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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    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Butterfly Effect
    A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.
  2. Made-Up
    It wants, as Kate says about her documentary, to be a "seminal work on beauty and aging." But it wears like a gauzy romantic comedy.
  3. Empathy
    At the very least, some of the answers and observations offered up in this hybrid documentary/drama/thesis project will surprise you.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Teacher's Pet
    Barrels along on a diverting enough sugar high, but in the hangover that follows you may wonder where the wonder was.
  5. Torque
    Invites you not simply to identify with its low IQ but to cheer it on. This is a movie that knows you know it's dumb, and that's enough to make the whole thing worth tolerating.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tom Dowd & the Language of Music
    Sometimes it gets into arcane talk of equipment that makes more sense for a Berklee College of Music engineering class than for a mass-market movie -- but as a probing look at a really nice-guy genius in the studio world, it succeeds admirably.
  7. Along Came Polly
    There is no central drama, no surprise, no tension in his comedy. The ads for Along Came Polly make it look so upbeat and simple that you're convinced it must be hiding something, like death or a disease. But the truth is there in the advertising: nothing happens.
  8. Tokyo Godfathers
    Demonstrates an idiosyncratic human touch. Kon is unafraid of the unseemly and unsightly. People are captured as they really might be.
  9. Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
    Aileen is Broomfield working compassionately. Perhaps it's only because he knows he can't save Wuornos that he can offer her as she might have been: part wounded animal, part self-destructive martyr, and all tragedy.
  10. Chasing Liberty
    It's one TV-movie romp that Kristy McNichol never got around to starring in.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Battle of Algiers
    The Battle of Algiers is a thinking person's action film in which there are winners -- but no heroes.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Secret Things
    Hints at a place where desire, fear, pleasure, and power all intersect, but it never actually goes there.
  13. Millennium Mambo
    If Millennium Mambo is the only chance to see Hou Hsaio-hsien's work at a movie theater, you'd better take it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Japanese Story
    Best taken as a dazzling showcase for Collette, an actress who fits none of Hollywood's ideas of glamour or artistry, yet who grows like a beautiful outback weed with each new role she takes.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Modern Times (re-release)
    Chaplin's sentimental politics and peerless comic invention dovetailed more perfectly in this film than in any other he made.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Company
    Robert Altman's gossamer, tension-free meditation on the ballet life, never quite recovers from a performance scene that arrives about 20 minutes in.
  17. Paycheck
    We're left with the painful reality that Paycheck might get Alfred Hitchcock, but it certainly doesn't know Philip K. Dick.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cold Mountain
    Three quarters of Cold Mountain consist of some of the most masterful and absorbing filmmaking of the year. The final quarter is Hollywood business as usual.
  19. Cheaper by the Dozen
    Martin puts a thankless gloss on the antic role he played in "Parenthood." As his wife, Hunt is the movie's saving grace.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Peter Pan
    All Peter Pan lacks is a Peter Pan with any discernible personality, no matter that Jeremy Sumpter is the first actual, genetic boy to play the role on film.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Monster
    A gruesome, helpless spiral barely saved by an actress locating humanity where few would have cared to bother.
  22. Calendar Girls
    More like that crowd-pleasing UK fluff that requires great actresses to do wacky things. Mirren is such an easy, breezy presence that you might think she's playing the screenwriting equivalent of air.
  23. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    The film's central drama is not between the former secretary and the filmmaker. It's between McNamara and history.
  24. Mona Lisa Smile
    The reliable Mike Newell directs Mona Lisa Smile with such assurance that the important moments are never mawkish or dull, and he encourages the women to act with absolute conviction.
  25. House of Sand and Fog
    Exacting but disappointing thriller.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    Yet what I felt when the lights came up at the end of this visionary, titanic, relentless experience was something different: a strange relief that it was, at last, over.
  27. Power Trip
    Part Marxist social drama and part Michael Moore corporation-needling, with fed-up residents trying to outsmart the big, bad naive company to keep their lights on for free.
  28. AKA
    The triptych is a device but never a gimmick: three windows into one fractured soul.
  29. The Statement
    Harwood's screenplay obscures any sort of philosophical, religious, or historical considerations in favor of pulpy and faith-bruising sensationalism.
  30. Prisoner of Paradise
    While Prisoners of Paradise gives us but an impression of Gerron's state of mind, the film does a powerful job of showing us how deflated, small, and desperate this boisterous man had become.
  31. Love Don't Cost a Thing
    The movie is so dependant on its source material that it fails to put Carter, Thompson, Penn, and Christy to better use.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stuck on You
    Story lines don't come any clammier.
  33. Something's Gotta Give
    Doesn't America's 50-and-fabulous set deserve better than a movie this superficial and pandering?
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Girl with a Pearl Earring
    Dancing on the edge of dullness, ''Girl'' is continually saved by the look of things: the hush of an atelier in midafternoon, dust-motes swirling in a sunbeam, pigment blooming under mortar and pestle. Impatience is forestalled, time and again, by rapture.
