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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    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Painter and the Thief
    So compelling is The Painter and the Thief — and ultimately so powerfully moving in its faith in human resilience — that you may not notice the illuminating ways in which Ree plays with form and viewpoint. The documentary won a special jury award for creative storytelling at the most recent Sundance Film Festival and it comes to streaming video as one of the year’s most affecting and subtly radical movie experiences.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Up
    On the most basic level the new film is pure vaudeville: a loopy flyaway fantasy that's hysterically funny if only to keep the darkness at bay.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Imitation of Life
    Laugh if you want at Imitation of Life or any of Sirk’s primal cinematic operas. Although if you can laugh at the film’s end, when Mahalia Jackson herself sings “Trouble of the World,” I can’t help you. Just understand that when you laugh, you’re really laughing at yourself, and you’re laughing to keep from crying.
  4. Menashe
    Funny, heartbreaking, impeccably observed, and nearly flawless drama.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Christmas Tale
    With at least nine primary characters and running two and a half hours, it's a big, fat novel of a movie - a domestic epic that fuses bitterness and forgiveness in completely satisfying ways.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Beautiful Losers
    For a film about a gaggle of slackers, Beautiful Losers is remarkably polished; with its quicksilver editing and fastidious mise-en-scene, it's as tight as the artists are slack.
  7. Inside Job
    The result is a masterpiece of investigative nonfiction moviemaking - a scathing, outrageous, depressing, comical, horrifying report on what and who brought on the crisis.
  8. The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear
    My only complaint about Naked Gun 2 1/2 is that it doesn't give you enough time to finish laughing at one gag before the next one comes along, cracking you up all over again. Naked Gun 2 1/2 is high-flying low comedy, 90 minutes of sublime nonsense that only the devoutly humorless could hate. [28 June 1991, p.69]
    • Boston Globe
  9. The Oh in Ohio
    It's a thrill to watch Posey incorporate, at last, some true emotion into her exuberant screwball wit.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Murderball
    Murderball is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Duck Season
    It's one of the small, pitch-perfect treasures of the movie year.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Into Great Silence
    One of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year.
  13. Twin Falls Idaho
    Bizarre, shadowy, enticingly eerie...more poetic, more tantalizingly original.
  14. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    Not since the original ''Star Wars'' trilogy has film dipped into myth and emerged with the kind of weight and heft seen in Peter Jackson's first installment of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy.
    • Boston Globe
  15. The Life of Chuck
    It’s one of this year’s best movies. I don’t know how it will fare at the box office, but I can see it becoming a beloved favorite in the same way “The Shawshank Redemption” ultimately did. Like that classic, this one really makes you think about life and the things we take for granted.
  16. Look at Me
    A marvelous, uncommonly observant, and unexpectedly rousing group portrait.
  17. The Class
    I was much more disheartened leaving the movie the first time I saw it than I was the second. Its richness resides in its apparent objectivity. Without sacrificing a sense of hope, Cantet suggests that the school system is just like a certain vexing grammatical tense: imperfect but still fighting against irrelevance.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Fits
    The Fits is what independent moviemaking should be and can be in this country. Like its heroine, it’s slight but it’s built to last.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mad Max: Fury Road
    The shock, really, is how tender Mad Max: Fury Road ultimately becomes. The film just wraps that tenderness in one of the most epic action extravaganzas of recent years. It's enough to renew your faith in movies.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Before Sunset
    That rose in the desert, a sequel that improves in every way upon its beloved predecessor and a romance that slowly builds a fire from embers thought dead.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Frankenweenie
    The movie, a simple yet immensely pleasurable tale of a little boy and his undead dog, is good enough on its own. If you know the back story, it's even better.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Shape of Water
    Fairy tales hew to time-honored story lines, and some may fault The Shape of Water for the traditionalism that underlies its phantasmagoric surface. It’s the getting there that bewitches, though, and a performance by Hawkins that’s smart, scared, furious, profoundly erotic, and regal — all without saying a word. Love doesn’t speak in this movie. Instead, it swims with unparalleled style.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Breathless
    Breathless is not an antique or a classic. It is still a new film, because it makes you feel cinema is still new. [18 Nov 2007, p.N9]
    • Boston Globe
  24. Women Talking
    Women Talking is full of phenomenal acting by a group of actors at the top of their game. There are a lot of characters here, but even the most minor are given moments to shine.
  25. The Interrupters
    The immediacy and caprice of violence in The Interrupters are just as strong as in nearly every documentary I've seen about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  26. The Straight Story
    Farnsworth's embodiment of old American values, with their combination of delicacy, reserve, and stand-alone independence, is a one-of-a-kind treasure.
  27. Things to Come
    Cinematic rarity — a genuinely philosophical film.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    So Much So Fast
    It is harrowing, heartbreaking, cheering, and unforgettable.
  29. Fast Food Nation
    Fast Food Nation has the dramatic flatness and willful lack of personality of some documentaries -- or at least how Linklater thinks a documentary should be. The movie nonetheless feels like both a work of investigative journalism and an immense human-interest story, veering into muckraking, horror, teen comedy, and what passes for "Twilight Zone" science fiction.
  30. Blue Heron
    Not since Charlotte Wells’s 2022 film “Aftersun,” about a woman remembering a pivotal trip she took with her father as a child, have I seen this level of personal filmmaking presented in such superb and original fashion. “Blue Heron” is one of the best films of the year.
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