Boston Globe's Scores

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For 7,945 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: 5,227 out of 7945
  2. Mixed: 1,553 out of 7945
  3. Negative: 1,165 out of 7945
7945 movie reviews
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  1. Chappie
    Chappie boasts so many entertaining elements, particularly the lead motion-capture performance by Blomkamp’s go-to guy Sharlto Copley, its shortcomings don’t sink the movie.
  2. Ballet 422
    In a way, Lipes’s documentary resembles Jonathan Demme and David Byrne’s “Stop Making Sense” (1984) — in which Byrne goes on stage solo with a beat box and the rest of the Talking Heads gather one by one — as much as it does Wiseman’s films.
  3. Song of the Sea
    Director Tomm Moore (the 2009 Oscar contender “The Secret of Kells”) crafts a traditionally rendered feature whose doe-eyed characters faintly echo Miyazaki yet offer a beauty all their own.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    The word “feminism” itself has become toxified. For young women who might be despairing as they fight the good fight, this film provides context, roots, and the wisdom of elders.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Maps to the Stars
    A lot of the movie works, but enough doesn’t for Maps to the Stars to go down as a lost opportunity and one of this director’s braver missteps.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Focus
    There’s a terrific popcorn movie in Focus — a con-game romantic comedy that bubbles along on a playful high and that keeps the audience guessing in a state of delighted suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately, that movie is over after 40 minutes, and Focus still has another hour or so to go.
  7. Timbuktu
    The Mauritanian-born Abderrahmane Sissako, one of the great filmmakers of sub-Saharan Africa, does not need to resort to propaganda in Timbuktu to denounce fanaticism. He has poetry. With subtlety, irony, and even humor, he gradually prepares the viewer for the horror to come.
  8. What We Do in the Shadows
    “Shadows” has its share of lines that will be repeated by fans ad infinitum (a favorite: “Yes, now Google it”).
  9. McFarland USA
    This chronicle of an ’80s high school cross country coach leading a team of Mexican farm laborers’ kids to competitive glory may be based on a true story, but the forced drama doesn’t help it to feel that way.
  10. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Compared with last time, the returning team of director Steve Pink and writer Josh Heald practically doodle the gang’s motivations and worse, their surroundings.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Last Five Years
    A pretty good movie expansion of a pretty good stage musical; what bumps it up into contention and makes it of interest beyond devotees of musical theater — you know who you are — is Kendrick.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Leviathan
    If Leviathan takes the Academy Award on the 22nd — and it’s considered the front-runner by some — it’ll be a win for great filmmaking and a loss for the Putin government.
  13. Human Capital
    Though it initially shows signs of overcoming its creakiness, “Capital” loses value when its screenwriters try too hard to be clever.
  14. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    It’s also a movie that further establishes Vaughn as one of the edgier and more underrated genre voices of the moment, and that makes us wonder why Colin Firth hasn’t indulged in an action sideline all along.
  15. Fifty Shades of Grey
    The director of the much-anticipated adaptation, Sam Taylor-Johnson, made what could have been a trashy TV movie into well-conceived cinema.
  16. Seventh Son
    To its credit, despite a rough start (witch burning and all that), Seventh Son does not succumb to misogyny.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jupiter Ascending
    Dazzling to behold yet puny of imagination, the movie takes the “Star Wars” formula — hero myths nicked from Joseph Campbell, cutting-edge visual effects, comic-strip dialogue, goofy-looking aliens — and reduces it to generic Big Box shelf product.
  18. The Loft
    There’s no redeeming this softcore nonsense, which plays like a script that “Storage Wars” stumbled across in Joe Eszterhas’s old locker.
  19. Strange Magic
    If you close your eyes you’d think it was a commercial for a “Great Love Songs” DVD collection.
  20. The Duke of Burgundy
    I have not seen the film “Fifty Shades of Grey” but I doubt that it evokes the mystery, wit, and eroticism that Peter Strickland’s sumptuously claustrophobic fable of women in love does. All without nudity, bad dialogue, or the requisite wooden acting.
  21. Project Almanac
    One of the advantages of time travel in a found-footage film is that it makes the chronology and causality so confusing that the problem of who’s shooting what becomes secondary. On the other hand, it doesn’t allow fast-forwarding through all the boring bits. For starters, I could have done with far less Lollapalooza.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Black or White
    Despite the best of intentions, a career-best performance from Kevin Costner, and outstanding work by Octavia Spencer and child actor Jillian Estell, Black or White succumbs to some of the same stereotypes it tries to dispel.
  23. Beloved Sisters
    If nothing else, Beloved Sisters is one of the most visually striking biopics around. Too bad you have to wade through so much verbiage in order to enjoy it.
  24. The Boy Next Door
    It will also make them laugh. Intentionally or not, director Rob Cohen (“Alex Cross”) has put together the most hilarious camp classic since “White House Down” (2013).
  25. Cake
    Here Aniston suffers every manipulative cliché and contrivance in the tearjerker playbook. She works hard, and it’s painful to watch.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Song One
    Movies can convey the fever of new love more intensely than almost any other medium, and Song One is best when it shrinks the world down to James and Franny alone together in a crowded city.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Two Days, One Night
    This is a small, compassionate gem of a movie, one that’s rooted in details of people and place but that keeps opening up onto the universal.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Still Alice
    At its best, Still Alice is a moving inquisition into the emotions and memories and connections that make us us and how we might cope when they’re taken away with slow, impersonal cruelty.
  29. Spare Parts
    Aside from the clever punning of the title, Spare Parts ends up as jury-rigged and programmatic as Stinky, the robot in the movie. And, unlike Stinky, it is dead in the water.
  30. Blackhat
    Unfortunately, Mann also leans on ill-fitting story elements that he might easily and smartly have avoided, and the movie’s rhythms and credibility pay for it.
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