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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    • 17 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    See No Evil
    Generic teen dice-and-slice with interior design by way of ''Saw." The movie's tight and reasonably well shot, though, and there are flashes of nasty invention between the ritual guttings.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sydney White
    Sydney White makes "Mean Girls" look like Shakespeare.
  3. Monster Trucks
    Monster Trucks might not be a complete lemon, but it’s hardly cherry.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Deadfall
    Wilde is stuck with the harder job of simultaneously playing sexy, innocent, conniving, and heartsore, and the effort appears to give her a headache. "This is kind of like an old movie," Liza says to Jay in one scene. Lady, don't you wish.
  5. The Strip
    The Strip makes you appreciate what hard work effortless comedy is.
  6. Session 9
    You couldn't ask for a better setting for a horror movie. What you could ask for is a better script.
    • Boston Globe
  7. Mother Mary
    The back and forth between the two actors becomes fraught with confusing allusions and muddled metaphors before ceding control to some unsuccessful supernatural elements.
    • 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.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sex and the City 2
    A dunderheaded comic melodrama with clothes to die for and dialogue to shrink from. It’s downright depressing.
  10. It's All Gone Pete Tong
    Isn't all wrong. But even at its very best, it's just all right.
  11. House of Wax
    For Hilton haters, the stupid and grotesque remake of House of Wax will only stoke their schadenfreude.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Horrible Bosses
    I say kill off everybody else and bring back Farrell for the sequel.
  13. Alex & Emma
    The lack of sexual tension is astounding.
  14. Stardust
    Stardust certainly could have gone somewhere fun. But the magic and zip you need to get a blimp like this off the ground is scarce.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Clash of the Titans
    The results are -- there’s no other word for it -- a disaster.
  16. Zookeeper
    As for other voices, the most notable are Adam Sandler, whose capuchin monkey wears out his welcome pretty quickly; Maya Rudolph, whose jivey giraffe comes perilously close to aural blackface; and Nick Nolte's gorilla.
  17. Milarepa
    Despite timely and worthwhile subject matter, there is nothing very inspired or inspiring in what makes it to the screen. Maybe they're saving all of that for the sequel, too.
  18. Prey for Rock & Roll
    The casting alone should warn you about what kind of bottom this movie's going to hit.
  19. Alien Nation
    Alien Nation quickly abandons any possibility of an equivalently fascinating world for the formulas of a routine cop movie. [7 Oct 1988, p.40]
    • Boston Globe
  20. Casanova
    The movie treats trysting as comedy and yet is stingy with the laughs.
  21. If I Stay
    A mawkish, preposterous melodrama riddled with clichés, stereotypes, bad dialogue, and inept emotional manipulation.
  22. Samsara
    The result is like an issue of National Geographic gone mad.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ironclad
    As history it's bunk; as inappropriate historical fiction, it's awfully close to comedy.
  24. Requiem for a Dream
    It's two hours of slumming in a vision of hell hatched from bourgeois comfort. That, and not its unsavory subject matter, is what makes it bummer theater.
  25. The 5th Wave
    It’s tough to stay focused on the provocative bits when soapy talk of teenage yearning and angst keep making us snicker.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Time and Tide
    A desperate, cynical self-parody.
    • Boston Globe
  27. Johnson Family Vacation
    Boring, mediocre movie.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    About Last Night
    Despite a frisky soundtrack that starts off with James Brown’s “Sex Machine” — trust me, it’s downhill from there — this is the visual equivalent of Muzak. You don’t have to see it to have seen it.
  29. 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.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Pacifier
    JUST worth your children's time, and hardly worth yours.
  31. The Mastermind
    If only this movie weren’t as slow as a sleepwalkng turtle. The story is constructed like one big, dark joke whose punchline isn’t worth sitting through 110 minutes to hear.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Uptown Girls
    The feel-bad movie of the summer.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Good German
    There's a great movie somewhere in The Good German, but it's buried under three tons of run-amok formalism.
  34. Endless Love
    Though Zefferelli’s version was trashy and downright nuts, at least it made you feel the love. This pallid replay just seems endless.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Elvira's Haunted Hills
    She's like Bob Hope with fake breasts and a wig. Now, that's scary.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Matthew Barney: No Restraint
    As blandly lucid as Barney's is wildly and perplexingly imaginative.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bewitched
    Bewitched presents a phony and cynical look at how Hollywood might make or remake a television show. It's as grating, laughless, and narcissistic (though, to its credit, not as cruel) as that new Lisa Kudrow show-within-a-show-within-a-show, "The Comeback."
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    And So It Goes
    And So It Goes looks like it was shot on outdated video equipment and has a forced, jokey script by Mark Andrus (”As Good As It Gets,” “Georgia Rule”).
