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. Jackass 3-D
    Are any of his stunts funny? Yes, one scene is worthy of Borat and Mack Sennett's Keystone Kops.
  2. Secretariat
    When the movie climactically reproduces that exhilarating Belmont, the fiction is just a pale shadow of the fact, and the realized myth that lives in our memory dies on the screen.
  3. Life as We Know It
    The dialogue is an occasionally witty cut above the norm, partly because director Greg Berlanti goes easy on those cute baby reaction shots, but mainly because of something rather more valuable: screen chemistry.
  4. It's Kind of a Funny Story
    It might be called "It's Kind of a Thin Movie."
  5. I Spit on Your Grave
    Neither boring enough to qualify as pornography nor vital enough to generate a controversy.
  6. The Social Network
    It has the staccato wit of a drawing-room comedy, the fatal flaw of a tragic romance and the buzzy immediacy of a front-page headline, all powered by a kinetic engine typically found in an action flick. And that's just the opening scene.
  7. Let Me In
    Less satisfying are the moments when the film concedes to American horror conventions, especially the scuttling vampire effects, which pull us out of the haunted world of these lovely damaged creatures into a place that, while not of this world, feels entirely too familiar.
  8. Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
    Saddled with this hollow script, Stone pads with elaborate set pieces.
  9. Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole
    A splendid adventure sure to thrill children and fantasy buffs, while leaving everyone else passably entertained.
  10. Buried
    Unfortunately, as the phone battery wears down, the plot's theatrics heat up to pot-boiling degrees of incredulity – a senile mother, a vicious personnel director, even a coiled serpent, all vie to raise the ante. Talk about your bad day.
  11. You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger
    Three words: Late Woody Allen. In the autumn of his career, toiling exclusively in Europe, Woody is like an aging cabinet maker still blessed with craft but grown erratic in design.
  12. The Town
    Like Martin Scorsese's "The Departed" or James Gray's "We Own the Night," The Town is a deliberately old-fashioned melodrama that echoes the pulpy mix of violence and romanticism of gangster films of the Thirties and Forties.
  13. Easy A
    It's definitely a Diablo Codyesque cut above the norm – the wit can sometimes feel contrived but at least there's wit to be found.
  14. Alpha and Omega
    If you have kids who are easily frightened, bring them to Alpha and Omega, a 3-D movie with training wheels. Kids may not like it, but they'll never fall off the ride.
  15. Catfish
    Catfish shows that the need to dispel lies isn't nearly as important as how we respond when we finally uncover the truth.
  16. Jack Goes Boating
    Jack Goes Boating barely stays afloat – it's a deep disappointment.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    GasLand
    While oil is still synonymous with unmitigated catastrophe, the documentary Gasland warns of the dangers lurking in natural-gas wells.
  18. Never Let Me Go
    What we see is admirable, but what we feel is minimal.
  19. The Virginity Hit
    The Virginity Hit is another slice of "American Pie," one more youth comedy that encourages its cast (and audience) to ridicule a fumbling, well-meaning teenager.
  20. I'm Still Here
    Unlike Sacha Baron Cohen's rude semi-documentary satires (Borat, Bruno), I'm Still Here never finds a satiric justification for all this grotesque behaviour.
  21. Bran Nue Dae
    The movie feels trapped in the 1980s and feels like a missed opportunity.
  22. Last Train Home
    It's an intense and tense time, unsurprisingly, and superbly realized by Lixin's unflinching yet compassionate eye, the Zhang family his microcosm for the Chinese macrocosm.
  23. Max Manus
    Max Manus (the title role is played by Aksel Hennie) feels so familiar that audiences watching it are likely to experience a numbing sense of déjà vu. Nothing seems particularly fresh or involving.
  24. Machete
    Machete is a drinking man's "The Expendables."
  25. Going the Distance
    Only read the bottom line of the accountants' review, after your generic masterpiece has gone the distance from theatrical release to video stores to the nethermost regions of the cable dial. If the accountants' judgment proves kind, head to the bank and feel free to enjoy precisely what you've denied so many others – a really good laugh.
