The Globe and Mail (Toronto)'s Scores

Select another publication »
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 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
view
per page
  1. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    For my first trick, allow me to write off an entire picture by merely affixing to the title a one-word contraction: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone isn’t. Please hold your applause.
  2. The Call
    For its last third, the entire thing gets a Frankensteinian head transplant, and turns into derivative serial-killer nonsense.
  3. I Killed My Mother
    Love sometimes hurts, but love/hate is always pure anguish. That's the two-stroke engine powering I Killed My Mother ( J'ai tué ma mère), a coming-of-age tale as ferociously raw as its teller - the very young Xavier Dolan.
  4. Starbuck
    Starbuck is unapologetic genre filmmaking with a winning performance from its lead, Huard ( Bon Cop, Bad Cop), a shambling, likeable comedian who can flip, flop and fly off a diving board while maintaining his sex appeal.
  5. Oz the Great and Powerful
    Unfortunately, it has the model of the 1939 film to remind us how lacking in delight this version is.
  6. Dead Man Down
    Lumpy title, lively movie. Dead Man Down proves to be a frisky gangster flick cum elaborate thriller cum off-beat romance. Yep, there’s a whole lot going on here, but this is one of those plot-heavy scripts that carries its weight with confidence – the intricate twists don’t cheat.
  7. California Solo
    Lewy’s script doesn’t cop out with any sentimental redemption, but neither does it establish why the self-destructive Lachlan deserves our sympathy.
  8. Jack the Giant Slayer
    While it’s fine for a director to explore his childhood inspirations, you hope he would bring something a bit more personal to it. Instead, Jack the Giant Slayer, while well-crafted, feels entirely generic.
  9. The Gatekeepers
    As a political testament, the result is revealing and important. Yet as a documentary, it wanders here, there and everywhere – long on intensity but short on focus.
  10. Stoker
    Park is busy treating every frame like a runway model, dressing it up in self-conscious layers of cinematic haute couture. It’s gorgeous to gaze upon but otherwise dessicated – listless, juiceless and ultimately pointless. For all his exemplary camera work, there’s no motion, or emotion, in the picture.
  11. 21 and Over
    Certainty, then, is the watchword, and you can be certain of three things: There will be plenty of juvenile energy to power the vehicle; there will be a few mild chuckles en route; there will be no reason to remember the ride the instant it ends.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    War Witch
    So is this a Western take on Africa? Yes, but Rebelle is full of such careful detail, and is carried so beautifully by Mwanza’s performance, that questions of authenticity slide away.
  13. Kai po che!
    It is a film that skips the huge dance numbers but not the dewy closeups; a film that can countenance premarital sex and doesn’t end in a wedding, but dissolves into melodrama nonetheless.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Dark Skies
    The characters are reluctant to believe in the face of overwhelming evidence, mostly because writer-director Scott Stewart doesn’t want to play his hand too early. By the time the movie is over, it’s easy to see why he kept his cards close to his chest. He’s not really holding anything.
  15. Snitch
    Pleasant because, instead of the usual hero-and-mayhem jive, Snitch is an honest exercise in workmanlike craft. This is to film what ceramic is to floors or Billy is to bookcase or what a third-line centre is to a winning hockey team – hardly great but good and solid and functional.
  16. Inescapable
    To her credit, Nadda is a solid actors’ director – the performances here are competent even when the writing isn’t. The exception is South Africa which, although a logistically necessary shooting location, ain’t much of a thespian.
  17. One Life
    What's before our eyes suggests we share the planet with some amazingly strange beings.
  18. Safe Haven
    It’s hard to argue with the title here – Safe Haven, indeed. This is all about safety in the Hollywood workplace. Why make a movie when making a Hallmark-card-with-dialogue is so much less risky?
  19. Beautiful Creatures
    What promised to be a teen screwball comedy with a supernatural twist soon descends into special-effects overkill and camp acting from the overqualified supporting cast.
  20. A Good Day to Die Hard
    Far more than most action stars getting on in years, Bruce Willis has aged nicely into the role. Maybe it’s that shaved pate of his, a bullet-head that still looks primed for any chamber.
  21. Middle of Nowhere
    Sometimes, the quiet lyricism of DuVernay’s direction seems at odds with the grittiness of the subject matter, like poetry force-fed into prose.
  22. Side Effects
    But it’s Rooney who commands the most attention. As she already proved in David Fincher’s "The Social Network" and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo," she has an oddly fascinating screen presence, suggesting both vulnerability and inscrutable levels of calculation. Few actors or actresses can make inexpressiveness look so smart.
  23. Identity Thief
    McCarthy delivers the moment of pathos in a totally different voice, tears staining her puffy face, as feelings awfully real and tainted in tragedy bubble up from deep within the comic persona. It’s startling, it’s wholly incongruous, yet it’s undeniably moving. God, how this woman can act and, within the brief frames of that different film, how we long to see the rest of it.
