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. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
    The film, which is as economically made as it is primitively animated, ambles from adventure to adventure, taking nothing seriously, not even itself.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bright Future
    The movie has a curious and cumulative power.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    After the Sunset
    For a movie that's sexist, racist, and possibly the most deeply closeted gay love story to be released this year, After the Sunset is reasonably entertaining.
  4. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
    The director, Beeban Kidron, handles the proceedings with an episodic aimlessness on par with Bridget's.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kinsey
    As superbly crafted -- as good -- as this movie is, Condon never really owns up to the cloud of pessimism at its center.
  6. Finding Neverland
    It's a portrait of the artist as Mary Poppins.
  7. Overnight
    Overnight is about all kinds of in-the-moment emotional rawness.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Polar Express
    Zemeckis and Hanks really seem to think they’re giving us a Christmas movie for the ages and a technology that will change cinema forever. They’re wrong on both counts. The Polar Express is merely a marvelous toy that has somehow become convinced it has a soul.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Callas Forever
    In sum, a big, honking tutti-frutti sundae of a movie that nonetheless is shot through with authentic feeling.
  10. Fade to Black
    The film elects a storytelling manner that's scarily similar to the beginning of a lot of hip-hop thrillers.
    • 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.
  12. Cachorro
    Pedro is what a friend of mine calls a ''macho Iberico," which refers to a certain type of cocky, insensitive Spanish man.
  13. Alfie
    Shyer's version is a thing of infinite emptiness and nauseating vanity. It's not funny, alluring, affecting, or erotic, just conceited.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Incredibles
    Such smart, whiz-bang fun that you may not realize what it's about until you're safely home.
  15. Enduring Love
    Technically outstanding and the performances are strong.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Birth
    Such a meticulously wrought piece of hokum that it's both easy to admire and impossible to warm up to.
  17. Saw
    As long as Saw stays in that big, nasty bathroom, all we need to believe is the knot in our stomachs.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ray
    He (Ray) was, a more complicated man than this film, or perhaps any film, dares allow. Foxx is not at fault here.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sideways
    It's a performance (Giamatti's) so nuanced and so real in its everyday pain that it doesn't stand a chance of winning an Oscar. But it should.
  20. Undertow
    It's an exercise in 1970s mood. But all the film does is conjure, channel, and allude, until there's really no movie of Green's own for an audience to grab onto.
  21. The Manson Family
    There's no real journalism here, just the sort of appalling revisionism that can turn a bloodbath into a beach party.
  22. Lightning in a Bottle
    It's hugely entertaining.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Machinist
    The main, if not only, reason to see The Machinist is for Christian Bale's title performance, and even then you have to be a fan of hardcore martyrdom in the service of craft.
  24. The Grudge
    Takes a leaf from the "Psycho" handbook and abandons its star for stretches here and there.
  25. Surviving Christmas
    It's the sort of stupid swill that gets spewed out by a studio committee, slapped together without a brain, a heart, or a good idea about where to put a camera or when to cut a scene.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sex Is Comedy
    A rigorous and bracingly charming movie about moviemaking.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    P.S.
    Contains more than its share of implausibilities and absurdities.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Final Cut
    Williams gives a performance that's honest and carefully wrought but on some level still a stunt. All that courtliness is wearing him out, and it's wearing us out too.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Moolaadé
    It's worth stressing how deeply pleasurable Moolaad is to watch.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Being Julia
    You can feel her (Bening) drag Being Julia uphill for an hour and a half until the final 15 minutes, when the ground finally levels out and the picture becomes fine, vengeful fun.
  31. 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.
  32. Shall We Dance
    Gere is a pleasure, smiling and spinning and high-fiving his two classmates -- played by Bobby Cannavale and Omar Miller -- and the movie is happy and extremely likable.
  33. Team America: World Police
    Stuck between point-blank ridicule and the obligations of a weary plot. Surprisingly, more than an hour of watching marionettes fight, curse, and fornicate turns out to be as dull as watching Michael Dudikoff do the same thing in one of his unremarkable soldier movies.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Scandal
    Of all the "Liaisons" adaptations, this may be the most sentimental.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Vera Drake
    The film is startlingly even-handed.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Around the Bend
    The result is a curious hash: warmly funny in the comic scenes and shamelessly sentimental during the sad bits, of which there are many.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Vodka Lemon
    This is frostbitten Fellini -- a film that finds fresh beauty and contentment in the wake of centuries of conquering armies. The great joke of Vodka Lemon is that the conquerors missed what was there all along.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stage Beauty
    Yet Crudup does good, mercurial work despite a silly surfer-dude haircut.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Friday Night Lights
    It also bears something you rarely experience in a football movie. Friday Night Lights has a soul.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Primer
    Shane Carruth's extraordinary work of shoestring speculation throws you into a deep ocean of techno-jargon and lets you dog-paddle or sink like a stone.