  26. The American
    The dread in the film is so quickly forgotten. What remains is an urge to fly to Italy, rent an apartment in a medieval city and invent your own adventure.
  27. Mesrine: Killer Instinct
    While Mesrine: Killer Instinct certainly deserves a place among memorable French gangster films, Richet never delivers a clear theme here, let alone a plot.
  28. The Last Exorcism
    A creepy, smartly written and very entertaining low-budget chiller.
  29. Takers
    The new heist movie Takers is surprisingly okay.
  30. Mao's Last Dancer
    The delight of this film isn't so much in the tale as the telling.
  31. The Switch
    The wonder here is that Bateman and the child actor spark off each other quite delightfully. For a few precious scenes, when father and son are alone, the movie is actually amusing, even touching.
  32. Nanny McPhee Returns
    Ultimately, the performances carry the film.
  33. Lottery Ticket
    Entertaining, if highly predictable, escapist ensemble comedy.
  34. Piranha 3-D
    Piranha 3D is more funny than disgusting, even when screen fills with half-nude swimmers, bobbing like human dumplings in a roiling vat of borscht. This isn't just sick, it's clas-sick!
  35. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
    English director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz), takes the approach that movies have been far too reticent. His new film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, is as vibrant as a cluttered wall of graffiti, jumpy enough to risk retina damage.
  36. Eat Pray Love
    Running more than two hours – a very long time for an adaptation of a book without a plot – Eat Pray Love is like an overstuffed lightweight suitcase, with little room for us to feel the emotional connections Liz makes with new friends along the way.
  37. Animal Kingdom
    Animal Kingdom isn't perfect: Some performance moments are over-ripe, and there's an episode of arbitrary cruelty that's excessively creepy.
  38. The Expendables
    Still, what makes Sly's new film fascinating is that, 35 years after he created and starred in the ultimate little-boy fantasy, "Rocky," Stallone remains such a guileless, big-dreaming innocent.
  39. Cairo Time
    One disappointment here is that Patricia Clarkson, the queen of indie film, is missing much of her usual spark. Her performance may be aiming for sensual, but too often it comes across more as listless.
  40. The Other Guys
    Have you ever seen a movie you half-liked a lot?
  41. Step Up 3-D
    The third instalment of the Step Up dance-romance franchise shifts the action from Baltimore to New York, adds a D to the 3 and invades your space with bubbles, balloons and a whole lotta breakin'.
  42. The Disappearance of Alice Creed
    The best Brit noir since "Croupier" is a complex, marvellously twisty thriller.
  43. Lebanon
    An emotionally powerful if somewhat divided experience. The grimness, the sweat, the panic are there in Saving Private Ryan-level intensity. At the same time, you never entirely lose the sense that the movie is a formal and calculated cinematic exercise, something of an illustrated argument.
  44. Dinner for Schmucks
    There's plenty here to keep summer comedy fans satiated, if not entirely satisfied.
  45. Charlie St. Cloud
    What "serious" means for young actors, as we know from Miley Cyrus's "The Last Song," is maudlin, and Charlie St. Cloud is no exception.
  46. Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore
    Aside from uninspired movie-parody gags, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore suffers from gadget overload.
  47. Get Low
    It's Duvall and Murray who make Get Low a small, wonderful thing.
  48. Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel
    The title – Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel – is fine as far as it goes. But if you leave out "octogenarian mammophile" and "calendar fetishist," you leave something essential out of the story.
  49. The Concert
    A discordant mix of melodrama and chaotic farce.
  50. Salt
    For all its action thrills, Salt is relatively humourless fare.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ramona and Beezus
    Corbett (of Sex and the City fame) is oddly cast, but still a lovable, if dorky, dad, capable of saving the day.
  52. Countdown to Zero
    A mess of a movie – a sprawling PowerPoint argument that covers too much ground way too fast, dispensing Wikipedia-calibre essays on a variety of subjects, from a blurred bio of J. Robert Oppenheimer, creator of the atom bomb, to an unsatisfying sidebar on A.Q. Khan, the world's first door-to-door nuke salesmen.
