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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    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Million Dollar Arm
    Where it falls short is that the film’s most compelling characters – Patel and Singh – are faintly unfinished and underexplored. It may well have worked better as pure documentary, and it will send many moviegoers on a mission to Google, where they will learn more about the real stars of the picture.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Ida
    Favouring long takes over didactic scripting, Pawlikowski lets his powerful imagery carry the film.
  3. Soundtrack for a Revolution
    With young audiences definitely in mind, the film puts a fresh spin on the issues and struggles of the civil-rights movement.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Belle
    Needless to say, Belle is a handsome piece of selectively reupholstered history, but its lesson on the victories of social progress in England seems almost as narrowly perceived as Dido’s own view of the world from the immaculately trimmed Mansfield lawns.
  5. Under the Skin
    All this is initially fascinating, and then progressively less so. The problem is the usual serial-killer issue – things, no matter how weird and kinky, get repetitive.
  6. Locke
    The combination of Hardy’s almost androgynous features and powerful physique evokes a young Marlon Brando, and while it’s premature to say he has a talent to match, he has emerged as one of the screen’s most versatile and compelling presences. Locke is what you might call his sedentary tour de force.
  7. Neighbors
    Rogen’s always a dominating presence, but the doll-like Australian actress, who showed her comic chops in "Bridesmaids," comes close to stealing the movie here, in an uncorked performance full of volatile, liberating mischief.
  8. Moms' Night Out
    Mainly, you have to wonder why Allyson doesn’t just hire a nanny, find a job and get out of the house. Ah, but this is a Christian movie, and once it stops pelting an audience with comic incident, it begins preaching.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Joe
    None of this would work with anywhere near the power it does without Nicolas Cage, whom Green has smartly cast in this sometimes maddeningly erratic and ill-disciplined actor’s most perfectly suited role since "Leaving Las Vegas" and "Adaptation."
  10. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    Less “amazing” than persistent.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Whitewash
    Whitewash is a small but sparkling gem on ice.
  12. The Railway Man
    Firth gives the performance his all as a man trapped in a vortex of grief, shame and hate, but as in Scott Hicks’s "Shine," which the film occasionally resembles, there’s an overtidy relationship between trauma and catharsis.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Blue Ruin
    Blair is excellent in the lead, but the filmmaking is the true star here.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Quiet Ones
    With its latest, The Quiet Ones, the company continues a tired trend, choosing the trite over the terrifying. The stale tone is struck from the outset with four simple words: “Inspired by actual events.”
  15. In the Blood
    It’s overlong, overplotted and crowded with a cast of “hey-it’s-that-guy!” C-listers (Luis Guzman, Danny Trejo), but the closed-quarters combat crackles with bone-shattering believability. And that’s really all that matters.
  16. Only Lovers Left Alive
    Only Lovers is so fluidly edited and thinly plotted that it feels almost off-hand; yet, it’s also made with great care, beautifully lit and set-designed to an eyelash.
  17. The Other Woman
    Apparently intended as a blend of "Bridesmaids" and "The First Wives Club," it’s often oddly engrossing, almost despite itself, largely thanks to the performances and the free rein the director gives his stars.
  18. Brick Mansions
    Brick Mansions is a non-starter: It chokes on its déjà vu, the hyperactive Mixmaster editing is exhausting and the characters’ banter is so leaden it might violate federal emission standards.
  19. Gabrielle
    Instead of a message movie, Gabrielle is a romance and an unusual kind of musical that seamlessly integrates special needs actors with the other cast members.
  20. The Face of Love
    After a while, it begins to feel like a confused comedy: How to explain to the neighbours that your dead husband has moved back home?
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq
    Watching De Clercq dance is not only what Nancy Buirski’s uneven documentary does to best effect, it helps you understand the movie’s otherwise restrictive emphasis on the men who became obsessed by her, primarily her discoverer and husband George Balanchine and the dancer/choreographer Jerome Robbins.
  22. Bears
    Some of the most striking moments in Bears are during the film’s closing credits, when we see how alarmingly close the camera crew was to the animals. We’re reminded us that while the movie Bears is both sweet and humane, the real bears are neither.
  23. Transcendence
    Apart from Mychael Danna’s portentous orchestral and electronic score, Transcendence simply lacks oomph: Shots don’t overwhelm, scenes don’t pop and nothing on the screen gets under your skin.
  24. A Haunted House 2
    A Haunted House 2 is so dreadful that it demands its own category of dumbness.
