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. Unfrosted
    It’s not about nothing, but it is nothing special.
  2. The Idea of You
    Whenever the camera is on Hathaway, which is almost always, the film feels a hundred times more rich and substantive.
  3. The Fall Guy
    The film’s most egregious misstep, though, is sabotaging its own best stunt: the high-wire chemistry between Gosling and Blunt.
  4. Occupied City
    As much as Occupied City’s observational eye is rooted in a humanistic and cumulative approach to history, it will, no doubt, leave those in search of a less austere approach wanting.
  5. Boy Kills World
    it’s a cheeky post-Deadpool comedy – irreverent to a fault – with grindhouse aesthetics that tend to feel inspired by Quentin Tarantino rather than the movies that inspired Quentin Tarantino.
  6. Challengers
    This is a startlingly entertaining, erotically charged movie that hits its many targets with a kind of ferocious and crazed accuracy that’ll knock the wind, among other things, right out of you.
  7. Humane
    Cronenberg offers a light touch to the material, spiking the deeply depressing dystopia with a sibling-rivalry battle royale that eagerly, if sometimes wobblily, shifts between sharp humour and slippery sentimentality.
  8. Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    Weaving in footage from Lucian Bratu’s 1981 film Angela Moves On (a melodrama following a female taxi driver and set during the heart of Nicolae Ceausescu’s crushing reign in Romania), and capped off by an extended movie-within-a-movie contained in one static shot, Jude’s film is an ambitious experiment of the mad-science variety.
  9. The Beast
    Classical and ultramodern – Bonello closes things off with a QR code, of all things – The Beast is an experience both bold and rich.
  10. Housekeeping for Beginners
    In lesser hands, this chaos might tumble into melodrama or farce. But Stolevski’s actors deliver such naturalistic performances, and he writes such specific dialogue . . . that you care deeply about what happens to these people.
  11. Carol Doda Topless at the Condor
    What I see is a social media influencer before social media, a person who did whatever it took to keep us looking, especially if that meant she didn’t have to look too deeply at herself.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Food, Inc. 2
    Food, Inc. 2 follows the formula of its predecessor so closely, it’s difficult to understand why it was made at all.
  13. In Flames
    When In Flames premiered at Cannes last year, I compared it with Ari Aster’s Hereditary, but suggested Kahn’s film has more heart and conviction. I stand by that.
  14. Civil War
    Raw and electrically presented, Civil War is an ugly odyssey and an audacious premonition.
  15. North of Normal
    The movie takes its time to get going, which can be frustrating given how thin the material feels along the way. But that patience also works in its favour during a lovely final act that doesn’t come off as maudlin and forced as this sort of melodrama usually tends to.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Monkey Man
    Patel is not reinventing the wheel here, nor is he establishing a coherent visual language to build upon in future films, but Monkey Man is cleverly castigating and proud of its lineage – a digestible bit of mythmaking with knife work to boot.
  17. Girls State
    Girls State is a powerful documentary that showcases just how invested and determined young women are in their desire to run for the highest office – despite the challenges they face.
  18. Wicked Little Letters
    It’s saved, first by strong performances from Buckley, always effortlessly believable, and Colman, expert at laying bare the clammy soul of easily dismissible women. And second, by the letters themselves.
  19. The First Omen
    While unable to fully deliver on the promise of its artistic potential, The First Omen remains, nonetheless, a fun, low stakes introduction for horror newbies to The Omen franchise and an enjoyable enough tribute to the original film (offering, also, a more contemporary take on visualizing the grotesque).
  20. Club Zero
    Hausner is clearly talented, and I’m all for a film without easy answers. But I wish this one was less insistently opaque.
  21. The Beautiful Game
    The Beautiful Game shines because of Nighy.
  22. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    A slow and visually hideous crawl to an underwhelming brawl.
  23. Road House
    Liman makes the most of what most would assume are flaws. He leans into the simplicity and familiarity of Road House’s premise, keeping the space open for big personalities to make it cartoonishly good fun.
  24. Immaculate
    While its penultimate scene returns to its affections for shock and gore, there remains a feeling that it’s been apologetically tacked on to a final act that is, overall, lacking in any other sort of fun or thrilling narrative twists and turns.
  25. The Queen of My Dreams
    While The Queen of My Dreams works in some places, it’s too disjointed a narrative to truly immerse the viewer into the technicolor universe.
