The Globe and Mail (Toronto)'s Scores

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For 7,291 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 48% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 49% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 3.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 62
Highest review score: 100 The Red Turtle
Lowest review score: 0 The Mod Squad
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,349 out of 7291
  2. Mixed: 1,826 out of 7291
  3. Negative: 1,116 out of 7291
7291 movie reviews
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  1. Knuckleball
    Knuckleball does not flutter; its pace and tone is lean, mean and eerie. Luca Villacis plays the home-alone little hero, a Rambo MacGyver Jr. in the making. Not all the kid’s ingenuity and wits are plausible, though, and a late-plot throw-in is a bit much. Still, there’s Ironside and enough cold-weather tension to make Knuckleball a swing-and-hit deal.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    At First Light
    The rare example of an understated, effectively told young-adult yarn that places emphasis on grounded characters, nuanced performances and stunning visuals over convolution and clichés, Canadian filmmaker Jason Stone’s At First Light boasts unpretentious but exciting surface-level charms.
  3. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    Why is she a problematic pop star? That’s the premise, but I’m not sure we get the answer here.
  4. The Old Man & the Gun
    The pace is leisurely; this is no amped-up police procedural. I love what savvy director David Lowery does with the camera, panning here and there, picking up stray sights and happenings. Top-rate stuff.
  5. Venom
    Where to even begin with Venom, a film that had me laughing at it so hard I started crying. A horribly scripted film so bad as to be enjoyable, but not bad enough to be good.
  6. Lizzie
    There are only two erotic scenes between the two women, and Macneill, Sevigny and Stewart handle them with conviction: For all the horror of her situation, Lizzie needed some larger motivation to wield her axe. Lizzie dramatically provides it.
  7. Night School
    So if you can get through this headache of a script and Lee’s unwavering commitment to choreographed dance numbers, there are some funny times in store.
  8. Hold the Dark
    It makes for intriguing and often gripping viewing, but delivers a more confounding experience than is necessary. Still, the director knows how to break those bones real good.
  9. Bad Reputation
    We learn a little about Jett’s activism, and hardly anything about her personal life.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Smallfoot
    Where Smallfoot shines, though, is – like Warner’s Looney Tunes and Animaniacs before it – its slapstick physical comedy.
  11. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    A fantastical adventure, dandy ode to weirdos, and accessible anti-war allegory for all ages, especially 10-year-old boys.
  12. Life Itself
    Because it’s emotionally manipulative, unashamedly contrived and outrageously sentimental. Lead actor Oscar Isaac doesn’t care a damn about that, mind you, giving a memorably heart-wrenching performance anyway.
  13. Love, Gilda
    Love, Gilda reveals this but does not probe it. With various soft and admiring interviews, it relies mainly on Radner’s own words to hint at how dark things got.
  14. The Wife
    There is a different kind of pleasure in watching ultracivilized people struggle to contain their clammy self-loathing (in Joe’s case) and fury (in Joan’s). And if you think the themes of this story are nestled comfortably in the past, think again.
  15. A Simple Favor
    Its mystery elements are infused with a uniquely Feig-ian sensibility, equal parts broad comedy and ironic winks. The genre-meld shouldn’t work as well as it does, but Feig wrangles all the disparate elements under his control.
  16. Beautiful Boy
    There is a strange emotional detachment to Felix van Groeningen’s adaptation, which renders the tale needlessly cold.
  17. Roma
    A majestic feat of filmmaking, an intimate portrait of a family that also serves as a broad portrait of a changing nation.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Children Act
    It’s Thompson who carries the film, both literally – she’s rarely off-screen – and emotionally.
  19. Mandy
    Mandy is, if it’s not clear yet, not for everyone. But for those who think nothing of staying up past midnight to devour the strange and fantastic, it hits the sweetest of spots.
  20. White Boy Rick
    It’s a working-class story, albeit one that doesn’t involve officially recognized "work,” which raises questions about police corruption and racially slanted drug policies. Speaking of questions, why is a white character being held up as a shining symbol of the black man’s plight? Something to consider. Otherwise, White Boy Rick has much to say yes to.
  21. Maya
    Hansen-Love’s ability to evoke the unspoken remains in full play as she returns to themes of young love and emotional crisis, but much of the film is in English and both dialogue and delivery feel stilted. Meanwhile, it’s never clear why being the object of a youthful crush might be a good cure for PTSD.
  22. Woman at War
    Filmmaker Erlingsson has an eye for detail, a flair for the absurd – a sousaphone-based trio pops up here and there – and a deft touch with social commentary and political satire.
