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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    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Open Hearts
    Open Hearts, like all good melodramas, is ruthless in its insistence that people are dragged, uncomprehending, in the wake of events.
  2. Till Human Voices Wake Us
    Despite being well acted and sweetly moving when it strips down to the tender poem at its heart, Till Human Voices Wake Us spends too much time playing to an otherworldly suspense that simply isn't there.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dark Blue
    In the end, the problem with movies like Dark Blue is that they willfully ignore the systemic, historical, cultural, and class causes of racism in favor of pinning it all on a few bad apples. Sure, that's entertainment. It's also a lie.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lawless Heart
    The thread that winds through their stories is love lost and connections found, but only the audience is able to weave it into something to keep.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gods and Generals
    Sanctimonious claptrap -- an inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.
  6. Old School
    It's also a message movie, about as weighty as Lara Flynn Boyle and twice as absurd. But I'd like to report that I had an excellent time.
  7. The Life of David Gale
    Positively reeks of self-importance -- the jokey, ham-fisted, pseudo-socially relevant, punch-pulling kind. It reeks worse of acting -- the Jack-Lemmon-in-a-coma Kevin Spacey kind.
  8. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    Watching the uncertain and disappointing new apartheid documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony'' is like going to the lecture of an impassioned but really disorganized professor.
  9. Painted Fire
    This is that rare art flick whose subject goes nuts because his work is not self-indulgent ENOUGH.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Jungle Book 2
    Note that it took six writers to come up with the script for The Jungle Book 2. Note that Rudyard Kipling isn't one of them.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gerry
    Watching Gus Van Sant's Gerry is the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. I mean that as high praise.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not
    Settles for the cliches of American suspense films, right down to an ending that leaves the door open to a possible sequel.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    All the Real Girls
    Green unquestionably has a rare, intermittent knack for rapture.
  14. Daredevil
    Daredevil the movie strains itself trying to catch up with Sam Raimi's web-slinging megasmash. It's a faceless copy, right down to the muscle-rock groaning on the soundtrack.
  15. Stone Reader
    A deep, exhaustive, and moving piece of do-it-yourself detective work.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Deliver Us from Eva
    Dawdles amiably and can't quite decide what it wants to be.
  17. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey don't simply star in this movie; they tag-team it out of the Freddie Prinze Jr. --Julia Stiles puppy-love ghetto.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Shanghai Knights
    So appallingly slipshod in all the usual departments is this sequel to the engaging martial-arts comedy Western ''Shanghai Noon'' that you're tempted to cite its makers for contempt.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    May
    Satisfyingly, May also turns out to be lowdown genre fun, a film that nearly makes up in slacker wit and high-spirited gore what it lacks in budget and elegance.
  20. Biker Boyz
    It's too long and self-consciously progressive to be entertaining, but it's too well-intentioned to be dismissed altogether.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lost in La Mancha
    It is an honest, dumbstruck, not particularly deep demonstration of how insanely difficult it is to make a movie, any movie, no matter how blithe the end result may appear on screen.
  22. The Guru
    The movie offers up too many airy spiritual lessons in the hope of crossing from farce to sentiment.
  23. Final Destination 2
    By the time I saw poor Tim crushed, head to toe, by a falling sheet of plate glass, I was certain I hadn't signed up for anything this punishing.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Recruit
    Pacino, thankfully, is on-screen enough to keep this stew on a solid low boil.
  25. Chaos
    The best that can be said of the men in Coline Serreau's Chaos is that some of them are pimps.
  26. Darkness Falls
    So much schlock and melodrama find their way into Darkness Falls that when an exasperated character shouts near the end ''All this over a [expletive] tooth!,'' you know how he feels.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    The filmmakers are smart to cut between their primary interview and later footage of Junge watching that interview and offering further commentary -- living footnotes, as it were.
  28. In the Mirror of Maya Deren
    Intimidated by the words "avant-garde film"? Then hand yourself over, without reservation, to the skills of documentarian Martina Kudlacek and her astonishingly accessible primer, In the Mirror of Maya Deren.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Divine Intervention
    The Academy accepts submissions only from real countries, and Palestine isn't one. This is as good a joke, and as dark, as anything in the movie.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Guy Thing
    A pleasant, thin, hammerlocked movie about the pleasures of breaking free - it's the Cliff Notes version of anarchic classics like ''Bringing Up Baby'' or ''What's Up, Doc?'' Should you want to take the graduate course, you'll find those films at your video store.
  31. National Security
    The film is profane. But who knew police brutality could play as a laughing matter?
    • 16 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kangaroo Jack
    Will parents be able to sit through Kangaroo Jack without plunging sharp sticks into their eyes? The short answer? Yes. Barely.
  33. City of God
    Full of action, but no soul.