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Toast
    I could pile on the cooking metaphors until you cried "uncle," but the fact remains that there's a very good movie in here that its makers have failed to bring off.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Spirit
    The movie's cleverest idea is to give the Octopus identical clone henchmen with names like Phobos, Logos, and Huevos, all played by Louis Lombardi with a marvelous fat-boy idiot grin.
  41. Paul
    Never achieves the exhilarating feat of exemplifying the types of Hollywood movies it wants to unpack.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stuart Little 2
    Sure, go ahead and take the kids. But, for pity's sake, read them the book first.
  43. Here
    Couple the broad acting and cliché-ridden screenplay with the fixed-frame format, and “Here” comes off like a bad sitcom, or even worse, a school play made by a bunch of fifth-graders who decided to tackle Eugene O’Neill or “Death of a Salesman.”
  44. Swing Vote
    Swing Vote is a satire that's afraid to satirize.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In the Heart of the Sea
    In the Heart of the Sea plays as if the joke was real and everyone on the production had caved in. The result, as a movie, is a joke.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    Has the distinction of being much dumber and pulpier than the comic book on which it's based -- the ink practically comes off on your fingers as you watch it.
  47. You People
    Director Kenya Barris, who also co-wrote the script with Jonah Hill, intended to make an edgy, race-based cringe comedy; the result is afraid of its own shadow. This Netflix release commits an even bigger sin by wasting the considerable comedic talents of former “Saturday Night Live” castmates Eddie Murphy and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
  48. 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
  49. Saban's Power Rangers
    Power Rangers might be the only movie that directly pays homage to “Transformers.” Sadly, it suffers by the comparison.
  50. Life of Crime
    The cast does capable work, but you’ll wish the movie concentrated more on the comedy, which has some zing, rather than the straighter elements, which quickly start to drag.
  51. The Divide
    It's doom that we're meant to feel here. And repulsion. I hate to say, but I shrugged.
  52. Lymelife
    Like so many of these farm-raised films, this one looks polished, but takes no risks, offers no surprises, and contains a final sequence that's laughable for its lack of courage.
    • 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.
  54. Amateur
    Except for a few coups de style, Amateur is a screenful of cool nothingness. [05 May 1995]
    • Boston Globe
  55. Triangle of Sadness
    Precise, expert execution can’t compensate for forced situations and an unenforced imaginative rigor. It’s not so much that all the characters are so unsympathetic. It’s that they’re all so uninteresting. Caricature without gusto is shrink wrap covering . . . shrink wrap.
  56. The Watcher
    Isn't even worth a glance.
  57. Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies
    There is much to learn from Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies. First, a wealth of sharp professorial minds and great artistic eyes is no guarantee of equivalent documentary moviemaking. Second, when making a sort of thesis statement, it helps to have a thesis.
  58. Poster Boy
    An overwrought story of American politics and image-making that really only gets interesting in the final act.
  59. Rambo
    Rambo isn't dull. It is, however, often murkily directed, a real shortcoming in an action movie. In the big rescue-the-prisoners sequence, it's very hard to keep track of who is doing what to whom where.
  60. Man on a Ledge
    You could cast this movie with potato chips and still get cheers when one of the bad guys is cuffed. It doesn't matter that none of it is to be believed.
  61. Battleship
    If only there were more genuine rah-rah fun involved, instead of just endless, thudding, seen-it-all-before mayhem.
  62. Skin
    It’s a fascinating story: part genetic mystery, part socio-racial tragedy. However, Laing’s life, despite its inherent melodrama, does not automatically lend itself to the screen.
  63. Village of the Damned
    Village of the Damned has everything you want in a horror movie but the horror. [28 Apr 1995, p.90]
    • Boston Globe
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Mau Mau Sex Sex
    If you are a devotee of sleaze, you'll salivate at the prospect of Mau Mau Sex Sex, a fond and fawning look back at exploitation, or grindhouse, movies from the 1930s through the 1960s.
  65. Snow Day
    Takes a vacation from quality.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Country Bears
    The music and the stars aren't enough to save the movie.
  67. Hellboy
    In the end, the movie leaves us stuck with unmoving drama and increasingly numbing carnage.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Land of the Lost
    Genially terrible, Lost is lazy, sloppy multiplex filler, good for a few solid giggles and not much more.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Abandon
    Abandon is this CLOSE to being good, juicy, bad-movie fun.
  70. Breakfast of Champions
    Consumerism is running more amok than ever, but this satire of it isn't.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Alice Through the Looking Glass
    To watch Alice Through the Looking Glass is to witness an army of smart, creative people dumbing themselves down into delivering what they think the market wants.