  53. Life During Wartime
    Todd Solondz isn't for everyone, maybe not even most people...he's a comic filmmaker whose idea of entertainment is shredding chum into a shark tank.
  54. Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child
    I doubt that Jean-Michel Basquiat would have endorsed the subtitle. Indeed, The Radiant Child seems to inflate the very cliché that the rest of this film is keen to refute.
  55. Inception
    You can’t feel for anyone when nothing feels real. Memo to Christopher Nolan for future outings: Kill the dream, tell a story.
  56. The Sorcerer's Apprentice
    The lively verbal sparring between the good and evil sorcerer-apprentice pairs sustains the movie, but, with a predictable plot, by-the-numbers action-movie jolts and no real sense of wonder, The Sorcerer's Apprentice is really just a pumpkin.
  57. Despicable Me
    The effect is Chaplinesque if Chaplin had the latest in gadgetry, because the entire picture is also shot in 3-D that, for once, puts all 3 of the Ds to imaginative use.
  58. Predators
    Predators never gives us the satisfaction of knowing what motivates the alien hunters to use humans for sport, but at least it has fun showing us that humans can, indeed, be the most dangerous game.
  59. The Kids Are All Right
    Cholodenko casts much better than she writes. Yet, alas, even a talented veteran like Moore can't sell a hoary line like, "Sometimes you hurt the ones you love the most." Maybe if she'd set it to music – nope, sorry, that's already been done.
  60. The Girl Who Played with Fire
    It's refreshing to have a movie assume that its viewers are also readers, yet this one takes that assumption to testing lengths. To those fearful of flunking the test, my advice is simple: Bring along the book as your cheat-sheet.
  61. The Last Airbender
    The story is a much more serious problem, a run-on, overstuffed narrative that feels like a very long prologue for a climax that never comes.
  62. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse
    With the bigger story and more fully developed relationships than the previous films, this is the first Twilight film that feels like a real movie in its own right.
  63. Love Ranch
    Love Ranch bounces between tongue-in-cheek wackiness and soapy melodrama while rarely hitting a true note.
  64. Grown Ups
    Adam is back to lining his pockets again.
  65. Wild Grass
    With its comic-book hues, crime-caper score, overly serious narrator, interior monologues and surreal touches, Wild Grass proves Resnais is still having fun with cinematic language.
  66. Knight and Day
    Mangold's larger problem is trying to hold together a movie that jerks about in tone as much as it does location, veering between grisly humour and cutesy sentiments.
  67. Toy Story 3
    Eventually, Toy Story 3 finds its way back to that theme of the power of childhood play. There are a few worrisome moments en route, though, when not only the characters but the filmmakers seem to have lost their way.
  68. Jonah Hex
    The best part of Jonah Hex is Josh Brolin on a horse. Especially when he's not saying anything, just moseying into or out of town. Too had he never moseys into a better movie.
  69. Cyrus
    The emotional geometry is familiar enough to be credible yet odd enough to be creepy.
  70. I Am Love
    Despite a superb cast and a fabulous look, the picture collapses under the weight of its lofty pretensions, especially in the black hole of the last act, where it topples into near-absurdity.
  71. The Karate Kid
    Smith’s charisma isn’t always an asset to the movie though. Unlike the unknown Macchio in the original Kid, there’s nothing vulnerable about Smith except for his diminutive size, which is its own problem.
  72. The A-Team
    The problem is director Joe Carnahan, who’s way too manic even when the formula calls for calm – he can’t stay still long enough to drive home the punch-lines.
  73. Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky
    It's all picture and no motion, as wooden as its framing. Lovely and lifeless, the result is a traditional portrait of two defiers of tradition.
  74. Winter's Bone
    This is a world out of time and, despite the trappings of flinty realism, the film too unfolds like an elemental myth from the stormy past – a Greek tragedy driven by dark fates and struggling toward a catharsis.
  75. Reel Injun
    Entertaining and informative documentary on how native people have been portrayed on-screen over the years and how these portrayals have shaped native self-perception and non-native prejudice.
