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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    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    13 Assassins
    Epic in scope, ambition, and execution, it's a classic swords-and-samurai film with postmodern blood and guts, and it's completely satisfying.
  2. Boxing Gym
    Wiseman has made several films about both disability and dance, but this new one might be his most hypnotic, rhythmically assembled observation of corporeal expression.
  3. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
    Not only does the movie look like it's set somewhere, it feels, cinematically, to have arrived from someplace - early John Cassavetes, the French New Wave, Eastern Europe.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Crazy Heart
    The music is terrific, as it should be in a movie where T Bone Burnett wrote the songs with Stephen Bruton.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    De Palma
    De Palma is a cinematic sampler that makes you want to gorge on the whole unholy buffet.
  6. A Little Princess
    With its beautifully crafted starburst of colors and themes spanning its requisite Victorian gravity, A Little Princess is a beguiling little supernova of a movie I can't imagine anyone not loving. [19 May 1995, p.64]
    • Boston Globe
  7. His Three Daughters
    Once the general premise is established, “His Three Daughters” lets us bask in the glory of three actors at the top of their game.
  8. Custody
    As for Drucker and Ménochet, they vividly embody the roles of abuser and victim but have little else to work with.
  9. Adaptation.
    Like no movie before it, Adaptation risks everything -- its cool, its credibility, its very soul -- to expose the horror of making art for the business of entertainment.
  10. Fighter
    In the end, Fighter, despite its newsreel footage, is less a document of wartime experience than of the mentality one needs to maintain in order to be a fighter.
    • Boston Globe
  11. The Snapper
    It sounds like what in this country would be a grim tale, but in The Snapper (Dublin working-class slang for baby) Stephen Frears and an Irish cast turn it into a terrific little comedy of nonstop vitality and warmth. [17 Dec 1993, p.98]
    • Boston Globe
  12. The Secret of the Grain
    Takes one man, his children, their spouses and babies, his ex-wife, his girlfriend, her daughter, and his friends and turns it all into a masterpiece about the strange power of food - to heal, unite, exasperate.
  13. The Graduate
    The Graduate is not subtle in its writing off of the parental generation as hopelessly corrupt. [Review of re-release]
    • Boston Globe
  14. Between the Temples
    Between the Temples emerges as a quirky and effective showcase for two actors known for playing oddball characters.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Wind Rises
    Should you see it? Of course you should. Anything Miyazaki does is worth your time. But the movie’s a gorgeous, problematic anomaly in an illustrious career.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fantastic Mr. Fox
    By forgoing actual human beings, the director has made his most charming, least annoyingly fey film - a thing of lovely comic wisdom.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In the Loop
    As a ranking cabinet minister in the brutally funny political satire In the Loop, actor Peter Capaldi unfurls dazzling verbal ribbons of the foulest language imaginable, thunderbolts of vulgarity that carry the force of precision carpet-bombing.
  18. Bus 174
    Engrossing, smartly made documentary.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    Is Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets exploitative or enabling? On the contrary, it is friendly, clear-eyed, and wise — tender about our follies and unsentimental about where they lead us. A heap see but a few know, and the Ross brothers are among the chosen few.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Soul
    Soul is messy, maudlin, funny, ridiculous, and poignant. In other words, it has soul.
  21. Amores Perros
    As bloody as any recent film. But it's shot through with a harsh, stony humor that's invigorating enough to be regarded as a slap back at death.
    • Boston Globe
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Osama
    Osama works simply as the story of one unlucky young girl.
  23. Glory
    Like films such as Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005), Glory transforms that realism into metaphors that don’t just criticize a particular system but lay plain the universal exploitation of the weak and honest by the corrupt and powerful.
  24. Sing Sing
    Sing Sing refuses to pass any judgment while inviting the audience to acknowledge the incontrovertible fact that these people are humans just like us.
  25. Turning Red
    From the texture of red panda fur to the detailing of a Toronto streetcar, “Turning Red” is a feast for the eyes. But the plotting, dialogue, and characters aren’t quite up to the studio’s standards.