  25. Heaven Is for Real
    The movie is no religious fringe event. It’s from a major studio (Sony), with an Oscar-nominated star (Greg Kinnear), adapted for the screen by "Braveheart" screenwriter Randall Wallace.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Oculus
    How do you get revenge on an inanimate object? That’s the quandary facing the characters in Oculus, a deeply silly and mildly effective horror movie.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Raid 2
    Gareth Evans’s sequel to his surprise 2011 hit takes the original’s basic formula – lots of people pounding on each other in close quarters – and simply stretches it over a much longer running time.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    Geller and Goldfine keep the story taut and engaging, except when they get distracted by the current inhabitants of Floreana, who say mostly unsurprising things about living on a remote island.
  29. Rio 2
    The superiority of the musical sequences, and laziness of the writing, creates a dynamic where you find yourself wishing the characters would shut up and dance.
  30. Draft Day
    There’s plenty of shimmying here, maybe too much, and lots of spin moves, but it’s missing on-the-field results.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    What it comes down to is the difference between spectacle and craftsmanship. The Winter Soldier has plenty of the former – every dollar of its estimated $170-million (U.S.) budget is onscreen – but it’s also got an intricate dramatic and thematic structure holding everything in place.
  32. Bethlehem
    As a story about a war that is unresolved, it seems better suited to a provisional “To be continued” than the certainty of “The end.”
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Unknown Known
    He’s a fox who’s used to being hounded by journalists, and as such he’s a very elusive subject for a documentary – even one by a filmmaker who’s renowned for getting his subjects to talk.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Afflicted
    The gradual ramping up of both the camera calisthenics and the gore quotient suggests a movie that’s been very deliberately paced, but that doesn’t mean that Afflicted really gets anywhere, except back to the very basics its state-of-the-art presentation is supposed to transcend.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Jodorowsky's Dune
    At its most heightened state of geek arousal, Frank Pavich’s Jodorowsky’s Dune imagines an alternate pop-cultural universe where an unmade movie changed everything.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Bad Words
    The laughs in this film are all mean-spirited or just frat-boy gross.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Returned
    The Returned can’t transcend its packaging as a genre piece: It swaps out an entire set of horror-movie manoeuvres for trite, TV-style thriller tricks.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Finding Vivian Maier
    Some may find Finding Vivian Maier invasive, since Maloof and co-director Charlie Siskel delved into its namesake’s past after her death, but their curiosity is genuine rather than prurient; this is the rare example of a documentary about an enigmatic subject that doesn’t pretend to know all the answers.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Noah
    What could have made Noah work is the same sense of urgency – of fateful craziness – that made "Pi" so memorable, and which also factored into the fatal obsessions of "The Wrestler" and "Black Swan" (two very flawed movies that admittedly benefited from stronger lead performances than the one here).
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Lunchbox
    If co-writer and director Ritesh Batra occasionally takes his sweet time getting from point A to point B, it’s equally true that he gives the audience a nice, comfortable ride.
  41. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    Volume 2 picks up the story with an older Joe, now played by Gainsbourg, with her watchful sad face showing the character’s unsatisfied hunger. It seems more von Trier’s script than any great social taboos that cause Joe to go into free fall in a world that becomes more kinky and sinister.
  42. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    Easily the best scene of Nymphomaniac occurs in the first two hours, when Joe finds herself the other woman in a marriage breakup.
  43. Divergent
    At almost 21/2 hours, Divergent is repetitiously brutal and drab, with sets that resemble warehouses and industrial junkyards; the action rarely emerges into the daylight before the climactic gun battle.
  44. Muppets Most Wanted
    The crimes and Gervais and Fey’s performances get stale quickly, though the song-and-dance numbers are fairly clever.
  45. Stay
    A spring-autumn romance that comes with side helpings of local colour and melodramatic backstory.
  46. Need For Speed
    Every stage of the race and chase is announced on a webcast conducted by the secret impresario of the illegal De Leon race, a billionaire car enthusiast known as the Monarch, who “nobody knows.” Actually, the Monarch is clearly visible in a corner of the computer screen and he’s played, with jive-spouting brio by Michael Keaton. Hey, the movie isn’t called Need for Logic.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Veronica Mars
    As a moviegoer, I have to say that that broader success isn’t earned here. You are much better off getting the Season 1 DVD to understand why many of us invested emotionally and financially in this tiny, annoying blonde, whose sparky banter is just a counterweight to her vertigo in a world forever upside down.
  48. A Field in England
    Over all, A Field in England aims to confound. The filth-encrusted characters aren’t easy to keep apart, and the narrative is too fragmentary and freakish to grasp (the sun turns black, a character vomits rune stones).
  49. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    From the start, it’s clear Anderson is working with a new sophistication both in the vocabulary and structure of the film’s voiceover narrations.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Enemy
    Shot before the Canadian director made the major-studio, suburban-vigilante drama "Prisoners," Enemy operates on a level of carefully calibrated unease, where the very elusiveness of motivation and logic is exploited for purposes of sustained cinematic disorientation.