  24. West of Memphis
    In a well-paced two and a half hours, Berg's film is an ambitious mixture of summary and fresh investigation.
  25. A Royal Affair
    For all its incident, A Royal Affair is slow and picturesquely framed – more of a languorously animated coffee-table book than a gripping drama.
  26. Warm Bodies
    Warm Bodies is for audiences who prefer stories about mending hearts to munching brains, and ideally, for girls who aren't quite sure yet if they want a slightly scary boyfriend, or a living doll they can dress up.
  27. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    The film can't be accused of taking itself seriously. Shot in 3-D, with lots of choppy action, a rudimentary plot, and plenty of CGI-shape-shifting, it comes in at a brisk, disposable 88 minutes.
  28. A Haunted House
    Never one to shrink from the challenge of parodying the already parodic, along comes Marlon Wayans to do in A Haunted House what he once did in "Scary Movie." And do it much, much worse.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Knife Fight
    Means and ends meet briefly, shrug and disappear under a torrent of self-flattering clichés.
  30. Parker
    The tight-lipped, give-no-quarter Statham is impeccable as the pitiless yet honourable Parker (though fans of the books will no doubt quibble, especially over the British accent). On the other hand, Lopez, that pleasant sex pot, hasn't a hope of producing the tragic desperation of her down-on-her-luck character.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mama
    The film's long middle section is basically "Paranormal Activity" sans that series' handicam aesthetic, as things go bump in the night and the grown-ups take forever to get their act together.
  32. Broken City
    Performances, over all, are a mixed bag; Zeta-Jones does a fair, if incongruous, impersonation of a forties vamp, while Chandler and Pepper do well with limited screen time. As usual, Wright, as a Machiavellian police commissioner, transcends so-so-material to establish himself as the most complex character in the film.
  33. On the Road
    Director Walter Salles, who knows a thing or two about picaresque journeys – in "The MotorcycleDiaries," even in "Central Station" – does make an honest effort here.
  34. Quartet
    Essentially Masterpiece Theatre comfort food, a chance to watch fine actors act without too many complications.
  35. The Last Stand
    Dig just a shade beneath the surface, trade in the text for the subtext, and a more interesting picture emerges – a little richer, sadder, almost poignant. Arnie is back again, yet now, as a storied immigrant nearing the end of his tale, he's become an odd sight to behold.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Birders: The Central Park Effect
    Equally enrapturing are the birders themselves, including the writers Jonathan Franzen and Jonathan Rosen – contemplatively articulate in all their geeky birding glory – and especially Starr Saphir, who leads birding tours through Central Park.
  37. Amour
    More arduously, Riva is obliged to act out the physical decline while still registering a full spectrum of emotions. Remarkably, she does it all, even when reduced to communicating with her eyes alone. Hers is, in every sense of the phrase, a nakedly honest performance.
  38. The Ambassador
    The Ambassador may be an important, even necessary film; just don't expect to find it enjoyable.
  39. Zero Dark Thirty
    Not everything about Zero Dark Thirty zips by. The middle hour of the film feels overstuffed with agency chiefs and national security advisors gazing on the feisty Maya with avuncular admiration.
  40. A Dark Truth
    A lightweight flick about a heavy-duty subject, A Dark Truth plays like a TV movie back in the days when TV wasn't worth watching.
  41. Gangster Squad
    The irony is worth noting: Back when it was really 1949, Hollywood made noir with teeth; this is nougat with pretensions.
  42. Barbara
    Barbara is intriguing because the script subtly plays off that expectation, not denying it so much as expanding it, showing us that the grey world can contain, and even embrace, contradictory colours.
  43. Parental Guidance
    Parental Guidance is one of those intergenerational embarrassment comedies in the "Meet the Fockers" line, where children can enjoy seeing grown-ups looking ridiculous.
  44. Promised Land
    Promised Land is a low-budget effort, far too awkward and contrived a drama to change many hearts and minds.
  45. A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (Une bouteille à la mer)
    The initially cynical Naim suggests Tal's project is insignificant, nothing but a bottle of hope bobbing about in a sea of enmity – and so too this film.
  46. Not Fade Away
    Ultimately a disappointment – this is a movie easy to watch and even easier to forget.
  47. The Guilt Trip
    The premise (and the promise) here, of course, is that, as the miles pass, the two will be as chalk is to cheese, oil to vinegar, an apple to an orange. And indeed this is what happens. Unfortunately, it's about the only thing that happens.
  48. Jack Reacher
    World-weariness is not really the energetic star's best driving gear. Nor are declarations of menace intended to identify Jack Reacher as a modern-day mythic avenger. When he tells an enemy, through his clenched choppers, "I mean to beat you to death and drink your blood from a boot," the effect is, unintentionally, popcorn-spitting funny. Talk about overreaching.
