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 3.1 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. Definitely, Maybe
    Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to guess which gal became the wife, which gal should have become the wife and which gal is there just to play with our heads. It's exactly like that old shell game – mildly diverting, pea-sized and otherwise hollow.
  2. Jumper
    Woefully short on script, the picture ends up disappearing down the wormhole of its own premise.
  3. The Spiderwick Chronicles
    Unlike Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth," which was also inspired by Rackham, The Spiderwick Chronicles is more whimsical than scary.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Step Up 2: The Streets
    So when it comes to rawness, realness or any other signifier of urban authenticity, Step Up 2 The Streets doesn't measure up, especially when compared with a grittier dance flick still in theatres, the Toronto-made "How She Move."
  5. Fool's Gold
    Fool's Gold starts flat and then deflates because of torpid pacing and flailing performances.
  6. In Bruges
    The setting is unique, the cast is terrific, the dialogue crackles and, if only there were a plot worth believing, In Bruges might have been a fine film.
  7. Wild West Comedy Show: 30 Days & 30 Nights - Hollywood to the Heartland
    Audiences can watch any number of similarly talented comics on late-night television or, even better, get close to the action at a downtown comedy club.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins
    More than sufficiently funny.
  9. Caramel
    The most unexpected thing about the Lebanese film Caramel is its predictability.
  10. The Eye
    A quirkily efficient genre exercise that knows exactly where and when to administer its cattle-prod shivers.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Over Her Dead Body
    Few things are more painful to watch than a botched comedy.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Strange Wilderness
    The vibe isn't mellow, nor predictably, affably dumb. Rather, this is a slapdash effort whose faux-Farrelly brothers humour is papered over with an unremitting, distasteful malice, featuring a cast that's completely wasted, in both senses of the word.
  13. Rambo
    Can anyone still be rooting for Rocky or Rambo?
    • 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.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Untraceable
    While the punishments and triumphs are absolute, the entertainment value is highly equivocal. This ultimately relegates Untraceable to the ranks of so-so thrillers with legitimate but half-developed intellectual aspirations. And since you inspired the movie in the first place, part of the responsibility rests on, well, you.
  16. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Relentlessly dark but expertly rendered, it shares its cinematographer and quality of aggrieved compassion with another recent Romanian art house hit, "The Death of Mr. Lazarescu."
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    U2 3D
    The details are astounding. During "Sometimes You Can't Make It on Your Own," the camera is in so tight that you can see Bono's hand tremble around the mike as he belts out a long, sustained note.
  18. Cloverfield
    Cloverfield is an exercise in realism that lacks reality's broader and richer context. Or, put another way, the experiment is artful, but it ain't art.
  19. Mad Money
    The pocketing of tired bills headed for the shredder, the producing of tired movies headed for the theatre -- it's all just recycling.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Still Life
    Perhaps Jia is trying to prove the point that the future has already arrived. Or perhaps he is suggesting that the truth is stranger than science fiction. This is today's China: Anything is possible.
  21. 27 Dresses
    Almost everything about this starring vehicle for Katharine Heigl feels borrowed from some previous romantic comedy.
  22. Taxi to the Dark Side
    Relentless, thorough and devastating.
  23. First Sunday
    The problems with First Sunday extend well beyond the hokey premise and predictable performances to the fundamentals of script, direction and tone.
  24. In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
    Is this movie so god-awful bad that it's hilariously good? Can't be bothered deciding. Figure that's an answer in itself.
  25. The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A VeggieTales Movie
    Except for one memorable interlude, the film just doesn't have near enough fun blasting spitballs at "Pirates of the Caribbean."
    • 24 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    One Missed Call
    Give this call a miss.
  27. Honeydripper
    A contemplative fable, Honeydripper locates the moment but misses the heart-pounding, gut-wrenching explosion -- the history is there, the thrill isn't.
  28. There Will Be Blood
    That's not to say that There Will Be Blood isn't something exceptional; it's just that the movie is jarringly erratic, ranging from moments of delicacy to majesty to over-the-top bombast.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem
    It's unclear whether any of the actors here have promising political careers since their only purposes are to serve as prey, adversaries and involuntary incubators to their guests.
  30. The Bucket List
    Director Rob Reiner is betting that their star power alone will blind us to the holes in this cheesecloth of a script. It proves a fool's bet – no star shines that brightly.
  31. The Great Debaters
    All of this unfolds with such predictability, the title might as well be The Great Foregone Conclusion.
  32. Persepolis
    Persepolis is as modern as tomorrow's headlines and as classic as an ancient myth.
  33. The Water Horse
    It's adapted with charming dispatch from the Dick King-Smith story, and served up by the same CGI wizards who animated the critters in "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Narnia Chronicles."
