best in Utah, both because in David Gribble's exhilarating cinematography we finally get to feel the full power and intoxication of the sport.
  36. Æon Flux
    Aeon Flux is the sophomore picture from Karyn Kusama, who's first movie was a modest boxing film called "Girlfight." Here she's in over her head. The movie's sexual and scientific ideas never come through, and the characters would be fun only if they came with a joystick.
  37. Transamerica
    It's debatable whether watching Huffman get dressed, take hormones, and learn to use a more feminine diction could sustain an entire movie, but the character is certainly a creation more original than a lot of the film itself.
  38. First Descent
    Less a documentary than a PR package with a chip on its shoulder.
  39. Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt
    When the film ends, we're haunted. We've been driving with a ghost.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mrs Palfrey at The Claremont
    It's an altogether satisfying drama -- the sort of movie some people complain they don't make anymore. So here it is; what's your excuse?
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Ice Harvest
    "Bad Santa" it's not. Bumptiously entertaining it is.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Just Friends
    Funnier than any low-rent rip-off of "There's Something About Mary" has a right to be. It's crass, it's unsophisticated, it aims right for the slapsticky pleasure center of the under-30 moviegoer's brain. So sue me, I laughed. A lot.
  43. Rent
    It's pedestrian.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Yours, Mine and Ours
    The movie equivalent of a box of generic macaroni and cheese: bland, easily digested, comforting, forgettable.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Libertine
    A glorious disaster.
  46. Syriana
    In its seriousness, Syriana has an absorbing, ominous roundness that plays even better with a second viewing.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    39 Pounds of Love
    '39 Pounds of Love is a heartwarmer that looks away from darker, deeper, and more troubling matters.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    Goblet of Fire is the entry in which Rowling finally took off the gloves.
  49. Walk the Line
    The film sends you home moved and in a tuneful mood.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zizek!
    Zizek is a revolutionary playing a comedian playing a revolutionary. Which makes him worth watching, even in this movie.
  51. Aristide and the Endless Revolution
    An absorbing piece of investigative journalism.
  52. Breakfast on Pluto
    Ambles along nicely, but feels as if it's never going to end.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Syrian Bride
    The Syrian Bride could be one of those big, teeming matrimony comedies like "Monsoon Wedding" or "Father of the Bride" but for the barbed wire running right down the middle of the aisle.
  54. Pride & Prejudice
    Jane Austen's novel has been rejiggered into a jaunty romantic comedy that leaves us as incandescently happy as its characters.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Derailed
    A tawdry, predictable hunk of movie headcheese, and I still had a pretty good time with it.
  56. Zathura: A Space Adventure
    Rarely is a movie audience asked to put up with so much noise for such a thankless payoff.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bee Season
    Here the foundation has been miscast. That's M-I-S-C-A-S-T.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ellie Parker
    Eventually the energy of the original short runs out and the movie coasts on fumes, but it remains surprisingly enjoyable for all that.
  59. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    On most levels his performance is as flat as his abs: very early Wahlberg.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Chicken Little
    Shiny and peppy, with some solid laughs and dandy vocal performances, but even a small child may sense how forced this movie is -- how hard it tries to be all things to all audiences.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jarhead
    All writers are entitled to tell the story of their own war, whether it's on the battlefield, in their head, or -- as is usually the case -- somewhere in between. Like it or not, Anthony Swofford did just that. Mendes, by contrast, tells the story of a Hollywood war, and it's simply not the news we can use.
  62. The Dying Gaul
    The film builds into a lurid and suspenseful thriller.
  63. Gay Sex in the 70s
    Yet despite the retrospective sensationalism, Lovett's 70-minute documentary is a sobering anti-erotic cautionary tale.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price
    The movie's masterstroke is to avoid interviewing the usual anti-globalist suspects and let solid, hard-working middle Americans speak.
  65. Prime
    Yes, Younger has made an update of the ''shiksa who changed my life" story in ''Annie Hall." But Prime is missing the psychological acuity and scabrous cultural wit of Woody Allen at his best. These lovers meet standing in line to see Antonioni's ''Blow-Up" and never mention the movie.
  66. Saw II
    The product of immaturity. It approaches suffering with a meaninglessness that must be a luxury for anyone who has never lost anyone, or is incapable of empathizing with someone who has.
  67. The Weather Man
    Dave is one of the most ineffectual characters ever to have an entire movie built around him.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    New York Doll
    You're left with the bewilderment and joy on Kane's face as he plays the old songs, and the sense of ghosts just behind his back.
