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 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. Detachment
    Ultimately, Detachment invites us to feel precisely what it warns against – detached.
  2. Headhunters
    Headhunters is slick and spritely, a mixture of corporate skullduggery and low-life slapstick that plays like "The Firm" meets "Blood Simple."
  3. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    Unfortunately, the script, based on Deborah Moggach's 2004 novel "These Foolish Things," might better be described as pure British stodge: high-starch English comfort food of more sentimental than nutritional value.
  4. The Avengers
    Expected too is the result: a kind of sterile opulence or, if you prefer, a magnificent emptiness.
  5. Sound of My Voice
    The star of Sound of My Voice is co-screenwriter, female lead Brit Marling, who plays Maggie with melancholy, amusement and scorn. Compulsively watchable, she can change who we think she is by simply turning her face. In profile, she's Vanessa Redgrave. Laughing, she becomes Debbie Reynolds. Marling might become a great character actress. Let's hope the movies use her well.
  6. Darling Companion
    The film sputters and stalls and winds up behaving like the worst sort of oldster – passing gas and pretending to be deep.
  7. The Lady
    Contrast this to "The Iron Lady," a film which managed to be both obnoxiously condescending and flattering to the divisive British leader Margaret Thatcher, and left those of all political stripes irritated. The Lady, devoid of either iron or irony, is merely forgettable, a much deeper insult to its subject.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    At times, Warriors sacrifices dramatic nuance for scale, but even its most rousing passages are tempered by a sense of loss. Rather than simply enshrining its underdog heroes' efforts, it considers their cost.
  9. The Raven
    The pervasive gore overpowers the few clumsy attempts at wit here, though the film does have one funny line. As one of Poe's literary rivals watches a razor-edged pendulum slice into his abdomen, the man screams in protest: "But I'm only a critic!"
  10. Safe
    Love the kid though, and Statham too – it takes a star with quality to be so rock solid in a crumbling yarn.
  11. The Five-Year Engagement
    A lot more cutting would have made this movie much funnier – but it should have taken place in the editing room, not on the screen.
  12. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    Designed to please all generations of irreverent humour-lovers, The Pirates! Band of Misfits may not be heart-warming (it is about nasty, scurvy pirates!) but it's breezy rollicking fun.
  13. Payback
    Payback is nothing if not brave. It's a documentary attempt to give concrete shape to an abstract discussion, using the medium of film to transplant a nuanced thesis – on the concept of debt – from its natural home on the printed page.
  14. To the Arctic
    After seven trips made over four years, the production was about to wrap when the crew, aboard an icebreaker, encountered a polar bear mom and twin cubs that decided to hang around for a week – offering a rare opportunity to film the daily life of these notoriously camera-shy creatures.
  15. My Way
    Adolescent boys will savour My Way's bombast and solemnity. Cringing adult audiences will more likely beat a retreat before final call.
  16. The Lucky One
    Another Nicholas Sparks novel, another cinematic brush with insulin shock.
  17. Chimpanzee
    Blend sound with sight, though, and the package becomes more difficult to take.
  18. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    A surprisingly tender look at San Diego Comic-Con.
  19. Inside Hana's Suitcase
    What always feels genuine, movingly so, are the faces of the school children caught up in their account of the unforgotten past.
  20. Fightville
    The mistake filmmakers Tucker and Epperlein (Gunner Palace) make here is assuming that fighters reveal their true characters in discussing their craft, when in fact just the opposite occurs.
  21. Lockout
    Pearce pumps a surprising amount of levity into his one-liners – sure, it's still hot air, but at least the banter comes fully inflated.
  22. The Three Stooges
    The result, which could be entitled There's Something About Curly, is an unabashedly moronic celebration of slap shtick.
  23. The Deep Blue Sea
    Happily, in his adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play, The Deep Blue Sea, Davies has found a setting close to his heart and a subject more nearly suited to his style.
  24. Keyhole
    Like Maddin's melancholic and relatively more conventional "My Winnipeg," Keyhole is about a memory house, but one that is even more fragmented, mythical and elusive.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Hunter
    By the time The Hunter jettisons its narrative ballast altogether and embraces its elemental appeal, it's too late. The near-mythic grandeur of its final scenes is less a welcome payoff then a suggestion of the truly striking film that might have been; it's ironic that a movie about a man who sets traps for a living would itself end up ensnared by formula.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Cabin in the Woods
    Cabin is a meta-horror-comedy mash-up that, at least for two-thirds of its running time, holds together smartly.
