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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    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    To the Wonder
    The director’s first real misfire, a meditation on love and lost paradise that starts with breathtaking assurance and slowly crumbles into self-parody.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Disconnect
    Disconnect is far from a bad movie. It’s just better at melodrama than drama.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Company You Keep
    LeBeouf may yet mature into an American James McAvoy — a charismatically spineless leading man — but Sarandon and her character have him and his character for lunch.
  4. Koch
    The documentary nicely mixes vintage news footage and photographs, talking-head interviews with journalists and Koch associates, and lots (and lots) of Koch.
  5. Upstream Color
    Henry David Thoreau plays an enigmatic role in Shane Carruth’s hypnotic thriller — an oxymoronic term to describe a film that is truly sui generis.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    42
    The ambitious new biopic about Robinson, is better written and produced than those children’s books, but it isn’t any deeper, and that’s a disappointment.
  7. Evil Dead
    Are we really looking to Evil Dead for gnarly possessions played straight? That’s what Alvarez gives us for an overlong stretch, until his reinterpretation of the malevolent-hand gag kicks off a last act that’s more freewheelingly, twistedly grisly. (Don’t skip the credits, because the fan-energizing momentum peaks at the very end.)
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Beyond the Hills
    It’s a deceptively impersonal style, because Beyond the Hills seethes with astonishment and rage at a broken society marooned between the 21st century and the 16th.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Gimme the Loot
    Mostly it’s a footloose tour through the noise and sun of a summer metropolis and an unassumingly wise portrait of a friendship.
  10. Free Angela & All Political Prisoners
    A description of Davis’s post-trial life would have been welcome. Twice Communist Party candidate for vice president, she now teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz. That raises one more question. Santa Cruz is less than a hundred miles away from San Rafael. How many lifetimes away does it feel like?
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    From Up on Poppy Hill
    Poppy Hill doubtless plays most strongly to Japanese audiences — especially the musical score made up of old-timey jazz and early-’60s pop that sounds like corn syrup to Western ears — but its central conflict is gentle, unyielding, and universal. Which is to say that it turns out to be a Hayao Miyazaki movie after all.
  12. High Tech, Low Life
    High Tech, Low Life has a nice easy rhythm. It feels neither hurried nor emphatic. There’s no narration. Zola and Tiger do most of the talking.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Place Beyond the Pines
    It’s very much a film about men, their yearnings and discontents, and about the way sins tumble down from one generation to the next. It’s a bank-robber movie, too, as well as a drama about the pressures teenagers face from parents and peers. You can feel Cianfrance biting off more and more until his mouth is too full to chew.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Reality
    The movie’s a funny, dark, increasingly razor-sharp inquiry into the metaphysics of modern fame — how the dream of “being seen” and thus validated on some primal level can completely unhinge the average schmo.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    War Witch
    War Witch deals with a reality so horrific that the film’s touches of magical realism are welcome, even necessary — the only way to retain one’s bearings and sanity in a world without signposts.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Sapphires
    The movie has the indulgent fondness of a gift from a son to his talented mum and aunties. But it also feels the funk, and that’s what counts.
  17. Starbuck
    Bertrand does his jelly-belly best to keep Starbuck a comedy. But even the broadest shtick can’t prevent a movie that features a Busby Berkeley-style group hug from becoming a male weepie. Or a testimonial to Planned Parenthood.
  18. G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    How funny that Pryce, a tweedy Brit playing a bad guy, should be the one person doing anything remotely heroic for this dud.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    The Host
    The Host will make perfect sense to 12-year-old girls, while their college-age sisters will probably laugh themselves sick and their mothers will look at Hurt and wonder when he got so old.
  20. The Silence
    The Silence is a victim of over-plotting, clunky narrative, gratuitous stylization, and too many points of view. When any character quirk or story turn shows promise, depend on some ill-considered directorial decision to put a stop to it.
  21. Olympus Has Fallen
    Butler serves the cause well, considering. Think that cause is a thankless one? Shhh, don’t tell Secret Service agent Channing Tatum or president Jamie Foxx, headed your way in June with, yes, “White House Down.”
  22. The Croods
    Some of the exotic landscape the group trailblazes looks imported from “Avatar” — happily, bringing that immersively dimensionalized, eye-catching quality along with it.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 63 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Admission
    Cheerful, skittish entertainment that never takes its subject seriously enough.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    On the Road
    A straightforward and rather sane version of the events described in the book and, against all odds, a surprisingly effective movie.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Ginger & Rosa
    In Fanning, Potter has found the perfect vessel, and the miracle is that the actress doesn’t even seem to be trying. She just is.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    Spring Breakers
    Korine wants to give us a portrait of our nation’s children — the girls, especially — as beautifully depraved sharks, pleasure-seeking killers oblivious to the comedy and horror of their existence. And damned if he doesn’t pull it off, or come close enough.
  27. Stars in Shorts
    The performances in tandem with the writing take most of these seven movies to interesting places.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 38 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    The actor/walking disaster known as Charlie Sheen gives a perfectly credible performance here. It’s the rest of the film that tries your patience.
  29. Upside Down
    Solanas’s daring takes the form of ambition. Upside Down has a visionary look that has affinities with everything from “Metropolis” to “Blade Runner” to “Children of Men.” Solanas has the temerity to split the screen horizontally in many shots. Usually, this works, though “Upside Down” is not recommended for anyone subject to visual dislocation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Reviewed by
      Ty Burr
    West of Memphis
    While the “Paradise Lost” films captured events as they unfolded in the heat of battle, West of Memphis has the luxury of at least partial closure.
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