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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    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Perfect Stranger
    After "Gothika " and "Catwoman ," a viewer has to wonder: Why does this woman keep making thrillers if she can't bring herself to be thrilled?
    • 31 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Your Highness
    The most painful movie so far in a year that's already scraping the bottom of the barrel, Your Highness is a tedious, dung-colored misfire that sullies the genre of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and "The Princess Bride."
  3. They
    At some point, I just tired of looking at all the nicely composed shots unworthy of the stock they're printed on. Lives are at stake here, and I don't mean Julia's and her annoying pals'. I mean the lives of you and me, the only pronouns that really matter here.
  4. 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.
  5. This Means War
    It's got both a soap opera plotline and a Chuck Norris-load of taxpayer-financed gadgets and gear. It also has Reese Witherspoon in another terrible part.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    That's My Boy
    Sadly, That's My Boy relies on caricatures, rather than characters, to make you laugh.
  7. Gossip
    Owes less to any film genre than to TV soap operas offered with far fewer pretensions on any given afternoon.
    • Boston Globe
  8. Pootie Tang
    The movie's comic powers are often marred by silliness and stereotypes. Pootie tanks.
  9. Antitrust
    An example of a film that begins with a provocative idea and then runs itself into the ground with clumsy structuring.
    • Boston Globe
  10. The Big Hit
    The last word in good-time mayhem.
  11. Getting Even with Dad
    Getting Even with Dad never allows us to forget that it's never more than a manufactured object untouched by quality control. [17 Jun 1994, p.78]
    • Boston Globe
  12. Hellboy
    In the end, the movie leaves us stuck with unmoving drama and increasingly numbing carnage.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Envy
    A weirdly airless disaster, a turkey so insistently DOA that the dialogue serves as its own epitaph.
  14. Monster-in-Law
    By Hollywood standards, a movie carried with such gusto by a 67-year-old woman has to be considered a miracle. And I'm not sorry to say I enjoyed watching her do it.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Life or Something Like It
    Delivered with all the subtlety of a steel-toe boot, you may be galled that you've wasted nearly two hours of your own precious life with this silly little puddle of a movie.
  16. Red Dawn
    As a combat action spectacle, the movie takes a straightforward, gritty approach that makes for mostly solid viewing.
  17. First Daughter
    Just bland behavioral propaganda, and Holmes makes such a guileless and robotic spokeswoman, it wouldn't be nuts to think the White House was just another mansion in Stepford.
  18. Deception
    The movie actually does feel like an Americanized work of Hong Kong moviemaking. But the desperate, derivative style, the nonsense plotting, and leggy, horny women are applied like too much MSG.
  19. Fire Birds
    There are the obligatory bonding scenes, including a boxing match and an early morning heart-to-heart, but without tension and warmth. Jones manages to be lovable, but he and Cage never manage a chemistry. [25 May 1990, p.50p]
    • Boston Globe
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Creature
    Deep in the swampy hearts and minds of some filmmakers, embarrassing stereotypes still fester, gathering moss and slime.
  21. The Black Waters of Echo's Pond
    In 10 years, this movie could easily take its place among cult classics like “The Room.’’ For now, it’s better left in the bowels of a Turkish cave.
  22. Blended
    Funny thing, though: The sunnier that Barrymore gets in her scenes with Sandler, the more the iffy elements and leaden bits seem to just melt away.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Bachelor
    A vapid, charmless update of Buster Keaton's 1925 film "Seven Chances."
    • Boston Globe
  24. National Security
    The film is profane. But who knew police brutality could play as a laughing matter?
  25. Love the Coopers
    Enjoy the sense of never quite knowing when the movie is going to stick another pin in its balloon of sincerity, and you’ll like the Coopers well enough.
  26. Texas Chainsaw 3D
    All the makers of Texas Chainsaw 3D cared about was getting your $16.
  27. Cop Out
    Cop Out seems aptly named. It’s not personal. It’s barely even a movie. It’s a fire hydrant that the director and his stars use for exterior shots.
  28. House at the End of the Street
    This is a terrible little movie even by the standards of the genre.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Under the Stadium Lights
    A stultifying drama based on the 2009 season of the Abilene High Eagles, Lights suffers from sermonizing dialogue, amateurish performances, and an ugly racial blind spot disguised as white savior paternalism.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Book of Henry
    The plot proceeds from the charming to the manipulative to the shameless to the demented in gentle steps that may lull some audiences the way a frog can be boiled to death by degrees.
  31. Vampire Academy
    Despite such attractions as Gabriel Byrne as a vampire with a skin disease and a décor that combines Hogwarts with “Suspiria,” the only lesson learned here is that Hollywood needs fresh blood.
  32. Highlander II: The Quickening
    The dullest and shoddiest action-adventure flick of the year, with only a few cute Sean Connery moments to rescue it from total, sheer and utter bogosity. [01 Nov 1991, p.29]
    • Boston Globe
    • 31 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor
    Despite exotic locations, epic cinematography, and much spectacular crash and bang, this "Mummy" feels like a threadbare toss-off.
