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. Aladdin
    It frankly doesn't match the franchise-renewing freshness of The Little Mermaid and the mythic core and emotional depth of Beauty and the Beast, but it has something neither of those films had - Robin Williams' scatty brilliance as the jolly Blue Genie, who carries Aladdin past some generic ordinariness that goes with the new feature's slick, zappy, computer-generated up-to-dateness and topicality. [25 Nov 1992, p.35]
    • Boston Globe
  2. Backbeat
    It's a terrific musical biofilm filled with drive, solid characterizations and - biggest surprise of all - musical performances that jump off the screen. [22 Apr 1994, p.33]
    • Boston Globe
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Treeless Mountain
    Feels both masterful and hesitant - it’s the work of a born filmmaker who’s still not quite sure what she wants to say.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Metropolis
    Poetic, surreal, and curiously powerful.
    • Boston Globe
  5. What's Love Got to Do with It
    It goes for broke on high-roller, high-energy scenes, and wins big. [11 Jun 1993, p.41]
    • Boston Globe
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    12:08 East of Bucharest
    For all its pessimism, the movie prompts a viewer to search his or her own memories for actions rather than reactions, and to mull over the differences between the two. It's a dark little ride, but at the end the lights hesitantly flicker back on.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Nebraska
    It’s a movie that floods you with emotion when you least expect it.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Time Out
    Cantet's script and direction are flawless, and, matched step-for-step by Jocelyn Pook's mournful score, he builds the tension to near unbearable levels.
  9. Ocean's Eleven
    It's slick, sleek, and stylish, and if it doesn't quite redefine cool, it certainly offers a snazzy update.
    • Boston Globe
  10. Mamma Mia!
    The movie takes the ABBA jukebox musical that ate London, and is still eating Broadway, and turns it into a surprisingly sensuous experience.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Hijacking
    A Hijacking tells a simple story whose ripples ultimately turn into tidal waves.
  12. The House of Mirth
    There was little mirth or innocence in the world that Wharton was able to write her way out of (she was much happier living in Paris), and Davies and his leading lady lift the silks to reveal it as the minefield it was.
    • Boston Globe
    • 94 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    La La Land
    Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers they ain’t. Stone’s singing voice is a soulful wisp of a thing. But this is the moment that convinced me the film’s writer-director, Damien Chazelle, knew exactly what he was doing. What his stars lack in training they make up for in relatability. They sing and dance just a little better than we would.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    War Witch
    War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts.
  15. Always
    You expect virtuosic technique from Spielberg, and it's there, in spades. What you don't expect is heartfelt romanticism. But that's there, too... Always is a terrific-looking throwback to those large-scale '40s cinematic stews of romantic longing. [22 Dec. 1989, p.43]
    • Boston Globe
  16. The Muse
    The season's brightest piece of counterprogramming.
  17. The Pillow Book
    The Pillow Book is Peter Greenaway's most stunning and accessible film since "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover." Dense, gorgeous and inexorable - once you give yourself over to its logic - it's a boldly erotic explosion of Asian chic, taken to places no film has gone before. [20 Jun 1997]
    • Boston Globe
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Hidden Figures
    The film’s made with more heart than art and more skill than subtlety, and it works primarily because of the women that it portrays and the actresses who portray them. Best of all, you come out of the movie knowing who Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson are, and so do your daughters and sons.
  19. Be Kind Rewind
    It's refreshing to see Gondry's moviemaking still possessed by the community spirit he caught a few years ago with "Dave Chappelle's Block Party."
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Punch-Drunk Love
    It's a honey of a performance: controlled, achingly human, and funny in the deepest ways.
  21. Darkman
    The film works because Raimi's motor-rhythmed pop sensibility was ready to take off in this movie, and does, in a series of wonderfully hyperkinetic comic-strip lurches. [24 Aug. 1990, p.34]
    • Boston Globe
  22. Marooned in Iraq
    As full of joy as pain, it's a perspective we need to see more often.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Truffle Hunters
    The movie, a balm for the senses and the soul, celebrates and discreetly mourns an activity that stretches back to antiquity and is slowly being snuffed out by global market forces.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Finding Nemo
    Pixar is so good at what it does that every other kiddie-entertainment purveyor -- including parent company Disney -- flounders in comparison.
