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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  1. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Compared with last time, the returning team of director Steve Pink and writer Josh Heald practically doodle the gang’s motivations and worse, their surroundings.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
    The problem with the "Alien vs. Predator" series is that the humans keep getting in the way.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    AVP: Alien vs. Predator
    This is one schlockfest that may be enjoyed more by casual viewers than by hard-core fans, since writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson breaks with the established mythology of both properties whenever he feels like it. Like it matters.
  4. Boys and Girls
    Plays like a college version of ''When Harry Met Sally.''
    • Boston Globe
  5. 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
  6. L.A. Twister
    Serves up a silly story and clunky dialogue that gets better than it deserves from Jennifer Aspen as Lenny's would-be girlfriend.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Somewhere in Time
    Somewhere in Time is a glossy, flossy and intermittently interesting piece of kitsch which, with more sensitive craftsmanship, could have been one of the more dazzling screen romances of the year. It's too bad that it's held down by its more overt commercial impulses. [7 Oct 1980, p.1]
    • Boston Globe
  8. Pathfinder
    Urban and Bloodgood make the most of their parts, locking eyes and arms, and occasionally using American English as if the snowy 10th century were another way of saying, "Where the après ski?"
  9. The Quiet
    Too confused to provide any thrills, even indecent ones.
  10. Scary Movie 2
    Just a bunch of spotty sketches slapped together that will satisfy no one except the diehards.
  11. Fool's Gold
    A tedious adventure-romance.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Red Riding Hood
    A laughably inept series of adolescent poses trying to pass itself off as a movie.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rock the Kasbah
    Rock the Kasbah is a pandering, poorly assembled botch that thinks it’s playing fair by Afghan popular culture but only manages to add insult to the countless other injuries inflicted upon that country. If it were any worse, they’d be screening it as evidence at The Hague.
  14. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    Though not everyone agrees, Ben Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” came close to finding the secret for making a movie about the secret of happiness. Peter Chelsom’s Hector and the Search for Happiness tries hard, but fails. Miserably.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Force of Nature
    Force of Nature lives up, down, and sideways to all those demands; it’s hardly a great film, but it keeps you watching, and only partly in disbelief.
  16. Just My Luck
    This mangy comedy only demonstrates that Lohan's star power is too bright for falling into mounds of mud, rooting around in cat litter for a contact lens, and getting punched out by a roughneck jailbird, as she does here.
  17. Snow Dogs
    Harmless, if witless, stuff for the kids.
    • Boston Globe
  18. Pulse
    If Pulse is unsurprising as a horror movie (come on: chalky, soul-sucking freaks again?), as a campaign against the Internet, digital piracy, cellphones, and anything that computes anything (like laptops or brains), it's a riot.
  19. The Best of Me
    Isn’t fate a funny thing? Especially when Nicholas Sparks makes it up. Filmmakers love to adapt his stuff because he puts together narratives riddled with contrived coincidences and implausibilities meant to seem like the workings of providence when in fact they are the creations of a hackneyed mind.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Anatomy of Hell
    Despite all that onscreen turgidness, Anatomy of Hell is itself so much a matter of the mind that it never rises above theory.
    • 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.
    • 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.
  23. You Again
    This is another miserable movie about women at war over nonsense.
  24. I Am Sam
    Ham-handedly manipulative film.
  25. Stigmata
    Could have been a classy thriller. But all the Aramaic in the world can't save it from its own pounding slickness.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Infinite
    Heading straight to streaming platform Paramount+ without the embarrassment of appearing in theaters first, the movie is both blissfully incoherent and weirdly generic, as if it had been assembled from the spare parts of other movies and glued together with stuntwork.
  27. Bunraku
    If Bunraku were serious about subverting or reinventing the genres it's cobbled together, Moore would play the gunslinger or the samurai or the crime boss. But no. All she gets are a couple of scenes that demonstrate that she still looks great soaking wet.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Good Day to Die Hard
    There are two problems with A Good Day to Die Hard: It’s terribly filmed and nothing in it makes any sense.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ghost Ship
    Pureed, predictable conflation of ''Alien'' and ''Titanic'' and ''The Shining.''
  30. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
    Van Sant winds up with disconnected, dispirited pieces that never come together and lift off the screen with a whoosh of sly high spirits. [20 May 1994]
    • Boston Globe
  31. Nobel Son
    Guy Ritchie made a name for himself with scuzz, but even his shtick has exceeded its sell-by date. Nobel Son goes further, crossing the contortions of "The Usual Suspects" with the shallowness of certain intellectual family melodramas.
  32. London Has Fallen
    For the sequel, London Has Fallen, Butler and director Babak Najafi (HBO’s “Banshee”) strike a tone that’s more consistent — consistently dumb.
