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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  1. Final Analysis
    If you get dizzy watching Final Analysis, it may be because it's such a "Vertigo" wannabe. But director Phil Joanou is no Hitchcock, and Kim Basinger, its star, is no Kim Novak, even though Joanou poses and lights her in a critical lighthouse scene the way Hitchcock posed and lit Novak in that bell tower in "Vertigo." The big problem with "Final Analysis," though, is that Richard Gere's pivotal expert shrink is pretty easy to fool. Not until late in the film does he literally run to a library to learn about one of Freud's classic case histories. You have to suspend a ton of disbelief to buy the assumptions you have to make about him, starting with his gullibility. [7 Feb 1992, p.29]
    • Boston Globe
  2. The Cutting Edge
    The Cutting Edge plays like the kind of date movie written by a computer, and not a very smart one...It makes shaved ice look deep. [27 March 1992, p.29]
    • Boston Globe
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wrath of Man
    Even the gunplay, of which there is plenty, feels secondhand.
  4. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    The humor is crass when it isn’t forced. The violence, which barely pauses for reloading, feels even more mechanical than it does mindless, and it’s very mindless. How can a movie so full of action feel so tired?
  5. The Protégé
    Well, even on automatic pilot, as he is here, Jackson is always good company. Maggie Q’s blend of grace and gravity translates into a quiet authority. Keaton completes the trio. He’s quite droll here. No one’s better at playing a low-key wiseass. The pleasure of such company isn’t enough to compensate for watching a succession of scenes that are like recruitment ads for abattoir work.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Mr. Destiny
    There's many a comedy to be made about money and the way it changes us and our perceptions, but Mr. Destiny - which wastes agreeable performances by Ron Lovitz and Bill McCutcheon as well as the principals - isn't it. [12 Oct 1990, p.33p]
    • Boston Globe
  7. Where the Crawdads Sing
    Where the Crawdads Sing, based on Delia Owens’s best-selling novel, is long on setting and atmosphere. It’s short on most everything else. Droopy in pace, it’s increasingly drippy in feeling.
  8. Mr. Jones
    No matter how hard Richard Gere huffs and puffs, his performance as the hunky manic-depressive known only as "Mr. Jones" won't blow you away. Bouncing foolishly from super-duper euphoria to catatonia and back, Gere expends too much energy to ever be believable. [8 Oct 1993, p.56]
    • Boston Globe
  9. Raising Cain
    To be blunt, Raising Cain is a thriller that doesn't thrill. [07 Aug 1992, p.30]
    • Boston Globe
    • 29 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Diana: The Musical
    As biography, Diana is shallow and reductive, checking the boxes of an extremely well-known story with numbing predictability. As musical theater, Diana is a forgettable farrago of painfully on-the-nose lyrics and clashing song styles that ventures perilously close to camp.
  11. Dune: Part Two
    Just as in the first film, I was put off by the white-savior narrative (Stilgar’s fervent belief quickly becomes grating), and the Hans Zimmer score that sounds as if Arrakis were in the Middle East rather than space.
  12. Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood
    If there is potential in a film that ridicules the John Singleton-styled black-men-are-doomed movies like Poetic Justice, Jungle Fever and Straight Out of Brooklyn, Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood squanders it on a series of repetitive gags and sexist jokes. [13 Jan 1996, p.28]
    • Boston Globe
    • 36 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Belly
    This sickeningly violent film, starring a bevy of rap stars, marks the feature debut of hot video director Hype Williams, and while there are hints of his trademark trippiness, this is basically an utterly joyless endeavor. [04 Nov 1998, p.E6]
    • Boston Globe
  14. The Bubble
    In his last movie, The King of Staten Island (2020), Apatow was stretching, both emotionally and tonally, and it largely worked. Here he isn’t, and it doesn’t.
  15. I Love My Dad
    Emotionally, the movie is a mess. It can be even messier tonally. As storytelling, though, “Dad” moves right along. Viewers may look away at times, but they don’t look at their watches.
  16. Operation Mincemeat
    A fine cast — Colin Firth, Matthew Macfadyen, Kelly Macdonald, Penelope Wilton — do their stiff-upper-lip best. It’s not good enough.
  17. Madame Web
    Johnson tries her best, and O’Connor is good for a few laughs, but “Madame Web” is a lost cause. The special effects are confusing and the action scenes are poorly edited. By the time we get a rote explanation of Webb’s powers, it’s too late to care.