  27. Monsieur Lazhar
    It's an exquisite, humanistic and subtly topical work of cinema art that manages to keep the intimate, revelatory sensibility of a one-man play intact while fleshing out the characters and creating a very realistic and richly detailed school community.
  28. The Salt of Life
    Overall, The Salt of Life has more bite but less charm than "Mid-August Lunch."
  29. Bully
    Indeed, like all bureaucracies, the educational version is a bit of a bully itself. In Sioux City at least, the official response to bullying is to recognize its existence but to deny it's an "overwhelming issue," and retreat behind the comforting bromide that "kids will be kids."
  30. American Reunion
    Halfway through, everyone starts drinking heavily and the film turns into agreeably sloppy fun. (Isn't that always the way – class reunions often perk up when someone spikes the punch.)
  31. Surviving Progress
    Though often fascinating and beautiful to look at, Surviving Progress falls into the adapting-a-book-into-a-movie trap. Trying to do too much too fast.
  32. Damsels in Distress
    This is a mannered comedy, more stylized and theatrical, almost surreal at times, and less accommodating to his trademark brand of razor-sharp dialogue.
  33. The Forgiveness of Blood
    There's much to observe – for example, the thoroughly credible performances of the cast, most of them non-professionals.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wrath of the Titans
    Ye gods, there's a lot of hacking and many seismic eruptions in The Wrath of the Titans, the latest 3-D action film that treats the Greek gods as action figures.
  35. Mirror Mirror
    Call me Grumpy, but this seems less an adaptation than a random assault.
  36. Goon
    What a disappointment.
  37. The Raid: Redemption
    Plot, characterization and dialogue are merely the frame here for the real goods, an immersion into the Indonesian martial arts form known as silat.
  38. The Hunger Games
    A film that transforms a popular work of teen fiction not just by faithfully exploring its themes but, more important, by proving those themes have a very grown-up resonance.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    It's rare for a documentary style to match its subject so ideally.
  40. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    As a young man he dreamed of racing cars. Now he rides a bicycle to the market each day, to negotiate with an elite fraternity of top fish dealers, who save their best for Jiri's restaurant. Like the fish that are disappearing from the oceans, they're probably the last of a breed.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    The film is narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, who also shows up as an interviewee, and in a Sesame Street clip, which frankly feels odd. Worse: the script she has to work with is often lacklustre.
  42. King of Devil's Island
    Possibly no one else does "grim" with as much unsparing enthusiasm as the Scandinavians.
  43. Being Flynn
    In this tale of two lives, Being Flynn gets the emphasis wrong. The success that has many fathers is altogether predictable; it's the despicable orphan of failure who has us in his thrall.
  44. Casa de mi Padre
    Really, Casa de mi Padre is a skit blown up to a feature flick, amusing for a while until its welcome wears out.
  45. Jeff Who Lives at Home
    This little movie – it's only 83 minutes – seems so determined to if not avoid, then only caress the tropes of slacker films that it commits the worst sin for a comedy: It's boring.
  46. 21 Jump Street
    A try-anything, fitfully amusing muddle that wears its mocking cynicism a bit too proudly.
  47. Friends with Kids
    Whom is this movie for, really? It's too tame for the whooping crowds of women who made hits of the "Sex and the City" movies and "Bridesmaids." And for sure it isn't for parents with kids. You can probably find them, diaper bags in the aisles and toddlers on their laps, watching "Dr. Seuss: The Lorax."
  48. Silent House
    Silent House is a bundle of horror-flick tropes yoked together like a package deal.
  49. A Thousand Words
    For a comedy about the quest for inner peace, A Thousand Words reeks of desperation.
  50. John Carter
    Epically fantastic would be a welcome change, although epically awful would at least keep the symmetry. Alas, epically bland will have to do.
  51. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    As the title more than hints, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen is all about a leap of faith, and faith is exactly what this picture requires of us. Make the leap, and you'll be delighted by a movie that's sugary goodness, a guilty pleasure.
  52. Attenberg
    What a strange, moving, puzzling, funny, frustrating and ultimately absorbing film this is.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Drummer's Dream
    It's pure emotion. Drumming, for these masters of the instrument, is about communication, acceptance and, above all, deep love.
