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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    • 23 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Love Stinks
    It would have done better to go straight to video, where it belongs.
  2. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Awful in ways that are just clever enough often enough to make it intermittently watchable.
  3. Teaching Mrs. Tingle
    Mostly a screenful of nothingness.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Enough
    Shamelessly exploits the horror of domestic violence for melodramatic, cheap thrills.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bringing Down the House
    There are about 15 minutes of genuine, bust-a-gut comedy in Bringing Down the House, and, surprisingly, they belong to Steve Martin, who hasn't been funny on film in years.
  6. Prey for Rock & Roll
    The casting alone should warn you about what kind of bottom this movie's going to hit.
  7. Here on Earth
    Maudlin script mars teen love.
    • Boston Globe
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hey Arnold! The Movie
    The ugly duckling of Nickelodeon's after-bath lineup. That's its strength.
  9. Sorority Boys
    Crude, lewd comedy that makes ''Animal House'' seem wholesome.
  10. See Spot Run
    See Spot Run isn't solely responsible for the dumbing down of movies, but it's part of the dismal phenomenon.
    • Boston Globe
  11. Tomcats
    Isn't as funny as it is crude, and isn't as crude as it is labored.
    • Boston Globe
  12. End of Days
    It seems endless. It's also unusually crude and stupid, even for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Club Dread
    A bumptious splatter farce that manages to improve from awful to moderately engaging as its cast is winnowed down to the five guys themselves.
  14. Bless the Child
    Causes one to wish... that movies about the supernatural could make contact with supernatural script doctors.
    • Boston Globe
  15. From Hell
    What the Hughes brothers have come up with is, to borrow another phrase from that bygone age, a penny dreadful.
    • Boston Globe
  16. The Eye
    Like the horror-flick hacks who infest Hollywood like termites, the Pangs don't build suspense, they assault the senses with twitchy photography and Danny's editing.
  17. But I'm a Cheerleader
    It's a lame and painfully overextended satire of homophobia.
    • Boston Globe
  18. Johnson Family Vacation
    Boring, mediocre movie.
    • 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.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Big Trouble
    Juggles so many stories and characters, nothing ever develops into more than a rough sketch.
    • 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Greendale
    Beware of stoner rock stars talking politics. No matter where you stand on the spectrum, the ecological/anticorporate idealism of Greendale is so vague as to be insulting to anyone past the backpack-and-Birkenstocks stage of life.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bulletproof Monk
    Indeed a rip-off - a rehash of Hong Kong superstar Chow's greatest celluloid moments with an overlay of Hollywood action cliches, youth-flick silliness, and ah-so stereotypes.
  24. Anger Management
    The most dispiriting thing about Anger Management is that its cameos seem like leftovers.
  25. Snow Dogs
    Harmless, if witless, stuff for the kids.
    • Boston Globe
  26. Jeepers Creepers
    The limp script actually has the characters spout ''Let's get outta here!'' more than once. Or maybe that's just a wise member of the audience talking.
  27. The Perfect Score
    Comes tantalizingly close to being interesting.
  28. Get Carter
    A sodden-looking film.
    • Boston Globe
  29. Soul Plane
    When it's funny it's uproarious. Otherwise, you're crestfallen to discover that the movie is a relentless sucker punch to black entrepreneurship.
  30. Final Destination
    Starts by cheating death and ends by cheating us.
  31. Irreversible
    Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships. He may as well have thrown a big ''whatever'' up on the screen.
  32. Road Trip
    Occasionally wills itself to rude, crude life. But most of the time it's pretty limp.
    • 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Twentynine Palms
    A textbook example of how a director can strip away plot, motivation, character, and meaning and still leave arrant pretension standing tall.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Head in the Clouds
    If you're up for a relentlessly overripe melodrama that takes place in movie-Europe as opposed to the real thing (the Parisian streetwalkers in berets are a good tip-off), by all means catch Head in the Clouds.
  36. Catwoman
    Watching [Berry] run around in that getup I felt embarrassed, the way I do for people who put on makeup before climbing a StairMaster -- it's too much.
