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. Solomon Kane
    It's always raining or snowing or misting. This makes for a nice visual, but it also makes the scenes look interchangeable. This is even more of a problem because the writer-director, Michael J. Bassett, imparts no shape to the story. Many movies suffer from worse problems, but not many waste the talents of Max von Sydow, as Solomon's father, or Pete Postlethwaite.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Resident Evil: Afterlife
    So nonchalant is Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth movie in Paul W.S. Anderson's dystopian franchise, that its overarching premise isn't explained.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Last Party 2000
    The film was conceived as a youthful tour of all that's wrong with the two-party system, with the likably shambling actor Philip Seymour Hoffman as host, but the breadth of subjects covered precludes any response other than nebulous discontent.
  4. Jade
    For a movie that's supposed to be sex-driven, Jade has the sexual energy of a dead battery. [13 Oct 1995, p.42]
    • Boston Globe
  5. See No Evil, Hear No Evil
    A witless mess with more scriptwriters than laughs. [12 May 1989, p.46]
    • Boston Globe
  6. 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.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Prom
    One hundred and thirty-two minutes of shrill, self-satisfied jazz hands, The Prom may be the biggest disappointment of the season.
  8. High Spirits
    Neil Jordan's High Spirits wants to be a supernatural comedy. But it isn't super, it isn't natural, it isn't high, and it isn't spirited. [18 Nov 1988, p.33]
    • Boston Globe
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    Essentially, an act of terrorism against entertainment. It's inconsequential, potty - mouthed, extremely silly, and -- the worst sin of all -- dead boring.
  10. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    Four writers are credited with the script, and their combined efforts yield just one scene with genuine verve.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Mississippi Burning
    Mississippi Burning plays loose with truth, turning the history of the civil rights movement on its head. The filmmakers shamelessly transform what was ultimately a triumph of due process and nonviolent civil disobedience into an ugly might-makes-right spectacle. It's "Dirty Harry" coming at you from the left. [27 Jan 1989, p.72]
    • Boston Globe
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    3 Days to Kill
    3 Days to Kill is pretty terrible, but it’s not really Kevin Costner’s fault.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wish I Was Here
    As an actor, Braff does thin-skinned sad-sack quite well. As a writer, he’s hopelessly banal. As a director, he’s a disaster.
  14. Fantastic Four
    What the movie lacks most is a real sense of adventure.
  15. Borgman
    Is Borgman a fable? A fairy tale? A parable? An allegory? A burlesque of Western bourgeois life in the 21st century? One thing Dutch writer-director Alex van Warmerdam’s film isn’t is a black comedy, even if that’s what it’s meant to be. The movie’s black, all right, but a comedy has to be funny.
  16. French Kiss
    French Kiss is a French miss. It's got the settings, but it has little magic, less charm and almost no chemistry between Meg Ryan's heartsick American innocent and Kevin Kline's shady Frenchman. [5 May 1995, p.57]
    • Boston Globe
  17. Nothing But Trouble
    A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to Atlantic City, and Dan Aykroyd decided to make an offensively tedious movie about it. [16 Feb 1991, p.14]
    • Boston Globe
  18. Code Name: The Cleaner
    It's another standard-issue bad star-vehicle action-comedy, this time for Cedric.
  19. Scary Movie 5
    Not that there’s all manner of comedy craftsmanship demanding study here, but the movie does seem to be a funny jumble of contradictory impulses.
  20. 80 for Brady
    Not even John Toll, who won two Oscars for cinematography, can make this movie look good. Stay home and watch the real Super Bowl instead.
  21. North
    Most bad films are forgettable. They go in one eye and out the other. "North," though, is the kind of disaster that leaves an imprint. Representing a total inability by Rob Reiner to tell a far from sure-fire story about a boy who divorces his parents, it's a "Hudson Hawk" and "Bonfire of the Vanities" for kids. [22 Jul 1994, p.68]
    • Boston Globe
  22. Hollow Man
    Should have been an inaudible man movie. Every time the characters open their mouths, they hammer it deeper into the ground.
    • Boston Globe
  23. Answers to Nothing
    None of what we see is at all credible.
  24. Jules
    Inside the sci-fi dramedy Jules lurks a message about senior citizens being ignored and deprived of their independence simply because of their age. Unfortunately, the script by Gavin Steckler takes a most confounding route to get to it — one involving an alien, town hall meetings, and FBI agents who want to keep the extraterrestrial here under wraps.
  25. Norm of the North
    Denounce the cynics who pander such pabulum as entertainment for children.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Dance Flick
    If you thought the world couldn't get enough of bad spoof movies, you thought wrong.
  27. Johnny Mnemonic
    To call Johnny Mnemonic a disaster would be giving it too much credit. Disasters land loudly, resoundingly. This one lands with a dull thud. [26 May 1995, p.87]
    • Boston Globe
  28. The Oath
    He (Barinholtz) works hard to creatively lampoon a nation divided, and his first-timer’s ambition and thematic investment are admirable. Disappointingly, though, he lacks storytelling chops, aiming for wildly provocative satire but instead churning out a technically spotty screed.
