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
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    An entertainingly brutal portrait of feckless privilege and buried tragedy, hewing reasonably close to those points we know to be true and juicily provocative about what happened in rooms you and I weren’t privy to.
  1. At a time when financial regulations have been gutted, stock market indexes reel, and trade wars threaten, Jed Rothstein’s slick and revealing documentary The China Hustle should only add to the anxiety and gloom.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Isle of Dogs is a fascinating (and furry) place to visit, but visit is all it does. It’s a good boy. But it’s not a great one.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Writer-director Maoz is best known for his 2009 film “Lebanon,” based partly on his own experiences as a tank gunner during the 1982 Lebanon War. Like that film, Foxtrot brings a coolly critical, occasionally surrealist eye on the assumption that Israel’s military efforts have made for a better, wiser people.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    It overuses ’80s nostalgia as shorthand for genuine emotional involvement, and it presents us with a rapturous digital wonderworld only to sternly lecture us that reality is the better value.
  2. If anything, Chernick’s film shows a life that may be too perfect. In addition to his triumphant career, Perlman has a seemingly ideal marriage — to Toby, a woman who is his match in ebullience, wit, and passion for art and music. It has lasted for more than 50 years.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A deft, disturbing piece of work, as cold around the heart as the Kubrick film, if infinitely more dismissible. It gets in, it messes with your mind, and it vanishes, leaving only an unsettling aftertaste of unresolved narrative. It’s an exercise, but some exercise leaves you gasping.
  3. Still, not to put too fine — or juvenile — a point on it, a bigger problem is that there’s nothing but ’bot-on-’bot mayhem until the climax, when familiar ugly heads are reared over Tokyo.
  4. The film is quite the showcase for Zoey Deutch (“Before I Fall”), giving her loose-scripted freedom to play brazen, breezy, even soulfully vulnerable. Still, her selectively promiscuous hellion is so off-putting so much of the time — as are most of those around her, and their lurid plots and predicaments — it’s hard to see the point of it all.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    After a brisk and promising opening half-hour set in London and Hong Kong, the movie devolves into a Saturday matinee B-movie, and not in a good way. It’s pure product, and a waste of a savvy leading actress.
  5. A serviceable thriller that might have been something more.
  6. It’s not exactly like the novel, but it captures the best parts of it.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Buscemi is magnificent, but all the players rise to the occasion; you may especially cherish Rupert Friend (“Homeland”) as Stalin’s demented alcoholic son Vasily and Olga Kurylenko (“Quantum of Solace”) as pianist Maria Yudina, the film’s elegant and only note of genuine conscience.
  7. The Leisure Seeker is slack and episodic in a way that only a committee could love. The sense of energy and surprise that one expects from a road movie is nowhere to be found. The pleasure of Mirren and Sutherland’s company is considerable, but not that considerable.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    As with the simpler and stronger “Rivers and Tides,” there are moments where you may want to stop the film to assure yourself you’re seeing what you’re seeing, so disordering to the senses are Goldsworthy’s re-orderings of nature.
  8. Beautifully photographed, well composed, but disappointingly superficial.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    It’s a twisty dark comedy in the action-suspense vein, piled high with talented actors playing cretinous fools and featuring enough betrayals, mistaken identities, and narrative switchbacks to keep you pleasurably befuddled.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Seems on the face of it to be one of Zvyagintsev’s simplest and saddest stories, but it widens in the mind like ripples spreading out from a body dumped in a lake.
  9. A story steeped in emotional remoteness manages to command our attention in Thoroughbreds, first-time filmmaker Cory Finley’s darkly satirical portrait of the young and disconnected in old-money Connecticut.
  10. The message is clear, if not original: stray from the herd and you’re dead. What makes Hirayanagi’s iteration of this familiar theme appealing are the quirky characters, the nuanced performances, and the curious cultural topography of Tokyo.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    So how’s the movie already? Not terrible, not great, something of a disappointment after what feels like a geological epoch of hype.
  11. A hard-R espionage thriller heavy on themes of sexual degradation and graphic, sometimes sadistic violence.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The penultimate moments of “Bombshell” are moving, re-creating the lost Vienna of Kiesler’s childhood and overlaying the voice of the aging Lamarr, interviewed by an Austrian news team in 1970, as she speaks of never being understood in America. Adrift in the Land of the Lotus Eaters, she spent a lifetime being looked at and never once being seen.
  12. As a portfolio of visionary images of surreal landscapes and hallucinatory flora and fauna, the movie sometimes dazzles. But as a metaphorical narrative, it often fizzles.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Mirrors loom large in this movie, and Marina reflects back an image that too much of society refuses to see, to the point where she herself starts to doubt her own reflection. Yet the film’s most potent and lasting image involves a hand mirror and a steady gaze, and it serves as a breathtaking poetic metaphor about gender, identity, love, and the human soul. All you have to do, says Lelio, is look and see.
  13. The film can be naggingly vague and patchily written where precision seems called for, but the familiar procession keenly digging into the wistful material does hold interest.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The new film is a lightly poisoned amuse-bouche that’s made with tasty high-end ingredients, but at 71 minutes it leaves you hungry for more.
  14. For all the energy that Rachel McAdams, Jason Bateman, and their castmates pour into their gimmicky comedy, there’s too often a feeling that they’re straining to pump up flat material.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Insult is optimistic enough to leave the door open to hope. But it’s also realistic enough to only leave it ajar.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Honestly, the chilly dog days of February are crying out for a good, smart, silly stop-motion family film, the kind you can fully enjoy under the pretext of spending an afternoon at the movies with your kids.

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