  72. Insidious: Chapter 3
    There’s no end in sight, and that’s what’s really insidious.
  73. Planet of Snail
    The Korean documentary Planet of Snail is spare and unemphatic - too much so - with an abiding sweetness of spirit.
  74. Stranger Than Fiction
    Watching the movie made me long for the big , risky ideas and entertainingly fearless filmmaking in David O. Russell's "I Heart Huckabees " and Spike Jonze's "Adaptation ," which Kaufman wrote. Both were similarly conceptual escapades, but they let it all hang out.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Skinwalkers
    Watching the movie is a little like picking up issue #42 of a comic book after you've skipped the first 41: There's an entire back story mythos hovering in the background like a phantom limb.
  76. Strays
    Strays is a live-action flick about talking canines. As a movie, it is not a good boy; it is a bad dog. But if I were currently 12, I might have reacted in a more positive way.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Limits of Control
    Jarmusch has come up with a dud.
  78. Pet Sematary
    Part of the reason Pet Sematary is so pedestrian is that its leads - Dale Midkiff and Denise Crosby - are uncharismatic. And director Mary Lambert, of Siesta and music video fame, doesn't know how to build and pace her material. [21 Apr 1989, p.46]
    • Boston Globe
    • 58 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    An American Pickle
    Among other things, An American Pickle is very, very Jewish, and a scene toward the end revolves around Ben finally joining a minyan to say the Mourner’s Kaddish. Better they should have said it for the movie.
  80. Mafia Mamma
    While Mafia Mamma fails as a comedy, it succeeds in delivering the graphically violent moments one expects from a movie about the Mafia.
  81. Underdog
    Underdog! Rest assured, there is no superhero cliche left unchewed; they even manage to slide in a "Lady and the Tramp" homage while they're at it.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Enough
    Shamelessly exploits the horror of domestic violence for melodramatic, cheap thrills.
  83. Warcraft
    There’s nary an honorable death that resonates, although we do get some creative visual perspectives on enthusiastically digitized brutality. But wasn’t the game good for that already?
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Legendary
    You'll come away from Legendary with no sense of what amateur wrestling is about.
  85. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Awful in ways that are just clever enough often enough to make it intermittently watchable.
  86. Autumn in New York
    It is all style and no substance.
    • Boston Globe
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Self/less
    The movie takes a decent “Twilight Zone” idea -- what if you had a second chance at youth? -- and runs it into the ground with watchable but diminishing returns.
  88. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    The first step in getting beyond preaching to the converted is letting the other side show how wrong it might be.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tomb Raider
    After a brisk and promising opening half-hour set in London and Hong Kong, the movie devolves into a Saturday matinee B-movie, and not in a good way. It’s pure product, and a waste of a savvy leading actress.
  90. The Secret in Their Eyes
    The secret here is that the movie is rather tasteless. It has the high, slightly nauseating stink of perfume on garbage.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Teenage
    Regrettably, it’s terrible poetry: a roughly chronological jumble of archival footage, unconvincing period reenactments, gauzy voice-overs, and half-baked ideas that makes one yearn for the stolid dullness of a History Channel documentary.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bad Moms
    This is no “Bridesmaids.” What the film’s premise has in novelty, it lacks in execution. The characters are uninspired, and they continue to lack depth and plausibility throughout.
  93. The Women
    The movie is a work of ambivalence. Is English making fun of these women? Or is she making a pilot for Lifetime?
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    G-Force
    The general consensus on this one: Rats.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Management
    Sometimes a cute-stalker movie can win the audience's heart. Management only makes you ponder the line between true love and a restraining order.
  96. Good Deeds
    Good Deeds is the first of the 11 movies he's written and directed to try a one-tone-fits-all approach. Sadly, that tone is funereal, and it's always a beat out of step with the rhythms of both real life and most movies.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Raven
    A grimly preposterous serial-killer thriller set in 19th-century Baltimore, this riff on the final days of the author of "The Tell-Tale Heart" and other masterpieces of the macabre might qualify as literary desecration if it weren't so silly.
  98. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    A lot of striking pictures in this would-be feminist "Braveheart," but a film that's pretty flat and earthbound because of the limitations of the figure at its center.
  99. Godard Mon Amour
    Godard Mon Amour is very much like a Woody Allen film, with Godard embodying Allen’s negative traits of pretentiousness, neurosis, and misogyny without the redeeming virtue of humor.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mood Indigo
    If ever a movie were lost in translation, it’s Mood Indigo, the latest from the scattershot genius Michel Gondry (“Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Science of Sleep”). With his penchant for sad-sack dreamers and gonzo visual gags, Gondry can make a director like Wes Anderson look like a prig, and “Mood” allows him freer access to his fancy than usual.
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