  34. The Life of David Gale
    Positively reeks of self-importance -- the jokey, ham-fisted, pseudo-socially relevant, punch-pulling kind. It reeks worse of acting -- the Jack-Lemmon-in-a-coma Kevin Spacey kind.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Winter's Tale
    Goldsman takes Helprin’s book — a work overflowing with events, ideas, characters, passions — and pounds away at it until all that’s left is mush.
  36. Artemis Fowl
    One wonders if a director more playful than Kenneth Branagh might have come up with something less hectic and more fun — or even just as hectic and more fun. Taika Waititi, anyone? Jojo Rabbit is almost as odd a name as Artemis Fowl.
  37. Dylan Dog: Dead of Night
    Some entertaining inventiveness, before nagging limitations finally drag it down.
  38. Seventh Son
    To its credit, despite a rough start (witch burning and all that), Seventh Son does not succumb to misogyny.
  39. 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.
  40. Alex Cross
    Nothing works. Or some of it works, but that doesn't matter because what's working is so deeply, painfully boring.
  41. The Final Destination
    The writers don’t write, the director doesn’t really direct, and the actors don’t exactly act. They wait for the movie’s contraptions to impale them.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Punisher: War Zone
    If most December movie releases are epic-length and Oscar-ambitious, then Punisher: War Zone has to be considered Hobbesian counterprogramming: It's nasty, brutish, and short.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Spirit
    The movie's cleverest idea is to give the Octopus identical clone henchmen with names like Phobos, Logos, and Huevos, all played by Louis Lombardi with a marvelous fat-boy idiot grin.
  44. Saw VI
    Who knew that the franchise’s creators would eventually find a plot twist that made sense?
  45. Over Her Dead Body
    Over Her Dead Body is to romantic comedy what Spam is to meat. But at least with Spam, you get cool packaging.
  46. The Babymakers
    The squirminess stands out here because there's so little going on the rest of the time.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hangover Part III
    This third go-round for the "Wolf Pack" doesn't bother to Xerox the original 2009 hit comedy, as 2011's witless "Hangover 2" did. Instead, the new movie heads in different, if utterly formulaic, directions. So it's not terrible. It's just bad.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Pacifier
    JUST worth your children's time, and hardly worth yours.
    • 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.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gods and Generals
    Sanctimonious claptrap -- an inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.
  51. Kill Me Three Times
    An Australian crime yarn with a solid cast and tone, but not enough freshness — or enough of Pegg’s waggishness — to be memorable.
  52. Little Boy
    The film is so bizarre, contrived, manipulative, and meretricious that anything is possible.
  53. The Boy Next Door
    It will also make them laugh. Intentionally or not, director Rob Cohen (“Alex Cross”) has put together the most hilarious camp classic since “White House Down” (2013).
  54. Queen of the Damned
    Degenerates into a lot of dull declaiming and attitudinizing, despite a sly tongue-in-cheek quality brought by a preening Stuart Townsend to the Lestat role he inherited from the utterly humorless Tom Cruise.
    • Boston Globe
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Waiting...
    Teenage boys will be in heaven. All others: Check, please.
  56. White Noise
    A moronic exercise in supernatural claptrap.
  57. Exorcist: The Beginning
    This prequel has something to appall everybody.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning
    The new prequel isn't really a slasher movie at all. It's a mess, with too much to say, and an odd genre in which to preach.
  59. Marmaduke
    We’ve just been treated like a fire hydrant.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore
    Stands to delight small children while probably causing their parents' heads to cave in.
  61. The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter
    With little going for it except its references to part one, The Neverending Story II is a neverending disappointment. [09 Feb 1991, p.11]
    • Boston Globe
  62. John Q
    A well-intentioned but self-defeatingly manipulative film that amounts to an impassioned commercial for national health care.
  63. Grown Ups
    In Sandler's movies, men don't cry; they urinate. So the scene in which the stars empty their bladders and change the color of a swimming pool's water might be the weepiest of the year.
  64. The Unborn
    The Unborn joins a growing glut of Holocaust- and Nazi-themed material -- "Valkyrie," "Defiance" - that are long on posturing, suppositions, and righteousness, yet short on moral complexity. Nazism and its crimes have lately inspired theme parks more than actual movies. Too many rides on that roller coaster and I feel sick.
  65. Stonewall
    Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall reduces these events to a backdrop for caricatures that were already passé in William Friedkin’s “The Boys in the Band” (1970).
  66. Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo
    Schneider's mild-mannered fish-lover is genuinely likable, and a good-natured foil to the crude jokes.
