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. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Despite the music, and no matter how the film’s editors slice it, the attempt to get a rise out of the audience by way of the endangered child device verges on emotional pornography.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
    The final questions in Pervert’s Guide to Ideology nag at us, and in a culture so built upon and so profiting by fantasies of Hollywood apocalypse, they deserve to.
  3. The Best Man Holiday
    All in all, maybe the best 90 minutes of romantic comedy in theaters this fall. Unfortunately, the film is 122 minutes long.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    How I Live Now
    A meticulously observed, rapturously directed account of World War III and its aftermath as seen from the point of view of a spoiled young woman. The movie’s pretty fascinating before it goes bonkers.
  5. Spinning Plates
    So here’s a tip: Don’t desert this film before giving it a chance. You might not want seconds, but eventually it dishes up a satisfying slice of life.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Dallas Buyers Club
    By the end of this sincerely calculated, always watchable movie, everything has burned away but the fury, including whatever you may think or have thought about the actor you’re looking at. That’s how good the performance is.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Thor: The Dark World
    Has its moments of visual invention and self-aware humor — mostly when the hero’s trickster brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is around — but otherwise it’s an awkwardly plotted extravaganza.
  8. Design Is One
    You may not recognize the Vignelli name, but you certainly recognize their designs.
  9. Man of Tai Chi
    With his thoughtful exploration of the conflict between desire and responsibility, and his self-reflexive exploration of the themes of voyeurism, ambition, and personal identity, Reeves’s debut shows signs of a talented filmmaker.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Diana
    Hirschbiegel and Watts don’t have the nerve for camp. Even a scene of a rejected Diana back at Kensington, forlornly playing Bach at her piano while mascara streams down her face, is played gloomily straight.
  11. Let the Fire Burn
    In his eloquent, evenhanded, and meticulously constructed debut documentary, Jason Osder stirs the ashes of this tragedy and sheds new heat and light on such timely issues as the abuse of authority and the violation of the rights of citizens, especially the marginalized and powerless.
  12. Birth of the Living Dead
    In the war between zombies and vampires for the domination of American popular culture, the zombies currently seem to have the edge. So suggests a montage in Rob Kuhns’s amusing but perfunctory documentary about the origins of the 1968 ur-text of zombiedom, George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”
  13. Free Birds
    At an hour and a half, the action in Free Birds gets stretched thin. It’s Thanksgiving fare, sure, but it only partly satisfies our hankering.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Blue Is the Warmest Color
    If you don’t really understand women — or don’t even want to — it’s easier to just call them a mystery and let it go at that. For all the close-ups, that may be why Blue Is the Warmest Color never gets close enough.
  15. Last Vegas
    Somewhere between John Cassavetes’s “Husbands” (1970) and “The Hangover” (2009) you will find Last Vegas. Not necessarily a bad place to be, except the film unfortunately has the madcap hilarity of the former and the emotional intensity of the latter.
  16. Ender's Game
    It comes down to this: Which is more important, the innocence of a child or the survival of the species? And if the race survives, will it just become like the enemy aliens that must be destroyed to do so?
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Kill Your Darlings
    That Ginsberg is played by Daniel Radcliffe might come as a shock, but the shock wears off as the movie rolls on and you realize you’re in very good hands.
  18. Zaytoun
    A scene between Yoni and Fahed in the pilot’s makeshift holding cell is a microcosm of everything that’s right about the movie, and not quite right.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    12 Years a Slave
    12 Years a Slave is to the “peculiar institution” what “Schindler’s List” was to the Holocaust: a work that, finally, asks a mainstream audience to confront the worst of what humanity can do to itself. If there’s no Oskar Schindler here, that’s partly the point.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    All Is Lost
    All Is Lost works quite brilliantly on its most basic narrative level.
  21. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    It’s the kind of outrageous comedy that you might even take your folks to, though probably not your kids. Say what you will about Harmony Korine and his demented geriatrics, at least they take their trash seriously.
  22. The Counselor
    This one has more in common with Scott’s “Thelma & Louise” in the memorable way it escalates, inevitably but also unexpectedly, into a spin through wilder country, and a meditation on bigger themes.
  23. The Summit
    First-time director Nick Ryan isn’t entirely up to the challenge in The Summit, but he does deliver some dramatic and visual highs in the attempt.
  24. Broadway Idiot
    This movie doesn’t make the case. In fact, had they upped the absurdity a notch, it would rival the comedy of Christopher Guest’s let’s-put-on-a-show mockumentary, “Waiting for Guffman” (1996). As it stands, it plays like an infomercial.
  25. Drug War
    It’s clear To is striving to keep the action gripping and creative. Modestly inspired is more like it.
  26. The Trials of Muhammad Ali
    The archival footage in Bill Siegel’s documentary The Trials of Muhammad Ali is wondrous. How could it not be, featuring the gentleman in the title.
  27. I Used to Be Darker
    This sounds like it could be austere and schematic, but the affecting, authentic performances from the first-time actors make these characters thoroughly authentic.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Fifth Estate
    The Fifth Estate is itself the response of an entrenched and corporatized information system toward something it barely comprehends. It makes a media format that has sustained us for decades — the two-hour movie — feel like a 20th-century dinosaur.
  29. Escape Plan
    In one amusing bit of dialogue, Stallone and Schwarze-negger kid each other about being smarter than they look. For a little while at least, we thought we might be able to say the same about Escape Plan.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Carrie
    The new Carrie is a thoroughly dispiriting remake — “retread” is the appropriate word — that could have been directed by any proficient Hollywood hack.
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