  76. Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
    Succeeds because the subject knows she's a showbiz monster and plays her role to the hilt. She's Norma Desmond in "Sunset Blvd." or "Mommie Dearest's" Joan Crawford up from the grave.
  77. Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage
    The story of Canada’s tragically unhip – Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart, charter members of a group that has sold 40 million or so albums and discs since 1973, without ever getting a whole lotta love. Never mind the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; Rush never even made it on American TV until funnyman Stephen Colbert invited them on The Colbert Report in 2008.
  78. Splice
    Despite acting under the computer-generated encumbrances of that monkey tail and those centaur legs, Delphine Chanéac does something remarkable with Dren – she makes her a disturbingly sexy thing.
  79. Get Him to the Greek
    What’s missing in Get Him to the Greek are the supporting characters that made "Forgetting Sarah Marshall" so engaging.
  80. Marmaduke
    Hey, it’s all good clean fun.
  81. Killers
    So here’s an idea: Maybe filmmakers should shoot what Ashton’s up to off-camera, because not many laughs are making it to the screen.
  82. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
    Destined to disappear into the quicksand of time, too innocuous to be hated, too bland to be remembered, just awaiting some bright optimist in a distant future to press the do-over button.
  83. Micmacs
    A comedy should provoke more than smiles. Should have characters instead of show-offs. Although often charming, Micmacs seems so pleased with itself that it hardly needs an audience.
  84. Survival of the Dead
    Still, even Romero's staunchest fans might conclude their hero is going through the motions here. Yes, almost like a zombie.
  85. Sex and the City 2
    But the best, most irrefutable reason why Sex and the City 2 deserves one-half a shining star. It’s worse than Sex and the City 1, and that alone is a remarkable achievement.
  86. Shrek Forever After
    Letting Shrek get grumpy again has freshly animated this cartoon series.
  87. MacGruber
    Think of a really bad, uncensored Saturday Night Live comedy sketch. Then make it worse – make it longer.
  88. Solitary Man
    Solitary Man makes too good on its title – it’s a fascinating character study isolated within a mediocre film.
  89. Robin Hood
    Damned if those dual spoilsports, the gladiatorial director Ridley Scott reteamed with his portly star Russell Crowe, haven't drained every drop of merriment right out of the myth.
  90. Iron Man 2
    With seemingly twice as much action, a whole new complex of villainy, competing Iron Man suits, robots and love interests, Iron Man 2 sequel cashes in hard on the unexpected success of the first Iron Man from 2007 and somehow loses much of its soul in the process.
  91. Babies
    Observant and funny and thoughtful too, powered exclusively by vérité footage without a word of narration, Babies is William Blake’s Infant Joy brought to rich cinematic life.
  92. The Trotsky
    The Trotsky goes down easily and, for what it’s worth, is better mannered than most contemporary youth comedies.
  93. The Infidel
    At least The Infidel is an equal-opportunity blasphemer, and God bless it for that. Otherwise, this thing plays like a cheeky Brit-com blown up to feature length, with a thin coat rack of plot to hang the ethnic humour on, and a wish to offend without being offensive.
  94. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    The ninth film in the franchise is competent enough but it won’t freeze the heart or fire the imagination.
  95. Furry Vengeance
    The paradox here is that the message of respect for animal life is outweighed by the lack of respect for human beings.
  96. Harry Brown
    The stark direction, the brittle performances, the impoverished setting, the scatological dialogue, everything about the film screams out "Gritty social realism." Everything, that is, except the plot, which shouts "Eye-rolling melodrama."
  97. Please Give
    The characters are entertainingly contradictory, though in a somewhat predictable way: Nice people aren’t honest, and honest people aren’t nice.
  98. The Losers
    Providing expectations are kept low, there’s some fun to be had in the elaborately preposterous action set-pieces, and especially Jason Patric’s campy performance as the movie’s villain.
  99. A Shine of Rainbows
    Sincere performances and the beautiful gold-and-grey Donegal landscape can only go so far in A Shine of Rainbows, a family film that risks drowning in its own syrup.
  100. The Back-up Plan
    Mostly though, The Back-up Plan feels like a movie aimed right at the funny bones of four-year-olds.
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