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. John Wick
    The movie’s one big pitfall, really, is that Reeves’s character is so intently focused, he takes care of business a bit too quickly. Some final skirmishing and a tonally false sign-off feel like unconvincing bids to stretch the story to a more legit feature length.
  2. Lilting
    Unlike other films that successfully explore abstractions, such as Wong Kar Wai’s “In the Mood for Love” or the memoiristic collages of Terence Davies, it doesn’t seem to have much going on beneath the drab surface.
  3. The Best of Me
    Isn’t fate a funny thing? Especially when Nicholas Sparks makes it up. Filmmakers love to adapt his stuff because he puts together narratives riddled with contrived coincidences and implausibilities meant to seem like the workings of providence when in fact they are the creations of a hackneyed mind.
  4. The Blue Room
    Though engrossing and aesthetically admirable, at times the humorless artiness verges on absurdity. It’s hard to take a film too seriously when plum jam and Bach’s “Chaconne” vie for equal cinematic significance.
  5. Addicted
    Things bottom out when Zoe not only hooks up with another lover (there is not an ounce of body fat in this movie), but also misses her son’s soccer game. And up until then we were all having a good time.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    St. Vincent
    So it is with St. Vincent, which might be Murray’s “Gran Torino” if you squint at it from one angle, or “Old Meatballs” if you come at it from another.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Fury
    Ayer, who has dealt with charismatic bad boys before — he wrote the script for “Training Day” and directed the sharp police drama “End of Watch” — makes the paternal “Wardaddy” into a figure both monstrous and upstanding.
  8. One Chance
    David Frankel’s film reduces an extraordinary life to a predictable template of bullying, resolve, success, disappointment, and platitudes — a pattern repeated two or three times until the genuinely moving finale.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Pride
    The film’s energy is contagious.
  10. Kill the Messenger
    It’s an engrossing portrait not only of government intrigue and crusading after the truth, but of media and their tangled motivations. Engrossing enough, in fact, that Cuesta needn’t try as hard as he occasionally does to heighten the drama and give it added flash.
  11. Art and Craft
    So Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, and Mark Becker, the directors of Art and Craft, have themselves an enticing subject in Landis’s activities. They do not have an enticing subject in Landis himself.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Zero Theorem
    Orwellian paranoia doesn’t die, it just gets fresh trimmings, and while The Zero Theorem is as messy and overstuffed as Fibber McGilliam’s closet, its sorrow and anger and demented humor strike just enough fresh sparks to keep this career alive.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Two Faces of January
    This is an unusual role for Mortensen, but after you’ve played a thinking woman’s hunk so long and so well, what else is there?
  14. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    What the filmmakers come up with is a modestly likable mix of zany and gently warmhearted, even if they overdo both elements at times.
  15. Aftermath
    By the movie’s end, viewers will have had a soul-searing brush with the unthinkable that far exceeds any real horror film of recent memory, and surpasses in its impact more traditional features and documentaries about the subject.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Judge
    A slick, ripsnorting character drama whose artistic ambitions are consistently neutralized by its commercial imperatives, puts Downey in a box from which even he can’t escape.
  17. Annabelle
    Though it features a plucky female protagonist, Annabelle still possesses the same medieval attitude toward women as “The Conjuring,” reducing the gender to the extremes of self-sacrificing mother and malevolent toy.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Notebook
    An elegantly made, almost unbearably depressing tale of WWII-era deprivation and survival.
  19. God Help the Girl
    When it comes to writing and directing movies, though, Murdoch has some work to do. “Girl” meanders narratively and with random chronology, some scenes playing like tepid music videos, others as unhelpful efforts at exposition, some as strained drama, and some as the genuine, funny, spontaneous interactions of gifted young people.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Memphis
    I thought of “That’s Life!” while watching Memphis, Tim Sutton’s sometimes forced, sometimes extraordinary tone poem about a modern-day bluesman. Enigmatic and brief — all of 79 minutes — the movie seems to fall into the cracks between documentary and fiction.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Men, Women & Children
    It’s one of those multi-character morality plays — think “American Beauty” meets “Crash” — and it will play especially well to freaked-out parents, even as it distances itself from them by acknowledging that the kids (most of them, anyway) are all right.
  22. Gone Girl
    Perhaps Flynn, who did the adaptation, has been a little too faithful to her novel. The faux-punchiness of her dialogue doesn’t help matters. The characters sound like people trying to sound like people in the movies and not quite pulling it off.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    20,000 Days on Earth
    It’s a relief to find a rock-doc that eschews the usual grainy hand-held wobble for steady camerawork and crisp compositions. The movie looks gorgeous — an artful frame into which Cave can pour his demons.
  24. Tracks
    Add to those John Curran’s adaptation of Robyn Davidson’s autobiographical book “Tracks.” In it he presents a vision of nature that shimmers with uncanny beauty and eerie solitude, transcended by Mia Wasikowska in one of the best performances of the year.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Here is where All Is By My Side runs into trouble. The real Etchingham has said, forcibly, that this didn’t happen — not the beating nor her subsequent attempted suicide, shown in the film.
  26. Rocks in My Pockets
    Signe Baumane opens her sardonically hilarious, sneakily moving, autobiographical animated feature, Rocks in My Pocket, with what looks like a darker version of one of those chipper psycho-pharmaceutical ads.
  27. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    Though not everyone agrees, Ben Stiller’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” came close to finding the secret for making a movie about the secret of happiness. Peter Chelsom’s Hector and the Search for Happiness tries hard, but fails. Miserably.
  28. Take Me to the River
    Flawed as it is, “River” reminds us where all the great music came from.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Boxtrolls
    We never know them as characters, particularly father figure Fish, because screenwriters Irena Brignull and Adam Pava have them speak an un-translated, Jawa-Gollum gibberish, not English.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Equalizer
    This Equalizer is a brooding, brutal origin tale, one that starts well but steadily caves into genre clichés. It’s a B-movie sheep in A-movie clothing, acceptable meathead mayhem as long as you know what you’re paying for.
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