Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,964 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: 5,240 out of 7964
  2. Mixed: 1,556 out of 7964
  3. Negative: 1,168 out of 7964
7964 movie reviews
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  1. Toy Soldiers
    Petrie's directing debut - he had been a scriptwriter - is proficient and assured from the technical standpoint, but he's unable to overcome the essential preposterousness of his screenplay. [26 Apr 1991, p.74]
    • Boston Globe
  2. A Kiss Before Dying
    A Kiss Before Dying is another failed remake, never approaching the claustrophobic pressure of the far grittier and more highly charged 1956 version with Robert Wagner, Joanne Woodward and Mary Astor. [26 Apr 1991, p.72]
    • Boston Globe
  3. Oscar
    While visually handsome, Oscar is terminally sluggish. [26 Apr 1991, p.71]
    • Boston Globe
  4. Mortal Thoughts
    It's a sleeper - the kind of fresh, dark, edgy, formula-shunning surprise that snaps you out of the usual Hollywood-induced torpor and nudges you back into believing in movies. [19 Apr 1991, p.44]
    • Boston Globe
  5. The Object of Beauty
    Object of Beauty is another zap-the-yuppies outing, more elegant than most, and sophisticated, too, but hollow and on the whole charmless as it leaves us uninvolved with the spectacle of cash-strapped John Malkovich and Andie MacDowell holed up in a posh London hotel, living on room service and dodging the manager. [19 Apr 1991, p.42]
    • Boston Globe
  6. 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
  7. The Comfort of Strangers
    The Comfort of Strangers seldom makes sense, and the bizarre behavior often seems arbitrarily trowled on from the outside as opposed to something bubbling up from within. The best that can be said for it is that its maze-like ways at times intriguingly replicate the mazelike streets of Venice [12 Apr 1991, p.82]
    • Boston Globe
  8. Ju Dou
    Ju Dou is far richer and more jolting than "The Postman Always Rings Twice," which it suggests. When it comes to film noir entrapment, we have nothing on the Chinese. [05 Sep 1990, p.63p]
    • Boston Globe
  9. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze
    An inferior, though quite respectable, follow-up. [22 Mar 1991, p.73]
    • Boston Globe
  10. Class Action
    Its squandering of talent makes Class Action a film that deserves to be disbarred, not reviewed. [15 Mar 1991]
    • Boston Globe
  11. Guilty by Suspicion
    Winkler fills the screen with some first-rate actors doing first-rate work. It's a handsomely crafted film as well as an honorable one. But it's also, on the whole, dramatically flat. [15 Mar 1991, p.41]
    • Boston Globe
  12. True Colors
    Along with Cusack's marvelously natural performance, True Colors offers a premise deeper than most twentysomething-audience movies. The ethical conflicts between Spader and Cusack are thought-provoking, if simplistic and exaggerated. At the same time, True Colors seems to scream Cultural Statement. It's self-consciously anthemic. [26 Apr 1991, p.74]
    • Boston Globe
  13. The Doors
    Stone's film rolls off the screen with affection and authority, even when Morrison's life enters its sodden, bummed-out finale, and Val Kilmer does an uncanny job of identifying with Morrison. [01 Mar 1991]
    • Boston Globe
  14. 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
  15. Sleeping with the Enemy
    The script and direction are her real enemies here. Sleeping with the Enemy is a vehicle with too many manufacturing defects. [08 Feb 1991, p.39p]
    • Boston Globe
  16. The NeverEnding Story II: The Next Chapter
    With little going for it except its references to part one, The Neverending Story II is a neverending disappointment. [09 Feb 1991, p.11]
    • Boston Globe
  17. Popcorn
    Popcorn is a "Phantom of the Shlopera" - the kind of corny B-movie midnight campers can sink their plastic fangs into. [01 Feb 1991, p.21]
    • Boston Globe
  18. Hamlet
    It's acceptable Shakespeare - no more arbitrary than most stage productions, especially the willfully anachronistic ones, or the ones with political agendas thrust upon them. [18 Jan 1991]
    • Boston Globe
  19. Green Card
    Despite its lush photography, Green Card has the texture of peanut butter. It's more romantic than comedic, but there isn't an abundance of either. [11 Jan 1991]
    • Boston Globe
  20. Not Without My Daughter
    Not Without My Daughter creeps up on you like an icy chill. Not since Midnight Express in 1978 has imprisonment in a foreign country been so alarmingly and intimately conveyed on film. [11 Jan 1991, p.69]
    • Boston Globe
  21. Warlock
    Although Warlock doesn't muster enough of a charge to shoot for genre classic status as Sands subsides, it does have a degree of interplay uncommon in such outings. [19 Apr 1991, p.43]
    • Boston Globe
  22. Alice
    Alice isn't one of the best Allen films, but it's one of the better ones, generating more than enough whimsical fantasy to surmount its tacked-on moral. We're talking choice fluff here. [25 Jan 1991, p.29P]
    • Boston Globe
  23. Kindergarten Cop
    Kindergarten Cop finds Arnold up to his old tricks, which will be exactly what his fans will want to know. But it's tough on kids and may make more than a few feel uncomfortable. [21 Dec 1990, p.51]
    • Boston Globe
  24. The Bonfire of the Vanities
    Up in smoke, down in flames, reduced to ashes - choose your disaster metaphor for Bonfire of the Vanities. As filmed by Brian De Palma, it's "Misfire of the Vanities," the most wrongly conceived of the many popular novels brought to the screen this year. [21 Dec 1990, p.49]
    • Boston Globe
  25. The Russia House
    There isn't a single chase scene in The Russia House. There's scarcely a love scene. And it dares to be slow. But it's attached to feelings as few spy movies are - and as even le Carre's book was not. The greatest compliment one can pay The Russia House is to say that it's the kind of spy movie that's making spy movies obsolete. [21 Dec 1990, p.49p]
    • Boston Globe
  26. Awakenings
    Director Penny Marshall's choreography encompasses emotional as well as physical ebbs and flows. Awakenings lives up to its title. [11 Jan 1991]
    • Boston Globe
  27. Mermaids
    Frankly, Mermaids is the kind of movie that needs the strong personalities of Cher and Ryder, and is lucky it has them. They put the movie over. It has a weak script, and the direction by Richard Benjamin - who had two predecessors on this project - is so reticent as to be almost absent. There's almost no pacing or shaping to speak of. [14 Dec 1990, p.53P]
    • Boston Globe
  28. The Rookie
    There's action aplenty in The Rookie, but director and star Clint Eastwood supplies his tired cop-buddy formula with an oddball tone that lifts it slightly above the genre. [07 Dec 1990, p.53p]
    • Boston Globe
  29. Cyrano de Bergerac
    Depardieu and Rappeneau have not so much revived Cyrano as restored it. [25 Dec 1990, p.87p]
    • Boston Globe
  30. Misery
    Two scenes in Misery are shockingly brutal. But many more are wickedly amusing - especially the ones stemming from the fact that no small part of the writer's torture is the way his deranged muse uses language. There's something simultaneously comical and scary about the way Bates employs euphemisms to keep the lid on. [30 Nov 1990, p.29p]
    • Boston Globe
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