  41. Raise Your Voice
    The movie's enthusiasm is as indelible and shiny as the lip gloss its star wears to bed.
  42. Tarnation
    A masterpiece.
  43. Taxi
    Too much of Taxi is just tired.
  44. Tying the Knot
    It makes a sane, civil, humanist case for marriage for all.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry
    Begins and ends as a fulsome Kerry campaign bio along the lines of the famed Bill Clinton convention short, "The Man From Hope."
  46. Woman Thou Art Loosed
    While the story couldn't be simpler and the filmmaking is crude, it forcefully addresses a reality.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dig!
    The result is one of the most unforgiving ground-level documentaries about the music business ever made -- the six-string equivalent of "Hoop Dreams."
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Shark Tale
    Where "Nemo" was clever, soulful, and marvelous to look at, "Tale" is manic and surprisingly ugly, with a script that leans on the shallowest aspects of hip-hop street cred while pimping for corporate product placement at every turn.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I Heart Huckabees
    Among the most insane mainstream movies ever released.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ladder 49
    Predictable, square, and honorable all at once.
  51. Incantato
    One wishes Incantato was made of something other than musty air. Avati provides no real emotional counterweight for all the whimsy and nonsense, and the movie carries neither the force of morality nor the titillation of trashiness.
  52. The Yes Men
    This movie could have been a nagging, preachy headache had either man exhibited a tendency for self-righteousness. But both are friendly, almost humble about their mischief.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Moog
    For every insight, there are a half-dozen meandering conversations and unguided reminiscences.
  54. First Daughter
    Just bland behavioral propaganda, and Holmes makes such a guileless and robotic spokeswoman, it wouldn't be nuts to think the White House was just another mansion in Stepford.
  55. A Dirty Shame
    A big, lascivious punch line about America's peculiar, embarrassed, hypocritical relationship with sex.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rick
    Everything about this curio is claustrophobic.
  57. The Last Shot
    Any movie that would think Calista Flockhart to be the sort of high-strung basket case who'd hurl obscenities down at a dog kennel outside her apartment is worth sitting through.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Forgotten
    Turns out to be a grade-A B-movie that grounds its thrills in particulars of time, place, and character, so that when the time comes to make the leap into the wholly preposterous, we do so willingly. This is a movie that earns our trust -- and then happily abuses it.
  59. Shaun of the Dead
    Every moment... is a cleverly constructed live-action joke on aloofness: The world is ending, and these people are too self-centered to notice.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Anatomy of Hell
    Despite all that onscreen turgidness, Anatomy of Hell is itself so much a matter of the mind that it never rises above theory.
  61. The Motorcycle Diaries
    For a movie, this feels inadequate, despite its splendors and, later, its social dismay. It does, however, have the makings of a grand postcard.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    September Tapes
    The film eventually collapses under the weight of its no-budget arrogance, but it goes some interesting places beforehand.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Take
    The Take represents the downside of the new documentary renaissance.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Head in the Clouds
    If you're up for a relentlessly overripe melodrama that takes place in movie-Europe as opposed to the real thing (the Parisian streetwalkers in berets are a good tip-off), by all means catch Head in the Clouds.
  65. Zelary
    This is just humble, heartwarming storytelling with good acting and lush visuals.
  66. Mr 3000
    Mac's TV show seems to have trained him to settle for feel-good tack-ons that cut against the prickly nature of Mr. 3000. The actor has such a serious and wise bearing that it's hard to believe Stan as a shallow jackass, which is why several of his scenes with Boca seem phony.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Incident at Loch Ness
    Once the cat is out of the bag, "Incident" becomes simultaneously entertaining and disappointing.
