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. Promises
    Beautifully crafted and brutally honest.
  2. Resident Evil
    A video game cum movie that substitutes shrieking decibel levels for a coherent plot and any resemblance to originality.
  3. Ice Age
    The coolest animation in town.
  4. Asphalt Zahov
    It is haunting in its literal and symbolic meanings, which is the powerful, lingering effect of Yellow Asphalt.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    All About the Benjamins
    All About the Benjamins has: flash, cash, and enough videogenic eye candy to make ''Miami Vice'' look like ''Little House on the Prairie.''
  6. Festival in Cannes
    Many of the story lines offer only superficial insight into the characters; Silver's rich but unhappy mogul has been done far too many times.
  7. The Time Machine
    The best thing about the new film of H.G. Wells's The Time Machine is the machine.
  8. Stolen Summer
    Sweetly earnest little drama.
    • 98 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pépé le Moko (re-release)
    Foreign intrigue is raised to an art form.
  10. We Were Soldiers
    It isn't afraid to genuflect to heroes and heroism and has everything it needs to connect with the resurgence of patriotism after Sept. 11.
    • Boston Globe
  11. 40 Days and 40 Nights
    The film's biggest problem, however, is its naive inability to understand that sex comedies, to amuse, must be about more than sex.
    • Boston Globe
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Cherry Orchard
    As Ranevskaya, the film's focal point and one of its only sources of vitality, Rampling is an enigmatic treasure.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Big Bad Love
    It's messy, but in the end satisfying, a film worth making, a journey worth taking.
    • Boston Globe
  14. Mean Machine
    More machine than mean, although it's anything but a smoothly running operation.
    • Boston Globe
  15. Monsoon Wedding
    The film's bountiful warmth and gusto do their work. By the end, we feel part of the family, too.
  16. Dragonfly
    At least Dragonfly isn't contemptible or altogether dismissible. But it doesn't use Costner well, and it even more unforgivably wastes Kathy Bates.
    • Boston Globe
  17. Queen of the Damned
    Degenerates into a lot of dull declaiming and attitudinizing, despite a sly tongue-in-cheek quality brought by a preening Stuart Townsend to the Lestat role he inherited from the utterly humorless Tom Cruise.
    • Boston Globe
  18. Return to Never Land
    Reliable, standard Disney animated fare, with enough creative energy and wit to entertain all ages.
    • Boston Globe
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Scratch
    An illuminating and entertaining study of an underground culture that has become part of the American mainstream.
    • Boston Globe
  20. Wendigo
    Ultimately, this film is only scary if you're afraid of artfully self-conscious, grainy cinematography.
    • Boston Globe
  21. Hart's War
    Reminds us that the human dynamic can do a lot that explosions can't, even when the film flirts with formula.
  22. Crossroads
    Packaged fluff aimed low, and patronizingly, at Spears's legion of young female fans.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Super Troopers
    Broken Lizard has a way to go to match the absurdity and conceptual genius of Monty Python or Kids in the Hall, but Super Troopers has promising moments of oddity.
  24. John Q
    A well-intentioned but self-defeatingly manipulative film that amounts to an impassioned commercial for national health care.
  25. Scotland, Pa.
    Blurs the line between black comedy and black hole.
    • Boston Globe
  26. Rollerball
    Meretricious without being entertaining, it's an easy game -- and an easier film -- to sit out.
    • Boston Globe
  27. Big Fat Liar
    Offers little in the way of pleasure, even to its target audience -- the easily pleased and undemanding.
  28. Collateral Damage
    Schwarzenegger's mortality for the first time suits him.
  29. Birthday Girl
    This bizarre, uneven comedy is notable mostly for the unsettling presence of Nicole Kidman in full, kinky, sex-kitten mode.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Slackers
    There's scant character development, pedestrian dialogue, and an almost complete lack of humor.
  31. Waydowntown
    The film will resonate with today's alienated workers, whose every brain cell and nerve ending hates the soul-crushing jobs they're told they should be grateful to have.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Son's Room
    A triumph of gentility that earns its moments of pathos.
    • Boston Globe
  33. The Mothman Prophecies
    The movie goes after our dreams by dragging them through our Sept. 11 nightmares with an apocalyptic finale so ludicrous, overedited, and from out of nowhere that it's hard to follow, let alone to believe it's happening.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Metropolis
    Poetic, surreal, and curiously powerful.
    • Boston Globe
  35. Storytelling
    Cleverly mocks the modern chronicler, raising questions that linger long after the film is finished.
    • Boston Globe
  36. The Count of Monte Cristo
    Wolpert and Reynolds seem to be aiming for the ''Titantic'' audience at the expense of sophistication and historical relevance. It's too bad. The able cast, not to mention Alexandre Dumas, deserves better.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beijing Bicycle
    Hard, gleaming images and an oblique storytelling style come to Wang the way the bike comes to Jian -- secondhand.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A Walk to Remember
    A movie where the miracles -- and treacly moments -- keep topping each other.