  49. Django Unchained
    Tarantino's approach is so enamoured of the exploitation cinema he emulates, there is a serious risk that noble intentions get smothered in juvenile comedy and cinematic grandstanding.
  50. Rust and Bone
    By turns brutal and tender, Rust and Bone is a bullet train of heightened melodrama that refuses to derail.
  51. Les Miserables
    You don't have to go to the barricades for Hooper's film to appreciate it for what it is – a productive experiment, an epic-scaled weepie, an exercise in sincere kitsch, and, perhaps too easily dismissed, a rare modern movie about the wretched poor, a traditional subject of interest at this time of year.
  52. This Is 40
    Apatow rescued big-screen comedy from its lengthy wallow in the trough of dumb-and-dumber – we have good reason to thank the guy. Until now. In This Is 40, his fingerprints are still identifiable, but not nearly as crisp. They're starting to look smudged.
  53. Meet the Fokkens
    Despite the occasional stumble, the doc never falls, thanks to the sheer strength of its subjects' undaunted and indomitable character.
  54. Hyde Park on Hudson
    As for Daisy, her inflated role is problematic. Although at the periphery of the action, the woman stands at the centre of the film, doubling as the compromised love interest and our voice-over narrator. But even Linney can't bring her to life.
  55. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    In this fitfully engaging, but often patience-straining preamble to Hobbit adventures to come, there is one transporting 10 minutes of screen time. It happens when Bilbo meets the freakish, ring-obsessed creature Gollum.
  56. Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet
    The film is an unremarkable exercise in craft dedicated to a thoroughly remarkable artist – the tale is sublime, the telling only serviceable.
  57. Deadfall
    Solid performances from veterans Sissy Spacek and Kris Kristofferson as Jay's parents, and Treat Williams as the sheriff, anchor the older generation, but the characters do tend to conform to stereotypes of hard, unforgiving men and loving, patient women.
  58. Playing for Keeps
    Though the script takes pains to paint George as a passive boy-man, there's just not enough lovable here and too much of the thoughtless lout. Butler beware: In acting as in soccer, if you keep taking dives, sooner or later you pay the penalty.
  59. A Late Quartet
    The screenplay by Seth Grossman and Israeli-American director Yaron Zilberman is old-fashioned and melodramatic but stirring in its portrait of people struggling with individual egos to produce something nobler than themselves.
  60. Killing Them Softly
    A stylish, brutal affair that delivers grim atmosphere and punishing violence but loses impact in telegraphing its political punches.
  61. Hitchcock
    Hitchcock unspools at that deliciously silly juncture where biography meets fallacy. Translation: Any director who could crank out Psycho must be a crackpot himself.
  62. Rise of the Guardians
    From time to time, as Alexandre Desplat's insistent score surged yet again while the characters rushed by, I found myself wanting the movie to slow down. Some of these images are too beautiful to disappear so quickly.
  63. Red Dawn
    The filmmakers have altered the premise from the unlikely to the ridiculous.
  64. Life of Pi
    Every once in a long while, the right director comes across the right project at just the right moment, and things so often discordant fall into perfect harmony.
  65. Citadel
    No longer content with simple conservatism, this horror is downright totalitarian.
  66. Holy Motors
    You may be of the opinion that taking in an art film, especially the haute brand that disdains conventional narrative, is like watching paint dry. If so, happy surprise, Holy Motors is definitely the art film for you – it's like watching paint blister.
  67. A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    The film only really has a pulse when it switches to live action in a few brief archival snippets, most memorably in John Cleese's appropriately outrageous eulogy for his late friend, an offering in the name of "anything for him, but mindless good taste."
  68. La Rafle (The Round Up)
    It is a paint-by-numbers Holocaust movie, scrupulously balanced, always cautious, occasionally clichéd, often sentimental.
  69. Lincoln
    Lincoln is directed by Steven Spielberg but, to his great credit, few will mistake this for a Steven Spielberg film. Rather, it's a Tony Kushner film, the playwright who conjured up the wordy but intricately layered script; and it's a Daniel Day-Lewis film, the actor who so richly embodies the iconic title role.
  70. Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    With its exotic setting and its beautiful cast, this Dangerous Liaisons is lovely rather than wicked.
  71. The Oranges
    A comedy about a middle-aged dad who has an affair with his neighbour's daughter, The Oranges does not taste freshly squeezed.
  72. Chasing Ice
    The impact should be visceral and gut-wrenching; instead, it's cool and cerebral – after all, we're being lectured in a lecture hall.
  73. How to Survive a Plague
    Society would do well to remember that, in large part, the most effective redress to the tragedy of AIDS came directly from the people with AIDS. Lest we forget, director David France is intent on reminding us.