  34. Crimson Gold
    This is the first beautiful performance in the year's first great movie.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
    For some of us, this constitutes a religious event.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Just Married
    Reasonably painless if you've never seen a comedy about the travails of newlyweds.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    Screenwriter Kaufman is in fine meta-fettle here, even if he's still losing control of his material toward the end, and while it's too soon to tell whether Clooney has the stuff of a great director, he certainly knows who to hire.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Love Liza
    Does have the enclosed, slightly overheated feel of a family theatrical.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Nicholas Nickleby
    A rambunctious joy.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Max
    In the end, the lure of the gimmick proves too much for Meyjes, clearly a writer-director of talent. If Max were half as audacious, it would be twice as good.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hours
    Still: The Hours is a book about people writing, reading, and living another book, and that literariness makes the movie resist itself.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Pianist
    There are three Poles in The Pianist -- Szpilman, Polanski, and Frederic Chopin. Of the three, fittingly, Chopin speaks the loudest.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Catch Me If You Can
    Nothing if not a celebration of our willingness to be gulled by life's charming strangers.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    Fans of the animated wildlife adventure show will be in warthog heaven; others need not necessarily apply.
  45. Two Weeks Notice
    Lawrence just leans on Grant and Bullock, who could have done a movie this breezy from the set of their next one -- where, presumably, Bullock will be playing Medea.
    • 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.
  47. Narc
    Frustratingly, Carnahan barely trusts his storytelling to keep our attention long enough to get through a scene without some grisly cutaway -- a gun to the head, the writhing wounded.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gangs of New York
    Scorsese and his team of Grade A talents are working on an operatic scale here, and like many operas, this is long, overwrought, sprawling, and more than frequently brilliant. It also hits just enough discordant notes to keep it from greatness.
  49. Antwone Fisher
    Corny. But it's corny in a way that a Hollywood movie about a boy who just wants to go home ought to be corny. Plus when it's done with this much care, corny works for me.
  50. 25th Hour
    It's deeply stylized, but there's an accompanying patience and gravity that are hard to shake. They're the architecture of a lingering, unsentimental sadness.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    The miracle is that 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is better: tighter, smarter, funnier.
  52. The Guys
    Short without feeling scant. That's how big its sense of grief is.
  53. Evelyn
    Isn't just a feel-good movie; it's a feel-good-and-righteous movie. And audiences will forgive its flaws.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Maid in Manhattan
    It's Lopez who's the proper focus of this dream. So intent has she been on becoming a superstar in the past few years that many people have forgotten that, given decent material, she can act.
  55. Star Trek: Nemesis
    Fails to match the philosophical and acting bounties of 1996's ''First Contact.'' Baird has seen to it that the Enterprise's being under fire still amounts to the crew rocking back and forth, gripping the railings as the ship's phasers are down to 4 percent.
  56. Intact
    The movie pits fortune against destiny and has an enigmatic old time splitting the difference.
  57. Drumline
    A bonanza of pop uplift. It wraps the up-from-nothing drama of ''Flashdance'' in the sassy, interracial pep rallying of ''Bring It On'' and the military romance of ''An Officer and a Gentleman.''
    • 29 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hot Chick
    Faris is delightful, in fact, and she steals the movie right out from under Schneider.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    About Schmidt
    How you feel about About Schmidt may depend in large part on how you feel About Jack.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Analyze That
    That this witless, formulaic sequel to the hit comedy Analyze This even dares to spoof ''The Sopranos'' is embarrassing. It's like Freddie Prinze Jr. slamming Gene Hackman as a bad actor.
  61. Empire
    Rossellini doesn't do much more than show up and be a hundred kinds of ravishing. Yet there's a movie in her ageless face and that untamed bouffant.
  62. Blackboards
    Like so much Iranian cinema, Blackboards is a work of lyrical propaganda. But its metaphors are opaque enough to avoid didacticism, and the film succeeds as an emotionally accessible, almost mystical work.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Equilibrium
    Equilibrium just happens to be a really bad comic book.
  64. 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.
  65. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    As ambitious as this may be, however, the movie's objectives tax its energy even as the girls' plight tears at your heart.
  66. Russian Ark
    Who most of these exquisitely costumed people are I have no idea, but they brush past the camera in such rapids of jubilation it's a wonder they don't knock the thing over. I watched most of the film exhilarated, but depressed that I'm not a big Russophile.
  67. They
    At some point, I just tired of looking at all the nicely composed shots unworthy of the stock they're printed on. Lives are at stake here, and I don't mean Julia's and her annoying pals'. I mean the lives of you and me, the only pronouns that really matter here.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Solaris
    To appreciate Solaris, the new film by Steven Soderbergh, it helps to downshift your moviegoing metabolism to a level approaching the cryogenically frozen: The movie's that cerebral, that contemplative, that slow.
