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. Land of the Dead
    Looks and feels like someone else's better-made schlock.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rize
    There's a delicate balance here between expression and belligerence.
  3. Yes
    The result is a unique time at the art house: a work whose badness becomes guiltily pleasurable, like a Harlequin romance novel masquerading as a dissertation.
  4. Lila Says
    Lila is all come-ons without any charm.
  5. Memories of Murder
    What's most remarkable about it is the way Bong builds real suspense and plays the chilling moments straight while leaving himself room for nonsense and horseplay. He seems completely at ease with the marriage of the silly with the serious. Only time can reveal whether he's a master filmmaker, but this, at least, is a masterful performance.
  6. March of the Penguins
    Touching and brisk.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Herbie Fully Loaded
    Blandly noisy and inoffensively average.
  8. The Deal
    Blame the unsexy subject matter if you want, but blame the uninspired casting first.
  9. The Perfect Man
    To be endured rather than enjoyed.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Heights
    Heights breathes, is briefly and immediately present, and is over. In this summer of noisy steroid cinema, such small favors are welcome.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Me and You and Everyone We Know
    Remarkably, ''Me and You" doesn't shock so much as soothe.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Summer of Love
    At its most interesting, the movie offers us the sight of people desperately embracing faith in the hopes it will pull them through.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Batman Begins
    In Batman Begins, Christian Bale gives us the best Bruce Wayne that has ever graced the screen.
  14. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    Maybe my priorities are wrong, but this inquiring mind wants to know when these two will find a movie entirely worthy of his understatement and her naughtiness. This one has its moments, but it's also littered with action-flick junk.
  15. The Honeymooners
    It's not as bad as the average Hollywood movie, it's stupendously worse.
  16. High Tension
    The horrible anticipation he [Aja] builds is derailed by a gimmick that makes the twist in, say, ''Fight Club" seem perfectly logical. To say more would be to ruin the movie, and why should I do that when its own makers have done it for you?
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
    One could forgive a budget this threadbare, performances this amateurish, a plot this tortuous if the 3-D effects passed the cool test. Sadly, watching ''Adventures" is an experience akin to seeing the world through dung-colored glasses.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Howl's Moving Castle
    The filmmaker's obsessions have got the better of him. That said, I can't recommend the film highly enough, since bad Miyazaki is still leagues better than anyone else.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    5x2
    It flirts intriguingly with the unknowable, what it shows us of the knowable isn't terribly interesting.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Keeper: The Legend of Omar Khayyam
    A vanity film refreshingly lacking in vanity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cinderella Man
    A broad, foursquare piece of populist filmmaking that happens to be tremendously moving.
  22. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rock School
    As a portrait of dysfunctional pedagogy, it's both refreshing and more than a little terrifying.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Apres Vous (After You)
    The movie is largely set in a busy Paris restaurant, and, not surprisingly, the food looks terrific. You may come out hungry for poached sea bass and a little starved for drama.
  25. Deep Blue
    A riveting and sobering way to spend a Saturday afternoon.
  26. Caterina va in città
    As much as the director andco-writer, Paolo Virzi, might try, he can't bring any of these people into focus. The movie is shapeless, too.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
    As female-bonding comfort food goes, ''Sisterhood" is that rare meal both adolescent girls and their mothers will be able to agree on.
  28. The Longest Yard
    Everyone in this overstaffed showbiz sampler has been better somewhere else. An assortment of talented comedians, character actors, professional athletes, sports commentators, one rapper, and two former sitcom stars sit in this movie like too much food on a buffet cart.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Madagascar
    Antic, cute, scattershot, it's a remarkable-looking but terribly uncertain bit of CGI fluff, with its richest humor off to the sides of the action and a whole lot of average in the middle.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bomb the System
    Visually dazzling and dramatically trite -- it's virtuoso piffle.
  31. The Fearless Freaks
    An uncommonly intimate portrait, in large part because the filmmaker, Bradley Beesley, is a longtime neighbor, friend, and collaborator.
  32. Saving Face
    Actually the problem with Saving Face as a romantic comedy is that its central romance is a drag.
  33. Stolen Childhoods
    As moviemaking, it's monotonous. But its insistence on breaking our hearts proves a reliable weapon.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    The real deal, an often awkward but nonetheless terrifically compelling high-stakes human drama.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    It's an account of what helplessness does to a man whose philosophy of life has been founded on decisive action.