  18. The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    The best I can say for The Super Mario Bros. Movie is that it’s infinitely better than its predecessor. But you don’t need a power-up to clear that bar.
  19. Day Shift
    Jamie Foxx is always interesting to watch. His latest movie isn’t. With “Day Shift,” reach for the garlic, not the remote.
  20. Armageddon Time
    The self-congratulatory, back-patting nature of this film is what makes it so insulting.
  21. 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.
  22. White Noise
    Unfortunately, a screenwriter’s fealty to the source material is often the kiss of death. Some things are just not translatable from a reader’s mind to a more objective and visual medium like film.
  23. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    Even if you’ve only seen one of these films, you won’t need to spend 156 minutes witnessing the rise of a madman whose actions never required any backstory in the first place.
  24. The School for Good and Evil
    School is endlessly talky, with dialogue that has the consistency of melted licorice (red or black, your choice). The one thing to be said for Theodore Shapiro’s muscularly egregious score is that the music makes it marginally easier to miss what the characters are saying.
  25. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    Perhaps the biggest problem with Beer Run is tonal haphazardness. Sometimes it’s meant to be funny — other times serious — other times even solemn. (Alternate title: “Chickie Learns About the Horrors of War.”) The few jokes that are clearly intentional tend to fall flat.
  26. Captain America: Brave New World
    While Lumbly brings a refreshing amount of Black anger and cynicism to his performance, Mackie is stuck in a kumbaya mode designed to not offend white viewers. It may be a brave new world, but it’s the same old story.
  27. The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    Fantastic Four: First Steps alternates between battle sequences that you’ve seen countless times and interminable scenes of exposition disguised as emotional beats. The actors play this poorly written material as if they were doing Ibsen, which is commendable, but their attempts fail because you truly don’t give a damn about their plight.
  28. Empire of Light
    Director Sam Mendes tries his hand at writing an original screenplay solo, and the results are far from magical. Instead, Empire of Light strands its poorly defined characters in a nostalgia piece filtered through the director’s love of the movies. (For a better film on the same theme, watch “The Fabelmans.”)
  29. The Whale
    The Whale is being hailed as the comeback vehicle for Fraser. The actor has been through a lot, and he deserves roles that showcase his numerous talents. But he fails to bring humanity to this character who lives in a state of constant apology. The role feels like a cynical grab for an Oscar, which he’ll probably win as the Academy loves masochistic malarkey.
  30. Snow White
    This movie is bad in all sorts of ways, none of which has to do with the fact that Disney cast a Latina actor as Snow White. In fact, that actor, Rachel Zegler, is the film’s saving grace.
  31. The Garfield Movie
    The somewhat inappropriate story won’t matter to youngsters who’ll be hypnotized by a color scheme so bright you need sunglasses to view it.
  32. Emancipation
    Had “Emancipation” shaken off its Oscar-baiting “slave movie” shackles and instead gone full-tilt into a vengeance-laden “freedom movie,” it might have worked.
  33. 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.
  34. Beau Is Afraid
    This is a movie with weapons-grade mommy issues.
  35. We Have a Ghost
    At an outrageously over-long 127 minutes, writer-director Christopher Landon’s adaptation of Geoff Manaugh’s novel “Ernest” feels like a different movie every 15 minutes.
  36. Theater Camp
    This musical should have taken center stage in Theater Camp. The dreadful story surrounding it deserves to get the hook.
  37. 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.
  38. About My Father
    I admire Maniscalco’s decision to make his character the butt of the jokes, literally and figuratively. If only the jokes were funny. He has zero romantic chemistry with Bibb, who appears to be acting in another movie entirely, but he and De Niro make a credible father and son.
  39. Golda
    The end result is an inert bore. Golda fails as a character study and as an exploration of wartime mechanics. It succeeds only as Oscar bait.
  40. 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.
  41. Napoleon
    Fierce and chaotic, the re-creations of war also fall short — the CGI in many scenes is shockingly bad. Whenever the movie threatens to become too dull, there’s a battle sequence. They start to blur together as the minutes slowly tick by.
  42. Priscilla
    Priscilla gives us little idea of the inner workings of Priscilla Presley. She’s an enigma in what is supposed to be a story of her empowerment.
  43. Dumb Money
    Gillespie and his editor Kirk Baxter cycle through scenes of these one-dimensional characters, headache-inducing montages of cable news footage, YouTube re-creations, and TikTok videos. The pacing is frenetic, but the content is mind-numbingly dull.