  25. Io Capitano
    Io Capitano doesn’t try to convince viewers whether Seydou, Moussa, and all the other migrants have a right to seek a better life. What it does do, however, is tell their story in a way that makes them far more human and relatable than most of the news stories we see nowadays.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Painting (Le Tableau)
    Creative, colorful, and unexpectedly wise, The Painting is the latest offshore animation to show to kids burned out on computer-generated Hollywood toons.
  27. The Claim
    Stark, haunting, epic, and mournful, The Claim is a mountain of a film.
    • Boston Globe
  28. The Quiet Girl
    Told from the perspective of its 9-year old protagonist, Cáit (Catherine Clinch), writer-director Colm Bairéad’s adaptation of Claire Keegan’s 2010 novella, “Foster” is as beautiful as it is devastating.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    How I Killed My Father
    Polite but emotionally devastating, How I Killed My Father throws such questions out like smart bombs, and they detonate long after the end-credits have rolled.
  30. At Berkeley
    The observations coalesce into a cogent whole, providing insights that are never overtly stated.
  31. Glory
    Glory is the long-needed antidote to Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. With a grave clarity that echoes Augustus Saint-Gaudens' Boston Common monument and Robert Lowell's angry poem, For the Union Dead, Glory not only does justice to its deserving subject, but brings it into the popular consciousness with a distinction that compels respect. [12 Jan 1990, p.36p]
    • Boston Globe
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    New York Doll
    You're left with the bewilderment and joy on Kane's face as he plays the old songs, and the sense of ghosts just behind his back.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lady Chatterley
    Pascale Ferran's Lady Chatterley is sensual in escalating degrees of heat, but the film's eroticism, which is substantial, is laid on with a caress. The movie's a slow-motion swoon back into Eden -- a nature documentary about humans -- and it's hypnotic.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tulpan
    In the tradition of ethnographic dramas from "Nanook of the North" to "The Fast Runner," Tulpan drops us in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere and marvels at the people who live there.
  35. The Holdovers
    The Holdovers feels like a movie Ashby might have made.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Wild Tales
    Wild Tales rockets along with sleek, amoral charm and a masterful sense of cinematic storytelling; it’s worth noting that one of the producers is Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar.
  37. Hard to Be a God
    The vividly realized squalor, cruelty, and ugliness engulf everything, including the narrative.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Palm Springs
    What makes the movie fly are the interlocking energies of its leading players, Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Another Road Home
    With pained gentleness, her film insists we make our homelands within us and take them wherever we go.
  40. Only the Strong Survive
    The movie is the product of his (Friedman) big, shiny love of forgotten soul legends whom superstardom (and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, I might add) has eluded.
  41. 35 Shots of Rum
    I liked these characters, and suddenly not having them in my life anymore, simply because Denis has decided to start the closing credits, devastated me.
  42. Walk the Line
    The film sends you home moved and in a tuneful mood.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Why We Fight
    An agit-doc of unusual depth. It has a point -- that the primary business of America over the past half-century has been waging war -- and it supports that point with nuance, research, and a willingness to hear the other side of the argument.
  44. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    As in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993), about the last day of school and first night of summer vacation in a Texas town in 1976, Apollo 10½ maintains a wondrous balance between Lone Star specific and anywhere-in-America general.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sweet Sixteen
    Compston's performance and the downer milieu, presented with appropriate paint-peeling profanity, are more than enough to keep an audience riveted and ultimately moved close to tears.
  46. I Don't Want to Sleep Alone
    The movie is a block of paper that, when Tsai's finished with it, becomes a chain of snowflakes. Loneliness doesn't often get such a gorgeously ornate tribute.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Last Train Home
    A miniature masterpiece of documentary observation.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    I Am Love
    If you're not in the mood, the whole thing will probably seem pretty silly. But if you are -- oh, if you are -- I Am Love may be the richest, tastiest truffle you're likely to savor all summer.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    A fitting, expertly made final chapter, freighted with hard-won emotions, shot through with a sense of farewell, and fully aware of the epic stakes involved.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ricki and the Flash
    Because Demme genuinely likes people and is interested in them, Ricki and the Flash feels like “Stella Dallas” as remade by Jean Renoir — it’s a humanist suburban fable.
  51. Güeros
    Güeros is brutal, ironic, madcap, and grim. Shot by Damian Garcia in black-and-white with the pristine spontaneity of Godard’s cinematographer Raoul Coutard, it is “Bande à part” (1964) meets “Los Olvidados” (1950).