  35. Big Fish
    The actor's job here is the hardest to pull off, since practical skepticism in a Tim Burton picture is next to villainy. Yet Crudup suggests complex grown-up feelings that makes the rest of Big Fish feel like an earnest collection of magic tricks.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Monsieur Ibrahim
    When Shirley MacLaine made this same movie, more or less, as "Madame Sousatzka," there was a whole lot of acting going on. Sharif brings us to Ibrahim with a modesty that oddly reminds you of why the actor is a legend.
  37. Honey
    Neither hot nor square, it's as simple and earnest as any after-school special and as cameo-laden as any rap video.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Last Samurai
    Even if you think Cruise has never had a moment of doubt in his life, he makes Nathan's self-loathing palpable, and the character's regeneration has a hoarse, cautious purposefulness that's striking.
  39. En la ciudad sin límites
    A tidy soap opera. But it's a discreet, warmly made one, too. In a show of restraint, the intrigue never rises above mildly juicy.
  40. The Legend of Leigh Bowery
    It takes almost an hour for The Legend of Leigh Bowery to make a case for Bowery's sort of genius, and in the last third, the movie gives a real sense of what made him him.
  41. Timeline
    The trouble with the movie is basically everything. It's long, sloppy, and -- to both the quantum-physics ignorant and informed -- steadily implausible, never exciting in either its skill or its ludicrousness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Cooler
    Looks brilliant while you're watching it and stands revealed as counterfeit only in the strong light of day. What Baldwin does, though, is the stuff of supporting actor Oscars.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Haunted Mansion
    It is spectacularly average. Neither an inspired reimagining nor a painful dud,
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Triplets of Belleville
    All you really need to enjoy "Triplets" is a taste for the weird and the wonderful.
  45. In America
    It's hard to dislike a film that wants to say that the bereft have to move on with their lives, that death is part of living, and that poverty is a state of mind. But it's not impossible.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bad Santa
    Without question, not for the children. It is, however, just the cup of rancid black-comedy eggnog for anyone fed up with holiday cheer in all its manifestations.
  47. 21 Grams
    Long on mood and moodiness, but at a loss as how to break any interesting human ground.
  48. Gothika
    For most of the movie, however, Halle sprints, Halle swims (55 laps!), and Halle screams. It's a two-hour fitness video -- a portrait of the Oscar winner as personal trainer.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Barbarian Invasions
    A honey, but your response to it may depend on where you fall on life's big curve.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Cat in the Hat
    If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Missing
    The movie runs into its deepest trouble with its depiction of Lilly's captors. After years of Hollywood wooden Indians and a more recent run of tribal angels (as in "Dances With Wolves"), movies like "The Last of the Mohicans" have acknowledged the historical truth that Native Americans could be as bloody-minded as their white conquerors.
    • 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Visual Bible: The Gospel of John
    The Gospel of John is to "The Passion of the Christ" as tap water is to parboiled sacramental wine.
  54. Tupac: Resurrection
    The movie is like an extra-strength episode of MTV's ''Diary,'' which is like ''A&E Biography'' in the first person. Only ''Resurrection'' has a subject who's been dead for six years.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    The joy is in the details, and they are unrelentingly comic.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    The opening 15 minutes of Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World are so well crafted that they restore your faith in commercial cinema.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Anything But Love
    Like many of us who cherish the safe harbor of old movies, Rose and Cary mourn the fact that they don't make 'em like they used to. If they'd paused to ponder why not, they might have a better movie.
  58. Hukkle
    There's scarcely any dialogue, and the "hukkle" sound is universal enough to make subtitles unnecessary and to please an audience of any age and attention span.
  59. My Architect
    Nathaniel fares well with his father's fellow masters, although Frank Gehry seems evasive.
  60. Martin & Orloff
    The film is faithful to its absurdities, sometimes hilariously so.
  61. Just an American Boy
    Earle's song introductions, like those of his mentors Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, are as meaty, pointed, and touching as the tunes themselves, and his spoken words -- full of humor and humanity -- are the heart of the film.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In My Skin
    In My Skin takes that pain/pleasure principle and magnifies it until you're either dumbstruck or running screaming from the theater.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gloomy Sunday
    Lushly engaging, even if it covers some of the same ground as ''The Pianist'' with less artistry and more melodrama.
  64. Elf
    The movie sets Ferrell's assaultive and juvenile physical comedy in a less-combative playground, and the result might leave the Ferrell-intolerant exiting the theater on a high.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Love Actually
    Charming, if terribly overstuffed, vision of romantic London gridlock.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Matrix Revolutions
    Revolutions, the final installment in the trilogy, parcels things more neatly. You get 45 minutes of the Wachowskis' patented theosophical bong water, followed by an hour of the most muscular, hard-core special-effects rama-lama yet to hit the screen. Only then does Jesus show up.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
    Mao had it wrong; in ''Revolution,'' political power comes out of the barrel of a TV tube.
