Boston Globe's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 5,240 out of 7964
  2. Mixed: 1,556 out of 7964
  3. Negative: 1,168 out of 7964
7964 movie reviews
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  1. Glory
    Like films such as Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005), Glory transforms that realism into metaphors that don’t just criticize a particular system but lay plain the universal exploitation of the weak and honest by the corrupt and powerful.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    According to the closing credits, My Entire High School was six years in the making and is clearly something that Shaw felt he had to get out of his system with his feature film-directing debut. Mission accomplished, and very stylishly, too.
  3. Chasing Trane: The John Coltrane Documentary
    The documentary variously consists of archival performance footage, home movies, photographs, pointlessly flashy graphics, and many, many talking heads.
  4. Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent
    Over-stylized and overly re-enacted documentary.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Dinner
    An acrid family affair that has been aggressively over-directed by the talented Oren Moverman (“The Messenger”) and brought to intermittent life by a very good cast.
  6. Buster's Mal Heart
    Smith’s ambitious film at times resembles “Badlands” (1973) crossed with “Fight Club” (1999) as directed by the Coen brothers. Mostly, though, it founders in the complications of its own excess of themes, interconnected story-lines, and multiple personality disorders sketchily connected by an anti-establishment point of view.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    The sharp comic timing and devil-may-care breeziness of the original only return intermittently, and the new film’s emphasis is on family feuds and forgiveness. It’s heavy on the feels. There are hugs.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Circle
    The dialogue is as subtle as a placard, the drama manages to be both cooked-up and dull, and the movie’s fear of brainwashed, tech-addicted millennials is so broad as to be unintentionally funny.
  9. Unforgettable
    It sounds like the movie itself: contrived, implausible, derivative, and — even though both the first-time director Denise Di Novi and screenwriter Christina Hodson are women — misogynistic.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    The title itself is a marquee-buster that bites off more than it can chew. So does the movie’s main character and so does the movie. But the chewing’s interesting and there’s food for thought here, not to mention a central performance that may stick to your ribs for quite some time.
  11. Their Finest
    At its best, which is often, Their Finest by Danish director Lone Scherfig (“Italian for Beginners;” “An Education”) manipulates appearance and reality, relief and recognition, with exquisite finesse. As befits a film about making films.
  12. Born in China
    Monkeys end up supplying the movie’s real drama. While parentally overlooked mischief-maker Tao Tao gets up to the requisite, well, monkey business, he’s also witness to a stunning snatch-and-fly attack by an opportunistic goshawk. It might not be nature on demand, but it’s some scene.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lost City of Z
    The movie is 141 minutes long but you rarely feel its weight; that’s how confident a filmmaker Gray has become. All The Lost City of Z lacks is a great leading actor, someone magnificent and flawed like a Peter O’Toole.
  14. The Promise
    Too glossy to truly immerse audiences in the horrors it depicts.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Free Fire
    Because Free Fire is a essentially a comedy of bad manners — a bedroom farce that only happens to take place in a warehouse, with volleys of gunfire rather than slammings of doors — it’s a highly enjoyable 90 minutes, especially if your tastes run to the violent, the absurd, and the violently absurd.
  16. Tommy's Honour
    A climactic contest takes place in arctic weather that would rival any New England Patriots playoff game. Had the filmmakers drawn more on this rowdy, hardy spirit, not to mention the hirsute gravitas of Peter Mullan, it might have done justice to its legendary subjects.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Colossal
    About halfway into Colossal you may experience the novel vertigo that comes when you genuinely have no idea where a movie is taking you but understand you’re in competent creative hands. That sensation holds until you’re deposited, happy and a little worse for wear, at the end.
  18. The Fate of the Furious
    Polar chaos notwithstanding, “Fate” delivers action with more consistent visual precision than in the last couple of films, as newly enlisted director F. Gary Gray accesses the flair he brought to 2003’s “The Italian Job.”
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Quiet Passion
    No matter how you feel, we still get the poetry, stitched throughout the film and occasionally soaring above it like an uncaged bird: hard, far-seeing, and waiting for the day it will be understood.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Queen of the Desert
    In no way, shape, or fashion does Queen of the Desert qualify as a good movie, but for fans of Werner Herzog — those of us who have followed cinema’s Teutonic imp of the perverse since the 1970s, when he was staging all-dwarf fables and sending conquistadors across mountains — it is fascinating and something close to a must-see.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    After the Storm
    A small-scale, satisfying human drama that backs gradually into larger matters.
  22. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    Entertainment so generically gentle, it doesn’t compare to last year’s similarly themed, tonally looser “Trolls.”
  23. Your Name.
    Being cluttered isn’t the only problem with Your Name. It also features insipid characters and dippy montage music from the J-pop band Radwimps.
  24. Gifted
    You may find yourself wishing that Webb (“500 Days of Summer”) would just power through court. We’d gladly watch more of Grace and Evans silhouetted against the sunset, their connection evident in his indulgent posing as her makeshift jungle gym.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Going in Style
    The 1979 film was both more casual and much darker about the realities and infirmities of old age, and it had one of George Burns’s better performances. It was a funny, touching experience, and it was a bitter pill. The new movie is a placebo, with Hallmark emotions put over by a cast of solid-gold professionals.
  26. Ghost in the Shell
    Or maybe Major, like Oedipus, is really searching for herself? Do people even have selves? Are identities and souls just a bunch of clichés spun out by teams of screenwriters? If these questions interest you, do yourself a favor and watch the 1995 original movie.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Zookeeper's Wife
    And there you have the problem with The Zookeeper’s Wife: Dialogue and plotting that keep this inspirational, mostly true story earthbound by hitting every note with a hammer.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Frantz
    Frantz is pleasurable slow going, developing its themes at an amble but with a measure of suspense, sympathy toward its characters, and a lasting faith in filmmaking craft.
  29. The Boss Baby
    At least a plot point about “secret formula” is sort of clever. The rest comes across as gibberish.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Personal Shopper
    Personal Shopper is as coolly, beautifully ambiguous as we’ve come to expect from France’s Olivier Assayas, and it contains the kind of mysteries that can leave adventurous audiences tingling pleasurably while others spit out their gummi worms in frustration.
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