  37. Coyote Ugly
    Such an utter piece of fluff so conceptually barren it might as well be a music video.
    • Boston Globe
  38. Next Friday
    The action is mostly witless and predictable. One measure of its desperation and lack of respect for its audience is the frequency with which it labors to wring humor from flatulence and excrement gags.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Vanity Fair
    She has been made lovable -- and a Vanity Fair with a lovable Becky Sharp has no reason to exist. It's as if Shakespeare had put Hamlet on Prozac: What's the point?
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    S1m0ne
    What it is, distressingly, is a mess - a ragbag of promising ideas and failed narrative, of good acting and plain old bad filmmaking.
  41. Get Over It
    Comes off more like a series of painful cliches than a comedy or a love story.
    • Boston Globe
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In the Cut
    It might even work if In the Cut was remotely convincing as a thriller, but Campion can't help wrinkling her nose at genre.
  43. 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
  44. 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.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Final Cut
    Williams gives a performance that's honest and carefully wrought but on some level still a stunt. All that courtliness is wearing him out, and it's wearing us out too.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ghost Ship
    Pureed, predictable conflation of ''Alien'' and ''Titanic'' and ''The Shining.''
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Slipping-Down Life
    The director deserves admiration for sticking to her guns, but here's a heretical notion: Maybe the producer's cut would have been a better movie. This version may be too late, but it's also too little, and that's what hurts.
  48. The Girl Next Door
    Comes up short when things get serious, resorting to cliches and a whole lot of hooey about "moral fiber."
  49. New Best Friend
    Tawdry, trashy yawn-fest that makes the viewer long for the days when bad girls were dangerous dames with sultry style.
    • Boston Globe
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Equilibrium
    Equilibrium just happens to be a really bad comic book.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Bourne Identity
    The best audiences can hope for is that they, too, get amnesia and forget they ever saw this movie.
  52. The Affair of the Necklace
    Larceny at its most labored.
    • Boston Globe
  53. The Family Man
    Sitting through it is like waking up on Christmas morning to find a stockingful of styrofoam.
    • Boston Globe
  54. Spun
    Because Spun is so plotless it's almost avant-garde, we're meant to be delighted with its assortment of set pieces.
    • 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.
  56. 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 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    The result is a revenge thriller that's too taken with its own ambience to actually thrill.
  58. Jeepers Creepers II
    It plays better as exasperating comedy than genuine horror -- although there is something terrifying about being stuck in a movie whose idea of a bogeyman is a scarecrow with an eating disorder.
  59. Snatch.
    One could argue that ''Lock, Stock'' and Snatch are essentially the same movie - crime comedies marked by an outlandish visual style. Which raises the question of whether Ritchie has the range to do anything else.
    • Boston Globe
  60. Gothika
    For most of the movie, however, Halle sprints, Halle swims (55 laps!), and Halle screams. It's a two-hour fitness video -- a portrait of the Oscar winner as personal trainer.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Purple Butterfly
    Ye bites off substantially more than he can chew.
  62. Basic
    Falls flat on two fronts: It's neither deep and interesting enough to be a brainteaser nor sufficiently thrilling to count as a mindless diversion.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Raising Helen
    Works so hard to be inoffensive that you may well be offended.
  64. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine
    No one in the film offers a shred of real proof that IBM cheated.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Around the World in 80 Days
    A peppy, fast-moving, wafer-thin amusement that's fine for kids if you don't mind a lot of Three Stooges-style martial arts. For grown-ups, it's the equivalent of a 59-cent tin globe.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Van Helsing
    We haven't had a good Frankenstein, Dracula, or Wolf Man movie in a long time, so here's one where the whole gang shows up. One catch: It's not good.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    After the Sunset
    For a movie that's sexist, racist, and possibly the most deeply closeted gay love story to be released this year, After the Sunset is reasonably entertaining.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Birth
    Such a meticulously wrought piece of hokum that it's both easy to admire and impossible to warm up to.
  69. Scream 3
    A lame little flat liner.
    • 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.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Just Married
    Reasonably painless if you've never seen a comedy about the travails of newlyweds.