  67. Grind
    What Grind lacks in cinematic skill, it makes up for in heart, which is what most dudes-in-arms flicks are missing. Given the option of spending eternity with these gentlemen or the boys of ''American Pie,'' I'd choose the lads of Grind.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Butterfly Effect
    A film of singularly boneheaded conceits, Butterfly is populated by, and appears to have been made by, stoned college dudes more hung up on oh-wow twists than the need to make sense.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Smurfs
    The bottom line: Any movie that gives Jonathan Winters work is doing something right.
  70. I, Frankenstein
    Eckhart doesn’t really do any of that classic grunting as Frankenstein 2.0, but maybe he should have.
  71. 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.
  72. Knockaround Guys
    Likable performances are critically wounded by implausible scenarios and derivative-minded direction referencing everything from ''Reservoir Dogs'' to ''Fargo.''
  73. Never Again
    There are moments, too, where the forced hipness falls aside and the two lead characters just plain relate, realistically and maturely, with a seasoned playfulness that is truly charming.
  74. Endless Love
    Though Zefferelli’s version was trashy and downright nuts, at least it made you feel the love. This pallid replay just seems endless.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sarah Landon and the Paranormal Hour
    A dull little PG-rated spook story for tweener girls.
  76. Madhouse
    As a film, it's as crass and awful as the house guests from hell to which it so unwarrantedly feels superior. How bad is Madhouse? Bad enough to make a critic think that the similarly themed National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation is art, right down to its fried cat. [16 Feb 1990, p.87p]
    • Boston Globe
  77. The Tuxedo
    The jokes are as fresh as rotten eggs and the direction stoops to the occasion.
  78. Where the Heart Is
    Never earns the rollicking life affirmation it's after.
  79. The Replacements
    Any ESPN commercial at all leaves it in the dust when it comes to imaginative firepower.
  80. The Gallows
    Occasionally the camera gets jumbled around, blacks out, and hisses with static as if it had been tossed in a dryer. Then it regains composure and reveals — an old playbill! A figure in a mask with a noose! The birth of a new franchise and the death of a great genre.
  81. Zookeeper
    As for other voices, the most notable are Adam Sandler, whose capuchin monkey wears out his welcome pretty quickly; Maya Rudolph, whose jivey giraffe comes perilously close to aural blackface; and Nick Nolte's gorilla.
  82. She Hate Me
    A belligerent little sex farce roiling inside an otherwise inconsequential lampoon of corporate America, the movie is rude and ridiculous, fearless up to a point, and breathtakingly hungry to provoke.
  83. Let's Be Cops
    None of this is as riotously zany as it wants to be.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Crossover
    Earnest and predictable, Crossover deserves more than the horselaughs that will probably greet it in theaters -- but not a lot more. The movie is harmless, which is both its strength and its weakness.
  85. Loaded Weapon 1
    Certainly Loaded Weapon delivers laughs. It's just that you notice the spaces between the laughs more readily than with the "Naked Gun" fusillade. I laughed, but I laughed more at Joe Dante's sendup of schlock sci-fi a la William Castle last week in "Matinee." [5 Feb 1993, p.33]
    • Boston Globe
    • 30 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Thirteen Ghosts
    A formulaic script, a tired plot -- and uninspired dialogue all point up the real star. It's the house,
    • Boston Globe
  87. Daddy's Home 2
    Returning director Sean Anders strings together mayhem-filled moments that just aren’t the howlers that they’re clearly scripted to be, never mind the fatherly foursome’s chemistry, or the tobacco-stained guffaws Gibson keeps busting out to sell these bits.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Without a Paddle
    Never quite as dumb as "Harold & Kumar," but it's nowhere near as smart, and that's what kills it.
  89. Premonition
    It's a movie only a psychic could love, since a psychic would know to stay home or see "Zodiac" instead.
  90. Domestic Disturbance
    Doesn't make nearly the ripple it could have made.
    • Boston Globe
  91. Johnson Family Vacation
    Boring, mediocre movie.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hot Chick
    Faris is delightful, in fact, and she steals the movie right out from under Schneider.
  93. The Collector
    Another helping of egregious slicing and slashing.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Peppermint
    Garner bulls her way through the film with determination and a minimum of facial expressions, like someone who’s been told to clean up something awful and just wants to get it over with. So what if Charlize Theron did it better in “Atomic Blonde,” last year’s female-led brawler that is in every conceivable way superior to Peppermint?
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    New in Town
    You've seen New in Town before, and you've seen it done better. Still, it's a sweet-hearted bit of anemia, pleasant and obvious, and there are a few honest laughs to it.
  96. Timeline
    The trouble with the movie is basically everything. It's long, sloppy, and -- to both the quantum-physics ignorant and informed -- steadily implausible, never exciting in either its skill or its ludicrousness.
  97. Eye of the Beholder
    Never brings its potentially intriguing plot strands into focus.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Driven
    When the film predictably limps across the finish line, you're left with the impression your time would have been better spent sitting in traffic.
    • Boston Globe
  99. Undiscovered
    It doesn't belong at a megaplex. It should be playing on a Clear Channel station.
  100. Answers to Nothing
    None of what we see is at all credible.
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