  26. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
    It is a fun, serviceable, family-oriented exercise in reprise that counts on nostalgia as it brings history and present day together.
  27. Hey, Viktor!
    Hey, Viktor!, a raucous mockumentary, is a mixed bag, veering wildly from self-deprecating humour and a downright cringefest to moments of heartfelt candour.
  28. One Life
    Throughout it all, Winton remains a cypher. There’s no curiosity here about him or the people he dedicated his time to. There’s no emotional journey to help us understand him and the stubborn modesty that made him so reluctant to share his story.
  29. French Girl
    French Girl’s crude and at times infantile slapstick humour is offset by livelier beats between the cast, whose cross-cultural banter is littered with flashes of genuine wit.
  30. Imaginary
    Imaginary is as dour a slog as M3GAN was a bloody bit of self-aware camp.
  31. Spaceman
    It’s Dano who floats away with the most goodwill, giving Hanus a tender, ultimately haunting air despite being, you know, a horrendously frightening creature that, in a parallel universe, might’ve inspired Stephen King to write It.
  32. About Dry Grasses
    Structured like a quietly grand novel, subtle and elliptical, Ceylan’s film unfolds with Chekhovian grace and a cutting understanding of character.
  33. Drive-Away Dolls
    A lascivious comedy that might have been produced by The Big Lebowski’s fictional pornographer Jackie Treehorn were he given far too much money, Drive-Away Dolls proves that there is a yawning gap between “a Coen Brothers film” and a “film by a Coen brother.”
  34. Dune: Part Two
    In terms of pure spectacle and shock-and-awe achievement, Villeneuve has produced an adaptation of mad glory and power.
  35. Concrete Valley
    Sensitive and intimate might be the obvious adjectives for such a film, but Bourges is also intent on making Concrete Valley quite funny in parts, the humane humour balancing the ever-present anxiety that exists in many of Thorncliffe Park’s hallways and crowded elevators.
  36. Bob Marley: One Love
    Although One Love is not a great music biopic, it serves as an acceptable portrait of the man.
  37. Land of Bad
    Once Land of Bad establishes its stakes – one man versus an army – the film settles all too comfortably into war-machine territory, minus any particularly inventive kills or sense of style.
  38. The Taste of Things
    If you can appreciate the simple concept of nourishment – of the stomach, and of the soul – then you will walk away delightfully stuffed.
  39. Madame Web
    Stupendously stupid and never remotely in control of its faculties, the film represents a kind of weaponized incompetence, hostile and assaultive.
  40. The Promised Land
    Ultimately, The Promised Land is a testament to not only the resilience of Denmark’s agricultural homesteaders . . . but also to the fierce power of Mikkelsen’s presence.
  41. Lisa Frankenstein
    While Williams isn’t quite as adept as Cody’s other all-star collaborators, her debut film is funny, cinematic and memorable.
  42. Argylle
    One of the most chaotically stupid action movies to torture audiences in ages.
  43. Orion and the Dark
    Brought to life with a smooth and almost restrained kind of animation – all rounded edges and frames designed to breathe, rather than hyperactively cram in as much action as possible – and paced with a confident speed, Orion and the Dark will charm and entrance.
  44. Four Daughters
    As unflinching as it is empathetic, Four Daughters is the best and slipperiest kind of film, whether you want to label it a documentary or not.
  45. Attila
    In terms of understanding and confronting the harsh reality that so many Canadians endure today, Attila is remarkable, verging on essential, filmmaking.
  46. Origin
    While Ellis-Taylor is, as always, magnetic onscreen, Origin fails her talents, as well as both its characters and story, by reproducing the flaws of Wilkerson’s book with a stoic conviction.
  47. Memory
    Chastain and Sarsgaard find all the pieces of Franco’s Memory worth saving, and proceed to connect with one another to build something that is new, remarkable, affecting. Hard to forget, even.
  48. I.S.S.
    A movie so dumb that it has tricked itself into thinking it is smart enough to be self-knowingly stupid, the new astronaut thriller, I.S.S., is a true waste of inner and outer space.
  49. The Beekeeper
    By Cinema Stathama considerations, The Beekeeper is a masterpiece – the best B(ee)-movie of this cold-hearted season.
  50. Mean Girls
    Rapp, who originated the role of Regina on Broadway, is a force-of-nature knockout, honouring but not imitating Rachel McAdams’s beautiful bullying from the first film with a sly kind of menace.
