Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,945 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: 5,227 out of 7945
  2. Mixed: 1,553 out of 7945
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7945
7945 movie reviews
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    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Silence
    The movie’s being promoted as the third in the director’s unofficial trilogy of faith, after “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1988) and “Kundun” (1997), and it feels like a self-conscious masterpiece, a summing-up from a filmmaker who, at 74, may be thinking of his legacy.
  2. A Monster Calls
    A Monster Calls is a portrait of coping that’s both fascinating and heartbreaking.
    • 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.
  4. Passengers
    More spectacular special effects might have helped, or at least something more creative than a spaceship that resembles a giant Christmas tree ornament shaped like a corkscrew. Perhaps as a well-written play for a cast of three, Passengers might have been first class. Instead, it’s just another mediocre thrill ride.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fences
    You don’t get groundbreaking cinema from Fences, but what you do get — two titanic performances and an immeasurable American drama — makes up for that.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Lion
    Lion is shameless and heartfelt and you’ll probably have a good, happy cry at the end. When a story pushes buttons so deeply wired into our consciousness...craft seems almost beside the point.
  7. Why Him?
    A James Franco-Bryan Cranston teaming that’s not as wild as intended, but reasonably diverting just the same.
  8. Assassin's Creed
    The effect is less video-game-turned-movie than zombie movie minus zombies: stilted, static, s-l-o-o-o-w. The ending couldn’t set up a sequel more clearly if “To be continued” appeared on a title card. Don’t count on it. Game on? Game over.
  9. Sing
    The result is entertainment whose pace and sound, while dizzyingly brisk at points, still accommodates characters and a setting that are terrifically rich — a menagerie more fully, memorably realized than “Zootopia.”
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Patriots Day
    At best, it's unnecessary. At worst, it's vaguely insulting.
  11. The Brand New Testament
    Starting with a premise that a smart-aleck high school sophomore might take pride in, the film rallies late to make some points about patriarchy and female empowerment, but not before a barrage of clichés, tweeness, and inanity.
    • 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.
  13. Collateral Beauty
    Too well-meaning and too infused with genuine poignancy from Smith and Harris for the film to be dismissed as just a trigger for our snark reflex. But it’s a shame that the tears Smith sheds aren’t serving a better conceived story.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    The cast does good work, despite a less-than-great screenplay.
  15. Things to Come
    Cinematic rarity — a genuinely philosophical film.
  16. Miss Sloane
    It answers most questions by the end, except the most important one: Is the devil in Miss Sloane, or is Miss Sloane the devil?
  17. Office Christmas Party
    This last angle had us thinking back to “Risky Business,” as did the Chicago setting and the reveling gone off the rails. Here, though, there’s no edge to the wildness, nothing memorable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jackie
    Jackie is a chamber drama rather than an epic; an impressionistic work of emotional opera rather than a chronological parade. What is this movie trying to do? Simply dramatize everything that can go on inside a woman simultaneously marginalized and revered.
  19. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    We hear from Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, several still-awed costars, one of Mifune’s sons, Kurosawa’s script supervisor, and a film sword master identified as “killed by Mifune more than a hundred times.”
  20. Seasons
    The voice-over narrator (Perrin) recites environmentally pious platitudes that offer little enlightenment about what’s on the screen. This is annoying when something strange and unfamiliar is being shown.
  21. Allied
    What Allied increasingly offers is insincere sincerity: As the emotional quotient rises, so does the phoniness.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Manchester by the Sea
    Manchester by the Sea is an experience worth having, not for the magnificence of its impact or the far-flung grandeur of its settings but for the way it illuminates with quiet, unyielding grace how you and I and our neighbors get by, and sometimes how we don’t.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Elle
    Elle may be the purest distillation of his worldview yet, and it’s a terrifying thrill.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Rules Don't Apply
    This is not a well-made film but it is an enjoyable one, in part because it’s genuinely unpredictable and in part because it’s a pleasure to see one of the great stars of his era on a movie screen once more.
  25. Moana
    If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to visit this corner of the world, you’ll instantly recognize the blissful natural grandeur that Moana captures, as well as the Pacific’s intimidating vastness.
  26. The Love Witch
    Visually, it has the intense intimacy of a dream.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Nocturnal Animals
    I don’t mean it as a cheap shot, but Nocturnal Animals is very like an exquisitely rendered window display. It’s something at which you pause and peer into and catch your breath — and then move on.
  28. The Edge of Seventeen
    This is less a throwback to cutely misunderstood Molly Ringwald than to “My So-Called Life” — but with our high-school heroine stuck in a spiral like Claire Danes never knew.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    Directing the film version, Lee gets lost in the grotesque pomp of the halftime spectacle and its lead-up. He gets fine performances from the actors playing the soldiers and a terrible one from Stewart, who flails her arms like an amateur. Martin’s role is beneath his talents, while Vin Diesel’s, as a Zen warrior of a sergeant, is almost beyond belief.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Bleed for This
    Teller is cornering a market on recklessness in the roles he chooses -- the energy from that demonic drum solo at the end of “Whiplash” seems to carry over into the ferocity with which Vinny pounds at life. He’s not very smart, he’s kind of a jerk, but he never, ever stops, and Bleed for This earns your respect for him.
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