  34. Charlie Wilson's War
    Takes a kernel of truth and roasts it into a popcorn movie. There's terrific fun to be had, and much wry comedy too. What's missing, surprisingly given the subject matter, is any real sense of gravity.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    National Treasure: Book of Secrets
    Throughout all this, Cage's lazy, dull performance – who knew there were so many ways to express smugness? – is enlivened only by poorly timed bursts of exuberance.
  36. P.S. I Love You
    This sappy thing is a two-hour cheat that never plays fair for a nanosecond.
  37. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    Though Burton's version is faithful, the filter of his sensibility has turned it into another of his necrophilic creepshows.
  38. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    The movie manages a couple of popcorn-spitting-funny jokes for each biographical decade the film covers, though typically it's no better than moderately clever.
  39. Steep
    If you like your skiing extreme but your documentaries safe, then carve a sharp turn over to Steep.
  40. Alvin and the Chipmunks
    As for children's entertainment needs, well, having seen both "The Golden Compass" and Alvin and the Chipmunks with a full theatre of four- to 12-year-olds, this reviewer is honour-bound to report that Alvin wins the kids' vote, paws down.
  41. I Am Legend
    After its promising opening, I Am Legend devolves into a generic zombie slaughterfest.
  42. The Kite Runner
    The movie doesn't have the heart of the book, but it does have a solid mechanical pump, strong enough at least to keep a robust story on two-hour life support.
  43. Youth Without Youth
    How's this for a ringing endorsement: Watching Youth Without Youth, Francis Ford Coppola's first film in nearly a decade, is like taking a philosophy exam. A really tiring philosophy exam, where the questions are elegantly phrased but damn confounding and not really conducive to right answers.
  44. Atonement
    It's an imperfect movie that serves as a perfect reminder of what the movies do best.
  45. The Golden Compass
    A demanding blend of spectacle, drama and exposition of ideas.
  46. Juno
    The film's forced quirkiness constantly threatens to derail the entire enterprise, making this another minor American indie exercise in family eccentricity. But it keeps being put back on track by the apparently effortless performance of a great young actress.
  47. Awake
    With a couple of more drafts to mend the plot holes and restructure the middle act, Awake could have been saved.
  48. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    The adjective “inspirational” doesn't do justice to the quality of Schnabel's film.
  49. The Savages
    Suffused with clever lines, characters with neurotic tics and a pervasive, jocular black humour, The Savages is more about craft than art, but the craft, especially in the writing and acting, is at a high level.
  50. Starting Out in the Evening
    This is a human-sized drama about people with contradictory motives, trying to help or use each other.
  51. August Rush
    A sickly sweet family drama.
  52. Enchanted
    The movie's big kick – what makes Enchanted live up to its title – is that the further Giselle progresses in New York, the more we feel like we've tumbled into a timeless Disney Neverland.
  53. Hitman
    It's all meant, I suppose, to conjure up cold visions of Terminators and Robocops past, or, in this post-9/11 world, of bin Ladens and Bushes present. If so, conjure at will.
  54. I'm Not There.
    Even with new information provided in the film, however, his personality remains not so much elusive as cantankerous, particularly in contrast with the expansiveness of his songs. That gap gives I'm Not There something of a hollow centre.
  55. The Mist
    I wouldn't say this is laugh-out-loud risible, but there are definitely moments. Still, you might want to consider sitting through the uneven thing just to get to the ending, because that's quite something. You may love it, you may hate it, but forget it you won't.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    This Christmas
    Occasionally engaging but very chaotic movie.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Beowulf
    If the arrival of Beowulf is any indication, movie actors will soon all be replaced by lifelike, digitally animated facsimiles. The good news is that some of them might still sound like John Malkovich.
  58. Margot at the Wedding
    These characters don't seem illuminating at all – just damned annoying and, ultimately, dead boring.
  59. Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium
    Semi-wonderful at best.
  60. Redacted
    Love it, hate it, but be sure to watch it, because this odd and disturbing picture is as different as the war it reflects, and that difference is vast enough to seem profound.
  61. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Today, the 1985 novel is the No. 1-selling paperback in North America. Sadly, the movie is a bonfire where the novel was a blaze of fireworks.
  62. Fred Claus
    As for Vaughn, he seems exhausted by his strenuous efforts to bring a few sparks of spontaneity to such an overcalculated Christmas product.
  63. The Life of Reilly
    A tender tale of semi-triumph.
  64. Lions for Lambs
    Lions for Lambs appears to have taken its inspiration from Al Gore's stolid "An Inconvenient Truth," using the stage lecture and Power Point presentation in lieu of dramatic momentum.
  65. No Country for Old Men
    The Coen brothers adaptation is impeccable, a perfect mirror of McCarthy's prose – sparse, suspenseful, probing and profoundly disturbing.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    P2
    A pointless thriller.
  67. War Dance
    This film offers a child's perspective on the ravages and complexity of war and is also a convincing testament to the healing power of creative expression.