  51. All of Us Strangers
    Director Andrew Haigh (45 Years, Lean on Pete) knows how to build towering moments of human drama from the tiniest foundations. And he mostly pulls off such a feat again in this tale of grief and generational pain.
  52. Anselm
    In truth, as this film observes more and more of his compelling oeuvre, the viewer becomes more engrossed in the art than its cinematic presentation and the 3-D effect seems to fade into the background, necessary rather than impressive.
  53. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    So highly imitative as to strip the word “derivative” of any meaning, Rebel Moon is fan-fiction writ large, as if Snyder believes he’s outsmarting everyone from George Lucas and George R.R. Martin to the estates of Frank Herbert and H.R. Giger.
  54. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    Through design or happy accident, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom closes out the DCEU on a mid- to high-water mark.
  55. Anyone But You
    There’s a zaniness to this film that feels refreshing, a going-for-broke energy reminiscent of an Adam Sandler movie at its peak.
  56. American Fiction
    Despite strong performances across the board – most notably Wright, who has never before been able to flex such leading-man magnetism – there is an overriding flatness to Monk’s personal life.
  57. The Color Purple
    The Color Purple arrives as a confused byproduct of the industry’s best intentions and worst habits.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
      • Posted Dec 19, 2023
  58. Ferrari
    Mourning her only child, her marriage, and very likely her fortune as the betrayed and sidelined Laura, Cruz goes scorched-earth, incinerating any performer sharing her space.
  59. The Iron Claw
    This is a picture as severe as the real-life generational abuse that its director is chronicling, even if a few false steps mean that The Iron Claw ultimately lands as a technical knock-out.
  60. The Zone of Interest
    The Zone of Interest is a knockout in all senses. It will pummel your heart, and flatten your soul. It cannot, must not, be missed.
  61. The Boys in the Boat
    The Boys in the Boat is a film made with such a gently dull spirit that you cannot help but wonder if Clooney put himself to sleep during production. Someone get this man a Nespresso.
  62. Poor Things
    So much of Poor Things, both in its conception and maturation, feels self-satisfyingly provocative instead of imaginatively profound.
  63. Into the Weeds
    Through deft editing and a keen sense of detail, Baichwal manages to compress the case of Johnson vs. Monsanto Company into a superbly paced, tightly wound thriller.
  64. The Boy and the Heron
    It is tender, true and – depending on your interpretation, or understanding, of the finale – intensely heartbreaking.
  65. Eileen
    The performances nearly save the film from itself.
  66. Wonka
    Chalamet seems to be a Gene Wilder fan / But he can’t live up to the original candyman / He’s flat, and he’s grating, and he can’t sing a tune / The heartthrob is best off on the sands of Dune.
  67. Maestro
    As intense and rigorous and thoroughly impressive a work Maestro is, the triple-threat Cooper cannot quite summon the nerve, or verve, to go completely off-book.
  68. Silent Night
    Silent Night is all needlessly protracted foreplay, a true “when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?” tease of an action movie. And when Woo finally does light things up with only 15 minutes to go, the result is a limp pop of sparks, easily extinguishable.
  69. Monster
    While the split-POV conceit initially begs comparisons to Rashomon, Monster’s three perspectives are not so much in argument with one another as they are pieces of the same puzzle. And once they are locked together, the final portrait is staggeringly heartbreaking.
  70. Dream Scenario
    This is the chef’s-kiss premise of the new dark comedy Dream Scenario, a thoroughly imaginative and mostly brilliant movie from Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli that is easily the best thing – real or otherwise – that Cage has starred in for ages.
  71. Napoleon
    For Napoleon, Scott gives every last little slice of himself – the dramatist, the set-piece strategist, even, and especially, the comedian – to deliver what just might be his late-career masterpiece.
  72. Wish
    The animation also feels half-caught between inspired and derivative . . . Thank goodness, then, for the songs.
  73. May December
    This is a juicy, outré exercise that gets its kicks from booting its audience into deliberately uncomfortable corners and then leaving them there to stew.
  74. Next Goal Wins
    The talented performers are ultimately overmatched by a janky script that telegraphs every emotional swerve and narrative beat as if audiences are not to ever be trusted.
  75. The Marvels
    The Marvels is just that kind of production, a white board of sticky notes that magically coalesces, slowly and grudgingly, into a feature-length motion picture that merely acts as a long advertisement for the next.