  69. Eight Crazy Nights
    What's special about the movie is how totally it believes in itself as a musical. The tunes, co-written by Sandler and a bunch of his pals, take on rock opera and traditional Jewish folk music with boyish exuberance.
  70. Die Another Day
    Die Another Day is still as professionally mediocre as its predecessors.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    This isn't a movie -- it's an author in love with the sound of her own voice.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Emperor's Club
    That uncertainty -- in the professor, in the audience -- is what drives Emperor's Club to a surprisingly thought-provoking, even disturbing conclusion.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Quiet American
    The key to why the new ''American'' is so good and so true, though, is Brendan Fraser as the title character.
  74. Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times
    Would have benefited from putting a wider lens on the man and his detractors.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Talk to Her
    Odd, moving, strained cinematic poetry.
  76. Friday After Next
    Loaded with priceless encounters that would seem incongruous in any other movie but play here as low-comedy facts of some parts of black life.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    One hell of a party, and it doesn't let anything get in the way of that.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Interview with the Assassin
    Like ''Blair,'' it never quite finds a way out of its own built-in dead-end.
  79. Half Past Dead
    Brilliantly named Half Past Dead -- or for Seagal pessimists: ''Totally Past His Prime.''
  80. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    Bernal, with his sweet man-boy looks, makes Padre Amaro's portrait of corruption all the more flabbergasting in its irony.
  81. Ararat
    The screenplay's intelligence begins to break down in Egoyan's formal choices. Ideas never elude Egoyan, but boy does Saroyan's epic look uncertain and cruddy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    Moves the franchise even closer to Indiana Jones territory, with bloodcurdling action scenes and a passel of climactic computer-generated slime beasties unparalleled in their potential ability to -- I'm quoting from both book and film here -- '' rip, tear, rend, kill. ''
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet
    This is art paying homage to art.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Bread, My Sweet
    Think low-budget ''Moonstruck'' but think again: A regional dish in the most heartwarming sense.
  85. Far From Heaven
    This is a love letter from one auteur to another that doesn't feel like a term paper. Instead, Far From Heaven is an honest-to-God drama with resonance all its own.
  86. 8 Mile
    A hip-hop cousin of Prince's ''Purple Rain,'' which had braver fashion sense and better original songs.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Femme Fatale
    Fatale is, truthfully, a mess - an absurdly overwritten Eurotrash thriller that beggars an audience's suspension of disbelief. It's also great over-the-top moviemaking if you're in a slap-happy mood.
  88. Strange Fruit
    The film spends its first half explaining the song -- famously and vividly about the cycle of Southern lynching. Its better second half-hour unmasks its composer as a compassionate Jewish guy from the Bronx.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Treasure Planet
    As literary desecrations go, this makes for perfectly acceptable, occasionally very enjoyable children's entertainment. You'll forget about it by Monday, though, and if they're old enough to have developed some taste, so will your kids.
  90. The Weight of Water
    Though it never rises to its full potential as a film, still offers a great deal of insight into the female condition and the timeless danger of emotions repressed.
  91. Tully
    The film's unhurried pace is actually one of its strengths. Entirely appropriately, the tale unfolds like a lazy summer afternoon and concludes with the crisp clarity of a fall dawn. That's not just a farm movie, that's life.
  92. Daughter from Danang
    That commendable sense of balance, which Dolgin and Franco use to approach this family reunion, ultimately makes the finished product devastating.
  93. The Santa Clause 2
    For an anonymous Saturday afternoon, it's the best lump of coal Hollywood can jam in your stocking.
  94. I Spy
    The sex bits are flat, the racial innuendo is flatter, and somewhere, Cosby is having a Pudding Pop and shaking his head in disbelief.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Santa vs. the Snowman
    Takes you inside a kingdom you've never seen the likes of before. Not only is it an IMAX film, with all the superlatives (six-story screen, 12,000 seat-rumbling watts of digital sound) this implies, but it's also computer-generated 3D animation.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Bank
    Handsomely shot and edited, The Bank benefits greatly from the brutal ministrations of LaPaglia,
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Quai des Orfèvres [re-release]
    A film noir? A backstage musical? A whodunit? A comedy? In truth, it's all of the above -- plus a kinky love story, an absorbing melodrama, and a mordantly jaded snapshot of postwar Paris -- and all of them are wonderful.
  98. All the Queen's Men
    A throwback war movie that fails on so many levels, it should pay reparations to viewers.
  99. Frida
    Disappointing.
  100. By Hook or by Crook
    Not particularly good -- meaning navigable, remotely entertaining, pleasing to the eye -- it does, rather nobly, want to hip its audience to gender fluidity.
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