  36. Mindhunters
    It's hard to have sympathy for a movie that tosses in the old shower sneak-up sequence or allows its characters to speak as obviously as possible while standing in a pool of red liquid.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kicking & Screaming
    It would have been nice if someone had included a script, too.
  38. Monster-in-Law
    By Hollywood standards, a movie carried with such gusto by a 67-year-old woman has to be considered a miracle. And I'm not sorry to say I enjoyed watching her do it.
  39. Unleashed
    Doing nothing special, Freeman manages to make the picture seem wiser, funnier, and more eloquent than it is.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mad Hot Ballroom
    Watching these pint-size Astaires and Rogerses practice the fox trot, tango, rumba, and swing is the immediate hook to Mad Hot Ballroom.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Mother
    Isn't for the kiddies. It probably isn't for anyone not interested in the darkest corners of the human psyche.
  42. Layer Cake
    A lot of the problem is that the picture's protagonist is both naive and foul.
  43. Kings & Queen
    The film is a tower of literary and cinematic references, tangential yet somehow essential characters, and one fantastic performance after another. It's a simple movie yet is anything but.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tell Them Who You Are
    In more ways than one, Mark Wexler gets the release he's seeking.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Crash
    Its characters come straight from the assembly line of screenwriting archetypes, and too often they act in ways that archetypes, rather than human beings, do. You can feel its creator shuttling them here and there on the grid of greater LA, pausing portentously between each move.
  46. House of Wax
    For Hilton haters, the stupid and grotesque remake of House of Wax will only stoke their schadenfreude.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kingdom of Heaven
    A mostly lumbering, occasionally rousing epic that walks a bizarre line between historical fact and Hollywood wishful thinking.
  48. Mysterious Skin
    The film is actually a major artistic breakthrough for Araki, a onetime bad boy of independent filmmaking. Its psychological intelligence, attention to emotional currents, and humanity are surprises.
  49. Brothers
    Piercingly co-written and directed by Susanne Bier, the movie dramatizes one man's collapse and the other's surprising maturation.
  50. Up for Grabs
    A rarity for documentaries. The movie is a full-tilt farce, and were it not completely true, it'd be a piercing satire that Preston Sturges might have polished into a resonant screwball.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Writer of O
    This gulf between a woman's public and private faces is an intensely rich subject that Rapaport glosses over.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Visually playful and often good fun, it never settles on a convincing narrative shape.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    xXx: State of the Union
    There are really only two kinds of big-budget action movies: stupid, and good and stupid. Surprisingly, XXX: State of the Union is good and stupid, which makes it an immediate improvement over 2002's meatheaded "XXX."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    3-Iron
    Dreamlike and the slightest bit precious, the film is a beautiful, over-cultivated hothouse flower.
  55. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    Like all of Jacquot's movies, it's not crazy enough.
  56. Funny Ha Ha
    A smartly observed, unpretentious, and unconventional comedy of manners -- or more properly, it's a comedy of mannerisms.
  57. The Holy Girl
    A collection of beautifully acted encounters, conversations, symbols, and vignettes woven into an evocative and unforgettably surreal garment.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ladies in Lavender.
    Likably played by Bruhl, the castaway remains more dramatic device than living, breathing character. And without him truly being there, Dench and Smith are just volleying an imaginary ping-pong ball between them. That's not acting -- that's exercise.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Another Road Home
    With pained gentleness, her film insists we make our homelands within us and take them wherever we go.
  60. The Interpreter
    A righteous but wrongheaded thriller, chokes on its well-meant outrage and leaves a moth-eaten plot and handful of nonsense characters on its way to a dopey finish.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Lot Like Love
    ''Love" doesn't have a plot so much as it has a concept, scribbled in crayon.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Double Dare
    Focuses on a parallel universe that moviegoers rarely consider: that of the invisible, hard-working craftspeople who put the illusion together.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Entertaining and enraging.
  64. The Game of Their Lives
    What the cast members lack in sharpened skill they more than make up for in raw gusto and athletic scrappiness (most of the actors have logged a lot of soccer in their pasts). These guys give a sport that is virtually nameless in the movies a good name in this one.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Man Who Copied
    What could have been an effervescent 90-minute experience is so in love with the sound of its own voice that it develops genre trouble and piddles on for two-plus hours.
