Boston Globe's Scores

For 7,946 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:
7946 movie reviews
  1. Because Spun is so plotless it's almost avant-garde, we're meant to be delighted with its assortment of set pieces.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The film's most natural appeal is to adolescent athletes -- in particular, cleat-wearing young ladies who will bask in its hard-won girl-power message. This is a movie with bruised shins and a huge heart.
  2. Frances McDormand rescues this role from the throes of cliche. It's as though drippy dialogue and sappy rock were a small price to pay for a part that lets her flash her breasts, get stoned, and join in a three-way.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The movie's strength is its refusal to offer easy answers.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    There are about 15 minutes of genuine, bust-a-gut comedy in Bringing Down the House, and, surprisingly, they belong to Steve Martin, who hasn't been funny on film in years.
  3. The film leaves you dissatisfied, as though you'd just spent two hours with a menagerie of plastic white people.
  4. Noe's summation is an ideological sucker-punch from a filmmaker who gets off on abusive relationships. He may as well have thrown a big ''whatever'' up on the screen.
  5. The film would be just as powerful, if less likely to saturate suburban megaplexes and flatter its patrons, were its saviors -- I don't know - French.
  6. Ten
    The new Abbas Kiarostami film is called Ten, and in it something amazing happens: nothing.
  7. This is a ride, a video game, a soundtrack -- unapologetic and clearly labeled as such. It has no middle speed.
  8. The film means to provoke a closer look at the faces of good and evil. It questions whether we really live in a world that can be divided neatly into black hats and white hats.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Open Hearts, like all good melodramas, is ruthless in its insistence that people are dragged, uncomprehending, in the wake of events.
  9. Despite being well acted and sweetly moving when it strips down to the tender poem at its heart, Till Human Voices Wake Us spends too much time playing to an otherworldly suspense that simply isn't there.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    In the end, the problem with movies like Dark Blue is that they willfully ignore the systemic, historical, cultural, and class causes of racism in favor of pinning it all on a few bad apples. Sure, that's entertainment. It's also a lie.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The thread that winds through their stories is love lost and connections found, but only the audience is able to weave it into something to keep.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Sanctimonious claptrap -- an inert pageant of waxen figures that fails completely as drama even as it insults the sensibilities of anyone not clinging to rosy memories of the slave-era South.
  10. It's also a message movie, about as weighty as Lara Flynn Boyle and twice as absurd. But I'd like to report that I had an excellent time.
  11. Positively reeks of self-importance -- the jokey, ham-fisted, pseudo-socially relevant, punch-pulling kind. It reeks worse of acting -- the Jack-Lemmon-in-a-coma Kevin Spacey kind.
  12. Watching the uncertain and disappointing new apartheid documentary Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony'' is like going to the lecture of an impassioned but really disorganized professor.
  13. This is that rare art flick whose subject goes nuts because his work is not self-indulgent ENOUGH.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Note that it took six writers to come up with the script for The Jungle Book 2. Note that Rudyard Kipling isn't one of them.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Watching Gus Van Sant's Gerry is the cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry. I mean that as high praise.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Settles for the cliches of American suspense films, right down to an ending that leaves the door open to a possible sequel.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Green unquestionably has a rare, intermittent knack for rapture.
  14. Daredevil the movie strains itself trying to catch up with Sam Raimi's web-slinging megasmash. It's a faceless copy, right down to the muscle-rock groaning on the soundtrack.
  15. A deep, exhaustive, and moving piece of do-it-yourself detective work.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dawdles amiably and can't quite decide what it wants to be.
  16. Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey don't simply star in this movie; they tag-team it out of the Freddie Prinze Jr. --Julia Stiles puppy-love ghetto.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    So appallingly slipshod in all the usual departments is this sequel to the engaging martial-arts comedy Western ''Shanghai Noon'' that you're tempted to cite its makers for contempt.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    May
    Satisfyingly, May also turns out to be lowdown genre fun, a film that nearly makes up in slacker wit and high-spirited gore what it lacks in budget and elegance.

Top Trailers