  72. The Beach
    It's "Beach Blanket Bingo" revisited, but with a Eurocast and more exotic locations.
  73. Ned Kelly
    Ultimately, Jordan's vision is so murky that Ned Kelly remains as foreign to us as wombat stew.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Blade II
    It was possible to hope that Blade II would turn out to be good. Well, forget it.
  75. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
    So heavy and lifeless that you keep waiting for those three little front-row kibitzers from "Mystery Science Theatre 3000" to appear at the bottom of the screen to start goofing on it.
    • Boston Globe
  76. Kikujirô no natsu
    Even allowing for differences in national styles, Kikujiro sprawls and stumbles. It's a road movie that turns into its own detour.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Aryan Couple
    Despite its handsome photography and a few memorable performances, The Aryan Couple is mainly notable for its inappropriate, blithe sentimentality.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A Walk to Remember
    A movie where the miracles -- and treacly moments -- keep topping each other.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Love Song for Bobby Long
    Works hard to give quirk a bad name.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ella Enchanted
    The producers of Ella Enchanted probably assume, correctly, that many more kids haven't read the book than have, and they're out to give that audience a slick, shallow good time.
  81. 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
  82. Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
    There's nothing really wrong with it -- it's bad, but no worse than it needs to be, which is the problem.
  83. 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
  84. 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Secret Things
    Hints at a place where desire, fear, pleasure, and power all intersect, but it never actually goes there.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Welcome to Mooseport
    It's a disappointingly limp small-town farce played several shades too broadly by a cast that has done better work elsewhere.
    • 9 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Superbabies: Baby Geniuses 2
    The overall effect is ghoulish.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Silver City
    As it is, the movie only shudders to life when Dickie Pilager's onscreen.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
    So unfocused is Shonda Rhimes's screenplay and so flabby is Marshall's direction.
  90. The Basketball Diaries
    It's not boring to watch, but in the end it's too lame and too tame. [21 Apr 1995]
    • Boston Globe
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Ragtime
    Except for the evocative sets and Randy Newman's upbeat musical score, Ragtime is better read than seen. [18 Dec 1981]
    • Boston Globe
  92. Happy Together
    An abundance of style and an almost total lack of substance make Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together a visually arresting but ultimately unrewarding excursion. [31 Oct 1997]
    • Boston Globe
  93. Amateur
    Except for a few coups de style, Amateur is a screenful of cool nothingness. [05 May 1995]
    • Boston Globe
  94. Mixed Nuts
    Mixed Nuts is that cinematic oddity: a film that's pretty awful, yet almost perversely endearing -- despite the tiredness with which it plays out its labored jokes before bringing them together in a gooey Christmas ending. [21 Dec 1994, p.94]
    • Boston Globe
  95. Rocky V
    By now, Rocky of the drooping eyes and damaged brain has turned guru, emphasizing heart, soul and family ties when the evil promoter starts goading him and playing mind games with his protege. Stallone, said to be following Arnold Schwarzenegger into comedy, is starting earlier than anyone realized. [16 Nov 1990, p.78]
    • Boston Globe
  96. My Blue Heaven
    My Blue Heaven is weightless and unwieldy. It's a confused carnival of silly subplots and characters who never manage to form an ensemble. [17 Aug 1990, p.37]
    • Boston Globe
  97. The Loss of Sexual Innocence
    There's no getting around the fact that it's an uneven exercise that shows signs of having gestated too long. [04 Jun 1999]
    • Boston Globe
  98. The Dead Pool
    The Dead Pool is not a subtle movie or a bloodless one, although it does manage to put its own twist on the usual car chase sequence. [13 Jul 1988, p.59]
    • Boston Globe
  99. Return to Oz
    The Disney people have taken such obvious care in making Return to Oz that it's a shame it didn't turn out better. It has its moments - mostly visual - but when it isn't a grim downer, it's largely inert. [21 Jun 1985, p.21]
    • Boston Globe
    • 58 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Flash Gordon
    If you enjoy laughing at a movie, rather than with it, then you might get a few chuckles. [18 Dec 1980, p.1]
    • Boston Globe
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