  54. Footnote
    A father-son academic rivalry provides fodder for this caustic comedy set in the Talmud Department of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
  55. Let the Bullets Fly
    Low on nuance and high on body count, the movie is primarily of interest to fans of Asian action spectacles and followers of the charismatic Chow Yun-fat (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), here cast as both a dandyish villain and his idiotic double.
  56. Undefeated
    Compared to many of last year's documentaries (Pina, Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory, Cave of Forgotten Dreams or The Interrupters), this film is distinctly minor league. But it does provide the thumbs-up emotional lift of a bumper-sticker message on game day.
  57. Norwegian Wood
    This is the one Murakami work that would seem an ideal candidate for the leap from page to screen. It should be a good movie. But it isn't.
  58. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    If the word masterpiece has any use these days, it must apply to the film Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, a mature, philosophically resonant work from Turkey's leading director, 53-year-old Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Climates, Distance, Three Monkeys).
  59. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    So it's puffed up with lots of extraneous stuff – Super fun for the kids but for grown-ups? Just fluff.
  60. Project X
    Judged by the usual aesthetic standards – Project X sucks. It's just another lame movie. Yet apply a different standard, the mores of our time, and you get a different verdict: Suddenly, it's a perfectly lame movie that speaks intriguingly to the way we live now.
  61. This Is Not a Film
    Deft and ironic, mixing banal reality with poignant metaphor in a typically Iranian style.
  62. Good Deeds
    What the film needs more than anything is Perry's alter ego, Medea – a rampaging bowling ball who might knock all these stiff, upright characters spinning.
  63. The Flowers of War
    While Bale speaks in an anachronistically modern American vernacular, the Chinese cast recite grammatically perfect, phonetic English so stilted you find yourself wishing the film would stick to subtitles. This is not so much a question of a story being lost in translation as a movie that never finds the right story to tell.
  64. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    Not often does a film double as a literary critic, but this is the Northrop Frye of docs. Essentially, it revises and sharpens the blunted reputation of a great writer.
  65. Act of Valor
    A recruitment poster loosely disguised as a movie.
  66. Wanderlust
    Film encyclopedias may beg to differ, the Cahiers du Cinéma might correct me, but, as far as your humble correspondent knows, Wanderlust is the first mainstream movie ever to star a Floppy Prosthetic Penis.
  67. This Means War
    This Means War is a Valentine's date dud: Think wilted roses, squashed chocolates and flat champagne.
  68. In Darkness
    Though the conclusion is foregone, Canadian screenwriter David F. Shamoon's script manages to extract suspense out of Poldek's ruthless, calculating nature.
  69. The Secret World of Arrietty
    The result is an intriguing hybrid, mixing a Japanese reverence for nature (a raindrop shimmering on a leaf is a visual haiku) with quaint Victorian architecture and a story featuring contemporary, Caucasian-looking Japanese characters speaking in American accents. Somehow, it all works.
  70. Michael
    Dreadful as the subject matter is, the authenticity of the performances and the skill of Schleinzer's filmmaking are difficult to deny in this portrait of a monster as the bland guy next door.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Swell Season
    The question subtly, craftily documented in The Swell Season is whether the fans or Hansard himself want to see the singer cast in this new role of success.
  72. Chronicle
    It's odd, how these high-concept films, knowing that the central gimmick has a way of wearing out its welcome, are all so short – a mere 84 minutes in this case. Why odd? Because short always ends up feeling so damn long. This is no exception. Quick to start and painfully slow to finish, Chronicle is the same old chronicle.
  73. The Vow
    While The Vow will give heart palpitations to fans of its charming co-stars Rachel McAdams and Channing Tatum, this amnesia-themed romance is the kind of featherweight fare that is enjoyed in the moment and forgotten soon after the end credits roll.
  74. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    Yes, The Mysterious Island is everything a 12-year-old boy could want – endless adventure involving a reckless adolescent hero, with a pretty girl in a clinging T-shirt around to watch him struggle.
  75. Safe House
    A movie with a double-crossing intelligence plot that's so generic it's an irritating intrusion in a lively chase through the streets and shantytowns of Cape Town, South Africa.