  69. Paradise Now
    It doesn't take its ideas or its audience far enough. The result is a humanist potboiler.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Passenger (re-release)
    What's most shocking about The Passenger 30 years later? Seeing Jack Nicholson at the lean, sardonic height of his youthful powers? Finding a Michelangelo Antonioni movie with an actual plot?
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Three... Extremes
    Gore fans will want to bump the two-and-a-half-star rating up a star, whereas those who can't handle on-screen violence will want to stay the hell away.
  72. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
    This is a movie from the past that's also eerily of a piece with the film culture of now and tomorrow.
  73. Doom
    Dreary-looking and painfully slow, but it's not terrible.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story
    Just rent the kid ''National Velvet" when you get home. That movie's proof you don't need a true story to be inspired.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Shopgirl
    Still manages to be a Steve Martin vanity project in ways that are fairly creepy.
  76. Stay
    Neither thrilling nor psychological, but it's chicly shot and edited and is pretty much art-directed to death.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    It's a merry deconstructive delight and easily the best party in town.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    After Innocence
    After Innocence isn't bravura filmmaking, and it doesn't have to be -- this is one of those documentaries where the subject is compelling enough to do the legwork.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Emmanuel's Gift
    Directed in the breathless inspirational tones of an infomercial, the film's an acceptable document of a thoroughly remarkable individual.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Protocols of Zion
    May be the most successful forgery in the history of hate.
  81. The Roost
    Keep your big-budget horror movie expectations locked away in a separate crawl space, because this grainy feature debut from writer-director Ti West demands that you buy into the silliness, and the cheese.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Naked in Ashes
    The film pulls off the remarkable feat of immersing a viewer in their world without providing any insights whatsoever.
  83. Three of Hearts: A Postmodern Family
    One of the smartest things Kaplan does, besides getting talented Boston folk singer Catie Curtis to contribute to the soundtrack, is hang around long enough to see how this three-headed relationship plays out.
  84. Domino
    His [Director Tony Scott's] pornographic lust for bloodletting, gunplay, and out-of-control camerawork far exceeds his abilities to tell a story.
  85. Elizabethtown
    Audiences of a certain hipster disposition, in fact, will see Elizabethtown and pine for Zach Braff's ''Garden State," the movie to which Elizabethtown bears an unfortunate and inferior resemblance.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Fog
    This new Fog floats in on the fumes of the 1980 John Carpenter original, but the surprise is that it's arguably better.
  87. Where the Truth Lies
    An erotic thriller. It is also an Atom Egoyan picture, which means any claims either to actual eroticism or conventional thrills are theoretical at best.
  88. North Country
    It infuriated me. It broke my heart. It convinced me that Caro, who's from New Zealand, is a strong, clear-voiced filmmaker
  89. Finding Home
    Finding Home is well meant and earnest but is stretched to almost twice what would have been a comfortable length.
  90. Innocent Voices
    Not a happy time at the movies. It bears the distinction of bringing to the screen a dark nugget of history.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Loggerheads
    Slow, unadorned, compassionate, and earnest, Loggerheads is a low-fi throwback to the independent films of the 1980s and '90s.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Nine Lives
    Not all of Nine Lives clicks, but at its best it finds an inarticulate sisterly solace that makes you want to see what this director could do with one life per film.
  93. The President's Last Bang
    Writer-director Im Sang Soo's coolly stylized political satire doesn't provide a lot of answers, unfortunately, but it does show how the future of a nation might turn on a few drunken insults thrown around at a high-level dinner party.
  94. Henri Langlois: The Phantom of the Cinematheque
    A sound piece of profiling that has miles of archival footage of the affable, pop-eyed Langlois enthusing.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Good Night, and Good Luck.
    A puzzle: a hermetically sealed period piece so intensely relevant to our current state of affairs that it takes your breath away.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Gospel
    A heartfelt but muddled melodrama.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In Her Shoes
    Entertaining enough, but it's more pat than provocative -- this is what makes it a bona fide audience pleaser while keeping it from drawing real blood.
  98. Two for the Money
    It's as if a version of Oliver Stone's movie has been frozen in some fraternity house beer cooler since 1987 and thawed for the age of plasma screen TVs.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Waiting...
    Teenage boys will be in heaven. All others: Check, please.
  100. Before the Fall
    Unusually compelling, even if it's treacly enough to be "The Chorus" in goose step.
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