  68. American Gangster
    As an epic, American Gangster doesn't cut it. The reputations of Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," Brian De Palma's "Scarface," Martin Scorsese's "Goodfellas" or Michael Mann's "Heat" are safe. At best, American Gangster is no better than a workmanlike imitation of its betters.
  69. Bee Movie
    Maybe Bee Movie is another ground-breaking show about nothing – a hornet's nest of hype for a fat hive of nothing. If so, pay up and get stung.
  70. Darfur Now
    Theodore Braun's work may well reach and convert one thousand more Adam Sterlings. Here's hoping it does. There is, however, a difference between a worthy cause and a worthy film.
  71. Martian Child
    Whatever glimmers of cleverness Martian Child offers, it all comes to Earth with a thud in the shamelessly manipulative climax.
  72. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    The problem is not that the director is working but that his latest film is working too hard. Way too hard – this thing is melodrama running a marathon.
  73. Bella
    If you have an appetite for well-made treacle, then Bella should go down a treat.
  74. 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.
  75. Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
    A bit of a docu-mess.
  76. Rails & Ties
    The film's best and most carefully shaded performance belongs to Bacon.
  77. Saw IV
    There is no narrative tension in the film, however, just a variety of grisly crucifixions. And the morality tales are blood-stained window dressing.
  78. 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.
  79. The Comebacks
    At the end of The Comebacks, Coach is offered job with a college basketball team called The Sequels - a joke perhaps, but all too horrifying a prospect after watching this dull fumble.
  80. Gone Baby Gone
    Very few movies end so much better than they begin. For that reason, and only that reason, this is an exceptional picture.
  81. Rendition
    A rarity – a political film that delivers its timely message with a cinematic punch and no undue speechifying.
  82. Reservation Road
    The result is that, rather than tragedy, this unfolds like a plodding morality tale in which Wrath and Cowardice play out their respective parts.
  83. Things We Lost in the Fire
    Apart from the mobile camera and a moderately challenging time-jumping script, this is weepy women's cable-television fare of the tears-and-cuddles variety.
  84. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    A shrill and silly affair, bordering at times on camp.
  85. Lars and the Real Girl
    Of course, entire books have been written, and perused by disappointed women, about the male reluctance to put away their fantasized Biancas. In that sense, Lars and the Real Girl is real indeed. In every other, it's a sweet, bordering on saccharine, bagatelle.
  86. Sleuth
    A high-pedigree, low-interest affair that serves mostly as an exercise in postmortem speculation: Why is a project with so many prominent names attached to it so sterile and lifeless?
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Terror's Advocate
    If the roots of terrorism are hopelessly snarled, Terror's Advocate does a very good job of exposing some of the soil in which they grow.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Why Did I Get Married?
    The movie has a better sense of flow than his past efforts, and a few lengthy travelling Steadicam shots and some decent mountain scenery (supplied by B.C. rather than Colorado) help dispel the feeling that Perry has merely filmed another of his plays.
  89. We Own the Night
    Creaky in its plotting, occasionally electrifying in its direction, We Own the Night is even more of a throwback to old-fashioned crime dramas than Martin Scorsese's "The Departed."
  90. Control
    The result is a good movie that falls short of greatness by aping too well the behaviour of its subject – occasionally brilliant, sometimes mundane.
  91. The Heartbreak Kid
    This remake is distinctly a Farrelly brothers' flick -- sentimental, rambling and raunchy.
  92. Michael Clayton
    Instead of the typical John Grisham-style connect-the-dots legal thriller, we get a film that's idiosyncratic, with a time-shifting structure, a surfeit of subplots and characters.
  93. My Kid Could Paint That
    The winner of this year's audience award for best documentary at Sundance has it all: heartless media, art fraud and a four-year-old painting prodigy.
  94. The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising
    Whether you fully embrace the Harry Potter phenomenon or simply live with it, there's no question that J. K. Rowling is an imaginative story-spinner. The trouble is that she has ruined the field for the legions of the second-rate.
  95. The Darjeeling Limited
    As always with Anderson, the comedy is neatly embedded in the jaded banter, where the insecurities and rivalries bubble up -- here, all within the bell jar of that shared sleeping compartment.
  96. Feast of Love
    The movie begins to feel more like a buffet of contrivance than a feast of love.
  97. The Game Plan
    The Game Plan, created as a vehicle for Johnson, is a family comedy heavy on syrup and low on laughs.
  98. The Kingdom
    The Kingdom is a barely coherent compendium of Middle East fantasies, fears and doubts.
  99. Lust, Caution
    This is a movie guaranteed to turn you into a vacillating commitment-phobe, embracing it passionately one moment and then backing off cautiously the next.
  100. Good Luck Chuck
    One Star (and only for quoting Knee-Chee).
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