Boston Globe's Scores

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:
7964 movie reviews
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The stakes in this story seem too low to justify its audience’s attention. If The Page Turner were a novel, it would hardly be a page turner. Why should we hold films to a lower standard?
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    It's an angry story, but also a strangely hopeful one, in the sense of new life sprouting through a battlefield. Above all, it's personal and specific, and that IS news we can use.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The movie's a cheeky, low-budget goof on dice-and-slice horror films, but for all the visible seams, it's a lot cleverer than "Scream."
  1. The filmmakers don't appear to know what's important, let alone how to pace an epic for big drama and maximum thrills.
  2. This new movie is a more credible, less grisly act of filmmaking , but it's a less compelling exercise. It doesn't have the ruthless moral reasoning of the first two "Saw" pictures, however grotesque and specious that reasoning was. But it does have a plot that revolves around a ventriloquist and her demon doll.
  3. The movie, instead, is a work of giddy self-sabotage that seems determined to matter and not matter at the same time.
  4. It's a movie only a psychic could love, since a psychic would know to stay home or see "Zodiac" instead.
  5. The historical scope of this story, as well as Loach's interest in absolute fairness, seems to have drained some of the life from its telling.
  6. The movie is one long pose. But it develops into an idea slightly greater than its flippancy. The steady frenzy is whipped into a roux of two reasonably developed characters.
  7. 300
    There's a stale, synthetic airlessness about the movie. Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screensavers. It could be ancient Greece. It could be somebody's hard drive.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mostly, though, it's "Godzilla" with a severe case of Murphy's Law, and it is never less than bizarrely delightful.
  8. Sadly, this is the sort of movie in which the white Europeans do all the talking and worrying with each other. The Africans, for the most part, are either terrified, cowering, wincing masses or corpses strewn in the dirt.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    James Scurlock's documentary horror show has a critical message to impart -- your credit cards are out to kill you -- and a naive, ham - handed way of imparting it.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Namesake has a deep, alluvial poetry to it, like a mighty river reaching the sea. It's mysterious and ordinary, insightful and banal, rambling and precise, and it is altogether unexpected.
  9. The message is clear almost immediately: charity not vanity.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Leave it to the French to take the joy back out of sex. The high-minded erotic drama Exterminating Angels has heat but little light; it speaks of pleasure while treating it as a dirty word. The cast huffs and puffs but the exercise, sadly, remains academic.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Part of the shoujo genre of gently fantastic romantic dramas about and for young teenage girls, it's also funny and creative enough to charm parents, brothers, cousins, and anyone else looking for an openhearted fable.
  10. Zodiac is a kind of corrective remake of "Se7en," a renunciation of that earlier movie's psychotic nihilism. That rejection extends to a neat sight gag. Fincher gives us a shot of a cardboard cutout for "Dirty Harry" that mocks the personal abyss that catching Zodiac becomes.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The movie is this year's "RV," a rolling tent show of suburban male anxieties: castration, obsolescence, dismissive offspring, fears of gayness. LOTS of fears of gayness. Unlike "RV," though, Wild Hogs is funny. Eventually.
  11. It takes a special first-time director to stick her neck out, personally as well as professionally. As much as anything else, The Cats of Mirikitani is a testament to good breeding.
  12. This movie is crazy, but the insanity is electric.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    One of the transporting film experiences of this or any other year.
  13. Archer isn't necessarily taking us anywhere new, but his movie's rapture is beautiful inside and out.
  14. The real problem with The Astronaut Farmer is that it has no spark.
  15. This low-rent, nonsense cop business filled me with a nostalgic twinge. I didn't know I wanted the "Police Academy" series resurrected with a lot more hilarity, but I'm glad somebody did it.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    With a "Lost"-meets-"The Haunting" plot and a handful of convoluted thematic twists involving family, history, murder, and death, The Abandoned limps into a nebulous kind of horror netherworld, peppered with painfully long tension-building sequences and unimaginative dialogue.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    It's a doughty movie, stuck halfway between Masterpiece Theatre and Classics Illustrated, but, to his credit, gifted journeyman director Michael Apted understands he's playing the long game.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    It's all breezy and predictable.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    As with most rock festivals, you had to be there, and if you're British you probably were, one year or another. In that case, Glastonbury is a pointed but essentially nostalgic tour of one country's more noble pop impulses. Otherwise, it's as muddy as Yasgur's farm back in the day.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A compelling and eerily effective little drama.

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