  51. The Art of the Steal
    As is often the case in these caper flicks, there’s too much plot for insufficient dramatic effect, and alert viewers will suss out where it’s all heading in the first five minutes.
  52. Particle Fever
    Their excitement is infectious and the entire endeavour both mind-bending and tremendously human: Near the end, Peter Higgs, the recent Nobel Prize-winner and one of the scientists who first predicted the particle back in 1964, is seen in Switzerland watching the data results come in, while a tear trickles down his cheek.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Like Father, Like Son
    While the case could be made that Koreeda is merely replicating the world as the blinkered Ryota sees it, the disparity between the characters’ development still leaves you feeling slightly cheated, if only because you want to see more of what this truly gifted student of human behaviour might do with them.
  54. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    Parents will get the historical jokes but are unlikely to be amused; kids won’t get them, but might laugh anyway.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    300: Rise of an Empire
    By throwing herself headfirst into scenes that a more cautious actress might beg off, Green earns herself a citation for valour – a Purple Heart in a movie that’s otherwise way too grim and grey for its own good.
  56. Stalingrad
    Overall, Stalingrad is a bizarre concoction, part Putin-era patriotic chest-thumping and part creaky war melodrama, all set in a superbly recreated ruined city.
  57. Omar
    Whether Omar will ultimately serve to change or harden hearts remains ambiguous, though it’s a movie that’s entertaining enough to appeal to the kinds of ordinary kids we see in the movie.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Son of God
    So yes, if you’ve seen "The Bible," you’ve already seen most of Son of God – but if there’s one story where spoilers just don’t apply, it’s the Greatest One Ever Told.
  59. Money for Nothing: Inside the Federal Reserve
    Actor Liev Schreiber’s voice-over narration is filled with sonorous urgency, but as the film’s commentators acknowledge, some ideas are a hard sell: How do politicians and regulators convince the public on the benefits of a financial diet when a spending spree sounds much more fun?
  60. Tim's Vermeer
    Johannes Vermeer is still a genius at documentary’s end but a fathomable genius, as much scientist as artist, a driven, resourceful creator whose conceptual and compositional brilliance remains undiminished by whatever techniques Jenison, Hockney and crew ascribe to him.
  61. The Wind Rises
    The work is more muted than Miyazaki’s more fantastical films, but visually complex and gorgeous, from the rustic mountain scenes to the urban scenes and soaring aerial views.
  62. Pompeii
    No doubt the audiences in the Coliseum would offer a thumbs-up to the scale of the destruction, though even they might have had some quibbles about the special effects, which, too often, resemble a very large pile of melting crayons.
  63. 3 Days to Kill
    3 Days to Kill is a comic variation on the "Taken" movies, which Besson also co-wrote and produced, starring Liam Neeson as a daughter-rescuing spy.
  64. Gloria
    Whether you appreciate Gloria as a portrait of a vital woman, muddling through life’s middle chapters, or as an allegory of Chilean resilience, the message is the same: Let’s face the music and dance.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Endless Love
    A film like Endless Love comes about as close to reality as a Hobbit sequel, only without a single dragon to remind impressionable viewers that they might not want to take it literally.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    About Last Night
    It’s high quality sweetness, as carefully prepped and prettily presented as any of the meals, cocktails and home decorating binges partaken of our quartet of love-locked converts to the way of the heart.
  67. Winter's Tale
    It is sincerely, painstakingly and astonishingly awful.
  68. RoboCop
    Though this RoboCop can’t come close to capturing the clever-silly audacity of the original, one area in which the current film easily surpasses it is in the quality of the cast.
  69. The Unbelievers
    Anyone interested in the contemporary debate between atheists and religious believers will gain nothing of value from the documentary The Unbelievers.
  70. The Monuments Men
    By the film’s end, one can’t help thinking that the story would be better served by a well-researched documentary on the real-life MFAA division (monuments, fine arts and archives.)
  71. The LEGO Movie
    No doubt, there is an uncomfortable number of logos being marketed to kids in the The Lego Movie, along with the obvious one that’s in the title, but the film as a whole is very much in the spirit of Cloud Cuckooland: It’s a place where the use of X-Acto blades and Krazy Glue breaks the rules but almost everything else goes.
  72. Vic + Flo Saw a Bear
    If there’s a low-key disappointment to Vic and Flo, it’s that the film teases the mind and pleases the eye without requiring emotional commitment.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Great Beauty
    An utterly ravishing portrait of listless luxuriance, a fantasy of decadent wealth and beauty.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Visitors
    As it glides along from one pretty picture to the next, Visitors starts to feel less like a singular artistic gesture than a compendium of quasi-experimental film clichés.
  75. Labor Day
    I can’t pardon Labor Day’s mush, not just because it’s mush, but because it comes with an unappetizing side order of condescension and contempt.