  39. Ha-Hesder
    Time of Favor, which boasts a haunting score, is an unflinching, complex portrait of a modern Israel that is rarely seen on-screen.
  40. Italian for Beginners
    It's the kind of romantic comedy that doesn't cheapen the word ''heartwarming.''
  41. Snow Dogs
    Harmless, if witless, stuff for the kids.
    • Boston Globe
  42. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    A zestful genre outing, and then some, right up its final overkill.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time
    May bring Goldsworthy's art closer than anything else to ''permanence'' in any traditional sense.
  44. Charlotte Gray
    Rarely has a movie that looked so good on paper fallen so flat as the aptly named Charlotte Gray. It's not a bad movie. Bad movies have more flavor.
  45. I Am Sam
    Ham-handedly manipulative film.
  46. Dark Blue World
    A bittersweet world, and it's frankly one to which we've been before, but seldom do we see it rendered with such exquisite, if pained, craftsmanship.
    • Boston Globe
  47. Black Hawk Down
    Character is almost wholly subordinated to a blast-furnace rendering of the hell into which they're dumped. Seldom will you see so many US military body parts strewn around a movie screen.
    • Boston Globe
  48. Gosford Park
    Never has a film taken such relish in between-the-wars malice as Gosford Park.
  49. Monster's Ball
    The kind of film that could easily be undone by its own high-minded ambitions and dissolve in a pall of uplift. But it stays the course and gives the season two of its notable performances.
  50. The Shipping News
    The Shipping News is good news, but not as good as it could have been.
    • Boston Globe
  51. Ali
    Ali, in short, is far from a seamless success, but it does get the big things right and it respects a subject who commands respect.
    • Boston Globe
  52. The Majestic
    A sweet, visually handsome sermon, but it's too dramatically bland to convert even the converted.
    • Boston Globe
  53. Kate & Leopold
    It's a charmer.
    • Boston Globe
  54. A Beautiful Mind
    The film makes more apparent than ever that Howard is quite underrated as a filmmaker, possibly because he's been hidden in full view in the mainstream for so long.
    • Boston Globe
  55. How High
    The biggest problem, ironically, is that even though the plot and the action center on smoking pot, it's not enough of a stoner flick. The concept of getting stoned isn't amusing; watching stoned people is.
    • Boston Globe
  56. Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
    Mixes ''Jetsons''-style futuristic hijinks with a reliable story of a boy inadvertently whisked ''over the rainbow'' to another galaxy where his mettle is tested.
    • Boston Globe
  57. Joe Somebody
    The cop-out is mitigated by Allen's ability to impart a comfortable, lived-in quality to his roles, this one included.
    • Boston Globe
  58. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    Not since the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy has film dipped into myth and emerged with the kind of weight and heft seen in Peter Jackson's first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
    • Boston Globe
  59. Kandahar
    A bleak road movie that often ambles. But its many moments of poetic grace make this haunting and harrowing journey a rewarding one.
  60. Lantana
    Haunting, powerfully acted, penetratingly written, it's about people coming home -- and not coming home -- to their marriages.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Not Another Teen Movie
    A clever satire that's layered like a breakfast club sandwich with sly in-jokes, sight gags, gross-out scenes, and, of course, requisite bathroom humor.
    • Boston Globe
  62. The Royal Tenenbaums
    There are laughs in it. But mostly you sit around waiting for it to be funnier, or at least funny more often. The problem is that it hasn't figured out a way to be funny while satisfyingly accommodating the pain in these characters.
    • Boston Globe
  63. Vanilla Sky
    May not emerge as the biggest disaster of the holiday movie season, if only because we haven't yet seen all the other year-end films. But it is a huge high-energy misfire, bringing Tom Cruise, Penelope Cruz, and Cameron Crowe to earth with a thud.
    • Boston Globe
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Behind the Sun
    This is a deeper film, delving into the twisted motives that rule lives, the lethal cycles that shackle progress, and, ultimately, the courage it takes to choose life.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In July
    Sweet little crowd-pleaser.
  66. Baran
    Simple, but loaded. It celebrates the humanity and humanism at the heart of Iran's remarkable flow of films, but it's also more of a rebuke to materialistic values than any ideologue could ever hope to be.
  67. Tuvalu
    Astounding. It is also bizarre, challenging, and, at times, admirably overreaching. In short, it's the kind of ambitious little film that can leave critics in a swoon and American moviegoers scratching their heads.
    • Boston Globe
  68. Last Orders
    Richly textured, beautifully acted.