  29. That Awkward Moment
    As for the dialogue, although the characters talk really fast, swear a lot, and overlap their lines, what they’re saying isn’t very funny or authentic. It’s as if David Mamet collaborated on writing an episode of “Two and a Half Men.”
    • 20 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Last Airbender
    The Last Airbender' is dreadful, an incomprehensible fantasy-action epic that makes the 2007 film "The Golden Compass,'' a similarly botched adaptation of a beloved property from another medium, look like a four-star classic.
    • Boston Globe
  31. Legends of the Fall
    This one is hollow and caves in on itself, growing wearisome and posed, ending in a burst of salvational violence and a coda of sentimentality masquerading as transcendent toughness. [13 Jan 1995]
    • Boston Globe
  32. Mother's Day
    It’s like a nightmare in which you are trapped in an endless Kmart aisle of horrible holiday cards.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tideland
    The results are dull, of all things. The movie itself feels like an overstuffed burrito,
  34. Bangkok Dangerous
    Bangkok Dangerous is bad without lifting a finger toward interesting. The trouble with it is that the people who've made it don't appear to understand life enough to allow any of it into their movie. This is an airless affair.
  35. Saw II
    The product of immaturity. It approaches suffering with a meaninglessness that must be a luxury for anyone who has never lost anyone, or is incapable of empathizing with someone who has.
  36. 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.
  37. The Inbetweeners Movie
    If nothing else, The Inbetweeners Movie earns itself a footnote in any comprehensive history of local movie exhibition. This has got to be the first time a wedgie has been inflicted onscreen at the Kendall.
  38. The Strangers
    A horror film with a moral. No matter how nasty a gang of murderers is, the moviemaker calling the shots is ultimately worse.
    • 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.
    • 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.
  41. Boogeyman
    A horror film whose only scare is that it was made at all... As with so many stupid horror movies in these post-''Scream" times, this one is at such a creative loss that all it can do is make its audience feel duped for having purchased a ticket.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Standing Ovation
    This low-budget film from writer-director Stewart Raffill (“Across the Great Divide,’’ “Mac and Me’’) is processed cheese molded into a series of loosely related, sloppily choreographed, and inexplicably auto-tuned dance numbers.
  43. A Sound of Thunder
    The movie fails to conjure the wonder of the Ray Bradbury short story that inspired it.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Rambo III
    Rambo III is just another of Stallone's exercises in narcissism and jingoism, death and glory wrapped up in one tidy package. [25 May 1988, p.75]
    • Boston Globe
    • 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.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Furry Vengeance
    Vengeance has the odor of court-ordered community service. The jokes never rise above the groin. The trees look plastic, the characters more so.
  47. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    Every ounce of the film feels artificially upbeat.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Disaster Movie
    The filmmakers are idiots.
  49. 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
  50. The Honeymooners
    It's not as bad as the average Hollywood movie, it's stupendously worse.
  51. Godsend
    Godsend makes swill of religion, science, family, and morality. It has the sensitivity of a cactus, the ingenuity of a square wheel, and the integrity of a CEO.
  52. Paul Blart: Mall Cop
    Looks like something stubbed out in an ashtray.
  53. College
    The grime, filth, slop, vomit, and crotch-nibbling pigs double all too easily as a recipe for this movie's failure. It hasn't been made so much as excreted.
  54. When Will I Be Loved
    Most atrocious movies build into their badness, as lacks of talent, ideas, self-confidence, or a total hatred of an audience, are revealed. This one gets it out of the way up front and never looks back.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Underclassman
    Saved from total puff only by the obnoxiousness of its star, who seems to be laboring under the delusion that he's the next Eddie Murphy.
  56. Straw Dogs
    It's a crude, queasy, ugly remake of a crude, queasy, ugly, yet artistically superior 40-year-old Sam Peckinpah movie.
  57. Epic Movie
    The willful sloppiness and retrograde gags make Epic Movie, which was not shown to critics, an inevitable byproduct of our Internet video era. It seems downloaded and projected onto the screen, a failing online-film-school project paid for and put out by a Hollywood movie studio. That said, very little on YouTube is this unentertaining.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Twilight Zone: The Movie
    The original tv series was sometimes frightening, sometimes enlightening, and sometimes a bit too allegorical, but it was almost always entertaining. Serling gave us more in 25 minutes than Spielberg & Co. give us in nearly two hours. [24 Jun 1983, p.1]
    • Boston Globe
  59. Who's Your Caddy?
    As it develops, Who's Your Caddy? just becomes depressing. You want to alert the United Negro College Fund: A mind has terribly gone to waste.
