Boston Globe's Scores

For 7,964 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:
7964 movie reviews
  1. Ends with a fizzle, not a bang.
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  2. A sodden-looking film.
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  3. A video game barely disguised as a movie. Violent, and the monsters are scary for younger children.
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  4. Distress of Parents is a real pleasure.
  5. 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.
  6. The tame, confused script eventually sinks the film, although Field shows skill directing actors.
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  7. It plays like a pilot for what I imagine will be network TV's first all-gay sitcom.
  8. A terrific little uppercut of a boxing movie and close to a perfect one.
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  9. Washington and the others score in this predictable but rousing film where the big victory is over attitudes.
  10. Insights run more along the lines of which ''Sesame Street'' character each of them identifies with.
  11. He's (Willard) a one-man storm of escalating inanity, and he's hilarious.
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  12. A steadily engaging and winningly humane film that loves its characters.
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  13. Although dated, it's not a bad musical.
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  14. Awful in ways that are just clever enough often enough to make it intermittently watchable.
  15. A romantic fairy tale that's light and in several ways seductive, if not exactly filling.
  16. Leaves you questioning its intentions.
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  17. Movingly recounts a hitherto untold story in the voices of the people who lived it.
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  18. The kind of heartwarming, well-intentioned film many audiences claim they want to see at their local theaters.
  19. Hits mostly flat notes, then a few really sour ones.
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  20. It plays like Scorsese's ``After Hours,'' but for higher stakes.
  21. Terrific French film about that most universal of subjects - work.
  22. Rich as it looks, it lacks the feverishness of Goya's art.
  23. Bait ends up seeming pretty wormy.
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  24. Hollywood filmmaking at its best, brimming over with feeling, texture, spirit, and several kinds of keenness that transmute experience into big pop myth.
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  25. Isn't even worth a glance.
  26. It's lively, edgy, full of zigs and zags, juicy performances, and offbeat fun.
  27. Sometimes trips over its own contrivance, especially at the ammo-ridden end.
  28. Offers some entertaining moments now and then in its relatively short running time.
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  29. A crass, witless knockoff of better films.
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  30. Mother's peace crusade ennobles Irish Town.
  31. Engrossing and eye-opening in several respects and even, when you least expect it, humorous.
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  32. In its zeal to counter the negativity usually found in depictions of Mormons, God's Army eventually succumbs to overearnestness, sentimentality, and cliche.
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    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A heady, sometimes blurry combination of fable, legend, and social-political commentary.
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  33. The sweetly enticing Smiling Fish and Goat on Fire repays the bit of patience it asks.
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  34. Dogged allegiance to blandness.
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  35. It takes us nowhere we haven't been before, except geographically.
  36. Brightly sidesteps the cliches that cling to the genre like barnacles and reinvents a lot of the old moves.
  37. She's (Dunst) the big reason the film rises above instantly rejectable formula to campy pop.
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  38. It's rare that a crime movie achieves such emotional complexity, but this one is smartly layered.
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  39. Many of the film's images will prove more than some viewers can take.
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  40. A ton of fun, and then some.
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  41. An earnest but ultimately scattered effort to put Yippie radical Abbie Hoffman's best foot posthumously forward.
  42. Not only exhilarating and cathartic. It's too funny to be ignored.
  43. Goes soft in the end, but not ruinously so. Meanwhile, its loose cannons bounce off one another deliciously.
  44. A bit of a cop-out, wrapping in wistful sentimentality a failure to acknowledge a connection that is more than epidermal.
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  45. It is all style and no substance.
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  46. Causes one to wish... that movies about the supernatural could make contact with supernatural script doctors.
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  47. It's the cinematic equivalent of one of those prop guns where you pull the trigger and a little flag comes out of the barrel, waving gaily.
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  48. Any ESPN commercial at all leaves it in the dust when it comes to imaginative firepower.
  49. One of the year's most winning performances, Logue's Dex will grow on you as he stumbles toward emotional fullness.
  50. Reveals real feelings.
  51. It's funny and charming most of the time, thanks to Brenda Blethyn.
  52. A little Hitchcock and some good Psycho fun at the beach.
  53. Such an utter piece of fluff so conceptually barren it might as well be a music video.
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  54. Should have been an inaudible man movie. Every time the characters open their mouths, they hammer it deeper into the ground.
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  55. Space Cowboys does achieve liftoff.