  68. National Lampoon's Gold Diggers
    Put it this way: National Lampoon's Gold Diggers makes "The Anna Nicole Show" look sophisticated.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    No one has really been asking for a fusion of "Independence Day," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," and an old Buck Rogers serial, but here it is anyway, and the only thing keeping it from greatness is a good story.
  70. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    Brims with forboding, but it pulses with candy colors and the hum of neon signs.
  71. Wimbledon
    Wimbledon is refried "Notting Hill" with a Teen People glaze. The latter movie also gave us an American star cheering up some tired British guy. Wimbledon is blander and far less worth rooting for.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Silver City
    As it is, the movie only shudders to life when Dickie Pilager's onscreen.
  73. Reconstruction
    The movie is so chilly and fundamentally empty at its core that we're more or less on the outside looking in.
  74. Criminal
    Just as exciting and socially vivid as Bielinsky's. Yet, somehow it's more stressful. The American characters practically sweat desperation.
  75. Testosterone
    Another gay movie that luxuriates in emotional implausibility.
  76. Cellular
    A ludicrous little abduction thriller that boasts an entertaining cocktail of gunpowder, suspense, adrenaline, and cheese. I just couldn't hate this movie, and I really, really tried. It's tightly made and well written in deceptive ways that don't reveal themselves until past the halfway point.
  77. When Will I Be Loved
    Most atrocious movies build into their badness, as lacks of talent, ideas, self-confidence, or a total hatred of an audience, are revealed. This one gets it out of the way up front and never looks back.
  78. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
    Like so many movies with a keypad for a brain, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is another exercise in making us feel the irritation associated with having to stand behind some game hack for our turn to play.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Evergreen
    An earnest, simplistic, affecting slice of low-watt indie filmmaking that goes where few American movies bother: below the poverty line.
  80. Virgin
    So much of Virgin is bunk masquerading as sexual politics.
  81. Warriors of Heaven and Earth
    More of a sand-and-noodles western set in the Far East.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wicker Park
    Movies that are entertainingly nuts don't come around very often, and when they do they need to be given their due.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Vanity Fair
    She has been made lovable -- and a Vanity Fair with a lovable Becky Sharp has no reason to exist. It's as if Shakespeare had put Hamlet on Prozac: What's the point?
  84. Suspect Zero
    Eckhart, who gets more rugged by the picture, certainly works hard to bring the audience along. But he's a nervous wreck for nothing. This movie isn't talking to us, it's talking to other serial killer movies.
  85. The Brown Bunny
    The Brown Bunny is certainly about how vain Gallo is. Yet rarely has narcissism produced such a handsome work of cinema.
  86. Bush's Brain
    In a refreshing change of pace, this week's anti-Bush documentary, Bush's Brain, is not really about George W. Bush at all. It's about his senior political adviser, Karl Rove.
  87. Hero
    These people may be really, really dangerous, but they're also really, really polite.
  88. Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
    There's nothing really wrong with it -- it's bad, but no worse than it needs to be, which is the problem.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    The overall effect is ghoulish.
  90. L.A. Twister
    Serves up a silly story and clunky dialogue that gets better than it deserves from Jennifer Aspen as Lenny's would-be girlfriend.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bright Leaves
    Where most documentaries offer us facts to hold on to, his (McElwee's) are obsessed with the mystery of things we don't know and never will.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    End of the Century
    Unearths the expected footage from the crypt -- including a hilarious live video of the band arguing onstage over what to play next. The anecdotes are pungent and revelatory.
  93. Nicotina
    While obviously not a unique or uniquely satisfying experience, the film still does the job in a pinch, and looks cool doing it.
  94. Rosenstrasse
    The picture's structural intricacy is a smoke screen for its psychological and emotional shallowness.
  95. Mean Creek
    Adults should find its simmering drama at least as compelling as teens will, even if parental figures are only slightly more present here than in a " Peanuts" comic strip.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bright Young Things
    Acridly funny.
  97. Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War
    Most of the expert insights contained in this concise documentary are already available in the door-stopping exposes of other experts, a fact that lends the proceedings a nagging redundancy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Red Lights
    Primarily a one-man show for Darroussin, and the actor, a longtime pro in the French film industry, comes through with a scarifyingly believable portrayal.
  99. Exorcist: The Beginning
    This prequel has something to appall everybody.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Benji: Off the Leash!
    Has a raggy charm, like the dogs, and a solid moral ending. For a late-summer children's film, it does the job.
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