Boston Globe's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 5,240 out of 7964
  2. Mixed: 1,556 out of 7964
  3. Negative: 1,168 out of 7964
7964 movie reviews
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  1. Miss Julie
    Figgis's film doesn't match its reach.
  2. The War Zone
    In all respects, from choice of material to fullness of execution on every level, The War Zone is an extraordinary piece of work.
  3. Diamonds
    Sadly unworthy of Douglas.
  4. Stir of Echoes
    Needs less down-to-earth flavor and more unearthly force.
  5. The Green Mile
    There's almost too much there, but the three-hour-plus film permits the kind of detailing that not only brings the storytelling to life, but sometimes persuades us we're breathing to its rhythms.
  6. Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
    Schneider's mild-mannered fish-lover is genuinely likable, and a good-natured foil to the crude jokes.
  7. Agnes Browne
    There's nothing really wrong with Agnes Browne, except a tendency to take a few easy, convenient outs.
  8. Holy Smoke
    In the end, Holy Smoke crashes and burns.
    • Boston Globe
  9. The End of the Affair
    The immaculately crafted film that just sits there and refuses to come to life.
  10. Sweet and Lowdown
    Agreeable eye candy and ear candy, but it's too slight to reach as deep as it thinks it wants to reach.
  11. A Map of the World
    Gives three first-rate actors a chance to stretch, and they do.
  12. Flawless
    A smartly crafted throwback to the gritty Manhattan crime melodramas of the '40s .
  13. Tumbleweeds
    You'll care what happens in this film with more than enough freshness and originality to avoid succumbing to girls-on-the-run cliches.
  14. End of Days
    It seems endless. It's also unusually crude and stupid, even for an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie.
  15. Ride with the Devil
    It's one of the few films that persuades you that it went out to meet the war and bring it to us with verisimilitude.
  16. Toy Story 2
    Everything you could want in a sequel. It satisfyingly regenerates the characters and qualities that made the first film so popular. And then it moves them forward into newer, fresher, more elaborate, more involving territory.
  17. The World Is Not Enough
    This 19th Bond installment is passable, but only just.
  18. All About My Mother
    A tender genuflection to the women's energies that keep that spinning world from keeling over.
  19. Sleepy Hollow
    A gorgeous screenful of period eye candy.
  20. 42: Forty Two Up
    A miracle of data retrieval as the grown schoolchildren are measured against their footage from the earlier films.
  21. Mansfield Park
    Stylish and arrives at a satisfying cumulative weight, even if it isn't Austen pure.
  22. Liberty Heights
    Both a lovingly crafted remembrance of things past and a deliberate broadening and darkening of the canvas Levinson previously filled in "Diner," "Tin Men," and "Avalon."
  23. Anywhere But Here
    Aims its big, bold mother-daughter conflicts straight at the heart by way of the tear ducts, and connects.
  24. Felicia's Journey
    Has more ambition than the usual serial killer film, but curiously less urgency.
  25. 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.
  26. Dogma
    Has that rarest of qualities in movies that think of themselves as religious. I'm talking about the vision thing. And the ability to make morality entertaining.
  27. Light It Up
    Light It Up isn't a great movie, but it's a cut above most so-called urban thrillers.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pokémon: The First Movie - Mewtwo Strikes Back!
    The Japanese animation is beautiful, and the script adaptation for the English-speaking audience is well-paced, clever, and absorbing enough to keep parents from squirming.
  29. Rosetta
    The bleakness of Rosetta will not be for all, but it's one of the best films of the year.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Bachelor
    A vapid, charmless update of Buster Keaton's 1925 film "Seven Chances."
    • Boston Globe
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Mein liebster Feind - Klaus Kinski
    Reflective, haunting, hilarious documentary.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Train of Life
    Another phantasmagorical tale of life among the Nazis, is upon us. This one works much better.
  33. American Movie
    It seems more a geek show than a slab of marketing wizardry.
  34. The Bone Collector
    Washington and Jolie earn their stripes here, but more texture would have resulted, I think, in more terror.
  35. The Insider
    A big, dark juggernaut of a movie about a big, dark juggernaut of a subject.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Beefcake
    It leaves you with an odd, sweet-and-sour taste - nostalgia painted in pastel colors, streaked with black smears.
  37. Music of the Heart
    Avoids the potentially suffocating pall of uplift hovering over its quite exhilarating story.
  38. The Legend of 1900
    Its protagonist haven't enough emotional substance to carry them through the long, darkly lit introspective sequences.
    • Boston Globe
  39. Princess Mononoke
    Its breadth, profundity, and stunningly rendered vision make idealism seem renewed and breathtaking again.
  40. Being John Malkovich
    But then Being John Malkovich is a brilliant juggling act, too, brilliantly brought off.
  41. The Best Man
    Breathes fresh life into old formulas.
  42. Three to Tango
    Trips early and never gets up off the floor.
  43. Bats
    A reassuring little cheeseball of a movie.
  44. Body Shots
    Beneath its glitz, poses, and pub crawlers and club prowlers, it's an old-fashioned morality tale.
  45. Crazy in Alabama
    The pieces don't always fit together smoothly, but there's a lot of flavorful work to savor.
  46. Show Me Love
    Charming and, compared with most Hollywood films like it, refreshing.
    • Boston Globe
  47. Bringing Out the Dead
    While heartfelt and beautifully crafted, Bringing Out the Dead is too freighted with its protagonist's failed savior complex and is surprisingly lacking in primal impact.
  48. Julien Donkey-Boy
    At its best, it will impale you on its raw urgency. At other times, it's a slog through long improvisations that never achieve dramatic liftoff.