  56. As engaging as it is ungainly and scattered.
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  57. There's a whole lotta latex goin' on. The trouble is that not enough else is going on.
  58. I'd take a chance on it anyway, even if it stumbles and loses its way.
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  59. Give it a chance and you'll probably share the cast's collective impulse to dive in and embrace it.
  60. It's a meditation on life and death, but it's less somber and more light-handed, subtle, and mischievously funny.
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  61. A train worth catching.
  62. A lively and affectionate cross between an infomercial and a genuflection.
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  63. It's terse, atmospheric, fatalistic, with vertiginous camera angles and edits offsetting its gray documentary flatness.
  64. Richly compelling.
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  65. Doesn't quite rank with the films that bracket Heckerling's pop-culture high priestess status
  66. 2000 isn't about nobility and humility; saving the planet from evil collectors is what sells video games.
  67. Ford and Pfeiffer deliver craftsmanlike work, but the film steadily unravels as Zemeckis tries to ratchet up the suspense.
  68. The moral universe remains unsullied in this lite, lo-cal thriller - the cinematic equivalent of a fizzy summer drink.
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  69. The film does not offer an optimistic view of relationships.
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  70. A deft, elegant, melancholy tapestry of flawed outreach, and the big reason it succeeds is Podeswa's courage in dispensing with a lot of exposition and trusting the audience - and the faces of the actors - to fill a lot of what otherwise would be gaps.
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  71. It's all we ask of a film but almost never get, as it first makes us squirm, then makes us cheer.
  72. Recedes to a string of mere action exploits. These are proficiently executed but, for all their visual authority, not much more than routine.
  73. We're in a golden age of comedy, and one of the reasons is Margaret Cho.
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  74. It's a lame and painfully overextended satire of homophobia.
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  75. Too bad The Kid gets bogged down in its sentimental manipulations. It has more going for it than you might suppose.
  76. The question facing the target audience for Scary Movie is whether the funny bits will be enough of a payoff for sitting through the tedious stuff between them.
  77. You won't see a more humane and delicately moving riff this year on the theme of getting clean.
  78. It's a sunny, funny, fittingly cartoony blend of computer-generated 3-D representations of the flying squirrel and his pal the moose with actors.
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  79. 'Titanic'' was a case of a cheeseball story riding terrific effects. The Perfect Storm is in every important way deeper.
  80. There are so many wonderful moments in Trixie and so few films like it that you wish Rudolph had given it a few more rewrites.
  81. It's often corny, but it's never boring, and it'll sweep you up in its momentum if you give it a chance.
  82. It has a few laughs, but it also has a lot of dead air, and barely any plot at all. In sporting terms, it's no home run.
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  83. There's nothing paltry about its poultry.
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  84. You can count on the fingers of one hand the number of works in any given year to which one is moved to apply the word ''masterpiece.'' Raul Ruiz's Time Regained is one of them.
  85. A space shot worth taking.
  86. With Jackson leading the way, Shaft has style, punch, and street cred. It's a hot cool update.
  87. Plays like a college version of ''When Harry Met Sally.''
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  88. It's often a downer, with a sweet but largely passive protagonist.
  89. Branagh and Love's Labour's Lost all but will themselves into liftoff. They achieve it, and in doing so, they somehow make it right to our pleasure centers with their generous embrace of stardust and pizazz.
  90. The flat tire of summer movies.
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  91. American Pimp, if not quite a self-serving orgy of self-justification, can hardly be thought of as a searching look at the skin trade.
  92. It keeps its promise to throw an hour and a half of lively entertainment at audiences.
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  93. There's no Passion in this psychological drama.
  94. The problem with 8 1/2 Women isn't that what you see is what you get; it's that what you see is all you get.
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  95. There's plenty of invention and exuberant vigor in the chopsocky, and Wilson's cool, ironic drollery provides the perfect foil for Chan's heroics.
  96. Even allowing for differences in national styles, Kikujiro sprawls and stumbles. It's a road movie that turns into its own detour.
  97. Hard-driving and propulsive as it is, the film is unable to hide the fact that Woo seems not only to be repeating himself, but parodying his earlier films on a much bigger scale, more crudely and coarsely.
  98. It's the kind of movie you can settle into, secure in the expectation that you can steal from it more than a little vintage Allen fun.
  99. Occasionally wills itself to rude, crude life. But most of the time it's pretty limp.

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