  76. Rampart
    Noir connoisseurs, however, will receive Moverman's latest like a double-bourbon from heaven. Rampart is the best crime-movie fix from Hollywood since "Gone Baby Gone."
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Chico & Rita
    This sexy, pulpy, very grown-up film is not your usual best animated feature material.
  78. The Innkeepers
    Admittedly, it's been a long time since Kelly McGillis was being hyped as "the next Grace Kelly." But of all the films in all the world for whom the former Top Gun lust object could have done a walk-on, this lacklustre haunted-house feature is the one she chooses?
  79. Big Miracle
    It's a screwball comedy, with a possible debt to Preston Sturges's 1942 film, "The Miracle of Morgan Creek," a movie inspired by the Dionne quintuplets, and similarly set in a small town turned upside down by media and political showboating.
  80. Albert Nobbs
    The film surrounding the performance is not always as strong, but the centre holds, and magnificently so.
  81. W.E.
    W.E. is a heavily made-up face masquerading as a movie and demanding to be admired – demands that might just leave you with an acute pain in the other end.
  82. The Woman in Black
    Though Radcliffe occasionally seems too stiffly callow to be completely convincing in this grown-up role, the movie is a proficient thriller with a potential appeal beyond the star's fan-girl audience.
  83. Tyrannosaur
    The principals are superb, with Mullan and Colman doing a masterful job of inhabiting their separate but equal prisons.
  84. Man on a Ledge
    None of it rings true, except perhaps the presence of an ambitious local TV news reporter (Kyra Sedgwick) who begins recording every macabre moment with relish.
  85. The Grey
    The film sustains some suspense and brooding atmosphere for its first half, but eventually the clichés of character and dialogue drag it struggling to ground.
  86. One for the Money
    Listlessly directed by Julie Anne Robinson (Miley Cyrus's The Last Song) from a script written by a trio of writers (Stacy Sherman, Karen Ray and Liz Brixius), One for the Money is tepidly glib throughout.
  87. The Divide
    Valuable life lessons always come at a steep price, and this one is no exception. Sorry, but you'll have to shell out for The Divide and then suffer through its nearly two hours of bloody inanities. Weigh the balance, make your choice.
  88. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    The bloody narrative has an oddly bloodless effect. But that's not surprising – not when a film is so eager to double as a lecture.
  89. A Separation
    Much like Robert Altman during his forays into the genre, writer/director Asghar Farhadi isn't really interested in the answers. Instead, he keeps expanding the questions, until that singular title comes to seem a misnomer.
  90. The Viral Factor
    The Viral Factor is deliriously far-fetched. And one wishes director Dante Lam (The Beast Stalker) could have at least had some giddy fun smashing all his toys around. But his new film is tediously overwrought and drably made, with scenes punctuated by synthesized drums out of eighties American TV drama.
  91. Red Tails
    Virtue aside, however, Red Tails is a lousy film. Not wincingly bad, mind you, just mediocre.
  92. Coriolanus
    It's a film of vigorous performances and provocative modern resonances, though it sometimes struggles to grapple with a grim, politically ambiguous, 400-year-old play.
  93. Haywire
    Serving as his own director of photography under the pseudonym Peter Andrews, Soderbergh picks his angles artfully and allows Carano to demonstrate her arsenal of acrobatic fighting tricks in extended, no-cheating single takes.
  94. Pariah
    Occasionally, Rees's script seems to mimic Alike's poetry, and fall into its own slough of earnestness, as the stages of the girl's dawning enlightenment get dutifully ticked off like stations of the cross.
  95. The Iron Lady
    The Iron Lady is a performance in search of a film.
  96. Contraband
    Playing a blonde with her roots showing, Beckinsale seems up for a scrap, but the film gives her nothing to do but get clobbered.
  97. Joyful Noise
    An unholy mess.
  98. A Dangerous Method
    Mostly, though, A Dangerous Method is a suave chamber piece: a series of glimpses of two 20th-century intellectual titans, in friendship and separation, and the story of a remarkable woman who history had swallowed up, brought into the light again.
  99. The Devil Inside
    All hell breaks loose and it's a heck of a lot of fun to watch.
  100. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    Yet these are precisely the sort of pictures that divide audiences over a central question: Are those strings being honestly played or just shamefully pulled? Of course, the answer determines whether you feel moved or merely manipulated.
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