  74. Wreck-It Ralph
    It's impossible not to feel a strong sense of nostalgic amusement, if not sheer delight, at the comings and goings of all these characters.
  75. Flight
    This movie is captivating until it gets uplifting – Flight soars when it crashes and crashes when it soars.
  76. Skyfall
    Skyfall is one of the best Bonds in the 50-year history of moviedom's most successful franchise.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chasing Mavericks
    I don't know if you have to be a surfer to fully appreciate Chasing Mavericks, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.
  78. The Sessions
    For all that The Sessions does well, it offers some telling deviations from the real story.
  79. Smashed
    If you had to be an alcoholic, you'd want to be like Kate, the young drunk played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead in the new movie Smashed.
  80. Cloud Atlas
    Even at three hours, the film feels truncated, which raises the question of whether the entire adaptation exercise might have chosen the wrong form. Stretched out to 10 or 12 hours on cable television, Cloud Atlas, the series, would be the talk of the fall television season, and the stories, rather than the thematic scaffolding, would be the right focus of attention.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    It's clear the director's proximity to the family stopped her from going into uncomfortable territory. We never learn much about Vreeland's husband or how his wife's high profile and dedication to work affected their relationship.
  82. The Paperboy
    The Paperboy is southern Gothic wallowing in the swamp of low camp. And if the wallowing were deliberate, this might have been hugely funny.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Alex Cross
    Instead of playing the role in drag, the erstwhile Madea simply is a drag.
  84. All Together
    In its second half, the movie tips into familiar Gallic farce territory before settling for a formulaic sentimental kicker. As middling comedies go, the French approach has certain virtues. If good wine and long talks with friends can't prevent the inevitable, at least they make the waiting more tolerable.
  85. Café de Flore
    The film commands our attention again as more connections emerge -- not enough to fully solve the mystery, but sufficient to convince us that Café de Flore amounts to more than the triumph of style over substance.
  86. The Imposter
    The utterly bizarre story made national news when it broke, has since provided much magazine fodder, and popped up only two years ago adapted into a dramatic feature. Now it receives the documentary treatment and, in the devilishly manipulative hands of director Bart Layton, what a treatment it is – the weirdness just gets weirder.
  87. Here Comes the Boom
    A farther-fetched fantasy: In addition to asking we believe our loosely packed academic can play Rocky, Here Comes the Boom imagines a world in which butterball Everyman Scott and the fabulously lush Bella (Salma Hayek) might argue and bill and coo and eventually fall in love.
  88. Nobody Walks
    A good-looking but anecdotally slight dramedy about life and lifestyles in Los Angeles's hip Silver Lake district.
  89. Sinister
    A mixed bag of old-school and contemporary horror tricks that occasionally raises a hair prickle of intrigue.
  90. Seven Psychopaths
    In the end, cast and audience are having such fun that it seems almost mingy to complain when the church, lacking a foundation, collapses under the weight of its own cleverness.
  91. Argo
    Argo is a movie of many parts, the sum of which can probably be best described as enjoyable Hollywood hokum.
  92. Taken 2
    Just a mediocre action franchise with a solid actor at the head and a travelogue in its heart.
  93. Frankenweenie
    You have to feel pleased just for the existence of a film like Tim Burton's Frankenweenie. A 3-D, black-and-white, stop-motion animated film, it's a one-man blow for cinematic biodiversity.
  94. In My Mother's Arms
    Roughly-made but illuminating, the Iraq documentary In My Mother's Arms is a brief immersion into life in a Baghdad boys' orphanage.
  95. Won't Back Down
    As a movie trying to make the case for parental management of the education process, Won't Back Down, doesn't make an entirely convincing case.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pitch Perfect
    Pitch Perfect pitches itself between "Bridesmaids" and "Glee," which is to say it celebrates the low-down raunchiness of girls being girls among girls, while delivering a snap-crackle-and-pop music catharsis. Yes, folks, rock is dead, but long live showbiz.
  97. Hotel Transylvania
    After six years in development, this comedy starring and produced by Adam Sandler feels as slapped together one of the comedian's live-action buddy movies.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Arbitrage
    As many of the most memorable and darker thrillers have, Arbitrage plays with affinities in order to completely confuse the drawing of any clear lines between good and evil, criminal and executive, skilled pro and callous cad.
  99. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    As long as Chbosky sticks to the story of surviving high school, Perks has a modest charm. But a melodramatic last-act bombshell about Charlie's troubled past, is jarring – like the giant foot of Godzilla descending to squash tender Bambi. It's a case of too much, too late and, ultimately, from a different kind of movie.
  100. Looper
    Looper ups the ante like a poker player on speed. What a potpourri of genres we have here – noir again, but sci-fi too, and action and horror and psycho-drama with existential trimmings, the latter designed to invite the thinking viewer into the fray.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »