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 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: 5,229 out of 7947
  2. Mixed: 1,553 out of 7947
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7947
7947 movie reviews
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    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Transit
    This is a movie that wants to reflect the limbo of war refugees and the greater limbo of life itself — the circles we run in while believing we’re walking a straight line. It does so with a precise, observant tone that’s cool, sometimes cruel, and ultimately coldly reductive.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Venus
    Venus is rollickingly funny at times -- but there's an undercurrent of extraordinarily clear-eyed sadness.
  3. The Love Witch
    Visually, it has the intense intimacy of a dream.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Diner
    Barry Levinson's Diner is an extremely clever, slick male fantasy that takes some time to work out its mood and tone but ultimately blossoms into a moving film. [16 Apr 1982]
    • Boston Globe
  5. Peter Hujar's Day
    This movie is a raging, unwatchable bore, filled with unnecessary details and interminable ramblings. Though it runs a mere 76 minutes, it feels like 76 hours.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Night of the Kings
    A tribute to the power of imagination and storytelling, and it’s like nothing you’ve seen before.
    • 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.
  8. The Second Mother
    A kitchen, a guestroom, and swimming pool become battlegrounds. Though hardly revolutionary, “Mother” subverts conventions — both cinematic and social.
  9. Nowhere to Hide
    Sharif is a paragon of decency and endurance, but his camera skills are limited and often constrained by circumstances. For the most part this roughness reflects the raw immediacy of the experience.
  10. Three Times
    Another triumph of modesty from a master who deserves real, paying audiences, not just the adoration of besotted film critics.
  11. Hit Man
    Hit Man is one of the year’s best movies.
  12. Ghostlight
    The trio give excellent performances, working together to create a credible family unit. Father and daughter hit their strides during their moments of catharsis onstage, which explains why audiences at Sundance reportedly laughed and cried during the climactic performance.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ajami
    It’s much too easy to call Ajami an Arab-Israeli “Crash,’’ but it’s a pretty good place to start.
  14. Viola
    Viola owes much of the pleasure it offers to the sorts of things one looks for in any good movie: an attractive cast, attractively photographed in an attractive location, and plotting that manages to feel relaxed without being lazy.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    127 Hours
    The scene appalls but doesn't offend; it's a "Worst-Case-Scenario Survival Handbook'' nightmare that resonates on the metaphysical level.
  16. Tell No One
    Once the final character has put the last puzzle piece in place, courtesy of an epic explanation, a kind of relief sets in: Someone just needed to spell it all out. It does not entirely help.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Illusionist
    A handcrafted jewel of a movie, The Illusionist understands the illusions that sustain us in youth and that we have to let slip in the end. It's the rare work of art that cherishes both the magic and the trick.
  18. The Deep Blue Sea
    Rachel Weisz has become an exquisite camera artist. In a single shot, she can open up a whole movie. The Deep Blue Sea has a scene like that.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The End of the Tour
    Just because David Foster Wallace would almost certainly have hated The End of the Tour doesn’t mean that it’s not a worthwhile movie. And in fact James Ponsoldt’s dramatic adaptation of Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky’s memoir about his 1996 road trip with Wallace is pretty excellent: heartfelt, probing, funny, above all touching.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Entertaining and enraging.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Safe Conduct
    Essentially a dramatic reenactment of a generation's coping strategies.
  22. Maiden
    Unless you’re familiar with the various particulars, you’ll likely find yourself experiencing the film in aptly wavelike fashion, cresting with optimism about the crew’s prospects before plunging into apprehension, again and again.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    War for the Planet of the Apes
    War for the Planet of the Apes plays like a mash-up of about five different movies, but at least one of them feels like a masterpiece.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Duma
    An exquisitely filmed, emotionally transfixing epic about a white South African boy's journey to return his pet cheetah to the wild.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Constant Gardener
    A predictable conspiracy thriller that somehow ends up diminishing the real urgency of the West's humanitarian disconnect from Africa. If it sends audiences home to log on to the Amnesty International website, terrific -- but that still doesn't make it a very good movie.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Short Term 12
    He (Cretton) just loves this place and these people so much, he wanted to give us more of them. For that, we should be grateful.
  27. Parenthood
    Funny, gritty, filled with surprising stabs of feeling, Parenthood is a stretch for Ron Howard, its director. This new adult comedy has the generosity of "Cocoon" and "Splash," but it takes Howard into deeper, darker, messier territory. [2 Aug 1989, p.57]
    • Boston Globe
  28. A History of Violence
    The film has the perverse intelligence of Cronenberg's other movies. It's not his best, but it is certainly his most accessible, least stagy work, obeying the laws of chronology and serving up characters whom we recognize as people.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sugar
    In its unhurried fashion, Sugar can take its place with the best baseball movies. Where most focus on the grand slam, this one's about the life that surrounds the game and everything that comes after.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Marwencol
    A strange and very beautiful documentary about the gray area between obsession and art.
  31. The Wind That Shakes the Barley
    The historical scope of this story, as well as Loach's interest in absolute fairness, seems to have drained some of the life from its telling.
  32. The Lobster
    Another thing that might bug people is the acting. The roles are performed almost devoid of affect, something like the characters voiced by Tom Noonan in “Anomalisa.”
  33. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    The Nightmare Before Christmas is the black diamond of family films, brilliantly conceived, touchingly pure of heart, much more endearing than scary. [22 Oct 1993, p.55]
    • Boston Globe
  34. Paris Is Burning
    With unpatronizing empathy, Paris Is Burning beckons us into a subculture. [09 Aug 1991, p.39]
    • Boston Globe
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Squid and the Whale
    This is one cinematic novella that stays with you for quite a while.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Winged Migration
    If it were any more real - if it were Imax, say -- the audience would be molting.
  37. Rebels of the Neon God
    Despite the self-conscious derivativeness and allusions, Tsai’s debut already demonstrates the contrariness and motifs that have distinguished him as a unique, difficult, and transcendent filmmaker.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    School of Rock
    Utterly adorable.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Star Trek
    In the pop high it delivers, this is the greatest prequel ever made.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Quiet Place
    The smarter, scarier horror movies know it’s not how much you show an audience but how little. A Quiet Place takes that maxim in a surprising direction: The tension in this movie — and it’s nearly unbearable at times — comes from how little we hear.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Namesake
    The Namesake has a deep, alluvial poetry to it, like a mighty river reaching the sea. It's mysterious and ordinary, insightful and banal, rambling and precise, and it is altogether unexpected.
  42. C'mon C'mon
    Anyone who’s been a parent will find C’mon C’mon memorable, even transporting. Anyone who’s ever thought about being a parent might find it even more so.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hunger
    So what is Hunger? Unexpectedly, a visually ravishing tour of hell and a meditation on freedom that at best is wordlessly profound and at worst interestingly obscure.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Howl's Moving Castle
    The filmmaker's obsessions have got the better of him. That said, I can't recommend the film highly enough, since bad Miyazaki is still leagues better than anyone else.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Hijacking
    A Hijacking tells a simple story whose ripples ultimately turn into tidal waves.
  46. Crimson Gold
    This is the first beautiful performance in the year's first great movie.
  47. Small Things Like These
    This is a master class in quiet acting, one that’s hard to shake once the credits roll.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    Anvil! is one of the sweetest, funniest films I've seen this year. Also the loudest and most foulmouthed.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Trip
    What on earth is The Trip, besides hugely enjoyable?
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Marty
    Marty is one of those films that appear every few years or so -- a picture so sensitively acted, so tenderly written, so human in its appeal, that it has the utmost distinction, no matter what kind of audience is in the theatre. [04 Aug 1955, p.21]
    • Boston Globe
  51. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    [Cuaron]'s a visionary and crafty storyteller who rewards your patience, not with twists in the plot, though the movie has its share, but with pure feeling. Deploying wit, grace, and artistry, he's whisked a kid flick into adolescence.
  52. La Promesse (The Promise)
    Hurtling from the screen with a vigor and importance that are all but absent from contemporary film, it's a deeply moving social drama, raw and gritty in style, shining with moral purpose as it delivers a scathing take-it-into-the-streets critique of feral capitalism and racism. [18 July 1997, p.D1]
    • Boston Globe
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Michael Clayton
    Michael Clayton is about the gap between predatory professionalism and the sins of real life - about how those sins can corrode the hardest business suit of armor.
  54. Downfall
    A bizarre film.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Knives Out
    Pound for pound, actor for actor, laugh for laugh, Knives Out may be the most entertaining movie of the year.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Spectacular Now
    A cleareyed, disarmingly tender adolescent romance that bears comparison with the best of its genre.
  57. Apocalypse in the Tropics
    “Tropics” is undoubtedly a political movie, but it’s also an assured, poetic work of quietly provocative aesthetics. Costa, a documentarian best known for the Oscar-nominated 2019 film “The Edge of Democracy,” has made an entrancing film-essay with a philosophical bent. And yes, discerning American audiences might find that it has a familiar ring.
  58. Let the Right One In
    The beauty of Let the Right One In resides in the way the horror remains grounded in a tragic kind of love.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rams
    If you can adjust to its rhythms, which move according to the seasons and to long-held family grudges, you’ll find it quietly funny, sometimes quite sad, and ultimately rather profound. If you can’t, you’ll be left in the cold with the sheep.
  60. Certified Copy
    You can see her (Binoche) effect on Kiarostami's filmmaking: She brings out something new in him, too.
  61. Taxi to the Dark Side
    The film quickly becomes one of the most powerful, carefully researched investigations of the moral-legal side effects of current American military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. It's terrifying in a way that sneaks up on you.
  62. Challengers
    It’s not that any of the actors are bad. Zendaya has a screen authority that goes way beyond that imperious look. It’s just that none of them is especially compelling.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pig
    Pig is a thoughtful, well-made movie for an audience primed for junk: It’s pearls before swine.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sorry We Missed You
    Some of Loach’s movies have breathing room, but this isn’t one of them. That’s a feature, not a bug. Sorry We Missed You depicts the vise into which many people are forced to put head, hearts, and lives in order to pay the rent and feed their families. It dramatizes a daily sprint up an escalator that pulls workers backwards.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Steve Jobs
    We don’t go to Hollywood movies for hard facts, but it’d be nice to think we’re getting some kind of truth with our entertainment. Maybe Aaron Sorkin thinks we can’t handle the truth.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Marley
    It's an outstanding, warts-and-all look at reggae legend Bob Marley.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Agronomist
    Smartly filmed (aside from a few distracting editing fripperies), but it's so dazzled by its subject and saddened by his martyrdom that it never moves past the heroic politics of dissent.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Touching the Void
    As sagas of endurance in the face of ridiculous odds go, this story is up there with Shackleton and ''Into Thin Air.''
  69. Le Havre
    The achievement of this movie is that Kaurismäki manages the seemingly impossible task of making a farce about farces. In other words, this is a very good movie in quotation marks and a very good movie.
  70. The Holdovers
    The Holdovers feels like a movie Ashby might have made.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sound of Metal
    The final moments, however, are all Ruben’s, which is to say they’re all Ahmed’s, and the actor makes his character’s ultimate decision feel both hard won and achingly simple. Coming out toward the end of a year of great and terrible cacophony, Sound of Metal understands the gift that is hearing and the blessings of silence alike.
  72. Embrace of the Serpent
    Though some of the concepts may be New Age boilerplate, the film’s images linger; especially that of the river, the snake devouring us all.
  73. Da 5 Bloods
    It’s a strange thing when a movie is at its most dynamic when it’s at its most didactic. But that’s the case with Da 5 Bloods. Lee is consciously juggling a lot of balls: not just fact and fiction, past and present, but also humor, action, family drama, and tragedy. The balls don’t stay in the air. The movie has the bumpety-bump pacing of a mini-series forced into a single overlong episode.
  74. Side by Side
    The directors and distributors can't rely on us. They should be implored to watch their movies in the same theaters we do. It's the only way for them to understand that a crime is being committed.
  75. The Last Black Man in San Francisco
    The movie is daring and unconventional. It’s daring in feeling so static, with a distinctive, unhurried rhythm. It’s unconventional in letting evocation drive plot more than events do. It can feel a bit dreamlike that way. A melancholy lyricism defines the movie.
  76. Days of Glory
    A movingly acted, terrifically old-fashioned World War II picture rethought as a post-colonial rebuke.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Summer of Love
    At its most interesting, the movie offers us the sight of people desperately embracing faith in the hopes it will pull them through.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Isle of Dogs
    Isle of Dogs is a fascinating (and furry) place to visit, but visit is all it does. It’s a good boy. But it’s not a great one.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Burma VJ: Reporter i et lukket land
    Burma VJ’ retorts that eyes and ears are everywhere in our ever-tightening global communications mesh. Voices, too, and they get heard. The generals and the ayatollahs have every right to be scared.
  80. Read My Lips
    An inventive, propulsive office thriller.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Return
    Filmed with a cold, poetic beauty, The Return slowly strips away motivation until it arrives at a place of myth both private and oddly universal.
  82. Mademoiselle Chambon
    There's a restraint to Mademoiselle Chambon that's more English than French. Emotions get repressed more often than expressed.
  83. Mysteries of Lisbon
    Mysteries of Lisbon brings us far inside oil-on-canvas in a way that isn't imitative. It's simply, magically a moving picture, what a movie in the 1800s would look like.
  84. Flamenco, Flamenco
    It is a delight for flamenco fans and provides a fascinating introduction for those unfamiliar with the music. But as cinema, despite the lush cinematography of Vittorio Storaro, it is lacking.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Certain Women
    Is Kelly Reichardt the most under-acknowledged great director working in America right now? Her new movie, Certain Women, is one of the glories of this or any other year, but it stays true to Reichardt form, which is to say it’s low-key, allusive, lit up with implied meanings without ever leading us by the hand.
  86. Hands on a Hardbody: The Documentary
    Bindler's recognition of the rich and intense human drama boiling away beneath the laconic surfaces and underplayed verbalizations turns Hands on a Hardbody into a surprisingly affecting metaphor for American life as an ongoing exercise in endurance. [30 Jul 1999, p.D7]
    • Boston Globe
  87. The Story of Louis Pasteur
    The Story of Louis Pasteur dates from the golden age of Hollywood biofilm, marked by conviction and craftsmanship. [13 Dec 1991, p.60]
    • Boston Globe
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Frozen River
    Does what too many independent American movies only pretend to do: Takes you to an unnoticed corner of our country and shows what it's like to actually live there.
  89. Drugstore Cowboy
    Drugstore Cowboy, Gus Van Sant's fresh, gutsy societal underbelly film, never wallows in picturesque down-and-outism, except at the end, when Dillon's character, frightened by the death of a girl he didn't like much and spooked by his own paranoiac suspicion, checks into a seedy hotel while trying to go cold turkey and not yield to the influence of a junkie priest drolly played by William Burroughs. [27 Oct 1989]
    • Boston Globe
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Love Is Strange
    One of those lovely little movies that starts out being about a handful of people and ends up being about all of us. That’s a tricky act to pull off and the talented writer-director Ira Sachs stumbles occasionally over moments of self-conscious lyricism. But then the film recovers its balance, looks at its characters with fondness and with faith, and quietly soars.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Assassin
    The Assassin achieves a pitch of the cinematic sublime of which very few filmmakers are capable, but it doesn’t make much traditional sense. Hou could do that, if he wants, but he’s after more rarefied game.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Concert for George
    It's spookily touching to see this massed group of former rock gods gathered to honor one of their fallen. Bald spots and graying shags predominate; the giant velvet lapels of 1969 have given way to sensible sport coats; the granny glasses are for real.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Twilight Samurai
    The anti-"Kill Bill." This is an old man's movie in all the good ways: gentle, humanistic, rich with observation, quietly aware of all that can't be solved by the sword.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Madeline's Madeline
    In a way I’ve never before seen done onscreen, Madeline’s Madeline fuses triumph and tragedy until the two feel strong and indistinguishable.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Captain Phillips
    Director Paul Greengrass creates an aura of urgency so compelling, so rooted in detail, that we temporarily forget what we know and hold our breaths for two-plus hours of tightening suspense.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Climb
    As The Climb wends its way through the years, and as the friends’ relationships with each other and their girlfriends and families take multiple turns, each “chapter” is presented in smartly thought-out single takes. Except when they’re not; it’s a tough gimmick to sustain and the filmmakers don’t seem too intent on trying.
  97. A Hero
    Farhadi’s artistry is what makes the details so important, both his selection of them and their handling. In much of “A Hero,” one simply has a sense of watching lives being lived.
  98. Three Kings
    You walk out amazed and refreshed by the way it kicks the assumptions out from under the genre.
  99. The Northman
    Everything feels strange, savage, implacably other: royalty alongside slavery, formality prized yet pity nowhere to be found. The Northman seems so foreign, as it should. Yet what Eggers never forgets, and this does almost as much as his talent does to make his film so frequently compelling, is that what to the characters is mundane is to us unreal — and vice versa.
  100. The Killer
    As far as shootouts go, The Killer is an over-the-top success. It's shameless in its excesses - in its filmic allusions, in its camp emotionality, in its frenzied and slo-mo sequences of bullet fire. There are shades of Martin Scorsese and Sam Peckinpah in the artfelt violence, and a direct hit on "Duel in the Sun" as two blinded lovers crawl to each other but miss. Throughout the absurd goings-on, director John Woo's playfulness is hard to resist, and Chow Yun-Fat as the hired killer has an appealing deadpan charisma. [28 June 1991, p.72]
    • Boston Globe
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