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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    • 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?
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  5. 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.
  7. 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.
  10. 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.
  12. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. 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.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Skeleton Twins
    The bitter, funny dialogue by director Craig Johnson and co-writer Mark Heyman gives the two stars room to work both comic and dramatic sides of their gifts.
  20. The Green Prince
    It takes a personal rather than a political perspective, exploring the ambiguities of truth and individual identity rather than the complexities of an ongoing historical calamity. And though the human drama is hypnotically gripping, it comes at the expense of the bigger picture.
  21. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    As tiresome as the relentless, indulgent inscrutability and lack of story momentum can be, it says something for the movie’s visceral power that there isn’t an urge to quit on it.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    This Is Where I Leave You
    It’s entertaining enough if you turn your brain off.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Tusk
    It’s been a while since there’s been this much dead air onscreen; over and over, Smith sets up a sequence, lets his actors shpritz, and stands by as the energy fades into giggly catatonia.
  24. My Old Lady
    It’s like a Parisian variation on Nicole Holofcener’s “Please Give,” or the premise of another PBS Masterpiece Theater series with Smith.
  25. Last Days in Vietnam
    At once riveting and heartbreaking. This youngest daughter of Robert F. Kennedy has the good sense — far rarer among documentarians than you’d like to think — not to get in the way of her material.
  26. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    Despite the artful, passionate performances by the cast, his experiment comes across more as contrivance than a work of thoughtful, aesthetic detachment.
  27. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    The problem with this adaptation of Lawrence Block’s detective yarn isn’t that it casts Neeson in a role we’re seeing him play again and again. It’s that no one else in the movie makes a character feel nearly as broken-in and fully inhabited as he does.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Maze Runner
    Using a refreshingly gentle FX touch, Ball has successfully transposed the decaying, vine-covered concrete jungle look of his short onto this gorgeously-designed feature. The neophyte knows how to direct heart-pumping chase scenes and has coaxed surprisingly solid performances from his young ensemble cast, especially O’Brien and Poulter.
  29. The Man on Her Mind
    Stunningly insipid and pretentious.
  30. A Master Builder
    The performances ratchet up to giddy near-hysteria, as Hilde toys with Solness’s randiness and repressed memory.
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