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. The Life Ahead
    Ultimately, Ponti’s film survives on the one surprise that’s not much of a surprise at all: the power and majesty of his lead actress. And how did the director score such a casting coup? You’d have to ask his mother ... Sophia Loren.
  2. The Hunt
    While The Hunt strives mightily to provoke outrage, get the blood boiling, pluck the heartstrings and open the tear ducts, it never quite succeeds – a function of a narrative whose failures of credibility, finally, prevent a viewer from wholeheartedly embracing what director Thomas Vinterberg wants us to feel.
  3. Valentin
    A well-cast drama that switches between sweetness and menace, the film goes down easily, thanks to a talented cast.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Aida's Secrets
    The debut doc is an ambitious attempt to get to the root of a tangled family tree, but the directors' close relationship to Izak (he's their uncle) means they sometimes pay so much attention to the genealogical minutiae that a viewer checks in and out to clear her head.
  5. Riding Giants
    Too long by about 20 minutes, and arguably too obsessed with the lineage of names only of interest to other surfers, this is a vicarious kick.
  6. Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood
    In its thin conception, shaggy form and muddy execution – and in its glee in coasting on a perceived aura of cool whiz-pow-bang energy – the film is as much a comic-book movie as they come.
  7. The Broken Hearts Gallery
    But viewed from another, more cynical angle, The Broken Hearts Gallery reveals itself as just another lightweight Saturday-night diversion – zippy and heartfelt, certainly, but hardly reinventing or even seasonally rotating the rom-com wheel.
  8. The Cave
    Though The Cave really, really tries to be scary from as many directions as possible, it fails to hold much in reserve and never manages to build suspense.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Blackfish
    As more than one orca expert points out in the film, when you take a creature born to roam thousands of miles of open water and stick it in a pool to do tricks, there’s going to be some behavioural blowback. In Tilikum’s case, it’s actually described as a form of induced “psychosis.”
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Professor Marston & the Wonder Women
    Because like the Wonder Woman mythos itself, there's almost too much ground to cover in just a single installment.
  11. Snakes on a Plane
    There is also a capable, wisecracking stewardess (Julianna Margulies) and, what a surprise, a steward who appears to be doing a Paul Lynde impersonation.
  12. The Ring
    It's a workmanlike, passably engrossing horror flick that copies well from the Japanese original. When it's good, it's not original, and when it's original, it's not so good.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Visitor
    The actor - like everyone else in this tedious yet affecting film - rises well above his soft-headed, solipsistic material, turning in a performance of nuanced delicacy.
  14. Scream 2
    Ultimately, the viewing experience is like watching a snake swallow its own tail -- that once-menacing serpent is now a clown act, all yuks and no venom.
  15. The Mustang
    The strong cast keep their heads down and offer all the obligatory rhythms – if you hire Bruce Dern as a crabby horse-trainer, you are going to get exactly what you paid for – and the film eagerly embraces the purely filthy dullness of prison life.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Goodbye Girl
    If you enjoyed previous Simon comedies like Plaza Suite, it is virtually guaranteed that you will enjoy Goodbye Girl. If you have not previously enjoyed Simon's work, Goodbye Girl will not convert you. [21 Dec 1977]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  17. The Laundromat
    In 96 minutes, Soderbergh presents a series of vignettes underlining humanity’s subservience to greed. Some of the segments work – especially one involving an African business titan who decides to teach his daughter an expensive family lesson – and some are too thin (maybe there is a downside to that brisk 96-minute runtime after all).
  18. Happy Death Day
    There's a spunky charm to the Scream-meets-Groundhog Day thing, and the film is well-built. The problem is its chipper message.
  19. The Quiet American
    The result is a rarity on the modern screen -- a film with more brains than heart.
  20. 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.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Wild Card
    There’s a modern noir story struggling to get out of Wild Card, just as there was in "Heat," and you can feel it every time Statham – a fine actor even when he’s not rearranging people’s skeletal structure – has to sit down, stare into yet another tumbler of vodka rocks and contemplate the miserable life sentence of his habit.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Woman in Gold
    Director Simon Curtis milks the predictable drama, thrills and heartache of the Holocaust-era story, but it’s a paint-by-numbers triumph, a copy of something we’ve seen many times before.
  23. Dream a Little Dream
    A nice little dream, too, hardly epic but weirdly satisfying, the kind you wake up from and dearly want to re-enter, just for another drowsy moment or two. [3 March 1989]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  24. Mars Needs Moms
    It's amazing to see, but potentially unsettling. Green is now 37. And it may be more than some mothers can take, imagining themselves cleaning up after their "little boy" when he's crowding 40.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Yves Saint Laurent
    Despite being sumptuously shot and competently assembled, it provides no real insight into the tortured mind of its subject or the creative process in general.
  26. Take Every Wave: The Life of Laird Hamilton
    The film may not shed any new light on Hamilton, but the footage of him riding 100-foot-high waves is nothing short of awesome.
  27. 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.
  28. The Duchess
    As for true-love Charles, he would ascend to the Prime Minister's office, and then rise again to even greater heights: They named the tea after him. Indeed, that may be the smartest way to see this flick, curled up on your sofa with a cup of Earl Grey -- just make sure it's as decaffeinated as what you're watching.
  29. A Most Violent Year
    Like that camel-hair coat Abel wears, A Most Violent Year is classy and commands respect, but a stronger pulse under the lapels would make us care much more.
  30. Capone
    The tension between trying to make something unique and trying to adhere to whatever expectations you place on yourself when you call your movie Capone (although to be fair its working title was Fonzo) is right up there onscreen. In all its glorious mess.
  31. Muppets Most Wanted
    The crimes and Gervais and Fey’s performances get stale quickly, though the song-and-dance numbers are fairly clever.
  32. The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    Foodies will enjoy the window into fancy restaurants but, without any interviews other than Ducasse, the documentary never questions the evolution of the chef into a peripatetic artistic director rather than an actual cook, nor the realism of professing environmental frugality in a three-star setting.
  33. War Dogs
    Phillips delivers a mostly by-the-book rise-and-fall saga of two bros in way over their heads, complete with ostentatious title cards that, instead of subtly addressing the film’s themes of greed and jealousy, only hammer the moral lessons with the grace of a rusty Kalashnikov.
  34. The Departed
    Rarely has a star's look-at-me turn so completely torpedoed a project. Whenever the picture threatens to gain some momentum, up pops Jack to stop it dead in its tracks. The loyal few may be laughing with him, but the rest of us are definitely laughing at him.
  35. 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.
  36. The Hunt
    The most shocking part of this too-shocking-for-audiences-today production is that Cuse and Lindelof are even involved, given the far smarter and sharper work they did last year on HBO’s "Watchmen," which took the carcass of U.S. politics and thoroughly eviscerated it in a new and startling fashion.
  37. You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    This picture is to comedy what carpet bombing is to aerial warfare: The onslaught is so relentless that occasional direct hits on the funny bone are a statistical guarantee.
  38. 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.
  39. Starsky & Hutch
    There's a surprising sweetness in the bond between the two cops. The gay subtext of the partnership is used for humour but it's never sniggering or mean.
  40. Red Joan
    Young Joan is played by Sophie Cookson, magnetic in the role. Dench is underused, though. The film’s suspense is waiting on the world-class actress to bust out some chops. It never happens. The spy who bored me, rather.
  41. Young Guns II
    There is a dearth of novelty in Young Guns II, but screenwriter Fusco proceeds as if the material were not familiar and seems to be having a hell of a time exposing it to an audience of teen-agers who wouldn't know John Ford from Ford Fairlane. [03 Aug 1990]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  42. The Proposition
    Huston's performance has a keen edge to it, as do those of the other actors, yet everyone suffers from the same problem -- they're not playing knowable characters so much as thematic points on the broad spectrum of violence.
  43. 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.
  44. Gulliver's Travels
    For a novel written nearly 300 years ago by a dour Irish cleric with a mad-on about the material world and a satiric mindset dark enough to flirt with misanthropy, it's amazing how well Gulliver's Travels travels. Even Jack Black can't ruin the thing, although not for lack of trying.
  45. The Ring Two
    Watts evokes a classic Hitchcockian virgin-whore duality.
  46. Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    The humour doesn’t go nearly as deep as the science of “looking eternity in the eye,” resulting in a neat-enough educational experience, if not a fulfilling work of documentary cinema.
  47. Nerve
    Nerve looks fabulous and the pace is evenly adrenalized, which makes up for clichéd characters, a concocted premise and commentary that is a bit on the nose.
  48. The Darkest Minds
    The storytelling is bald and the logistics remain vague. The adult characters, especially a sadistic prison guard, are laughably overblown and the simplistic dialogue betrays the script’s YA roots.
  49. The Brothers McMullen
    Respectable by the tube's standards, even a cut above dumbed-down Hollywood, but hardly the stuff of creative renewal.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Bill Nye: Science Guy
    It’s a by-the-numbers profile, complete with the requisite visit to his childhood home, but, partway through, it becomes a rather piercing portrait of a man constantly doubting himself – while he studied under Carl Sagan, he lacks a PhD and is therefore, in the eyes of his detractors, not a real scientist – and struggling with his celebrity.
  51. 30 Days of Night
    Like most kiddies games, this one starts out fun and then gets tired. Inevitably, that's when Slade tries to revive our interest by upping the gore quotient.
  52. Permission
    Ultimately, the film becomes a love letter to Hall, and that's what saves it. She's such a beautiful, prickly, intelligent, singular presence that you root for Anna, no matter how many questionable choices she and the film make.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    How She Move
    Dialogue isn't Morais's strength, and it's only when the actors stop trading “Just give me a chance” chestnuts that the film really takes off. The deftly shot dance sequences are entirely satisfying, thrillingly choreographed by Hihat (most famous for her work with Missy Elliott) to music by the likes of Lil Mama and Toronto's Tha Smugglaz.
  54. Two Girls and a Guy
    And the climax, where fake tears suddenly become real, doesn't ring true. By then, nothing does, leaving the film's successful deception to double as its eventual failure -- cast adrift in this fog of appearances, we appear not to care.
  55. 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.
  56. Dheepan
    For a while, it’s quietly meditative and riveting – worthy of the Palme d’Or it captured last spring in Cannes. But in the film’s final 10 minutes, Audiard lets his bombastic sensibilities loose, creating an over-the-top revenge tale that’s bewildering.
  57. Hearts Beat Loud
    The film hums to tepid indie-pop and is sentimental to a fault, but the cast is a soulful bunch (including Toni Collette and a wonderful Ted Danson) who breathes life into a film that is all heart.
  58. The Infiltrator
    Unfortunately, the script is held together with something much less adhesive than, say, Amy Adams’s "American Hustle" blouse tape.
  59. Lost in La Mancha
    Gilliam himself is a joy to behold. His wit stays sharp even as his fortunes dull, and the conditions that conspire against him only prove the mettle in our man of La Mancha.
  60. Charlotte's Web
    It's not exactly radiant, but at least the movie's a little bit humble.
  61. The Disappearance of Finbar
    Narrative-driven and determinedly unpredictable, The Disappearance of Finbar is true to its mandate as a mystery story to a fault. [18 Jul 1987]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  62. Madame Satã
    Truly strange, and often captivating.
  63. 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.
  64. Velvet Goldmine
    The movie is dramatically limp, running out of narrative steam long before the set decorator runs out of colours.
  65. Hope Floats
    This is a frustrating film that takes its cutesy title way too literally.
  66. U.S. Marshals
    Who really wants to go to an escape movie and have to work this hard to figure it out?
  67. Muppet Treasure Island
    Broad, loud and crammed full of costumed characters and stage asides about the poverty of the script, it's typical pantomime, with a thin plot on which to hang the over-the-top performances and light-hearted musical numbers (by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil). [16 Feb 1996]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  68. Thumbsucker
    So no one would argue that Thumbsucker sucks. But the thing does seem just so indie-movie familiar.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There
    It takes more than a fan to analyze the legacy of a period. But a fan is just what it takes to indulge in that legacy, which is exactly what Broadway: The Golden Age is all about.
  70. The Game
    This sort of flick can be fun, and there are moments here when it is, when a suddenly shifting perspective tosses us for a dizzying loop. Then again, there's such a thing as too much fun and too many moments -- at over two hours, this particular game meanders on way past its welcome.
  71. Derailed
    A movie so hysterical it worked best as a black comedy.
  72. The Prince of Egypt
    Certainly spectacular -- an elaborately designed combination of animation and computer-generated imagery -- but at times it's a spectacular bore.
  73. Equity
    The key problem is the figure of Naomi, clawing her way to the top and desperate to stay there. Gunn plays her as mightily determined and potentially abrasive.
  74. Blade II
    Though superior to the original Blade, the superiority is mostly in the myriad ways the "suck-head" enemies can be blown up, melted and dismembered.
  75. Hellbound: Hellraiser II
    Clive Barker is not without a sense of humor. And he's certainly not without a sense of what will scare his audiences senseless. [28 Dec 1988]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  76. Inland Empire
    By the time Inland Empire, David Lynch's three-hour digital epic shot on a home video camera, takes you through its tour of the contents of the director's febrile imagination, it's probably the bunnies you'll most remember.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Frozen
    It's hard to generate a sense of warmth when the plot points all feel so coldly calculated, and it doesn't help that the musical numbers are so pedestrian.
  78. Calendar Girls
    Both Mirren and Walters are successfully cast against type.
  79. Interstellar
    While it’s technically eye-popping and intricately structured, Interstellar is at its most fascinating when it struggles hard to communicate those things we human beings call “emotions”. Instead, we get something like a freeze-dried approximation of Steven Spielberg at his most sentimental.
  80. Your Mommy Kills Animals
    Your Mommy Kills Animals works best as a fast-moving carnival of faces and feature stories. Like most amusement-park rides, it lets you off dizzy and confused, whereas the best documentaries leave you feeling that you've come to a settled perspective on a subject.
  81. Raw Deal
    Both Cobra and Raw Deal are designed primarily to get the audience off on violence, and both are successful; what makes Raw Deal marginally preferable is not only the bizarre charm of its star, but the fact that the filmmakers are honest about what they're up to and do not unduly exploit the hostility of the audience.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  82. Aladdin
    Each frame is drowning in vibrant colours and packed with so many decked-out extras that Aladdin’s environment seems less like a typical CGI-enabled sound stage, and more like a tangible, if bombastically stylish, world of its own.
  83. Casino Jack
    The facts really get in the way of the portrait here, and we are left hungry for more Spacey and more insight into a man with the hubris to wonder if he has disappointed God.
  84. Madeline's Madeline
    Decker evolved her project with her actors over five months, and it’s both pro and con that, boy howdy, it sure feels improvised.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Two Lovers and a Bear
    Like those who live up there, viewers have two choices: Give yourself over to the experience, and you’ll be transported; stand back, and you’ll feel nothing but chill.
  86. The Little Things
    Hancock (The Blind Side, The Founder) keeps the action moving briskly and with little tonal confusion, highlighting just what a polished studio-favoured professional can do when given gobs of money and zero intellectual-property obligations. And his trio of leading men are all given ample space to play to their strengths.
  87. Detachment
    Ultimately, Detachment invites us to feel precisely what it warns against – detached.
  88. Prom Night
    A slow-moving but otherwise efficient Canadian B-movie that gives the audience what it came for: blood and guts (the title, coincidentally, of Lynch's previous film). It is similar but inferior to Carrie, Halloween and When a Stranger Calls; it is similar but superior to Friday the 13th. [17 Sep 1980]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  89. Inside Man
    As the end credits are rolling: What happened? Suddenly, the film stalls, and everything that looked great -- the mechanics of the caper, the grafted-on wit and wisdom -- starts to feel repetitious and a tad gimmicky.
  90. World Trade Center
    Despite the best efforts of the cast (Cage is especially evocative in a literally confined role), Stone can't disguise the fact that his movie, like his heroes, has come to a kinetic halt, stuck between a narrative rock and an emotional hard place.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Turning Point
    The dancing is lovely, the story is secondary. [17 Nov 1977]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  92. The Quick and the Dead
    Thanks to him, The Quick and the Dead is more than moribund. How much more? Let's just say that there's motion in the picture. Indeed, speaking of accomplishments, Sharon Stone appears clad throughout an entire feature - gee, give a gal a gun and there's no telling what she can achieve.m [10 Feb 1995, p.C1]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Vitus
    Nevertheless, Vitus's cool intelligence, knotty narrative and precise performances make it a pleasure to watch even when it sends mixed messages about the true nature of its protagonist.
  94. Dan in Real Life
    In the end, the commercial necessity of wrapping up a family comedy in less than 100 minutes seems to have trumped anything real about Dan's life.
  95. The Fifth Element
    The movie unreels like a depressive in a manic phase, a frenzy of lightning-fast cuts, cuts, cuts.
  96. Synchronic
    Once the big twist kicks in, there’s plenty of gritty fun to be had, but patience is a hard-won virtue in genre filmmaking.
  97. The Last King of Scotland
    Unfortunately, despite a committed and lively performance, McAvoy's Scottish doctor is fictional, an amalgam of Amin's "white monkeys."
  98. Dreamcatcher
    Like nightmares, horror movies pull us down with them. And so the film keeps us in thrall for every one of its 134 minutes.
  99. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Not until the final shot does Noyce rise up to the potential of the history: There's a sudden shiver of recognition, that, my God, these people really lived this.
  100. Swimming Pool
    Well-acted, nicely shot, slick and certainly sexy, Swimming Pool may be all foreplay and no climax, but what the heck -- there are worse ways to be teased.
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