  69. The Business of Strangers
    Isn't much more than ''Baise-Moi'' in business suits as they deconstruct sisterhood with an expense account, but their duets sizzle.
    • Boston Globe
  70. No Man's Land
    From beginning to end, it bristles with ironies in classic Eastern European absurdist style.
    • Boston Globe
  71. Ocean's Eleven
    It's slick, sleek, and stylish, and if it doesn't quite redefine cool, it certainly offers a snazzy update.
    • Boston Globe
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Independent
    A charming and funny look at the independent filmmaking business and the thin line between a masterpiece and a $9 nap.
  73. The Affair of the Necklace
    Larceny at its most labored.
    • Boston Globe
  74. Behind Enemy Lines
    As it is, Behind Enemy Lines will satisfy only those in search of a rousingly, if simplistically, patriotic bloodbath.
    • Boston Globe
    • 40 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Trouble Every Day
    A success in some sense, but it's hard to like a film so cold and dead.
  76. In the Bedroom
    The surehandedly wrought, beautifully acted, almost unbearably tense In the Bedroom is a rare film, not to be missed.
    • Boston Globe
  77. Black Knight
    It's hard to find the movie unpleasant, but it's hard to imagine it causing any strong reaction at all.
    • Boston Globe
  78. Sidewalks of New York
    The film's flaws seem unimportant, and it passes the big test, making you want to find out what happens to these characters, even when what does happen is predictable.
    • Boston Globe
  79. The Devil's Backbone
    A seductively corrosive horror story that also potently suggests the ways war can shatter childhood.
    • Boston Globe
  80. Spy Game
    There's something elegiac in Redford's spy who knows he's a dinosaur but still has a few moves left.
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Così ridevano
    A film of great ingenuity and imagination, full of suggestive power, and it deserves to be seen.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Porn Star: The Legend of Ron Jeremy
    Captures a shadowy scene.
  83. Novocaine
    Quite apart from wringing the last molecule of vividness from his freewheeling roster of loose cannons, he brings to his direction of Martin a finesse shared by only a few of the directors who have worked with the comedian-actor.
    • Boston Globe
  84. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    A firm, ringing yes and no on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The best thing about it may be that it will lead many back to read -- or re-read -- the book.
    • Boston Globe
    • 18 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Wash
    This real-life alliance is part of what makes the slice-of-life comedy The Wash work as well as it does, despite a somewhat skimpy though often crassly amusing script written by the film's director, D.J. Pooh.
    • Boston Globe
  86. Heist
    Not only reminds us that there's a little larceny in all of us, it reminds us how much fun it can be to commune with our inner thieves.
    • Boston Globe
  87. Shallow Hal
    You can't help cheering on Shallow Hal. That and the fact that it's not at all politically correct. It's something better. It's big-hearted, and it's funny.
    • Boston Globe
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Happenstance
    It has every mark of inspiration by imitation.
    • Boston Globe
  89. Tape
    Smart, unpredictable, and alive with the energies of actors who clearly are enjoying being stretched by their material.
    • Boston Globe
  90. Domestic Disturbance
    Doesn't make nearly the ripple it could have made.
    • Boston Globe
  91. Monsters, Inc.
    By any other standard, the creatures in Monsters, Inc. would be impressive. But by the high standard Pixar not only set itself, but invented, they're only ordinary.
    • Boston Globe
  92. Amélie
    Delightful and original, the film conjures up a corner of Paris distinct and specific, yet fairy-tale fanciful.
    • Boston Globe
  93. The One
    The problem in The One isn't the black holes in the universe, to which the characters refer at periodic intervals, but the black hole on the screen. The One is a zero.
    • Boston Globe
  94. The Man Who Wasn't There
    Lacks the requisite sense of dread.
    • Boston Globe
  95. On the Line
    In the end, it's much ado about not very much, certainly not enough to catapult Bass into a film career, but probably enough to satisfy 'N Sync fans.
    • Boston Globe
  96. K-PAX
    It would be gratifying to report that there's a lot more to K-Pax than Spacey at the top of his form, but there isn't.
    • Boston Globe
  97. Life as a House
    This one is nearly as bad as it gets, suggesting that all the wrong people were wielding the sledgehammers here.
    • Boston Globe
  98. Better Than Sex
    There are many things that Better Than Sex is better than, although sex is not among them. It is better than a root canal, an IRS audit, or a rained-out ballgame.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Thirteen Ghosts
    A formulaic script, a tired plot -- and uninspired dialogue all point up the real star. It's the house,
    • Boston Globe
  100. Donnie Darko
    The debut feature from 26-year-old director Richard Kelly shows plenty of promise, but it's somewhat self-involved and won't appeal to audiences who like a straightforward -- even if fantastical -- narrative.
    • Boston Globe
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