  60. Dangerous Men
    Just because Rad — who died in 2007 at the age of 70 — wasted 26 years bringing Dangerous Men to the screen doesn’t mean you should waste 80 minutes watching it.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Clue
    Clue the movie, not the board game, isn't so much a drama as it is a marketing gimmick. Presumably, Paramount Pictures believed that an audience was clamoring to see actors play one-dimensional figures from a game. [13 Dec 1985, p.57]
    • Boston Globe
  62. Marci X
    Clueless and sad.
  63. The Order
    A stupendous bore.
  64. Last Ounce of Courage
    The problem with this numbskull travesty isn't that it's fatuous and smug (which it is). It's that it's slack and dull.
  65. Alone in the Dark
    Think of the lamest horror movie you've ever seen. Now think of Tara Reid in the lamest horror movie you've ever seen. See how much worse it could have been?
    • 25 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Georgia Rule
    For proof that some actresses can take on a misconceived role and get out alive, there's Huffman as Lilly.
  67. The Collector
    Another helping of egregious slicing and slashing.
    • 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.
  69. Saw V
    Oh, Jigsaw. Here we go again. You kill. I doze off. Someone at the studio goes "ka-ching!"
  70. The Condemned
    Just watch Austin on "WrestleMania" instead, avoiding the shower this movie leaves you wanting.
  71. Man on Fire
    Man on Fire is ponderous and bloated, dragging the Bible and Giannini into its swirling cesspool. Scott can't give the movie any real emotional weight. And Washington gives his first lifeless performance.
  72. Surviving Christmas
    It's the sort of stupid swill that gets spewed out by a studio committee, slapped together without a brain, a heart, or a good idea about where to put a camera or when to cut a scene.
  73. Exorcist: The Beginning
    This prequel has something to appall everybody.
  74. The Reaping
    Long-delayed, pitiful excuse for a horror film.
  75. Fair Game
    The buzz was that Fair Game reshot its ending. They should have reshot its painfully fabricated beginning and middle, too. [03 Nov 1995]
    • Boston Globe
  76. Marmaduke
    We’ve just been treated like a fire hydrant.
  77. Texas Chainsaw 3D
    All the makers of Texas Chainsaw 3D cared about was getting your $16.
  78. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
    Banderas slums through this dollar-bin action flick wearing the same look of wiped-out exasperation that Danny Glover's Sergeant Murtaugh sports in each installment of ''Lethal Weapon.'' And like Murtaugh, Banderas might be too old for this, too.
  79. Resident Evil: Apocalypse
    Like so many movies with a keypad for a brain, Resident Evil: Apocalypse is another exercise in making us feel the irritation associated with having to stand behind some game hack for our turn to play.
  80. Yes
    The result is a unique time at the art house: a work whose badness becomes guiltily pleasurable, like a Harlequin romance novel masquerading as a dissertation.
  81. Fascination
    I'm afraid this is one of THOSE movies, one where ''plot" is another word for ''gratuitous sex scene."
  82. Seven Days in Utopia
    The movie is terrible partly because it's badly written, directed, and conceived and partly because it lacks the necessarily thematic coherence to accomplish proselytism of any kind.
  83. You Again
    This is another miserable movie about women at war over nonsense.
  84. Her Alibi
    There's no excuse for Her Alibi. [3 Feb 1989, p.42]
    • Boston Globe
  85. White Noise
    A moronic exercise in supernatural claptrap.
    • 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.
  87. Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
    If all the first "Deuce" had going for it was a regular-guy approach to over-the-top humor, that's completely absent in this follow-up.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Christmas with the Kranks
    Kranks is a feel-good movie in which every character is hateful (except, sigh, the cancer lady), and a Christmas movie too chickenhearted to mention Jesus.
  89. 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
  90. 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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Finding Amanda
    Finding Amanda, unfortunately, is one vast, irritating surface.
    • 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."
    • 37 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Bad Company
    The major problem with this alleged comic thriller is it is neither funny nor thrilling. Neither the heavies nor the good guys are believable.
  94. Silent Hill
    Tens of millions of dollars were spent to tell us what we should have known going in: that the makers of the movie you're slogging through will spare no expense to demonstrate how much they hate us. Do us a favor. Tell them the feeling is mutual.
  95. Megalopolis
    That the director spent 40 years trying to make this worthless, 138-minute hot mess shocks me to no end. “Megalopolis” plays as if every iota of this once-great filmmaker’s talent got sold along with his vineyard.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Virginity Hit
    It's more like "Porky's for Dummies," a thoroughly depressing teen farce in which Internet voyeurism has replaced human intimacy and where privacy is SO 20th century.
  97. Son of the Mask
    At its least intolerable, the movie is a fatherhood freak-out.
  98. Saw 3D
    The dismemberment and torture are now shtick. The filmmakers - "Saw" veterans - struggle to imbue this movie with the usual righteousness.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Old Dogs
    It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without a turkey, and in Old Dogs, we have the season’s blue-ribbon gobbler.
    • 19 Metascore
    • 12 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Cat in the Hat
    If the producers had dug up Ted Geisel's body and hung it from a tree, they couldn't have desecrated the man more.
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