  26. Chop Shop
    Everything about Chop Shop is modest - the movie's scale, the characters' ambitions. Another director might have tried to nudge the film's grim detours toward tragedy. And that might have worked, too. But Bahrani is a refreshingly deceptive director in that sense.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Raising Victor Vargas
    The ''R'' rating is understandable, but absurd. This is a family film in the most complicated and, ultimately, most cheering sense.
  28. '71
    Churns out dread, suspense, and hellish splendor with its derelict cityscapes and breakneck action.
  29. Blackfish
    What’s on camera is both damning and expertly assembled, a filmmaking effort worthy of standing with 2009’s Oscar-winning documentary about dolphin abuse, “The Cove.”
  30. Corpse Bride
    Burton, who directed the film with animator Mike Johnson, has rarely been in brisker, friskier form.
  31. Full Time
    From the opening credits to its last shot barely 90 minutes later, the film never eases up on its intensity. Fans of relentless rollercoaster rides like 2019′s “Uncut Gems” and 1998′s “Run Lola Run” will find much to enjoy here.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Project Nim
    An engrossing and enraging drama of one chimpanzee and his life's journey across a landscape of human folly.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Neil Young Trunk Show
    The movie’s not all glorious noise.
  34. The Lighthouse
    Pattinson and Dafoe dig into their roles, all right, with both actors crazily, mesmerizingly toggling from workaday to recriminating to maniacal and on and on. Together with Eggers they deliver a masterful study of souls trapped on a rock alone, but also trapped together, with all the twisty complexities involved.
  35. Spider-Man 2
    Raimi seems more comfortable being his outlandishly jokey, B-movie self, letting entire sequences play on the line between carefree schlock and Hollywood blockbusting.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    20 Feet from Stardom
    20 Feet From Stardom may possibly be the happiest time you’ll have at the movies all summer, but it comes with a heavy load of frustration. The joy...is in the sound of women singing their big, beautiful hearts out. The pain comes from the anonymity they’ve spent their lives working under and fighting against.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Avatar
    An entertainment to be not just seen but absorbed on a molecular level; it's as close to a full-body experience as we'll get until they invent the holo-suits. Cameron aims for sheer wonderment, and he delivers.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    20th Century Women
    A fairly standard coming-of-age saga on its face, with an effectively pained performance by 15-year-old Lucas Jade Zumann holding center stage.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pina
    Where Pina excels - where it resembles no previous dance film - is in the staging of several of Bausch's signature works for Wenders's cameras.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Animal Kingdom
    You probably won't see a better directorial debut this year than David Michôd's Animal Kingdom.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hugo
    An exhilarating tale of magic, machines, memories, and dreams, Martin Scorsese pulls off the neatest trick of all. He marshals the marvels of modern movie technology - up to and including the dreaded 3-D - to create a love letter to the earliest of movies and, by extension, to every movie from then to now.
  42. Wild Reeds
    Wild Reeds is not only Andre Techine's best film in a decade, it's one of France's, too. [22 Sep 1995, p.57]
    • Boston Globe
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The LEGO Movie
    The first great cinematic experience of 2014.
  44. Ladybird Ladybird
    Ladybird, Ladybird is full of heart and compassion, but it's also uncompromising and unconsoling. [10 Mar 1995, p.52]
    • Boston Globe
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gloria
    If the movie’s about anything, it’s about the tension between what we owe our families and what we owe ourselves.
  46. Drag Me to Hell
    Working with his brother Ivan, Sam Raimi is laughing with us - and often louder than we are.
  47. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters
    A portrait of two different men whose compulsion for Donkey Kong is hilarious.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Spider
    It's Cronenberg's finest film, it's star Ralph Fiennes's riskiest role, it's a tour de force for actress Miranda Richardson.
  49. The Day He Arrives
    The verb in the title of The Day He Arrives doesn't refer so much to a traveler reaching a destination as to a man finding himself - or hoping to.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Come from Away
    All drama asks you to suspend disbelief, but Come From Away asks you also to suspend cynicism, aiming to move and uplift you. It’s not a bad bargain, and Come From Away holds up its end.
  51. Evil Does Not Exist
    The ambiguous finale provides neither certainty nor respite, and may prove frustrating for some. I had no idea where Hamaguchi’s cautionary tale was taking me, but I remained intrigued until the bitter end.