  23. Too Late to Die Young
    The director simply trusts that his performers and sun-dappled visuals will carry the film forward. And he’s right – there’s little narrative propulsion to Too Late to Die Young, yet it hums along with a vibrant humanity all the same.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Free Solo
    Whether you care about climbing or not, you’ll appreciate this tale of passion, discipline and, ultimately, transcendence. One incredible climb for one athlete, one quantum leap for mankind.
  25. Touch Me Not
    It’s not that every film has to achieve some grand epiphany, but Touch Me Not is not nearly as satisfying as the primal act it’s obsessed with.
  26. The Fall of the American Empire
    The core trio are smooth and amusing in their roles, but the larger plot is filled with painful stereotypes, from a tough female cop to various black gangsters. Meanwhile, as the sympathetic criminals try to outwit police, the social theme remains unfocused – despite heartfelt pleas for street people, especially the homeless Inuit of Montreal.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Fahrenheit 11/9
    It doesn’t all hang together, but its furious, ramshackle energy does the job, and maybe that’s all that matters: Outrage, after all, aims to spur action, not land four-star movie reviews.
  28. What They Had
    An excellent cast (including Michael Shannon and Hillary Swank) hit the right notes in an evenly wrought family drama that rings true.
  29. The Sisters Brothers
    It's a my-brother's-keeper drama, except when it's a violent comedy. It's a tale of There Will Be Blood-levels of greed, except when it's a high-ho adventure.
  30. Halloween
    It's fierce, it's lean, it's mean, and it has at least three first-pumping "Hell, yeah!" moments.
  31. The Front Runner
    This Altman-esque drama about the rise and fast fall of the 1988 presidential hopeful has a lot on its mind – morality in public office, the state of journalism, the often paradoxical nature of running a campaign based on lies – but spends too little energy dissecting those thoughts.
  32. Out of Blue
    Part police procedural, part supernatural thriller, part lesson in metaphysics and all neo-noir, Carol Morley’s Out of Blue never gels into a convincing whole.
  33. Boy Erased
    Edgerton, who also plays the tightly wound chief of the conversion-therapy organization here, wrings devastating performances from his cast, including Lucas Hedges as Garrard, and Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman as his parents.
  34. Donnybrook
    The apocalyptic vision of the heartland created by Sutton and his cast (based on the novel by Frank Bill) is impressively convincing, even if the themes are often overstated and the film itself is very hard to watch.
  35. Her Smell
    [A] bafflingly unbalanced film by American auteur director Alex Ross Perry.
  36. The Death and Life of John F. Donovan
    Perhaps explanations for all these improbable scenarios were lost on the cutting-room floor during Dolan’s notoriously prolonged editing process.
  37. High Life
    By twisting around preconceptions of what an outer-space epic should be, French auteur Claire Denis returns to the fertile ground of her Trouble Every Day era, using genre to dig beneath themes that others would only treat as skin-deep.
  38. Quincy
    Tireless, ultra-talented and exceedingly charismatic, he emerges as a survivor in a film that spends too much time on his accolades and not enough on deciphering what makes this treasure of an octogenarian tick.
  39. Colette
    Colette is a satisfyingly conventional biopic about a highly unconventional woman.
  40. Mid90s
    Mid90s doesn't feel like a recreation of an era so much as a lost artifact of the time. There's one predictable and regrettable narrative beat toward the end, but otherwise Hill has crafted a debut that will last a lifetime.
  41. Widows
    Led by a magnificent Viola Davis, the cast is ridiculously stacked. The action is tremendous. And the ultimate message – that nothing comes for free in America – is devastating in its swift brutality.
  42. First Man
    It is immersive, engaging and dizzying filmmaking.
  43. If Beale Street Could Talk
    Jenkins creates many remarkable scenes, particularly as the male characters discuss the racist realities with which they live.
  44. The Predator
    On the whole, the film slays in all the right ways: killer cast, killer one-liners, killer kills. But there's a distinct sense that the story is stitched together from other, hastily discarded plot lines – even the simple manner in which some characters get from Point A to Point B is messy.
  45. Greta
    It's a jumbled mess, to put it mildly.
  46. Dogman
    The naively amenable character is wonderfully observed by Fonte, and early scenes show delicious whimsy and black comedy...but as the film’s numbing brutality takes hold the character’s passivity makes the action drag in places.
  47. Diamantino
    Part political satire, part fantasy, part I-don’t-even-know-what, Diamantino is exactly the type of surreal concoction that begs to be discovered by unsuspecting audiences.
  48. Cold War
    Form and content seem oddly divorced, but music – the Polish folk tunes, communist-propaganda anthems and Parisian torch songs – sets the mood and saves the day.
  49. Climax
    Just as it seems that Noé will tip over into the truly extreme, he backs off. If this is the dawn of a new, slightly restrained Noé, we might need five more stages to process the pivot.