  76. That Awkward Moment
    Like its characters, That Awkward Moment has commitment issues: It lacks the courage of its bad taste.
  77. Devil's Knot
    Well-intentioned but emotionally straitjacketed.
  78. Linsanity
    Filmmaker Evan Jackson Leong, who began following Lin when he played for Harvard, also emphasizes the importance of Lin’s tight bonds with his family and the importance of his evangelical Christianity (“I only play for God,” Lin says).
  79. The Past
    For about two-thirds of the film, The Past’s release of information and emotion is almost perfect. Then, in the last third, it begins to feel contrived, as if Farhadi is trying to show a long chain of guilt, and to see how far it will unspool. The drawn-out revelations feel like overkill, though not enough to spoil what’s very good here.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Stranger by the Lake
    Spare, steely, sexually explicit in a way that transcends mere provocation, Stranger by the Lake is vital cinema.
  81. Big Bad Wolves
    While Big Bad Wolves delivers the Hostel-like torture jolts with ruthless precision, the movie is also a rudely funny satire of a macho, paranoid culture where the protection of children is used to justify any conduct.
  82. The Invisible Woman
    The Invisible Woman is, fair warning, leisurely in its pace.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Nut Job
    The Nut Job has a certain lo-fi charm, but it’s hardly a world-beater; with all due respect to Surly, Rocky J. Squirrel’s place in the pantheon would seem to be safe for another 50 years.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Square
    In the end, Ahmed claims a kind of victory, noting that open dissent and public protest has become embedded in the culture, even if Egyptians have not yet found a leader to unite them all. Something has begun, he says. Its real meaning is not yet clear.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    The appeal of the Jack Ryan character, at least on the page, was that he was always the smartest guy in the room. In Shadow Recruit, that doesn’t seem to be much of an accomplishment, because the movie around him is so dumb.
  86. August: Osage County
    Although a couple of performances here may earn Oscar nominations, by the time you’ve sat through the wreckage, you’re left with the sense that this really must have worked better onstage.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Lone Survivor
    This is a contemporary war-is-hell account in which hell burns so intensely that it scorches the firewalls of the mundane world around it. But it doesn’t burn them down.
  88. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    This entry has been described as a “cousin” to the other movies. Specifically, The Marked Ones is a Hispanic cousin, customized for Latino audiences in the United States where the series is particularly popular.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    A run-of-the-mill movie hero.
  90. Grudge Match
    Everyone in the movie, of course, is anxious to see these comeback seniors beat each other up, except, perhaps, the viewing audience.
  91. The Wolf of Wall Street
    What keeps the energy percolating is DiCaprio’s performance, in the loosest and most charismatic turn of his career.
  92. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    Unfortunately, this reverent and old-fashioned biopic is a prime example of the kind of inspirational movie that is, itself, uninspired.
  93. Inside Llewyn Davis
    Inside Llewyn Davis only really kicks into gear at its 55-minute mark. Unsurprisingly, this occurs with the arrival of Coen venerable John Goodman, playing an acerbic jazz hipster who has little truck with the folk idiom but a large appetite for heroin.
  94. American Hustle
    The character of Rosalyn – a mash-up of Carole Lombard, Lady Macbeth and maybe even Regan from The Exorcist – is by far the most hair-raising phenomenon in a movie bristling with high hair.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Walking with Dinosaurs
    Unfortunately, the only thing that dies harder in the movies than natural selection is careworn cliché, and Barry Cook and Neil Nightingale’s movie about a plucky, lovestruck pachyrhinosaurus named Patchi subjects our long defunct earthly ancestors to a fate arguably worse than extinction: a life lived in a world of cheese.
  96. Her
    Phoenix, for long scenes, is onscreen by himself, lost in his thoughts and those of the operating system moulded to fit his psyche. With his wounded awkwardness and boyish giggles, he seems authentically vulnerable, but the character’s emotionally arrested development also begins to weigh the film down.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    It’s a stacked lineup, and considering the profound un-funniness of so many Hollywood comedies, the fact that the film bats somewhere around .300 for its two-hour duration makes it feel like a genuine all-star event.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers
    Not much room for controversy here, and certainly none for counterargument, this is prime-time TV history rendered as a soothing, Papa Bear bedtime story.
  99. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
    In a series of mini-rants with insights that range from the ho-hum to the profound, the sixtysomething Žižek, paunchy, bearded and bobbing his hands like a squirrel’s paws, rummages through what he calls the trash can of ideology.
  100. Blood Brother
    No doubt, Blood Brother is narrowly focused on Braat’s needs and evolution, but in contrast to social-issue films filled with talking-head experts and bullet-point graphs, this is a portrait of a caregiver that goes to the core of motivation – in this case, the need to share love.
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