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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    • 22 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Black Christmas
    Silly, obvious, clumsy, and just gruesome enough to keep jaded genre fans from angrily throwing popcorn at the screen.
  2. New Year's Eve
    New Year's Eve is fun in the way that eating at a buffet is fun. It's two hours of foods that have nothing to do with each other piled high on a plate because it was too cheap to resist.
  3. Getaway
    In the end, it’s hard to remember another action entry that expends so much energy on frenetic blacktop choreography and attention-deficit editing with so little to show for it.
  4. Shark Night 3D
    Heartlessness, stupidity, cynicism, and greed are a demoralizing combination for movie-going. We pay to see a movie that doesn't respect us for being there at all.
  5. The Watcher
    Isn't even worth a glance.
    • 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.
    • 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.
  8. One for the Money
    The biggest problem One for the Money faces is trying to have it both ways: gritty-ethnic inner city vs. girly-girly comic.
  9. Say It Isn't So
    There are laughs here and there, and Graham and Klein aren't nearly as grating as what surrounds them. But there's no getting around the fact that far from seeming a labor of love, Say It Isn't So seems merely labored.
    • Boston Globe
    • 21 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector
    ''Health Inspector" hopes to do for Larry what ''Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" did for Jim Carrey, who in this context looks like Noel Coward.
  11. Norm of the North
    Denounce the cynics who pander such pabulum as entertainment for children.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj
    The Rise of Taj is relatively pointless in the scheme of things, but refreshing in what it (mostly) doesn't resort to for laughs.
  13. Held Up
    Alazy rip-off of ''Dog Day Afternoon'' that is too limp to even offend.
    • Boston Globe
  14. Killers
    Just as I was beginning to hope that she’d (Heigl) find a part that called for intelligence and sophistication and backbone, she plays another uptight naif.
  15. The Order
    A stupendous bore.
  16. Summer Catch
    The screenplay, with its relentlessly schematic characters saying relentlessly schematic things, is so moronic that it makes you long for a documentary on the real Cape League.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Life Itself
    Fogelman is familiar with the genre, having created the Emmy-nominated “This Is Us,” which has been deft enough in its treatment of loss to make it one of NBC’s most-watched shows. Life Itself fails to elicit the same sniffles, instead drowning its cast in a sticky, soggy script.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 0 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bratz
    A live-action film based on a line of dolls, it's pure marketing chum for tweeners: a proudly shallow, purposefully bland ode to girly-girl narcissism. I could actually feel my brain stem shrivel up as I watched it.
  19. Highlander: Endgame
    Offers some entertaining moments now and then in its relatively short running time.
    • Boston Globe
  20. 3000 Miles to Graceland
    An exercise in excess, but it's the best of the month's crop of mindless films, if only because it jumps off the screen with acertain pop and playfulness.
    • Boston Globe
    • 20 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    An American Carol
    Ultimately, the problem with An American Carol is the problem with far too much political discourse in this country, left or right: It highlights the worst excesses of the opposition for the sole purpose of discrediting the vast middle.
  22. Spinning Into Butter
    Despite all the hyperventilating, the movie fails to consider what these crimes mean when, say, the residents of the White House happen to be black. The filmmakers recognize that identity politics are often a trap door. But it's one they're helpless to save themselves from falling through.
  23. Hoodwinked Too! Hood VS. Evil
    By the time the giant, snarling spider shows up - the most boggling of the movie's various "holy schnitzel" touches - parents of the littlest "Hoodwinked" fans may be feeling hoodwinked themselves.
    • 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.
  25. Saw V
    Oh, Jigsaw. Here we go again. You kill. I doze off. Someone at the studio goes "ka-ching!"
  26. Son of the Mask
    At its least intolerable, the movie is a fatherhood freak-out.
    • 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
  28. Whatever It Takes
    Pretty lame stuff. Already it seems to be passing with the speed of light into the limbo of utterly forgettable "who-will-I-take-to-the-prom?" movies.
  29. Joe Dirt
    We have to endure 93 minutes of this torture, with only a few high points.
    • Boston Globe
  30. The Food of the Gods
    H.G. Wells's tale of nature's little critters turned steroidal gets cheesy screen treatment from director Bert I. Gordon, a veteran of the ginormous creature genre of the '50s. [09 Sep 2007, p.N32]
    • Boston Globe
  31. Marci X
    Clueless and sad.
  32. Corky Romano
    The most dumbed-down mob comedy in years. It's the kind of movie you tie around the ankles of a stiff you're tossing into deep water and never want to see again.
    • Boston Globe
  33. Digimon: Digital Monsters
    A video game barely disguised as a movie. Violent, and the monsters are scary for younger children.
    • Boston Globe
    • 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.