  52. Mountains
    A house is just a structure; what’s inside makes it a home. This film delicately shows what happens when the powers that be decide that the home you made is no longer yours.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Arrival
    Arrival would be nothing without Adams.
  54. Pump Up the Volume
    It's a celebration of free expression that treats youth like a fierce and beautiful animal, and never attempts to tame it. In Pump Up the Volume, the "why-bother" generation finds a voice, and begins to bother. [22 Aug 1990, p.47]
    • Boston Globe
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Bombshell
    It's loud, abrasive, and as soothing as a slug of battery acid. This crackling 1933 satire directed by Victor Fleming skewers the Hollywood star system with saber-sharp precision. [23 Nov 2006, p.5]
    • Boston Globe
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Notre musique
    Elegant, insistent movie -- a great gray filmmaker's finest in years.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Support the Girls
    Herein lies the quiet magic of Support the Girls — the reason to see it, the reason that keeps it coming back from the recesses of a reviewer’s psyche: Lisa is kind. That’s the secret, the reason the film is a little diamond.
  58. The Second Mother
    A kitchen, a guestroom, and swimming pool become battlegrounds. Though hardly revolutionary, “Mother” subverts conventions — both cinematic and social.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Philomena
    Philomena is a tearjerker of rare honesty and craft.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Search for General Tso
    It’s noted that General Tso himself was a guardian of Chinese tradition and would himself shudder at what the dish named for him has become. On the other hand, what does “authenticity” even mean when it comes to cuisine that has assimilated into another culture along with the people who make it? The best food — the kind we want again and again — always tastes like home. Wherever that is.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Hunting Ground
    The Hunting Ground does a fine and fierce job of portraying campus sexual assault as a national disease. It never dares to suggest that it’s a symptom.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The End of the Tour
    Just because David Foster Wallace would almost certainly have hated The End of the Tour doesn’t mean that it’s not a worthwhile movie. And in fact James Ponsoldt’s dramatic adaptation of Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky’s memoir about his 1996 road trip with Wallace is pretty excellent: heartfelt, probing, funny, above all touching.
  63. Fun with Dick and Jane
    Writers Nicholas Stoller and Judd Apatow remake is more devilish, hitting its targets with the reckless glee required for a round of Whac-A-Mole.
  64. Stonewall Uprising
    "This was the Rosa Parks moment,'' another participant says, "the time that gay people stood up and said, 'No.' ''
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Phoenix
    It is first and foremost a moral tale, and an overpowering one.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Spellbound
    A fascinating, grim, exciting motion picture, based on the current popular interest in psychiatry, and illustrating a new method of crime detection. [25 Jan 1946, p.17]
    • Boston Globe
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    Grueling yet ultimately exhilarating.
  68. The Ballad of Wallis Island
    This is a movie about a relationship that deserves to be nurtured and cherished. The most wonderful feature of “The Ballad of Wallis Island” is that it’s not the relationship you’re expecting.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The LEGO Movie
    The first great cinematic experience of 2014.
  70. The Dance of Reality
    Compared to his previous films, The Dance of Reality offers a nearly coherent narrative and a gentle, reconciliatory tone.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Roger Dodger
    Mines laughs from the ways in which its antihero's reductive philosophy consistently goes kerflooey in his face, but there's a weary sadness to it as well.
  72. Cyclo
    Although not without flaws, Tran Anh Hung's Cyclo is, nevertheless, the most ambitious and impressive achievement of Vietnam's young film industry. [01 Nov 1996, p.E5]
    • Boston Globe
  73. Aftermath
    By the movie’s end, viewers will have had a soul-searing brush with the unthinkable that far exceeds any real horror film of recent memory, and surpasses in its impact more traditional features and documentaries about the subject.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Catch Me If You Can
    Nothing if not a celebration of our willingness to be gulled by life's charming strangers.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Loveless
    Seems on the face of it to be one of Zvyagintsev’s simplest and saddest stories, but it widens in the mind like ripples spreading out from a body dumped in a lake.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Game 6
    It's an inside-the-park home run -- a small, lovingly overwritten comic drama about fate, failure, and primal longing. To put it in words a Sox fan would understand, the movie hurts good.
  77. Eyes Without a Face [re-release]
    Eyes Without a Face, outre as it is, never tires as hypnotic, touching, ghastly fun.
