Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,948 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 point 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: 5,230 out of 7948
  2. Mixed: 1,553 out of 7948
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7948
7948 movie reviews
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    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The King of Staten Island
    The laughs in The King of Staten Island are earned, and they are frequent — a frequency that is no small accomplishment, given the pain and loss at the film’s center.
  2. As Tears Go By (1988)
    This sounds like a fairly standard debut. But Wong smothers the story with tremendous style. Some directors give you a healthy ratio of mashed potatoes to gravy. Wong seems not at all to care for the potatoes.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Ides of March
    The filmmaking is shallow but assured, the star charisma thoughtful but undimmed. As for the character, I'd vote for Mike Morris. Actually, I wish I could.
  4. Shortcomings
    Though it delves into some dark territory, Shortcomings has a light touch and is at times very funny. The hilarious Cola is easily the film’s MVP, but Mizuno and Maki are also quite good. The film’s self-awareness and humor about its protagonist are its greatest assets.
  5. Guinevere
    While the appeal of Guinevere is decidedly intermittent, it's there, and the acting is right on the money.
  6. Tesla
    A subplot involving Sarah Bernhardt (Rebecca Dayan) seems to have wandered in from another, less watchable movie. It might have been for the best if Eve Hewson, as J.P. Morgan’s daughter and Tesla’s sort-of love interest, had wandered out.
  7. A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints
    The first-time filmmaker aspires to show us what caused him to leave his neighborhood and stay gone for 20 years. All I can really glean is that the place was too loud.
  8. Poison
    Poison is at once disturbing and beautiful, a cereus blooming in the darkest of night. Uncompromising and heady with ambition, Haynes likes to make his audiences think. Poison succeeds in this goal, and increases in power the more you look back on it. Like the most potent movies, it creeps on you. [19 Apr 1991, p.41]
    • Boston Globe
  9. Watermarks
    In the absolutely moving new documentary Watermarks, seven women in their 80s return to the Vienna swimming pool of their youth.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Flow: For Love of Water
    Flow preaches to the choir with a starry-eyed NPR eco-humanism that can set the wrong kind of person's teeth on edge.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    The Perks of Being a Wallflower finds an unexpectedly moving freshness in the old clichés by remaining attentive to the nuances of what happens within and between unhappy teenagers.
  12. Jesus, You Know
    Whatever blend of fact and fiction is really at work in this latest offering from ''Dog Days" director Ulrich Seidl -- known, by the way, for playing fast and loose with the documentary format -- the irony-laced ''Jesus, You Know" does persuade viewers to sit up and take notice of its inspired conceit.
  13. A Master Builder
    The performances ratchet up to giddy near-hysteria, as Hilde toys with Solness’s randiness and repressed memory.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Music from the Inside Out
    Daniel Anker's Music From the Inside Out is so intent on divining the mysteries behind the creative act that it comes up frustratingly short on specifics.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Sapphires
    The movie has the indulgent fondness of a gift from a son to his talented mum and aunties. But it also feels the funk, and that’s what counts.
  16. Garden State
    A standard issue, first-movie navel-gaze whose cobwebs Braff meticulously sweeps away by directing the bejesus out of it. The photography makes loveliness out of the film's dank, hung-over atmosphere; the camerawork and editing lend the movie a luscious daydreaminess.
  17. The Green Prince
    It takes a personal rather than a political perspective, exploring the ambiguities of truth and individual identity rather than the complexities of an ongoing historical calamity. And though the human drama is hypnotically gripping, it comes at the expense of the bigger picture.
  18. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    It has a sense of small-town America that feels special even without great specificity. Some of the music on the soundtrack places it in 2007 or 2008, but, really, the film occurs outside of time, virtually outside of place (it's suburban Detroit), and in a void of cultural chic.
  19. The Year My Parents Went on Vacation
    It really only comes alive in its shots of people in the neighborhood sitting around their television sets. What we're really talking about here is a problem in scope. In Hamburger's film, the world is no bigger than a cup.
  20. Water Lilies
    A distant thematic and artistic cousin of Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" and Lucrecia Martel's "The Holy Girl."
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Unforgivable
    Everyone is equal parts emotional victim and villain in Unforgivable, an elegantly rambling Franco-Italian affair about the ways we do each other wrong while trying to do each other right.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Long Shot
    Long Shot is awfully funny when it’s not being completely preposterous — and sometimes even when it is.
  23. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    Silva doesn’t resort to any fancy tricks to depict his characters’ inner experiences. But something happens nonetheless, a bonding of sorts that is almost, if not quite, convincing.
  24. The Legend of Ochi
    The Legend of Ochi is being pitched as a family movie by A24, but I don’t believe most kids would enjoy this slow-moving slog set in the Carpathian mountains.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Schultze Gets the Blues
    A delightfully deadpan comedy from Germany, is one of those movies where nothing whatsoever seems to happen until you look closely, at which point everything happens.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Visual Acoustics
    Essential viewing for builders, graphic designers, visual artists, and other optically inclined folk, but it’s a bit of a slog for the uninitiated.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Girl Asleep
    There’s a lot of talent here and a lot of enthusiasm; also a lot of influences that haven’t been successfully reprocessed into something convincing or fresh. It’s a mess, but a reasonably charming one.
  28. Furious 7
    Finally, a movie with at least some coherence despite its sadly challenging circumstances.
  29. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
    Telling all is not necessarily the same thing as telling the truth, even if Bowers’s memory seems as clear as the glint in his bright blue eyes. Maybe it’s his ego that’s not clear — or too much so.
  30. Upgrade
    Upgrade, Whannell’s second outing behind the camera, is yet another top-notch repair job, this time a kinetic sci-fi riff fashioned from scrap metal and human entrails, nervily updating Cronenbergian body horror for the iOS era.
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