  52. Seymour: An Introduction
    Whether or not Hawke got any answers to his questions about the purpose of being artist, seeking them under the guidance of a teacher like Bernstein resulted in this work of art.
  53. Merci Pour Le Chocolat
    The magic of their perfectly shaded performances is that you always have to wonder ... Is she really that bad?
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    56 Up
    The attitude of many “UP” fans hovers between voyeurism and concern, between cherishing these people as distant friends and as extensions of ourselves. They’re canaries in the coal mine of human existence.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Triad Election
    Set two years later, the sequel's the better film.
  56. Up in the Air
    At its best, Up in the Air invents new realms for old Hollywood sophistication.
  57. Milk
    By nearly every measure, Milk is a beautifully made, far less conventional movie biography than most.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lilya 4-Ever
    Doesn't derive its power from the turning wheels of plot suspense but from the simple act of looking and not blinking.
  59. Grey Gardens
    Truly, there is no looniness like looniness with lineage.
  60. Cutie and the Boxer
    In this alternately whimsical and grim documentary, Zachary Heinzerling relates the couple’s down-and-out, inspiring saga, which slyly comments on the evolution and ironies of the past half century in contemporary art.
  61. U2 3D
    They may not be as cool as Bono's fly shades, but the plastic yellow glasses required for viewing U23D supply an amazing fly-on-the-amp view of the Irish rockers in their natural habitat.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    One Night in Miami
    To be successful and Black in America, this movie says, is to tell your own story even as you live it, in the pages of a book or the grooves of a record, in the end zone of a football field or the battleground of a boxing ring. To understand the weight and importance of having to be an example. And to understand when being an example just isn’t enough.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    The result is insanely good, and the best time I've had at the movies in ages.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Vera Drake
    The film is startlingly even-handed.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Private Life
    A modern comedy-drama in the Woody Allen-Noah Baumbach mold — urban intellectuals talking their lives in circles — but what keeps it from being a live-action New Yorker cartoon is the heart beating away in the script and the performances. At over two hours, it’s long but it’s true.
  66. Moonage Daydream
    Morgen’s immersive, sometimes convulsive, visual approach justifies the format. This is filmmaking that’s anything but chaste. Intentionally overwhelming, “Moonage Daydream” is indulgent and overproduced — which suits its subject.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    BlacKkKlansman
    A ferocious mix of prankishness and cold fury that is one of the director’s strongest yet most entertaining works in years.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lake of Fire
    After 152 epic minutes, ‘Lake of Fire’ comes down to this: If you’re not living this woman’s life, maybe you shouldn’t tell her what to do.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Under the Skin
    What’s under the film’s surface is intriguing enough, but it’s the surface itself that holds you in a dark trance. A portrait of alienation filmed from the alien’s point of view — or is it just a woman’s? — the movie’s a cinematic Rubik’s Cube that snaps together surprisingly easily, yet whose larger meanings remain tantalizingly out of reach.
  70. Red Army
    Fetisov, who looks like a cross between Sam Neill and Klaus Kinski, is a compelling figure. He has an unmistakable gravitas. He’s just a hockey player in the way that Reagan was just an actor. In fact, Fetisov is a member of Russia’s parliament and previously served as minister of sport. If all that weren’t enough, he has a winningly dry sense of humor.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Post
    As a movie, The Post is engrossing and enjoyable, if falling slightly short of “All the President’s Men” and “Spotlight.” As a period piece, it couldn’t feel more eerily of the moment.
  72. The Flat
    There's something touching about the way Goldfinger obeys his moral compass. He doesn't seem at all happy with that luxury. It's a burden by a more extravagant name.
  73. Cunningham
    “[Dance] gives you nothing back,” says Cage. “No manuscripts to store away, no paintings to show on walls and maybe hang in museums, no poems to be printed and sold, nothing but that single fleeting moment when you feel alive.” Kovgan’s film comes close to capturing that moment.
