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. War Horse
    Sumptuous and schmaltzy, Steven Spielberg's First World War drama, War Horse, is a strange beast of a film.
  2. Carnage
    Although the subject, school bullying, is as fresh as today's headlines, the treatment isn't. Despite the efforts of an impressive cast, the film starts out stale and then just gets tedious.
  3. We Bought a Zoo
    Director Cameron Crowe who, not having made a dramatic feature since his 2005 stinker "Elizabethtown," seems bound and determined to crank out a crowd-pleaser here.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pina
    Bausch's work, as performed by her dance company Tanztheater Wuppertal, is shot exactingly by Wenders, who captures everything from the largest gestures to the subtlest facial nuances in ways impossible in 2-D – and of course in far closer detail than seeing the dances performed live.
  5. The Adventures of Tintin
    Hergé was the pioneer of an even-handed style of cartooning with solid lines and no shading that became known as ligne claire, but there is a decided lack of clear lines in this erratic movie adaptation of his work.
  6. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    Not too surprisingly, Fincher doesn't bring his auteur A-game here, though his crafty B-game is better than most. As well, the break-out performance of Rooney Mara as the semi-feral computer hacker, Lisbeth Salander, gives the film a residue of authentic anguish.
  7. Dragonslayer
    Dragonslayer documents what happened when California stopped dreaming.
  8. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    Like the recent Adam Sandler dud "Jack and Jill," a sizable chunk of Chip-Wrecked was shot on the newest ship in the fleet of a major cruise company – the ultimate in movie product placement!
  9. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    This movie wants to be a horse but, even measured in box-office millions, it's just another nag.
  10. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    This superb remake has the inevitable look of a period piece, a smoke-filled rendering of things past. However, thanks to Tomas Alfredson's direction, a taut screenplay, and a uniformly brilliant cast, the film also retains its contemporary relevance.
  11. Young Adult
    Plays precariously close to an unfunny sociopathic case study.
  12. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    The movie rolls on, with more clever but increasingly repetitive action sequences that entertain, but drain the film of any credible sense of jeopardy.
  13. The Sitter
    Add up these three intentions – the down-and-dirty tone, the tender and uplifting message, the starring vehicle – and the math ain't funny. Bottom line: This movie is a whole lot less than the sum of its parts.
  14. New Year's Eve
    New Year's Eve. It's big and shiny and crowded and no matter how much you might look forward to it, it never lives up to the hype. The movie is even worse.
  15. Sleeping Beauty
    At its simple core, Sleeping Beauty is a perfectly pitched chamber piece about the menace of voluntary oblivion.
  16. Into the Abyss
    By Herzog's lofty standards, the result is mildly disappointing. The film lacks the sociological depth of "The Executioner's Song" or the emotional wallop of "In Cold Blood." But it sure is a surpassingly, and compellingly, strange tale.
  17. London River
    Here, in orderly fiction, the reverberations bring about the alignment of cultures, the meeting of minds and the comforting assertion that "our lives aren't that different." Maybe so, and the film deserves full marks for trying, at times movingly, to convince us. In the end, the argument is a little too neat to accept, but far too poignant to ignore.
  18. Tomboy
    It may be a slim story, but its gentle humour, natural rhythm and above all authentic performances make Tomboy beautiful, intimate cinema.
  19. My Perestroika
    Essentially agenda-free, My Perestroika has the quality of a candid conversation with long-lost cousins from another country.
  20. Shame
    This is an affecting picture that leaves the viewer as wrung out as the protagonist. No doubt you'll be seduced but, in the end, you may also feel abandoned.
  21. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    Almost everyone is scum. The venality spreads from the slums or favelas, up the ranks of local militias, crooked police and pandering politicians.
  22. My Week with Marilyn
    The acting is superb, the settings are beautifully recreated, the dialogue crackles with occasional wit, but where's the juice? Although lovely to gaze upon, the whole thing feels a bit precious and porcelain, more teapot than sexpot.
  23. We Need to Talk About Kevin
    Ezra Miller's sneering, absurdly precocious evil-child performance makes him just another bad-seed horror villain.
  24. The Artist
    With elements of "A Star Is Born" and "Singing in the Rain," The Artist is a rarity, an ingenious crowd-pleaser.
