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. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    The best thing about Money for Nothing is the many talking heads trying to explain what monetary policy is and what the Fed does: controlling the supply of money and, with any luck, guiding the economy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Thanks for Sharing
    See Steve McQueen’s “Shame” (2011) if you want a sense of how destructive this sickness can be to the soul. See Thanks for Sharing if you want to know what people can do about it.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Short Game
    What Greenbaum captures is compelling, and occasionally uncomfortable to watch. Sports in their purest form are played by children, who are — most of the time — much too young to be tarnished by professional-level jealousy, scandal, sacrifice, and unfair expectations.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Wall
    Bleak and beautiful, harrowing yet also curiously stirring, The Wall (“Die Wand”) is a stunning tale of isolation and survival that unfolds in a wild and silent world.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Patience Stone
    A startling fantasy of Muslim feminist empowerment that allows the Iranian-born actress Golshifteh Farahani to put on what amounts to a one-woman show.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Prisoners
    As gripping as it is grueling, with performances that swing for the fences and a central mystery that seems an unresolvable tangle of knots until those knots come undone in a somewhat forced final act.
  7. Adore
    Just one more touch of “realism” in a sexual melodrama played so straight that it’s nuts.
  8. Populaire
    Despite hard-working performances and the occasional sexual frisson from ingénue Déborah François (a kind of French Renée Zellweger) and seductive Romain Duris (who looks like Tom Hanks by way of Montgomery Clift), Populaire hits mostly wrong keys.
  9. Things Never Said
    In a year when black filmmaking has surged with Oscar-touted films such as “The Butler” and the upcoming “12 Years a Slave,” Murray’s Things Never Said has a quiet eloquence of its own.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Drinking Buddies
    Drinking Buddies is further evidence that Wilde has more depth and ambition than mainstream Hollywood can currently handle, and it marks Swanberg as one of the subtler talents of his generation — a deceptively casual moralist whose films observe their characters without judging them yet whose conclusions are unmistakable.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Afternoon Delight
    The results feel a little life lesson-y but also well-earned and well-observed, and Hahn takes advantage of a rare lead role to locate both the ugliness and beauty in her character.
  12. The Family
    Not known for subtlety, Besson gets the expected laughs, and then some. He also exercises an unwonted finesse, not only with the allusions, but also with variations on the “f” word that, if not poetic, are at least funny.
  13. Viola
    Viola owes much of the pleasure it offers to the sorts of things one looks for in any good movie: an attractive cast, attractively photographed in an attractive location, and plotting that manages to feel relaxed without being lazy.
  14. Portrait of Jason (re-release)
    Artistically, though, you can’t help but trust him. Like any star turn, Holliday’s performance rings utterly true. It’s that indefinable but unmistakable reality-beyond-reality called art.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Riddick
    This is back-to-basics stuff, which turns out to be not such a bad idea.
  16. Terraferma
    The story gets both complicated and predictable.
  17. Hell Baby
    As a five-minute sketch it would have been so-so. But as a 93-minute slog through witless puerility, it seems like an eternity in hell, baby.
  18. Ain't in It for My Health: A Film About Levon Helm
    Unfortunately, Hatley chooses not to offer much context or background history regarding that or other aspects of Helm’s half-century career, other than archival footage of Helm and the Band in their prime, press clippings, and comments from the Band “biographer,” Barney Hoskyns.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Short Term 12
    He (Cretton) just loves this place and these people so much, he wanted to give us more of them. For that, we should be grateful.
  20. The Grandmaster
    Who knows what they’re fighting about, but given the ecstatic ballet of fists and water, tossed bodies and smashed decor, centered by Leung’s majestic impassivity, it doesn’t really matter.
  21. I Declare War
    Imagination is what these filmmakers could use more of, as their ingenious concept doesn’t develop much beyond a gimmick.
  22. Thérèse
    The film looks great, boasting all the elegant period details that are expected in tasteful French adaptations of treasured national literature, with beautifully photographed Bordeaux landscapes and luxurious interiors. As for the human element, however, the mood is more apathetic than tragic.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Lifeguard
    Writer-director Liz W. Garcia depicts Leigh’s quandary with a heavy hand that gets heavier as the movie goes on, ending with one of those portentous freeze-frames that worked in “The 400 Blows” and never since.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 25 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Austenland
    Hess has made a classic rookie director mistake: Any spoof has to be at least as smart as the thing it’s spoofing, and this one’s twice as dumb.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    One Direction: This Is Us
    The problem is that the movie offers no way of differentiating between them beyond their hairstyles.
  26. Getaway
    In the end, it’s hard to remember another action entry that expends so much energy on frenetic blacktop choreography and attention-deficit editing with so little to show for it.
  27. Closed Circuit
    Instead of all-seeing, it’s more like seen it all before.
  28. Cutie and the Boxer
    In this alternately whimsical and grim documentary, Zachary Heinzerling relates the couple’s down-and-out, inspiring saga, which slyly comments on the evolution and ironies of the past half century in contemporary art.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    It’s a secondhand vision, when all is said and done, but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing when the craft is rapturous.
  30. You're Next
    Like [The Purge and The Conjuring], Adam Wingard’s sly, diabolical, and oddly moral You’re Next draws on the home invasion/haunted house scenario, but outclasses them with its wit, irony, and technically proficient terror.
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