  49. The Story of Us
    Conspicuously short on the kind of texture that makes us feel we're watching real people living real lives.
  50. Joe the King
    Whaley's self-effacing but strongly etched and wrenchingly effective film.
  51. The Straight Story
    Farnsworth's embodiment of old American values, with their combination of delicacy, reserve, and stand-alone independence, is a one-of-a-kind treasure.
  52. Fight Club
    Begins with that invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz. But its chic indictment of empty materialist values fizzles.
  53. Random Hearts
    A-list soap opera, high-class and high-gloss.
  54. The Grandfather
    A solid, humane, old-fashioned film in the best sense of the term.
  55. The Limey
    Can't outrun its very visible limits.
  56. Superstar
    Part of the reason for the comic surehandedness is the obvious chemistry between Shannon, Ferrell, and director Bruce McCulloch.
  57. Boys Don't Cry
    "In Cold Blood," "Badlands," "The Executioner's Song," and now, joining those grisly milestones on the heartland hit list, and every bit their equal, is Boys Don't Cry.
  58. Plunkett & Macleane
    Scott makes it easy to overlook the conventionality beneath his sometimes overdone but almost always enjoyable combination of atmosphere and propulsiveness.
  59. Mystery, Alaska
    Individual performances...are flavorful and simpatico.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Elmo in Grouchland
    The Jim Henson folks...come up with another winner.
  61. Happy, Texas
    I can't imagine anyone not feeling entertained by Happy, Texas.
  62. Three Kings
    You walk out amazed and refreshed by the way it kicks the assumptions out from under the genre.
  63. Drive Me Crazy
    Gets by on the watchability of its young stars.
  64. Double Jeopardy
    Judd is pretty much on her own - an assignment she mostly can handle with aplomb.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    On the Ropes
    Has the impact of a left-right combination to the chin.
  66. Mumford
    The performances are disarming and Mumford is the kind of comedy that grows on you if you give it a chance.
  67. Jakob the Liar
    Deserves a place alongside "Life Is Beautiful" and, yes, even "Schindler's List."
    • 46 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dog Park
    A romantic comedy with an adult sensibility, a film that avoids characters-as-caricatures (with one exception), and deftly mixes cynicism and hope.
  69. Guinevere
    While the appeal of Guinevere is decidedly intermittent, it's there, and the acting is right on the money.
  70. Splendor
    Runs out of helium and lands pretty heavily after its airy beginning.
  71. Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember
    A long, warm, satisfying farewell encounter.
  72. Sugar Town
    Likable, but at times it's also inescapably sketchy and ramshackle.
  73. Breakfast of Champions
    Consumerism is running more amok than ever, but this satire of it isn't.
  74. Lucie Aubrac
    Seems so preoccupied with genuflection that it never achieves its subject's heart-pounding immediacy.
  75. Get Bruce
    Captures just enough behind-the-scenes flavor to qualify as a light, bright divertissement.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Blue Streak
    A rather witty, streetwise comedy/action movie with a lot going for it.
  77. For Love of the Game
    After revitalizing baseball movies with "Field of Dreams" and "Bull Durham," he's now three for three with the funny, quirky, rueful, and richly textured For Love of the Game.
  78. Romance
    Lots of sex, but little joy.
  79. American Beauty
    Spacey is diamond-brilliant in a role that plays as if custom-made for him.
  80. The Minus Man
    The sly and subtle Minus Man is a wicked little sidewinder of a black comedy.
  81. Earth
    Hurls its Holocaust at us in a series of justifiably horrific images.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Love Stinks
    It would have done better to go straight to video, where it belongs.
  83. Stigmata
    Could have been a classy thriller. But all the Aramaic in the world can't save it from its own pounding slickness.
  84. Black Cat, White Cat
    The gusto in the flying bullets, the fleeing lovers, and the flowing music will make you want to hang around until the party is over.
  85. All the Little Animals
    Involvingly acted, surehandedly crafted.
  86. Outside Providence
    It's much closer to a European film in sensibility than to one of Hollywood's factory products.
  87. Chill Factor
    Gooding plays the worst role I've ever seen him play in a movie...he perpetuates a kind of black stereotype that should have become history years ago.
  88. The Muse
    The season's brightest piece of counterprogramming.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    A Dog of Flanders
    What a disaster -- a dog.
  90. The 13th Warrior
    About everything is big in The 13th Warrior except the writing, which is microscopic.
    • Boston Globe
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dudley Do-Right
    Never gets horribly bad, but can't sustain its moments of inspiration either.
  92. In Too Deep
    Invigorating excellence.
    • Boston Globe
  93. Mickey Blue Eyes
    It brings an enlivening wit to a comedy of culture collision.
  94. Teaching Mrs. Tingle
    Mostly a screenful of nothingness.
    • 24 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Universal Soldier: The Return
    Devoid of personality and has an annoying gratuitous sentimental streak.
  96. Bowfinger
    Just enough laughs to keep you watching.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Better Than Chocolate
    A semisweet nugget, an insinuating, low-budget little charmer. [27 Aug 1999, p.E4]
    • Boston Globe
  98. Autumn Tale
    Few, if any, films this year will approach, let alone equal, Autumn Tale in its subtle sparkle.
  99. Illuminata
    Beverly D'Angelo, Rufus Sewell, Georgina Cates, Leo Bassi - tumble with zest through a daisy chain of sexual capers. But while warmly energized, their carryings-on also seem a little generic.
    • Boston Globe
  100. The Iron Giant
    A solid, not to say ironclad, winner in the less than overcrowded family animation arena.
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