  25. Arthur Christmas
    For the kids, the action is always lively and, for the rest of us, the dialogue has a witty and even caustic edge.
  26. The Muppets
    The Muppet charm, always more at home within the intimate frame of a TV set, is gone here.
  27. Hugo
    As well as an engaging fable about a homeless orphan living in a train station, Scorsese's film is a richly illustrated lesson in cinema history and the best argument for 3-D since James Cameron's "Avatar."
  28. Happy Feet Two
    Pitt and Damon deliver the best lines (wisecracks about the food chain, predators and evolution, etc.) but their characters also represent most of us.
  29. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    It's the most jumbled and tonally confused movie yet.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The Descendants
    Heartwarming, tragic and, at times, hilariously funny drama.
  31. J. Edgar
    What a sprawling, befuddling, fascinating, frustrating mess of a movie. Usually the tautest of directors, Clint Eastwood has gone all slack here, allowing his subject to get completely away from him.
  32. The Mill and the Cross
    The Mill and the Cross may thrill you. But be prepared for a fight. Twenty minutes in, your companion may throw up his or her arms and complain, "This is like watching a painting dry." They wouldn't be wrong.
  33. Margin Call
    Chandor's shrewdest bit of business is figuring out how to make an A-list movie with a $3.5-million budget. Solution: buy low, sell high. Hire last decade's A-list – Spacey, Irons and Demi Moore – and give them their best parts in years.
  34. Melancholia
    All that's deliberate, but the lingering question is not: Is Melancholia a sly depiction of the end we deserve, or simply a lovely load of bombast? Be prepared to choose one or the other; unless there's an extra moon in tonight's sky, it can't be both.
  35. Jack and Jill
    A noxious PG comedy starring Adam Sandler as a pair of middle-aged male-female twins that should have been separated at birth to spare us from this movie.
  36. Immortals
    Thrills are in short supply, but so are annoyances. This is a maintenance-free ride.
  37. Tower Heist
    Tower Heist is as over-inflated as those Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons that are featured in the movie's climax. Also similarly, it's entertaining in its own predictable way.
  38. The Way
    The pilgrimage is still long but, even with the crosses they bear, these are pilgrims lite – perhaps it's the modern way.
  39. Le Havre
    Le Havre, offers the director's usual humour, pitch-perfect acting and compassionate message, with a Gallic twist that should win new converts.
  40. Like Crazy
    Keen to be both really romantic and romantically real, the movie is neither, and falls between the cracks of its twin-ambitions. The result? Call it l'amour phooey.
  41. A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    The laughs may not be as strong as they were the first time, and the sense of discovering something fantastically illicit may have faded to mellow, familiar charms that come with the occasional giggle fit, but that's life as a stoner comedy.
  42. Puss in Boots
    Puss in Boots is essentially non-stop dazzling action scenes loosely connected by a thin, predictable story of greed versus good.
  43. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Director Sean Durkin's precisely constructed psychological thriller Martha Marcy May Marlene is a movie of many m-words – memories, mirrors and madness.
  44. The Rum Diary
    Essentially an affectionate and personal project to honour Thompson's memory, The Rum Diary occasionally strains to evoke the journalist's surreal black humour.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    RA. One
    And yes, the super effects are fantastic. But overall, Ra.One fails to impress.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Inni
    This is the perfect film for a band that was never trying to be something other than inventive.
  47. Anonymous
    The less you know about Shakespeare, the more you're likely to enjoy Anonymous.
  48. The Skin I Live In
    Though beautiful to look at and graced with moments of ticklish camp, The Skin I Live In is also sluggish, arbitrarily conceived and, especially in its sagging middle, unaccountably dull.
  49. In Time
    Along the way there are definitely some pleasing distractions, just not enough to obscure the growing realization that a much better picture could have been made, and wasn't. Many films never have a chance, but this one did – it's an opportunity wasted.
  50. The Three Musketeers
    All the borderline pantomime acting and wigged buffoonery is deliberate and silly, but The Three Musketeers remains charmless, a romp brought down by its lead-footed script.
  51. Dirty Girl
    Dirty Girl isn't. Sorry, but it's just faux grime, a thin layer of bad behaviour that wipes clean with a two-ply tissue to reveal the real movie beneath – all shiny sentimentality.
  52. The Woman on the 6th Floor
    A sporadically amusing, occasionally off-putting French farce.
  53. Johnny English Reborn
    Like the incompetent spy himself, this is a comedy that will sneak up on the skeptical and defy low expectations, producing something smart enough to neatly balance the thrills and the yuks.
  54. Paranormal Activity 3
    The first 45 minutes of this film feel like far too much normal and not nearly enough para.
  55. Revenge of the Electric Car
    Given Paine's penchant for B-movie-sounding titles, let's hope he gets to make it a trilogy that concludes with The Electric Car Lives!
  56. Benda Bilili!
    An unabashed crowd-pleaser.
  57. Footloose
    While dance sequences are not particularly well edited compared to the new breed of dance flick, Wormald and Hough are exciting hoofers to watch.
  58. The Big Year
    The result is an offence-free, mild entertainment in which everyone from cast to scriptwriter seems to be winging it.
  59. Take Shelter
    The story of a man afflicted with fearful visions, Take Shelter is a film that's hitting the right apocalyptic trumpet call at the right time.
  60. The Thing
    It's no great thing, just a better Thing than expected.
  61. The Ides of March
    Initially, the quick dialogue and strong cast obscure, at least partly, the fact that the plot is itself a dirty trick, a bit of a con game. Once the deception is seen through, the movie ends up inadvertently mimicking its subject matter: Like politics, it too leaves you disillusioned.
  62. The Interrupters
    Redemption, not crime, is the real theme here, for this handful of courageous men and women who have rescued their own lives, and just possibly may help save the blighted neighbourhoods in which they labour.
  63. Margaret
    Kenneth Lonergan's new film, Margaret, finally released six years after it was shot, now seems destined to become part of film history as one of the more stunning examples of a filmmaker's sophomore slump.
  64. Circumstance
    As the plot moves toward the climax, where each girl is forced to make a hard choice dictated by her unique "circumstance," that feeling of compression, of so many contradictory urges and needs vying for attention, grows almost overwhelming. Such is life among the young in present-day Tehran, up on the screen for all to see – all but those who most need to see it.
  65. Real Steel
    It's a combination that seems ideal for 10-year-old boys who adore violence, and could well be the cornerstone of the next DreamWorks franchise.
  66. 1911
    If 1911 doesn't impress as historical spectacle, neither does it rank high as a Jackie Chan film.
  67. Trespass
    Trespass is at least a suitable rest stop for his (Cage) anguish. An unapologetic B-movie that comes with lots of flashbacks, gunplay and shouting, it can easily be savoured and forgotten inside 90 minutes.
  68. The Last Circus
    The Last Circus is a bizarre, surreal, grotesque, fascinating, demanding, disappointing and ultimately exhausting political allegory that plays like a waking nightmare.
  69. We Were Here
    The most gripping war movie you'll see this year, We Were Here tells first-hand the story of how AIDS attacked San Francisco, killing more than 15,000. Whole peer groups were happy, healthy, and then dead in months.
  70. Bellflower
    Glodell never lets his creation spin out of control. Bellflower revs the engine of an exciting new maverick.
  71. Poetry
    Yun, a veteran Korean actress, gives a splendidly layered performance.
  72. Restless
    Relentlessly twee as all this is, Wasikowska's warmth and Hopper's off-beat timing (he's the son of the late Dennis Hopper) are appealing to watch.
  73. Machine Gun Preacher
    At the end of these "based on a true story" flicks, it's customary to flash photos of the real people over the end credits. There, Sam Childers looks older and less handsome and awfully imposing, a scary sort of cat with raw but authentic tales to tell. I'd like to hear them.
  74. What's Your Number?
    Once again Anna Faris manages to be the best thing in another not very good Anna Faris movie.
  75. You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
    Everyone should be thankful, if not for the doc's content, then certainly for its tone – there is no fulminating here. Instead, courtesy of Canadian co-directors Luc Côté and Patricio Henriquez, witnesses are quietly gathered and arguments are quietly made. For once, no one rants, and, in the relative calm, the tone can be heard, so muted and sad.
  76. Moneyball
    Turning the stately game into something few can resist – a smart and lively comedy of manners.
  77. Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    What elevates Foy's impressive first feature (he also served as editor and composer of the dark, whimsical score) above, say, your average "unsolved mystery" TV episode, is the emotional connection he gradually builds between Duerr and the elusive creator of the Toynbee tiles.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pearl Jam Twenty
    Even those more neutral about Pearl Jam will find it impossible not to enjoy director Cameron Crowe's driving retrospective of the band's stage-diving 20 years, at least on some level.
  79. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    Detective Dee is the action flick of the year, a two-hour epic that blows the "Pirates of the Caribbean" to the Bermuda Triangle.
  80. Dolphin Tale
    A potentially appealing story about a rescued disabled dolphin gets smothered with inspirational family values guff.
  81. Limelight
    All outrageous stuff. Gatien's story is worth telling. Which makes it all the more unfortunate that director Billy Corben presents it in such a methodical fashion.
  82. Higher Ground
    The film's quiet realism demands from us our own act of faith: We're asked to watch closely and to listen intently in the promise of a greater reward to come. Well, the promise is partly kept.
  83. Killer Elite
    Killer Elite's major problem: motion at the expense of emotion.
  84. Abduction
    Taylor Lautner puts the abs in Abduction, but not much else.
  85. Journey from Zanskar
    More heart-breaking and action-packed than one imagines from a monastery travelogue film.
  86. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    It's no fun looking after a determined, self-justified alcoholic; or even watching him waste away. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life accepts its subject on his own terms. And the compromise feels like capitulation before its hero's last record spins to a close. The death of a ladies man is pretty grim sport after the ladies have gone.
  87. Straw Dogs
    The film has one sly, ominous touch Peckinpah would have liked. David is writing a script on the defence of Stalingrad, a battle that swallowed two million lives. Otherwise, the new version is a vigilante action film bereft of subtlety or restraint.
  88. I Don't Know How She Does It
    It's a going-through-the-motions domestic comedy that makes, say, "Cheaper By The Dozen" look like a heart-warming, cutting-edge laugh riot.
  89. 50/50
    Even hardened cynics will embrace the cliché – yep, you will laugh, you will cry.
  90. Drive
    Tense car chases, action scenes handled with crisp panache and Canadian actor Ryan Gosling channelling Steve McQueen as an existential wheel man add up to make Drive one of the best arty-action films since Steven Soderbergh's "The Limey."
  91. Warrior
    Warrior is a weirdly affecting hybrid, a 100-proof melodrama that's two-thirds Sylvester Stallone and one-third Eugene O'Neill. Think Rocky's "Long Day's Journey into Night."
  92. Contagion
    Contagion isn't meant to provide delicious roller-coaster chills. Released two days before the 10th anniversary of 9/11, it's a film meant to scare the bejesus out of us.
  93. Bobby Fischer Against the World
    Beyond the knights and rooks, Bobby Fischer Against the World tells the story of a Jewish kid raised in Brooklyn who spent his final years in exile as a fulminating anti-Semite and a raving anti-American.
  94. The Debt
    Political thrillers with flawed heroes demand a different potion, one that mixes the grit of reality with the seeds of excitement until they reach a critical mass and explode. In that sense, for all its strengths and good intentions, The Debt owes a debt to the wrong genre – Birkenau wasn't fantasy; too often, this movie is.
  95. Our Idiot Brother
    The ensemble is unwieldy and the attendant yarn much too cluttered.
  96. 5 Days of War
    5 Days of War feels low-budget in everything except its battle sequences.
  97. The Guard
    The Guard is guilty of being overly cute, but it brims with talent and a freshness that extends beyond the clever script.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    This is still a seriously entertaining horror movie, one that will please newcomers as well as fans of the original oddity. But by the end of the film, I was wishing the filmmakers had left us wondering about precisely who and what these critters were just a little bit longer.
  99. Tales from the Golden Age
    Though the threat of exposure and incarceration lurk behind every story, the characters' ingenuity and humour serve as impudent alternatives to authoritarian stupidity and brutality.
  100. 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy
    3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy fails to live up to either its promise or title.
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