  44. Migration
    Parents will be tortured by this film. If the whiny adult ducks and their even whinier kids don’t give them a headache, the garish animation will.
  45. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    The problem with “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” is the same as so many of these franchise-based films: They’re all soulless special-effects extravaganzas where CGI takes the place of character development, good writing, and emotional connection.
  46. PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie
    PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie is not a good movie, but it should appeal to its intended audience. I admit I was bored, but to my surprise, I didn’t find it that much of a chore to sit through.
  47. Joker: Folie à Deux
    In addition to being a lousy musical, “Folie à Deux” is also a dreadfully dull courtroom drama.
  48. The Legend of Ochi
    The Legend of Ochi is being pitched as a family movie by A24, but I don’t believe most kids would enjoy this slow-moving slog set in the Carpathian mountains.
  49. 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.
  50. Blink Twice
    Blink Twice may be aiming for a feminist statement, but it’s ultimately just a slasher movie with a bunch of one-dimensional Final Girls played by Alia Shawkat, Trew Mullen, Liz Caribel, and “Hit Man”’s Adria Arjona.
  51. Fly Me to the Moon
    The reason romantic comedies fail so often is that they attempt too much. “Fly Me to the Moon” may be the busiest example I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the worst, despite its eclectic needle drops convincing me that I need to buy its soundtrack album.
  52. Summer Camp
    By the time the film settles down to give us a few solid dramatic scenes, I appreciated the effort but had long since stopped caring.
  53. The Instigators
    It’s sad when a film wastes the talents of so many fine actors. Sad for us, that is, because I’m sure they were all paid handsomely.
  54. Treasure
    Julia von Heinz’s direction can’t handle the film’s tonal shifts, and the screenplay (co-written by von Heinz and John Quester) centers on two very poorly written leads who clash in ways that are supposed to be comedic but are mostly infuriating.
  55. 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.”
  56. We Live in Time
    Perhaps Crowley was trying to deconstruct the clichés we’ve become accustomed to in romantic movies since the old studio system started churning them out. But even that explanation fails to hold water as “We Live in Time” repeatedly falls back on those dated, tired tropes.
  57. Marty Supreme
    There is nothing I dislike more than a movie that demands that you love an obnoxious, insufferable protagonist. Marty Supreme is not only one of the worst examples of this phenomenon, it’s also one of the worst movies of the year.
  58. Friendship
    Robinson’s dedicated commitment to the bit is a given, but the bit is so one-dimensional that Craig stops being believable or human.
  59. Dog Man
    The big surprise is that none of these talented voice actors bring anything new or interesting to their one-dimensional roles.
  60. Song Sung Blue
    Song Sung Blue leans too far into biopic tropes, and Brewer rushes through tragic and life-changing events far too quickly for a film that runs almost 2½ hours.
  61. Wuthering Heights
    When Fennell swaps in her adult actors, the cracks start showing immediately. While strikingly attractive on their own, Elordi and Robbie have zero romantic chemistry.
  62. The Alto Knights
    When we’re not being fed warmed-over narration and editing tricks that remind us of the Scorsese-directed examples, we’re trapped with a visibly disinterested De Niro. He barely gives one performance, let alone two.
  63. Oh, Hi!
    As it adds extraneous characters, “Oh, Hi!” becomes so frustrating and unbelievable that I wanted to yell advice at the screen.
  64. Smurfs
    Your kids will probably love this movie, which means you’ll be watching it often. Excuse me while I giggle with unSmurflike malice.
  65. Materialists
    Song deconstructs rom-com tropes in service to a much meaner drama, with unlikable characters, a flimsy love triangle, and a dark subplot that is poorly handled.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Turnabout
    The leads are all vaguely Protestant and all suspiciously chipper, yet this dopey farce somehow backs itself into cross-dressing, gender reversal, and gay camp while insisting that everything's in good, butch fun. [23 Feb 2007, p.D10]
    • Boston Globe
  67. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Despite a high body count, director-cowriter Jennifer Kaytin Robinson’s version is not gory enough to satiate gorehounds. The atmospheric cinematography, by Elisha Christian, and the bombastic score, by Chanda Dancy, fail to accompany or elicit a single good scare.
  68. Him
    I’m not implying that a horror movie needs to be coherent to deliver the chills — watch any J-Horror movie for proof that this concept can work. But “HIM” doesn’t even try to be scary. It’s too busy bombarding us with nonsensical, quickly flashed images that divulge nothing.
  69. 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.