  78. Parallel Mothers
    The heroine of a woman’s picture is almost always a victim, a practitioner of redemption through suffering. Janis is no victim, and Cruz’s performance makes that very plain. In revisiting the genre, Almodóvar, with Cruz’s help, is also subverting it.
  79. The Sun
    This emperor verges on dementia, having no apparent clue how to function.
  80. Blue Moon
    This is a film about a professional divorce, not a romantic one. The fallout is just as painful.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    I'm Going Home
    Richly allusive and eloquently stylized.
  82. Thirteen Conversations About One Thing
    Resonates with intelligence and a poignancy made more sorrowful by what happened to all of us, but especially to New Yorkers, on that terrible day.
    • Boston Globe
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Whistlers
    Much about the new film feels simultaneously playful and dangerous, with fanciful inventions like the whistling language taught to the hero by the gangsters so they can communicate out loud in secret.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Abe
    A great measure of Abe’s success is that it made me hungry. More than that, it’s the first movie in quite some time to make me smile.
  85. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s superficial, it’s full of likable stars and scientific mumbo-jumbo, and, above all, it taps into the human urge to see big things become little and little things get big. It’s as close to lizard-brain entertainment as superhero blockbusters get, and as the mercury pushes toward 100, I’ll take it.
  86. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    This is movie as inundation. It’s daring, dashing, often delirious — except that the writer-director team of Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (the Daniels, as they like to bill themselves) keeps the delirium under just enough control.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Duma
    An exquisitely filmed, emotionally transfixing epic about a white South African boy's journey to return his pet cheetah to the wild.
  88. Zheng hun qi shi
    A subtly comic, ultimately moving film about modern adult relationships.
    • Boston Globe
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Fallen Idol (re-release)
    Formally, the movie's a lasting pleasure: Reed's incisive direction; Greene's easy yet weighted dialogue; the farseeing deep-focus photography of Georges Perinal; Vincent Korda's luxuriant sets.
  90. After Dark, My Sweet
    After Dark, My Sweet sticks to essentials, and nails the fatefulness in this doom-haunted genre. [24 Aug 1990, p.35p]
    • Boston Globe
  91. Read My Lips
    An inventive, propulsive office thriller.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Fantastic Woman
    Mirrors loom large in this movie, and Marina reflects back an image that too much of society refuses to see, to the point where she herself starts to doubt her own reflection. Yet the film’s most potent and lasting image involves a hand mirror and a steady gaze, and it serves as a breathtaking poetic metaphor about gender, identity, love, and the human soul. All you have to do, says Lelio, is look and see.
  93. Carlito's Way
    Carlito's Way reunites the Scarface team of Al Pacino and director Brian De Palma to much better effect than the first time around, proving there's a lot of life still to be found in the conventional urban-gangster movie. [12 Nov 1993, p.45]
    • Boston Globe
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rize
    There's a delicate balance here between expression and belligerence.
  95. Tucker: The Man and His Dream
    It's also [Coppola's] most gloriously extravagant film since "One from the Heart." [12 Aug 1988]
    • Boston Globe
  96. Mad Dog and Glory
    Mad Dog and Glory is the funniest and most original studio comedy since "White Men Can't Jump." What makes it fun is its ability to find new ways to do old things. [5 Mar 1993, p.61]
    • Boston Globe
  97. The Story of Louis Pasteur
    The Story of Louis Pasteur dates from the golden age of Hollywood biofilm, marked by conviction and craftsmanship. [13 Dec 1991, p.60]
    • Boston Globe
  98. The Biggest Little Farm
    Think “An Inconvenient Truth” meets “Babe,” or “The Good Earth” meets a biodiverse “Marley & Me,” with a dash of the Food Network’s “Pioneer Woman” tossed in. Among other things, that means furry critters romping to a folksy soundtrack with tubas and banjos employed unironically. It means circle-of-life lessons and sun-dappled everything. It means check your cynicism and snark at the gate, if you dare.
  99. Serial Mom
    Sly, oddly sweet, wickedly funny take on violence that's as American as apple pie. [15 Apr 1994, p.91]
    • Boston Globe
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The White Tiger
    Director Bahrani has always buried his social concerns in story and character; he’s one of the very few American filmmakers to pay attention to this country’s poor, and he applies his creativity to the paradoxes of India without missing a step.
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