  35. All the Queen's Men
    A throwback war movie that fails on so many levels, it should pay reparations to viewers.
  36. Thomas and the Magic Railroad
    A train worth catching.
    • 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.
    • 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.
  39. Good Luck Chuck
    This is less an affront to women than it is to comedy.
  40. Grown Ups 2
    Grown Ups 2 offers a bittersweet paean to childhood and youth and their inevitable loss. Take the case of Adam Sandler. Didn’t he use to be funny?
    • 19 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Covenant
    The Covenant is dopey, formulaic stuff for the Friday night fright crowd. Worse for them, it's never remotely scary.
  42. Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
    Yes, I've seen Dumb and Dumberer, so you don't have to. As good deeds go, this is about as significant as getting a cat out of a tree, but believe me, you're better off at home, alphabetizing your old comic books, talking to your parents, or watching paint dry.
  43. Wild Orchid
    It's a movie Playboy spread, with irksome misogynist overtones. And, as the camera swoops liberally along the tropical seaport, it's hard to imagine how such a lovely spot was made to seem so tawdry and so tedious. [28 April 1990, p.8]
    • Boston Globe
  44. 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.
  45. 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.
  46. Valentine
    A flagrantly retro example of a tired genre that would vanish in a puff of smoke if anger management classes were to enter the picture, or if it would ever occur to any one of its endless stream of victims to reach for a light switch before proceeding into a spooky place.
    • Boston Globe
    • 18 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Ultraviolet
    Jovovich is bad, and not in a good way. She turns in an epically expressionless performance (maybe she thought it was one of her modeling gigs?) but she sure looks great.
  48. Company Man
    It's not that the film is devoid of honestly earned laughs here and there. The problem is that there are too few of them and that the film can't connect them.
    • Boston Globe
    • 18 Metascore
    • 0 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gigli
    An overlong, joyless, and inconsequential affair, full of dead air, and possessing only a few moments of jaw-dropping bad taste. It's a dull disaster.
  50. Swept Away
    At its best, Swept Away is like a scrapbook of postcards starring two lovebirds with great tans.
  51. 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.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Wash
    This real-life alliance is part of what makes the slice-of-life comedy The Wash work as well as it does, despite a somewhat skimpy though often crassly amusing script written by the film's director, D.J. Pooh.
    • Boston Globe
    • 18 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Serving Sara
    How inept is Serving Sara? It makes even Elizabeth Hurley seem graceless and ugly.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Darkest Hour
    Once upon a time, you'd go to see a grade-C genre movie like this willing to trade consistency and artfulness for a few stray thrills or oddball charm. But Darkest Hour doesn't have even as much character as those Discover commercials.
  55. Kickin It Old Skool
    Probably as tolerable as it can be for a comedy with no obvious creative aim. You can imagine the crew cracking up on some outtake reel, which honestly is what this movie feels like.
  56. The Devil Inside
    No one onscreen was actor enough to make us believe we were watching actual people commit or require actual exorcisms.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Movie 43
    The line between gross-out humor that's inspired and the kind that's witless is fine indeed, and Movie 43 obliterates it with poop and movie stars.
  58. Boat Trip
    Even 007 is a big old queen. Yes, Roger Moore's on board as a lusty codger, who, unlike the rest of us, can't get enough of Sanz.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Mr. Magoo
    Since a film like Mr. Magoo relies - literally and figuratively - on sight gags, they ought to be hilarious and razor-sharp. But the film's gags couldn't work their way through melted butter. [25 Dec 1997, p.C6]
    • Boston Globe
    • 18 Metascore
    • 0 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Nutcracker
    This is first-degree cultural homicide.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Vampires Suck
    Non-"Twilight'' fans would be better off surfing YouTube.
  62. The Apparition
    To those of us in the audience who might be strangers in paranormal precincts, it looks suspiciously like a séance.
  63. Mother's Day
    It’s like a nightmare in which you are trapped in an endless Kmart aisle of horrible holiday cards.
  64. 88 Minutes
    I've seen Pacino over the edge. This is not it. He looks pooped and pickled. Maybe being the only thing standing between a megaplex opening and a trip straight to the $4.99 bin at Target wiped him out.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    See No Evil
    Generic teen dice-and-slice with interior design by way of ''Saw." The movie's tight and reasonably well shot, though, and there are flashes of nasty invention between the ritual guttings.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Material Girls
    Isn't as witty, stylish, or sophisticated as the similarly themed "The Devil Wears Prada." Material Girls is pitched to the Seventeen crowd, and it succeeds on its own terms. These days, even pre teens live in a material world.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li
    This is a movie for the overcaffeinated, undereducated teenager in all of us.