  68. Die, Mommie, Die!
    Busch combines French absurdist theater and American performance art with a drag queen's flamboyant wit.
  69. Shattered Glass
    Shattered Glass, with its dumb title, is smart about good vs. evil. Incidentally, the good is Lane, who now works at The Washington Post and was a consultant on this picture.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Human Stain
    Benton has laid bare a great author's creaky plotting only to deliver a melodrama with bookish pretensions.
  71. Eyes Without a Face [re-release]
    Eyes Without a Face, outre as it is, never tires as hypnotic, touching, ghastly fun.
  72. Girlhood
    Documentary filmmaker Liz Garbus spent three years shooting two teenagers living in a Maryland juvenile detention center. The completed film is called Girlhood and it feels as much a work in progress as its two troubled subjects do.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Singing Detective
    The question that has to be asked is: Why? The original six-part BBC ''Singing Detective'' remains one of the signal achievements in the history of television -- really -- and its release on DVD this past spring puts it easily within reach of the curious.
  74. Radio
    A tall glass of hogwash that's terrified to declare itself the racial-healing melodrama it is.
  75. Elephant
    The atmosphere is hypo-stylized, vividly generic and worse than real, like a doomy Frederick Wiseman documentary.
  76. Scary Movie 3
    Notably Wayansless. It's also notably devoid of a point of view.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beyond Borders
    Worse than junk, in fact. Beyond Borders so trivializes the plight of the world's displaced peoples that it becomes actively obnoxious.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Last Party 2000
    The film was conceived as a youthful tour of all that's wrong with the two-party system, with the likably shambling actor Philip Seymour Hoffman as host, but the breadth of subjects covered precludes any response other than nebulous discontent.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In the Cut
    It might even work if In the Cut was remotely convincing as a thriller, but Campion can't help wrinkling her nose at genre.
  80. Sylvia
    At heart, Sylvia is constructed as a psychological suspense film framed around the ambiguities of Hughes's infidelity and Plath's resulting paranoia. So at its strangest, the movie is a potboiler.
  81. Veronica Guerin
    Veronica Guerin hardly trusts you to follow its story, opening with the murder, then a series of titles that explain what's to follow.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Runaway Jury
    The closest cinematic approximation to a beach novel that money and skill can buy.
  83. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    As the eviscerations ensue, the truth becomes undeniable: This is easily the most gruesome, most pointless, episode of "Scooby Doo" ever.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pieces of April
    The movie ends with a sentimental vision of unity that, admittedly, warmed this weary moviegoer's heart. If that vision was earned, I might even have melted.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dopamine
    There are rich issues at play here, about the nature of attraction and whether individual will is or isn't pinned to the wheel of physiology. But Decena hasn't dramatized them; he's used them as talking points set to an indie-film guitar strum, and the result is both earnest and passionless.
  86. The Flower of Evil
    If 'The Flower of Evil' is not vintage Claude Chabrol, it's at least vintage mediocre Claude Chabrol.
  87. Good Boy!
    The film is touchingly firm about leveling with children, drawing a careful, crucial line between fantasy and reality, without patronizing or haranguing them.
  88. Intolerable Cruelty
    The film is often at odds with itself as a sincere work of romantic comedy, as Wilder's sometimes were, too. Nonetheless, it's determined to keep Clooney's considerable comedic skills front and center. He's never been looser, sexier, or more antic.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    House of the Dead
    House of the Dead, sadly, is so bad it's bad.
  90. Girls Will Be Girls
    The performances by Plotnick, Leupp, and Roberson comprise a jarring special effect.
  91. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    The worst thing about the first Quentin Tarantino picture in five years is that after 93 minutes of some of the most luscious violence and spellbinding storytelling you're likely to see this year, Kill Bill ends.
  92. Bus 174
    Engrossing, smartly made documentary.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mystic River
    This is at bottom a pulp thriller that strains -- sometimes pretentiously, at other times with gutter magnificence -- to reach the level of basic human truths.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rare Birds
    For the record, Rare Birds doesn't even fly as a birder's special, since Tasseter's Sulfurious Duck is a fictional species. Now, if they'd seen a Eurasian Wigeon, then we'd be talking.
  95. The Event
    Dukakis gets off some of the film's best lines and keeps the worst from sinking the whole affair; Polley's role is limited, but her character's audition for a feminine hygiene commercial is by far the best thing here.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Out of Time
    An overly constructed little thriller that squeezes a fair amount of suspense out of its far-fetched plot.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Concert for George
    It's spookily touching to see this massed group of former rock gods gathered to honor one of their fallen. Bald spots and graying shags predominate; the giant velvet lapels of 1969 have given way to sensible sport coats; the granny glasses are for real.
  98. The Station Agent
    Mercifully, The Station Agent is not about how these misfits heal one another -- they're not that miserable, for one thing. It's about the unlikely ways proximity, need, and coincidence create friendships.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wonderland
    Skips lightly along the sewers of human depravity as if the trip alone was worth the telling.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    School of Rock
    Utterly adorable.
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