  33. Graveyard Shift
    The scariest thing about Graveyard Shift is the money, time and energy - however minimal - invested in its creation. If you're looking for a good rat scare, the alleys near Haymarket might be a better place to invest your time. [27 Oct 1990, p.11p]
    • Boston Globe
  34. Passion of Mind
    There's no Passion in this psychological drama.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Just Married
    Reasonably painless if you've never seen a comedy about the travails of newlyweds.
  36. Blood: The Last Vampire
    The finale of this tedious piece of Asian-ish action-schlock based on a popular anime series implies an intention to make more. One was plenty for me.
  37. Eating Out
    The explicit encounters and dirty talk in Eating Out suggest a new genre -- call it porncom -- that seeks to amuse and arouse at the same time.
  38. Immigration Tango
    Neither the comedy nor the romance is strong enough in Immigration Tango to offer any improvement on Peter Weir's similar, and better, 1990 film "Green Card."
  39. The Divide
    It's doom that we're meant to feel here. And repulsion. I hate to say, but I shrugged.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pandorum
    Pandorum is a dark, disquieting dream worth watching out for.
  41. The Big Wedding
    Quaint and crass get together — or would that be “bump uglies”? — with awkward, thoroughly flat results in The Big Wedding, an ensemble comedy with a tonal cluelessness as surprising as the name cast that signed on for it anyway.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hitcher
    If you boil off dialogue, performance, narrative logic and grind a movie down to the nub of genre, will there be any suspense left? The answer is yes, but only in a Pavlovian sense. You react to this dull shockathon like a wired lab rat who's seen it all before. And guess what? You have.
  43. Pokémon: The Movie 2000
    2000 isn't about nobility and humility; saving the planet from evil collectors is what sells video games.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Happily N'Ever After
    A pallidly "hip" revision of classic fairy tales that would be better told straight up if anyone had the nerve. It will divert small children, but so will a brightly colored object if you twirl it.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Haunting of Molly Hartley
    Molly Hartley is dull at worst and surprisingly spooky at best.
  46. Ernest Rides Again
    Most of the time Ernest Rides Again is a one-joke - or, rather, one-cannon - movie, enough to raise grave doubts about the importance of seeing - let alone being - Ernest. [12 Nov 1993, p.47]
    • Boston Globe
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    The actor/walking disaster known as Charlie Sheen gives a perfectly credible performance here. It’s the rest of the film that tries your patience.
  48. Atlas Shrugged: Part I
    With a plot devoid of suspense and characters without complexity, Rand's iconic line elicits merely a yawn, or a shrug.
  49. Season of the Witch
    After a while, the movie tires of the witch business and trots out a plot twist that permits the effects department to spend money. Some moviegoers might find the bait-and-switch funny.
  50. The Ugly Truth
    The movie has embarrassingly limited ideas about both the sexes and sex. Like Sandra Bullock’s career woman in “The Proposal,’’ Abby appears to have never heard of intercourse, much less experienced it.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Deck the Halls
    The saddest part is that "Deck" wastes four comic talents ranging from the near-genius (Matthew Broderick, Danny DeVito) to the inspired (Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth ) to the charming (Kristin Davis of "Sex and the City").
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gentlemen Broncos
    A comedy that can’t even admit to its own overwhelming sense of disgust.
  53. Tyler Perry's A Madea Christmas
    It’s a Christmas nightmare, stuck with two obnoxious relatives who think they’re funny, and won’t shut up.
  54. Pixels
    Pixels may feel flatter to kids of the ’80s than it does to moviegoers too young to have known Pac-Man from Ant-Man.
  55. Head Over Heels
    A lame romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor comedic.
    • Boston Globe
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Pokémon Heroes
    Any richness in the drawing of the backgrounds only underscores the weirdly flat, affectless renderings of the characters moving through them.
  57. The Perfect Man
    To be endured rather than enjoyed.
  58. Sweet November
    It's a small film, and a far from perfect one, but it allows her (Theron) to extend her range as no previous role has done.
    • Boston Globe
  59. Delgo
    Delgo demonstrates how hard it is to create a memorable, credible-looking piece of animated entertainment.
  60. The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
    If you walk in with your expectations at a suitably low setting, you won't walk away disappointed.
    • Boston Globe
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Garfield
    A black-dressing young intellectual of my acquaintance recently ascribed a "lazy generosity" to Garfield and his daily antics. If so, the movie gets the laziness but misses the generosity.