  50. Birds of Passage
    The impact of modern vice upon the Wayuu is a captivating tale never told before, and the final few minutes are brutal in the best possible way
  51. Assassination Nation
    Levinson displays some amazing technical chops – most of which can be traced back to Joseph Kahn, but never mind – and there’s one standout home-invasion sequence toward the end. But some warnings are best heeded.
  52. Ash Is Purest White
    Entire passages stretch along at a too-leisurely pace, allowing whatever anger Jia is surely carrying to too frequently cool off. Still, by the film’s New Year’s Eve-set finale, there’s little doubt Jia can create masterful cinematic moments when he so desires.
  53. 3 Faces
    It’s a film full of delicate metaphors and gentle humour – the locals have elaborate rules for giving a warning honk of the horn on their one-track road but refuse a simple suggestion to widen it – and meanders, sometimes a bit elliptically, to its conclusion.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Shoplifters
    The director, though, reaches in and steals your heart right in front of your eyes, like a magic trick, and you have to admit you didn’t even see it coming.
  55. Vox Lux
    Corbet’s work is a big, sloppy wet kiss to all manner of rise-and-fall clichés. Yet it mostly works, with Corbet as eager to display his influences...as he is to prove he can handle his own gonzo-spectacle set-pieces.
  56. Outlaw King
    Director David Mackenzie (Pine's collaborator on Hell or High Water) dabbles in some interesting aesthetic experiments – including a doozy of a single-take scene in the film's opening minutes – but the narrative is cut, dried and left to rot under the soggy Scottish skies.
  57. Burning
    As it dips into murder-mystery territory, then something more quiet and philosophical, Chang-dong writes a story both expected and surprising.
  58. A Star Is Born
    It rejoices in a classic structure in which one upward trajectory and one downward meet for a shining moment in the middle. Under Cooper’s direction – and thanks to his chemistry with his co-star – the movie throbs with the excitement of that meeting, while the downfall of his alcoholic rocker achieves an almost tragic catharsis.
  59. Everybody Knows
    As he transfers his talents to a European setting and Spanish-speaking cast, Farhadi loses none of his remarkable ability to observe close relationships collapsing under stress.
  60. Destroyer
    Director Karyn Kusama shifts dexterously between the present and the past, unspooling a satisfyingly twisted piece of storytelling by writers Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, who succeed in making both plots gripping. Kudos to Kidman for taking on an ugly role (both physically and morally) and for giving both versions of the character a convincing hardness.
  61. Kusama - Infinity
    The film will make highly informative viewing both for those who get it – and for those who don’t.
  62. The Nun
    The plot is simple, the character development is lazy and the use of the oh-my-God-there’s-someone-right-behind-you device is tiring. Still, the premise is sound. Evil in the church – who would have thought? Duh-duh!
  63. Peppermint
    A laughably bad melange of blood, guts and racial stereotypes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Let the Corpses Tan
    It’s a profoundly weird film but hypnotic nonetheless.
  65. Revenge
    As is the case with such movies – where every character's passing glance hints at a dark secret – everything is not as it seems, and the story quickly collapses into itself.
  66. Searching
    A clever twist-and-turn thriller.
  67. Juliet, Naked
    Open-hearted and sure to resonate with more than a few viewers, Juliet, Naked roms and coms in the most charmingly honest ways.
  68. The Little Stranger
    Gleeson and Wilson deliver tightly-wound performances, while the ending is more chilling, and perhaps perplexing, than audiences might expect.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Great Great Great
    Beirne and Kolasky's performances hit many high notes.
  70. What Keeps You Alive
    The action is grim and not without gore. Heebies, jeebies and even willies will be left on theatre floors like so much stray popcorn and spilled soda. That being said, the victory of What Keeps You Alive is not its heart-thumping (and a little too long) second act, but the question of survival versus vengeance the film raises.
  71. Maison du Bonheur
    Maison du bonheur is a thoughtful, affecting study of the space we choose to take up in this world, and what happens when we grow old enough to realize the truth and consequences of those decisions.
  72. Madeline's Madeline
    Decker evolved her project with her actors over five months, and it’s both pro and con that, boy howdy, it sure feels improvised.
  73. Support the Girls
    Bujalski (a member of the indie cabal known as mumblecore) sticks to the truth of Lisa’s life – there’s no air-punching triumph at the end. Nevertheless, she persists, and that feels like victory enough.
  74. Papillon
    As director Michael Noer struggles to tease a theme out of a string of exploits, Papillon remains as entertaining as ever.
  75. The Happytime Murders
    True appreciation must be paid to Melissa McCarthy, who does a so-very-loud version of her usual shtick – foul-mouthed wrecking-ball – to keep audiences awake when director Brian Henson (yes, son of Muppet creator Jim) resorts to having his puppets drop F-bombs instead of delivering actual jokes.