  74. Fireworks
    Fireworks is anything but the usual cop thriller. It's a piercing meditation on mortality, with a heartbroken tough guy at its center. [20 Mar 1998, p.C8]
    • Boston Globe
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Magdalene Sisters
    Blistering and brilliant work.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tyson
    Terrifically compelling and, more than that, unexpectedly moving.
  77. Henry V
    One of the things that make [Branagh's] Henry V so thrilling is his audacity in trying to turn it into an antiwar play - a view that would have astounded Shakespeare. Astonishingly, he pretty much brings it off, emerging with steadily growing power as the young king who isn't afraid to bloody his hands. [15 Dec 1989]
    • Boston Globe
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Eastern Promises
    This is the first time, though, his (Mortensen)performance seemed so much bigger than the film surrounding it. That he manages the feat with so few wasted gestures puts him in line with the greats.
  79. Footnote
    Footnote culminates with stirring gravity that you wish Cedar had the confidence - in himself, his material, and us - to sustain. Both Uriel's dilemma and his father's are unenviable, even as you understand the deep guilt, sense of conflict, and hubris this mix-up provokes.
  80. Being 17
    The performances are meticulous and passionate, the narrative low-key and obliquely sensitive enough to conceal, until the traumatic incidents keep piling up, the film’s contrivance.
  81. Free Solo
    Go figure that the year’s most outrageously harrowing action movie turns out to be an arthouse doc from National Geographic.
  82. Trouble the Water
    The film is so immersed in Roberts's life that it becomes easy to think that most of what the camera sees is also from her perspective. It's actually too seamless.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Saint Maud
    A startling psychological horror story with a breakout performance by Welsh actress Morfydd Clark.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mustang
    Mustang is a damning portrait of the lot of women in rural Turkish society, but its outrage and empathy spill over the sides of the movie to embrace the planet as a whole — anywhere a woman is condemned for all the thoughts others have about her.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Palm Springs
    What makes the movie fly are the interlocking energies of its leading players, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    It Follows
    Low-budget, sure of itself, and creepy as hell, the film actually scores quite low on the gore meter. Like the best nightmares, though, it proves nearly impossible to shake.
  87. Is That Black Enough for You?!?
    Black Enough is smart, lively, and sprawling.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Driveways
    Dennehy had completed two more films before dying, at 81, on April 15, but Driveways is coming out on streaming platforms closest to his passing and it is the one to raise a glass to and maybe shed a tear over.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Don't Think Twice
    Don’t Think Twice is comedy inside-baseball, and it’s pretty delicious.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    Sweeney Todd comes as close to raging at normalcy as Burton has dared. It's no coincidence that the rage is borrowed from a greater artist.
  91. Intervista
    It's a relief that when Fellini decided to sum up his career, he still had enough left to do it so wittily, jauntily and with such expansiveness of spirit. Lovely stuff, just lovely. [19 Feb 1993, p.30]
    • Boston Globe
  92. Winchester '73
    This tight, tense black-and-white Anthony Mann film revived Westerns and kept Jimmy Stewart's career alive during the actor's Korean War stint. [19 Apr 1991, p.46]
    • Boston Globe
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Locke
    The seductively gripping cinematic stunt that calls itself Locke bears a slight resemblance to the recent “All Is Lost.”
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    20,000 Days on Earth
    It’s a relief to find a rock-doc that eschews the usual grainy hand-held wobble for steady camerawork and crisp compositions. The movie looks gorgeous — an artful frame into which Cave can pour his demons.
  95. Election
    An invigoratingly mordant comedy that proves that Alexander Payne's rambunctious debut, "Citizen Ruth," was no fluke.
  96. Memento
    The most disorienting and trippiest data-retrieval caper in years.
    • Boston Globe
  97. Creed
    After a long, long stretch in which the series’ attrition had come to feel like even more of a bummer than intended — no more Mickey, no Apollo, no Adrian — the franchise has welcome new life. But instead of going by Rocky, he goes by Creed.
  98. 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.
  99. Pride & Prejudice
    Jane Austen's novel has been rejiggered into a jaunty romantic comedy that leaves us as incandescently happy as its characters.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Monsieur Lazhar
    There's a quiet metaphor here: How do you teach children without touching them - their minds, their souls, their sensitivities?
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