Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,950 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: 5,231 out of 7950
  2. Mixed: 1,554 out of 7950
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7950
7950 movie reviews
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  1. Cameraperson
    The film shifts back and forth in time. It works like memory that way, but the memories are Johnson’s, not the viewer’s, which makes the absence of some discernible organizing principle a real drawback.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Short Game
    What Greenbaum captures is compelling, and occasionally uncomfortable to watch. Sports in their purest form are played by children, who are — most of the time — much too young to be tarnished by professional-level jealousy, scandal, sacrifice, and unfair expectations.
  3. Art and Craft
    So Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, and Mark Becker, the directors of Art and Craft, have themselves an enticing subject in Landis’s activities. They do not have an enticing subject in Landis himself.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    May
    Satisfyingly, May also turns out to be lowdown genre fun, a film that nearly makes up in slacker wit and high-spirited gore what it lacks in budget and elegance.
  5. Confessions of a Shopaholic
    This movie has no light to shed on the matter. It is its own contradiction: a film about confessions in which nothing much is confessed.
  6. Observe and Report
    This new movie is crazier, scarier, funnier, and more bewildering. It's the strangest movie I expect to see from a Hollywood studio for the rest of the year.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Avengers: Age of Ultron
    Ultron’s goals never make much sense beyond the basic kill-the-Avengers-and-destroy-the-Earth checklist, nor does he develop as a character over the long haul. He’s just a static baddie, fun to look at and handy with a quip but ultimately as dull as unpolished chrome.
  8. Monte Carlo
    Honestly, the whole movie is from 1960-something.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gabrielle
    The catch in Gabrielle is that the audience pays as well.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Thanks for Sharing
    See Steve McQueen’s “Shame” (2011) if you want a sense of how destructive this sickness can be to the soul. See Thanks for Sharing if you want to know what people can do about it.
  11. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
    Good enough, but only just. It's got the hardware, but neither the characters, the imagination, nor the resonance one had hoped for.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Mortal Kombat II
    Will “Mortal Kombat II” make a splash this awards season? Probably not. But this faithful adaptation should satisfy longtime fans of the franchise.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Aniara
    Parts of the film aren’t pretty because people don’t always act in pretty ways, and the speculation that such an event might create its own hermetically sealed reality, one increasingly distorted to our eyes, is intriguing, if not especially deep. It all plays out like a “Big Brother” reality show with 5,000 participants and no Big Brother.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Solo: A Star Wars Story
    Audiences should feel free to lower their guard — to adjust expectations into B-movie territory. And as a B-movie, “Solo” delivers, sometimes in a way that reminds a viewer of this franchise’s roots in classic Saturday matinee adventure serials and sometimes simply as proficient, dutiful, time-passing entertainment.
  15. Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult
    There's a little less hilarity in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult than in the first two films, but there's still enough slapstick firepower to put it across. There's efficiency in Peter Segal's direction, but never real zaniness, and in the gaps between the sight gags lurks the onset of sequelitis. [18 Mar 1994, p.68]
    • Boston Globe
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Conjuring
    The Conjuring digs up no new ground — indeed, it seems almost proud of its old school bona fides — but it plows the classic terrain with a skill that feels a lot like affection. The ghost that’s really haunting this movie is nostalgia.
  17. Kill the Messenger
    It’s an engrossing portrait not only of government intrigue and crusading after the truth, but of media and their tangled motivations. Engrossing enough, in fact, that Cuesta needn’t try as hard as he occasionally does to heighten the drama and give it added flash.
  18. Big Fish
    The actor's job here is the hardest to pull off, since practical skepticism in a Tim Burton picture is next to villainy. Yet Crudup suggests complex grown-up feelings that makes the rest of Big Fish feel like an earnest collection of magic tricks.
  19. Sometimes Always Never
    This extremely dry film mixes humor and melancholy to distinctive, if muffled, effect. Take away the muffled part, and that’s very Nighy, too. In being winningly understated and sometimes maddeningly stylized, Sometimes Always Never is a bit like Alan.
  20. Lakeboat
    Feels a bit flat and underdeveloped.
    • Boston Globe
  21. John Wick
    The movie’s one big pitfall, really, is that Reeves’s character is so intently focused, he takes care of business a bit too quickly. Some final skirmishing and a tonally false sign-off feel like unconvincing bids to stretch the story to a more legit feature length.
  22. The Good Dinosaur
    A very middling movie, it does have a nifty premise.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Little Shop of Horrors
    Obviously, it wasn't the plot that has given Little Shop such a long life. In the case of this film, it's the music, the sets and the comic sketches that make this remake mostly successful. [19 Dec 1986, p.77]
    • Boston Globe
  24. The Commuter
    Neeson’s financially strapped character might vent even more convincingly if he didn’t somehow still have a BMW parked back at the depot, but we’re on board with him all the same.
  25. Hustle
    This is a movie that’s definitely got game. But what’s richest and best about Hustle is how, yes, it’s a character study. It’s not in the same league as “Hoop Dreams” or “High Flying Bird” or even “Hoosiers” (1986) — what is it about basketball-movie titles and the letter “h”? — but it’s smart and agreeable and, emotionally, it gives a true bounce.
  26. Stir of Echoes
    Needs less down-to-earth flavor and more unearthly force.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Adoration
    Watching Adoration is like juggling three tennis balls, a porcupine, and a graduate thesis, but eventually it finds a unifying theme, that of tolerance melting away racial and intergenerational hatreds.
  28. Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins
    What’s stimulating and fun about “Raise Hell” is quite stimulating and fun. But the more smitten you become with its subject — and it’s hard not to be — the more you feel there’s something missing or that what isn’t missing is yet too thin.
  29. Haiku Tunnel
    They're a far cry from the Coen brothers, or even the Polish brothers, but Josh and Jacob Kornbluth emerge intact from their first filmmaking venture and score more hits than misses in this comedy.
    • Boston Globe
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    13 Tzameti
    13 (Tzameti) is an existential horror film, a violent prank, a metaphor for modern Europe, and a first-time director's startling calling card.
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