  66. The Amityville Horror
    The latest cannibalization of a popular older horror film.
  67. House of D
    House of D, is like the kind of sticky greeting card you'd find on CBS some Sunday nights.
  68. It's All Gone Pete Tong
    Isn't all wrong. But even at its very best, it's just all right.
  69. The Girl from Monday
    Numbing story.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Palindromes
    What makes Palindromes bearable is that Solondz has yet to come up with an answer.
  71. Sahara
    In the end, the thing that Cussler's fans will probably object to most is the nonsensical way Sahara manhandles his story.
  72. Fever Pitch
    Effortlessly entertaining romantic comedy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kung Fu Hustle
    Like a meal prepared by an extreme chef, ''Hustle" is more than a bit of a mess. It still tastes like nothing you've ever had before.
  74. Eating Out
    The explicit encounters and dirty talk in Eating Out suggest a new genre -- call it porncom -- that seeks to amuse and arouse at the same time.
  75. Winter Solstice
    Ultimately undercut by its fictional elements and its flat characters.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    Stylish and only superficially superficial, Happily Ever After plunks us down with three male friends as they dance on the edge of their 40s.
  77. Major Dundee (re-release)
    Expanded, Major Dundee is still a mess of great scenes sprinkled among some fairly monotonous action.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sin City
    Tarantino may have nicked the title first, but this is the real ''Pulp Fiction," with all the drama and the dead ends that implies.
  79. Dust to Glory
    Brown lays out his guiding philosophy up front when he says of the Baja, ''This isn't about a race, it's about the human race."
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Control
    Takes your angriest thoughts about urban public transportation and magnifies them into a grubby and rousingly antisocial fantasia on post-communist breakdown and bureaucracy.
  81. Look at Me
    A marvelous, uncommonly observant, and unexpectedly rousing group portrait.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beauty Shop
    Formulaic but extremely good-natured comedy.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Oldboy
    More than anything else, Oldboy recalls Alfred Hitchcock with all restraint tossed to the wind, or Hitchcock's most obsessed devotee, Brian De Palma, at his most nastily inspired.
  84. Guess Who
    The movie will please those looking for easy physical comedy.
  85. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    If only Miller's writing had some human zest. Nearly everybody here is crunchy, salt-of-the-earth organic, and off in a dreamland.
  86. Nina's Tragedies
    Gabizon never establishes a consistent tone or point of view. Instead, we hop from one episode to the next, with no momentum and no reason to care about these people.
  87. Miss Congeniality 2: Armed & Fabulous
    The laughless outtakes for ''Armed and Fabulous" helpfully remind us that it could have been worse.
  88. Mondovino
    The movie feels incomplete and uncentered. It's like a grand magazine profile that's all reportage and absolutely no prose.
  89. Ice Princess
    A feel-good but inane Disney production.
  90. The Ring Two
    Scares up few chills.
  91. Melinda and Melinda
    Doesn't entirely work.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fifty-Fifty
    True to its title, Schizo is both gripped by the past and pulled toward an unknown future.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Steamboy
    Boys of all ages, by contrast, will be mesmerized by the relentless, breathtakingly visualized action.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Rider Named Death
    Shakhnazarov's film effortlessly captures the times and the author's conflicted yet unyielding attitude, yet it never draws any conclusions -- the film remains under glass.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hostage
    It's a B-flick all the way, but it has no pretensions to the contrary, and that's some kind of refreshing.
  96. Robots
    Isn't as trippy, scary, handmade-looking, or environmentally aware as some of Miyazaki's pictures. But it shares their dreaminess. Even at its most ingenious, not even Pixar does that.
  97. The Upside of Anger
    It's the men in ''Upside" who speak all the truth.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Millions
    You really don't need to borrow someone else's kids to ponder and enjoy what Millions has to offer.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In My Country
    At its best when Anna confronts her tangled Afrikaaner legacy and when it brings the heretical notion of forgiveness up front, where a non-African audience can come to grips with it.
  100. Black Cloud
    But this film, with its many cliches and borrowed substitutes for creativity, suggests his (Schroder) career in the boxing arena might have peaked with ''The Champ."
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