  68. Prom Night
    When Jamie Lee Curtis ran from a killer in 1980's "Prom Night," she was 22 and had a unique gift for belting out fear. She was the Beverly Sills of slasher flicks. That "Prom Night" was dumb, but it wasn't insulting in the way this remake is.
  69. The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    Really, all Six is going for, with the generous application of both hardware supplies to the skin and feces to the camera, is a tired commentary on his shallow talents: They're excremental.
  70. Bless the Child
    Causes one to wish... that movies about the supernatural could make contact with supernatural script doctors.
    • Boston Globe
    • 17 Metascore
    • 0 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    All About Steve
    Easily the worst movie of the week, month, year, and Bullock’s entire career. It is to comedy what leprosy once was to the island of Molokai: a plague best contemplated from many miles away.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Delta Farce
    Consider this the sequel to "Ernest in the Army " that the late Jim Varney never got around to making. It's not very good but at least it's not evil.
  73. 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.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Witless Protection
    It's mostly harmless dum-dum stuff, though.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I Know Who Killed Me
    An intensely unpleasant killer-thriller mystery.
  76. Lost Souls
    Full of atmosphere and visuals, it's empty of anything that really matters.
  77. Weekend at Bernie's II
    It's a tossup as to which element of padding is more lifeless - the labored buddy stuff between McCarthy and Silverman, the empty comedy of gangsters Tom Wright and Steve James, or the lame buffoonery of corporate sleuth Barry Bostwick. As long as the calypso beat is on, Bernie staggers ahead, a pepperpot of zombie mirth. [10 July 1993, p.22]
    • Boston Globe
  78. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Awful in ways that are just clever enough often enough to make it intermittently watchable.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Deuces Wild
    Just about the only things that remotely redeem this movie are the solid acting performances by the principals, who make the most of the one-dimensional material given them.
  80. Beverly Hills Cop III
    Although the limits on Beverly Hills Cop III are pretty obvious, it's not a total write-off. Still, it's time to stop making movies about Murphy's Motown cop and start making one about Serge. [25 May 1994, p.69]
    • Boston Globe
  81. Harlem Nights
    The best thing about the film is the way it allows Richard Pryor to rise above the demeaning buffoon roles he's been playing for the last few years and finally play a character with dignity and style. [17 Nov 1989, p.89]
    • Boston Globe
    • 16 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kangaroo Jack
    Will parents be able to sit through Kangaroo Jack without plunging sharp sticks into their eyes? The short answer? Yes. Barely.
  83. Tomcats
    Isn't as funny as it is crude, and isn't as crude as it is labored.
    • Boston Globe
  84. My Boss's Daughter
    Having also starred in "Dude, Where's My Car" and "Just Married," Kutcher is becoming a stoopid-comedy specialist.
  85. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
    This is the sort of movie where men stand blankly over dead loved ones, then start digging. Masculine stoicism or emotional botox? You decide.
  86. Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
    Berlinger has approached Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 with intelligence and even a bit of thematic heft. But, frankly, the cheap thrill is gone.
    • Boston Globe
    • 15 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie
    With its lifeless animation, characterless characters, and plotless plot, Yu-Gi-Oh! is so flat as to make the card game on which it is based seem positively three-dimensional.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Disaster Movie
    The filmmakers are idiots.
  89. 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.
    • 15 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    House of the Dead
    House of the Dead, sadly, is so bad it's bad.
  91. Mixed Nuts
    Mixed Nuts is that cinematic oddity: a film that's pretty awful, yet almost perversely endearing -- despite the tiredness with which it plays out its labored jokes before bringing them together in a gooey Christmas ending. [21 Dec 1994, p.94]
    • Boston Globe
  92. Rollerball
    Meretricious without being entertaining, it's an easy game -- and an easier film -- to sit out.
    • Boston Globe
  93. Dungeons & Dragons
    A mildly entertaining but tepid extravaganza more suited to television than the big screen.
    • Boston Globe
  94. From Justin to Kelly
    They have the chemistry of step-siblings, so a movie that has them make out is, as the one of the few girls in the theater exclaimed, "so gross."
  95. Glitter
    It touches on universal themes of love, friendship, and family. Suffice to say it falls dreadfully short.
  96. The In Crowd
    The moral universe remains unsullied in this lite, lo-cal thriller - the cinematic equivalent of a fizzy summer drink.
    • Boston Globe
    • 13 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Daddy Day Camp
    Innocuous amusement for 5- to 8-year-olds and other people stuck in the anal stage of development.
  98. Fascination
    I'm afraid this is one of THOSE movies, one where ''plot" is another word for ''gratuitous sex scene."
  99. 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
  100. Freddy Got Fingered
    His (Green) new gross-out comedy is crude and stupid, but just as often rudely funny. It doesn't so much push the envelope as shred it.
    • Boston Globe
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