  70. The History of Sound
    The History of Sound is even more repressed than its characters, and at over two hours, that’s far from entertaining.
  71. Anaconda
    There’s a real identity crisis going on here. I can’t tell if director Tom Gormican is making a new horror comedy based on the original movie, a straight remake, or a feature-length fan fiction controlled by its characters.
  72. Christy
    The writing is coy when it should be direct, and the characterizations of the main antagonists are so broad that it reduces Martin to victim-like status.
  73. The Moment
    Unfortunately, director Aidan Zamiri and his co-writer Bertie Brandes are equally bad at mockumentaries and generating suspense.
  74. How to Make a Killing
    How to Make a Killing should be a lot more fun than it is. The murders are poorly staged and unfunny, and Powell’s performance is so one-note and smug that you can’t root for him even if you think his killing spree is justified.
  75. Marc by Sofia
    I suppose that if you’re familiar with the designer and his history, you’ll find this movie entertaining. But there’s nothing here for newbies or those wanting to know more about its subject. I found little of use, so it was a long, dreary slog to get to the end credits.
  76. When in Rome
    It winds up being predictably charmless and forgettable, even as a travelogue or iPod download.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lovely Bones
    The Lovely Bones, then, is something special: A spectacular, cringe-inducing failure as both a book adaptation and a film.
  78. Did You Hear About the Morgans?
    Grant and Parker stand around as if they're waiting for someone to yell, "Cut.'' He's in one movie. She's in another. Neither is any good.
  79. Law Abiding Citizen
    Like a lot of action-movie directors, Gray lacks the imagination to view the art of cat-and-mouse as more than a chance to play with state-of-the-art war technology.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Couples Retreat
    Everything about Couples Retreat feels plastic, though: the jokes, the trees, the extras, the attitudes. It’s dumbed-down entertainment aimed at a dumbed-down audience - the comedy equivalent of a McMansion.
  81. The Fourth Kind
    The Fourth Kind doesn’t build, instill, or maintain an audience’s fear. It just spends 98 minutes trying to prove that what you’re watching actually happened.
  82. Taken
    Taken? You bet.
  83. Babylon A.D.
    When this Vin Diesel vehicle isn't pointlessly frenzied, it's narratively inert, wasting some decent production design, and a French-flavored cast primed for fun.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Informers
    You come away with only the memory of Christie, the film's perfect California blonde, lying insensate on the beach in the final ravages of AIDS - a potent and frightening image the rest of The Informers can't live up to.
    • 7 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Miss March
    A sex comedy that appears to have been made by people who've never actually had sex.
  86. Mindhunters
    It's hard to have sympathy for a movie that tosses in the old shower sneak-up sequence or allows its characters to speak as obviously as possible while standing in a pool of red liquid.
  87. Elektra
    As she sashays, mirthlessly, from one thankless confrontation to the next, it's unclear why anyone would find Garner any more deserving of stardom than certain mannequins.
  88. Are We There Yet?
    This gnarly and illogical little sitcom is bound to make any adult reconsider that next outing with the kids.
  89. The Wedding Date
    Messing should know this is precisely the kind of movie Grace would ridicule Will for dragging her to see.
  90. Be Cool
    Barely any of it is funny, and if a minute of it is meant in mockery, few of the darts ever find the board.
  91. Dot the I
    A deplorable piece of cynicism whose only point of interest is Gael Garcia Bernal's accent
  92. The Ring Two
    Scares up few chills.
  93. The Amityville Horror
    The latest cannibalization of a popular older horror film.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Lot Like Love
    ''Love" doesn't have a plot so much as it has a concept, scribbled in crayon.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl 3-D
    One could forgive a budget this threadbare, performances this amateurish, a plot this tortuous if the 3-D effects passed the cool test. Sadly, watching ''Adventures" is an experience akin to seeing the world through dung-colored glasses.
  96. Fantastic Four
    What the movie lacks most is a real sense of adventure.
  97. The Cave
    It's ultimately just a rigorous personal training film made by people who don't seem to like movies or the people who go to them.
  98. The Exorcism of Emily Rose
    The fun of these movies is that Linney often seems too refined for such greasy junk, but there she is anyway, hamming it down as it were.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    HellBent
    A genre cheapie from its digital-video camerawork to its Casiotone soundtrack to its bland, buff cast, the movie is a cultural watershed in a dry gulch.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Thing About My Folks
    It's a family comedy-drama that wants to pluck the heartstrings but keeps getting tangled in its own tinny sentiment.
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