  76. Breath
    Baker proves himself a talented director; he manages the rolling rhythms of his waves and his story with skill – especially a montage around Pikelet’s sexual awakening, which is at once funny, steamy and poignant.
  77. Little Italy
    A slice of advice, then: Take the film’s 102 minutes to visit the actual Little Italy and enjoy a leisurely meal. Or make your own pie at home. Or stay home and do nothing. Basta!
  78. The Bookshop
    Coixet occasionally overplays her hand – a dropped headscarf, a sudden death – as does a constipated Bill Nighy in the role of the reclusive widower who is Florence’s one ally, but overall, the film is stealthily impressive.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Skate Kitchen
    Moselle believes in the power of girls. The friendships through which Camille learns how to be loved become the anguish that breaks her heart and the forgiveness that humbly heals her. And resiliently they soar through the city, a harmony of wheels on pavement.
  80. Nico, 1988
    “I’m selective about my audience,” says the singer. “I don’t need everybody to like me.” With a dour, sophisticated film that won’t be to everyone’s taste, writer-director Nicchiarelli seems to have taken those words to heart.
  81. Alpha
    There’s something delightfully clever in a narrative that is easily transferable to modern times. Speaking of which, seeing Alpha on as big and splashy a screen as possible is advisable, preferably with children who can handle occasional scenes of intense peril.
  82. Mile 22
    Somehow, Mile 22 devolved from what Berg promised STX would be – “the new wave of combat cinema” – to exactly the kind of generic late-summer garbage any studio could, and has, released for Augusts immemorial.
  83. We the Animals
    Working mostly with non-professional actors, Zagar also wrings some heartbreaking performances out of his young cast, especially Rosado, whose Jonah seems teetering at the edge of something he may never understand.
  84. Crazy Rich Asians
    As the obscenities of wealth accumulate while a large cast of Asian and Eurasian actors render their many silly characters, the source of the laughter becomes troubling.
  85. The Meg
    The makers of The Meg may have gone to school on Spielberg, but the big-budget deep-sea thriller is nothing but bloodless summer filler. Unsure if he wants to have some fun and jump the Sharknado or make a seriously gory fish fest, director Jon Turteltaub has surfaced with nets empty.
  86. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    Writers Cecilia Frugiuele (who also produced) and Desiree Akhavan (who also directed), working from Emily Danforth’s source novel, capture the fugue state that is teenagehood, then refract it through the extra-weirdness of the camp.
  87. Puzzle
    Turtletaub has some difficulty ending the film, which resolves itself with one too many closeups of Macdonald gazing out at the world, whether from a lakeshore or a train window, as both the script and its director struggle to figure out what happens next.
  88. Cielo
    A serene, existential experience from the Canadian filmmaker Alison McAlpine, who takes to Chile’s Atacama Desert to look both skyward and inward.
  89. Dog Days
    No clichés are avoided in the pleasant, if relentlessly adorable ensemble comedy Dog Days.
  90. BlacKkKlansman
    A bold, if sometimes preachy, film that is stylistically daring, improbably entertaining and politically supercharged.
  91. Christopher Robin
    No, Christopher Robin is not a naked cash grab, just a prettily clothed one.
  92. Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda
    It is a heartfelt mediation on the creative process, with elegantly presented ideas on nature, music, mortality and things out of tune.
  93. McQueen
    McQueen is a haunting biography that goes beyond even that live runway experience to conjure the visionary himself, in as much as he may ever be known – and in a way even his savagely beautiful clothes themselves cannot.
  94. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    The difficulty is that Fogel hasn’t got enough plot here to keep things going at this smart pace. Even by the standards of a spy comedy, The Spy Who Dumped Me’s wafer-thin storyline makes precious little sense.
  95. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
    The film is also a chronicle of the sexual politics of the era – and the subsequent systematic erasure of LGBTQ history (under the guise of privacy and not “spoiling” the illusion) by the juggernaut industry that shaped our culture. That perspective on the proclivities makes Scotty as fascinating as it is poignant.
  96. The Darkest Minds
    The storytelling is bald and the logistics remain vague. The adult characters, especially a sadistic prison guard, are laughably overblown and the simplistic dialogue betrays the script’s YA roots.
  97. Our House
    A so-so remake of the low-budget 2010 film "Ghost from the Machine" that comes off as run-of-the-mill paranormal thriller. No electricity, one might say.
  98. Generation Wealth
    Greenfield tells us she charts the extremes to understand the mainstream, but glimpses of an explanation for the insanities and obscenities depicted in Generation Wealth are frustratingly few.
  99. Shock and Awe
    This sadly derivative film has one too many screenings of "All the President’s Men" written all over it.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    This is a show that adults can more than merely tolerate; I am happy to binge-watch it with my nine-year-old.
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