  62. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    Up in smoke, down in flames, reduced to ashes - choose your disaster metaphor for Bonfire of the Vanities. As filmed by Brian De Palma, it's "Misfire of the Vanities," the most wrongly conceived of the many popular novels brought to the screen this year. [21 Dec 1990, p.49]
    • Boston Globe
  63. The Happytime Murders
    Some of this smutty irreverence is undeniably hilarious, goosed along by Melissa McCarthy’s game presence as Phil’s estranged LAPD partner and human foil. (In other felt-free casting, Maya Rudolph is equally entertaining as Phil’s trusty secretary, even if Elizabeth Banks and Joel McHale go to waste.)
  64. Vampire in Brooklyn
    Vampire in Brooklyn isn't a disaster. In fact, it has some funny moments. But it's a long way from being the comeback movie Eddie Murphy needs. [27 Oct 1995, p.57]
    • Boston Globe
  65. Are We There Yet?
    This gnarly and illogical little sitcom is bound to make any adult reconsider that next outing with the kids.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sex and the City 2
    A dunderheaded comic melodrama with clothes to die for and dialogue to shrink from. It’s downright depressing.
  67. 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.
  68. Crossroads
    Packaged fluff aimed low, and patronizingly, at Spears's legion of young female fans.
  69. The Majestic
    A sweet, visually handsome sermon, but it's too dramatically bland to convert even the converted.
    • Boston Globe
    • 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.
  71. 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.
  72. Gamer
    For long stretches of the PlayStation-minded Gamer, the action does drag.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wild Hogs
    The movie is this year's "RV," a rolling tent show of suburban male anxieties: castration, obsolescence, dismissive offspring, fears of gayness. LOTS of fears of gayness. Unlike "RV," though, Wild Hogs is funny. Eventually.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Transformers: The Last Knight
    The plot is a canvas on which to bludgeon the audience with action sequences that have been shot for maximum overstimulation.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things
    The Heart Is Deceitful wants to cauterize us into feeling something -- anything -- but it's far too heartless to know what.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Spy Next Door
    The film’s so formulaic your 6-year-old will be ticking off the plot points as they lope by.
  77. Coyote Ugly
    Such an utter piece of fluff so conceptually barren it might as well be a music video.
    • Boston Globe
  78. The Women
    The movie is a work of ambivalence. Is English making fun of these women? Or is she making a pilot for Lifetime?
  79. When a Stranger Calls
    Even by the lowest standards, this is a frightless, cynically made movie.
  80. Playing for Keeps
    This isn't a genre-less character study, it's myopic romantic comedy, and watching a woman of Catherine Zeta-Jones's easy carnality and fathomless beauty compete for the attention of Gerard Butler, who's pining for Jessica Biel, is dismaying, like spotting Anna Wintour in line at a soup kitchen.
  81. Cool World
    The only thing that keeps Cool World from imploding is that Bakshi turns it into a series of animator's riffs, with little explosions of toon action erupting like video game novas into the foreground of the story that isn't happening. [10 Jul 1992]
    • Boston Globe
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Fog
    This new Fog floats in on the fumes of the 1980 John Carpenter original, but the surprise is that it's arguably better.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Let's Go to Prison
    It's a remarkably laugh-free comedy that takes on a dark subject and skitters along its surface.
  84. Taxi
    Too much of Taxi is just tired.
  85. The Musketeer
    The images are pretty, and Gene Quintano's screenplay gets everybody from point A to point B, though with no discernible knack for wit or subtlety.
    • Boston Globe
  86. Norbit
    The only recommendable thing about Norbit is that he's not as bad as every other person in this movie.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    View from the Top
    Who on earth is this embarrassment -- easily the worst film of the year to date -- aimed at?
  88. The Trumpet of the Swan
    The film is gentle and carries a simple moral.
    • Boston Globe
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Little Fockers
    Is there a statute of limitations for how many good actors can be wasted in a bad movie?
  90. Fantastic Four
    Ultimately, what Fantastic Four delivers is change for change’s sake, rather than change for the better.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Twisted
    Eerily similar in its story line to "In the Cut," the much pasted Meg Ryan sex-and-death thriller that came out last year. Only it's worse.
  92. Little Man
    I laughed at the Wayanses' movie, and I don't even hate myself for it.
  93. Because I Said So
    A sloppily made bowl of reheated chick-flick cliches.
  94. War Room
    It’s only in the late going that the marital drama turns somewhat more authentic, helping to restore a bit of the audience’s, well, faith.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dolittle
    And while I understand Downey wanting to make a movie for his kids, the world might be better served if, at long last, he made one for himself.
  96. 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.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Echelon Conspiracy
    There's nothing in Echelon Conspiracy as suspenseful or entertaining as your average episode of "24."
  98. Trixie
    There are so many wonderful moments in Trixie and so few films like it that you wish Rudolph had given it a few more rewrites.
  99. The Choice
    In the end, though, the film disappointingly, even lazily, shies away from being anything more than you’d expect.
  100. 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.
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