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
  1. From Sherlock Holmes to Doctor Strange, Cumberbatch has excelled at playing oddball heroes. Wain extends that line. As noted, though, things darken once oddball behavior becomes something more than that, and this darkening makes the second half of the movie feel slightly stilted and increasingly grim.
  2. Everything is leaden, solemn, portentous. When the writing’s not wooden, it’s clumsily demotic.
  3. It’s easily the most mannered movie Anderson has made, which is really saying something. It’s so mannered at times as to be almost unmoored — speaking of ships — but the many marvels it contains make that an acceptable price to pay.
  4. Among the virtues of Bergman Island is how uncluttered it is generally, as well as its consistent quietude and Hansen-Løve’s keenness of observation.
  5. The best thing about The Last Duel is its very handsome look, courtesy of Scott’s go-to cinematographer, Dariusz Wolski.
  6. What makes a rock band worth attending to a half century after its breakup isn’t its personalities or backstory or context, interesting as those can be, and here they’re all highly interesting. It’s the music.
  7. With this fifth and final go-round, it’s clear who the best Bond is. It’s Craig, Daniel Craig.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Like a surly teen pilot, you, too, might find yourself bored and muttering, “Honestly, maybe the fate of humanity and the world isn’t important to me, either.’’
    • 29 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    As biography, Diana is shallow and reductive, checking the boxes of an extremely well-known story with numbing predictability. As musical theater, Diana is a forgettable farrago of painfully on-the-nose lyrics and clashing song styles that ventures perilously close to camp.
  8. Andy Serkis directed. Serkis, who’s given so many memorable acting performances (Gollum! Caesar the chimpanzee!), doesn’t elicit any here. The great cinematographer Robert Richardson shot the movie, which makes its lack of visual texture all the more dispiriting.
  9. Titane is deeply unpleasant, and its narrative borders on the inexplicable — not just the sex and pregnancy — but Ducournau knows what’s she’s doing, even if the audience doesn’t know why she’s doing it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    As a Goodfellas-ish crime drama that vividly evokes time and place, Saints is rendered with enough bare-knuckled verve, unpredictability, and darkly glinting wit to make it work.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Director Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Wonder) and screenwriter Steven Levenson work the levers of emotional manipulation so vigorously, and with so little finesse, that it’s hard to get truly invested in either Evan’s pain or his self-created dilemma.
  10. The Guilty gets less and less plausible, not least of all in how neatly it ties together various plot elements. For its first 40 minutes or so, the movie shows how much Gyllenhaal and Fuqua can do with little. Confinement becomes a dramatic launching pad. Then melodrama kicks in, and what had been a gripping offbeat thriller becomes a morality tale (including a truly shameless plot twist).
  11. When the film keeps things simple, it’s at its best: uncluttered and assured.
  12. Old Clint is still Clint, but he definitely looks a little stooped and more than a little frail. There’s an unexpected benefit to that frailty, and it makes this leisurely, not especially plausible film worth watching.
  13. It treats the Bakkers as something between grotesques and simpletons, which does rather limit the biopic angle. Satirizing televangelism is such low-hanging fruit it’s windfall. As for camp, it’s hard to avoid in a movie with Tammy Faye as its title character.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    All drama asks you to suspend disbelief, but Come From Away asks you also to suspend cynicism, aiming to move and uplift you. It’s not a bad bargain, and Come From Away holds up its end.
  14. The constant sense of low-grade menace that helps make the first quarter of The Card Counter intriguing and effective gets put on hold, in a good way, whenever Haddish is on screen.
  15. Overall the movie has too many dead spots. And they aren’t necessarily the non-action sequences.
  16. This is not the most promising dramatic material — legal and actuarial material, yes, dramatic, no. Yet Worth manages to combine process and emotion in a way that works.
  17. Poitras includes screenshots, Zoom sessions, surveillance footage, even voice mails. The overall effect is both hypnotic and deeply unsettling, like watching a real-life William Gibson novel.
  18. Acute and skillfully made, Candyman is also pointedly political.
  19. Drawing on the memories of family members, friends, and collaborators, and tapping into a trove of archival material, including tapes of James’s raucous, raunchy live shows, Jenkins keeps pace with his subject’s breakneck progress. Along the way James encounters opportunities that are missed or exploited and tragedies that are averted or courted. He transforms hard times into artistic success, and squanders success in debauchery.
  20. Visually as well as emotionally, there’s more energy here than in some action movies.
  21. Really, The Lost Leonardo is a detective story. Like any good detective story, it’s also a morality tale. Or maybe immorality tale better describes these goings on.
  22. Well, even on automatic pilot, as he is here, Jackson is always good company. Maggie Q’s blend of grace and gravity translates into a quiet authority. Keaton completes the trio. He’s quite droll here. No one’s better at playing a low-key wiseass. The pleasure of such company isn’t enough to compensate for watching a succession of scenes that are like recruitment ads for abattoir work.
  23. Writer-director Lisa Joy doesn’t lack for ideas. It’s just that there are too many and few of them original.
  24. Ruby is an underdog worth rooting for, and Jones (the Netflix series Locke & Key) is terrific. She’s like a cross between the young Winona Ryder and the young Kate Winslet. The comparison flatters all three.
  25. Sometimes Free Guy expands on its predecessors, just as often it doesn’t. In such an uninspired movie summer, derivativeness may not be as much of a problem, and the movie does have its moments.

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