  76. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    While Lawrence and his producing partners got deserved flak for breaking up Collins' third novel, Mockingjay, into two films, they've learned the wrong lessons here, compressing what should have been either two films or a miniseries into one excessive production.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
      • Posted Nov 9, 2023
  77. The Holdovers
    There is a joy watching interesting people change for the better while in a carefully crafted environment . . . and Payne knows just how to balance the sour and sweet.
  78. Priscilla
    Priscilla the movie is as complicated and beguiling as Priscilla the woman.
  79. Pain Hustlers
    There is no guts to Pain Hustlers’ try-hard gonzo-ness, resulting in a sub-Scorsese style that both underlines and loses its point.
  80. Freelance
    Too tame in its violence to be thrilling, too flat in its gags to be funny, and too PG-minded to be genuinely sexy, Morel’s film arrives and exits like a mild breeze – totally and utterly forgettable. John Cena deserves better. And so do we.
  81. The Killer
    This is David Fincher’s version of a sitcom: as violently funny as it is hilariously violent.
  82. The Delinquents
    Moreno avoids putting too fine a point on just why he’s playing around with such matters of multiplicity. His film is both a provocation and a shrug – make of it what you will.
  83. The Mission
    Anthropologists, former missionaries and Chau’s friends offer valuable perspectives – and prompt viewers to examine their own roles in perpetuating ages-old saviour complexes. The Mission’s message is as timely as it is timeless, tragically.
  84. Nyad
    Perhaps fittingly, the directors’ big foray into Hollywood is saved by the star power of the two industry legends headlining the film. Bening and Foster are absolute delights from beginning to end.
  85. Anatomy of a Fall
    Huller is asked to play a wonderful mess of contradictions – and the actress pulls off the job marvelously, all steel nerves and darting eyes.
  86. Dicks: The Musical
    Demanding a full audience of sickos to unlock the film’s true communal madness, Dicks: The Musical is destined for midnight-movie deification. Worship its transgressive power, or denounce it as unholy. The film thankfully offers no in-between.
  87. Killers of the Flower Moon
    This is a master artist putting a stamp on not only his own career, but also the entirety of American cinema and, why not, American history, too.
  88. Foe
    There is an unshakable and electric hum to Foe that ensures director Garth Davis’s work will stay with audiences attuned to its distinct frequency for days, months, perhaps ages.
  89. The Royal Hotel
    The fact that The Royal Hotel keeps its audience as captive as its leads until that final moment is an impressive and ultimately incendiary feat.
  90. The Exorcist: Believer
    Even though the latest horror-franchise resurrection from intellectual-property gravedigger David Gordon Green (Halloween) isn’t sullying a spotless brand, The Exorcist: Believer still reeks of sulfur-scented soullessness. The moviegoing body may be willing, but the cinematic flesh is weak.
  91. She Came to Me
    She Came to Me is overstuffed to be sure, but in an admirable way that underlines Miller’s fierce desire to enchant and entertain an audience looking for stories about people, not intellectual property.
  92. Fair Play
    The film is neither a stern lecture nor cheap entertainment, with Domont instead threading the needle somewhere in-between to create a tense guessing game of just how far she will push her characters.
  93. Flora and Son
    If you can walk away from a movie with a tune in your heart and a bounce in your step, then it’s safe to say that the film clicked in just the ways that were intended.
  94. The Creator
    The homages that Edwards and his co-writer Chris Weitz make are honest, and instead of stealing the best ideas of other films, The Creator uses them as the source code to create a next-generation story that is pure, foot-on-the-gas entertainment.
  95. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    When it does get fun and gory, the moments end too quickly but provide enough gore and a few jump scares to leave you satisfied.
  96. Strays
    With what is clearly Perrault’s first feature script, the stars here struggle to keep up their energy in what adds up to be 93 minutes of crude jokes.
  97. Blue Beetle
    Representation is the crutch this latest limp and derivative comic-book movie leans on – a reason for critics and audiences who want to champion diversity to simply overlook how dull and hideous-looking this latest franchise (of many) is.
  98. Golda
    Most of Nattiv’s film is a dry and frustrating affair.
  99. Gran Turismo
    Gran Turismo can never rise above its stakeholder’s portfolios because it’s never interested enough in its human characters.
  100. Dreamin' Wild
    That feelgood story of a long dormant musical dream finally realized was enough to earn major press attention, but is it enough for a feature-length film? Probably not, which is why writer-director Pohlad piled on the melodrama and leaned into clichés.
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