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. Eight Below
    At two hours, Eight Below becomes rather repetitive and arduous in its final stretch, the rescue mission. But the canine cuteness, breathtaking action and acts of bravery are worth braving the Disney elements -- overpowering, poignant music, an unnecessary romantic subplot -- if you like your movies doggy-style.
  2. Freedomland
    Price has written a screenplay that may be complex and ambitious to a fault.
  3. Night Watch: Nochnoi Dozor
    A wildly convoluted, preposterous vampire flick that is understood best as a sardonic social allegory.
  4. Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
    Julia Jentsch offers a brilliant example of what actors call "not playing the ending," and the awful suspense of the piece is watching as she realizes, in increments, that this is all much worse than she thought.
  5. Curious George
    Unfortunately, the team led by producer Ron Howard and directed by Matthew O'Callaghan has jettisoned much of the charm of the original books along with that politically touchy storyline.
  6. Final Destination 3
    Yes, Final Destination 3 is a roller-coaster ride of a movie from start to -- well, only about 10 minutes later. The fun part is over and we settle down to watch a sadistic assembly line of characters making premature exits.
  7. Firewall
    Overall, it's a satisfying example of the classic thriller, with a nifty digital update for these times.
  8. The Pink Panther
    The best sequence is a five-minute set-piece where Clouseau struggles with an accent coach to learn how to order a hamburger like an American.
  9. Neil Young: Heart of Gold
    This remarkable concert film, beautifully shot by director Jonathan Demme over two days last summer, is all about legacy, a more-or-less conscious exercise in myth-making on the part of a musical giant facing his own mortality.
  10. A Good Woman
    With the two American actresses miscast, and the two young British lads behaving like a couple of "Brideshead Revisited" rejects, most of the dramatic heavy lifting is left to veteran English actor Wilkinson.
  11. What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole
    In short, it's much fatter with less matter and a distressing shrinkage in thought.
  12. Annapolis
    Guaranteed neither to offend nor delight.
  13. Nanny McPhee
    It's a brilliant opening, but the difficulty with the familiar plot formula wherein a special stranger wins over a difficult household is that once the spell has been cast, all the plot tension, and much of the movie magic, dissipates.
  14. Imagine Me & You
    The fluffmeister here is writer-director Ol Parker, and say this for young Ol: This may be his feature debut, but the guy is one hell of a smooth engineer.
  15. Little Jerusalem
    Understandably, a script so obsessed with the dark doings of plot has little time left over for the study of character, and, thus, we never really get to know these people.
  16. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    Can a little-read 18th-century literary masterpiece be food-spittingly funny? Can it also include contemporary English actors riffing about their bad teeth, getting drunk and kissing their personal assistants? The answer is yes, as long as you agree that the best way to adapt an original book is with a correspondingly original film.
  17. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    Brooks is always a dry vintage, so the lack of outright laughs is to be expected. But Looking for Comedy is more depressing than funny.
  18. Why We Fight
    The strength of this documentary lies in its balance, or at least the careful appearance of balance.
  19. Underworld: Evolution
    Classic style over substance, with some gruesome-looking creatures and settings and non-stop shooting and biting (both the vampires and werewolves get their teeth into it). But, alas, at almost two hours, it is much ado about nothing.
  20. Glory Road
    If the facts of the story are essentially true, their presentation is as formulaic as ever.
  21. Last Holiday
    Queen Latifah's energy may be winning and her self-reliance message righteous, but Last Holiday grossly overextends her credit
  22. Tristan and Isolde
    When it comes to retelling the tale of Tristan and Isolde, give us a movie that makes love. Or even a movie that makes war. Anything, just anything, but a movie that makes nice.
  23. Fateless
    At first startling, even disengaging, that strange style eventually dovetails with the awful substance.
  24. Hostel
    The thing is just a clunky and tasteless and dumb scare picture, isn't it? Clunky, yes. Tasteless, for sure. But not so dumb I fear.
  25. Grandma's Boy
    An Adam Sandler movie without Adam Sandler, it turns out, is not necessarily an improvement.
  26. The Promise
    In keeping with that home-team tradition, The Promise lives up to the title --it really delivers the eye-popping goods.
  27. Match Point
    The movie is unexpectedly disciplined and enjoyable.
  28. Wolf Creek
    While it's not exactly the kind of movie many will feel like catching during a holiday break, fans of the horror genre will appreciate the fresh take on a killer's hunt for fresh meat.
  29. Casanova
    As with his other costume farce, "Stage Beauty" (with Billy Crudup and Claire Danes), Hatcher produces more froth than zest.
  30. Rumor Has It...
    The real weak point is Reiner's listless direction, with too few scenes that almost gel and too many that fall flat.
  31. The New World
    Yes, a Terence Malick film remains an event, but he appears awfully disoriented in The New World -- less a seasoned traveller than a perplexed tourist, content to mask his confusion by reaching for a camera and snapping relentless pretty pictures.
  32. The Matador
    Never as good as you'd hoped or as bad as you'd feared, The Matador is one of those of up-and-down experiences -- here a sharp pica of wit, there a welcome veronica of absurdity, but, now and then, just a bit too much bull in the ring.
  33. Munich
    Bouncing about from one flawed movie to another, Steven Spielberg has lost his way of late, and Munich finds him more disoriented than ever.
  34. Caché (Hidden)
    Haneke is best known for "The Piano Teacher." His latest, Caché (or Hidden) is a quieter but equally provocative attack. It's less in your face, more in your head and under your skin.
  35. The Ringer
    The Ringer is a movie whose good intentions shine a lot brighter than its art.
  36. Cheaper by the Dozen 2
    Sure ain't a movie. Nope, it's a product, pure and very simple and carefully tested to sell to the widest possible market.
  37. Fun with Dick and Jane
    None of this is funny enough to justify stealing 90 minutes of your viewing time.
  38. The White Countess
    This last Merchant/Ivory film feels like a thin apparition of the team's best films -- similarly static but less substantial, less palpable, and sadly less respectable, just the vestigial remains of a better day.
  39. The Family Stone
    Popped in the oven and marked with a predictable P, The Family Stone is the Christmas cookie of Christmas movies -- this thing is so pat it should come with the recipe attached.
  40. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    What a strange and strangely compelling movie this is.
  41. The Producers
    This is the stage experience documented on film, from the perspective of someone sitting front row centre watching actors pitching for the back rows of the balcony.
  42. Hoodwinked!
    What big ambitions you have, Grandma. And what a disappointingly modest follow-through.
  43. King Kong
    The verdict? King Kong may be a great movie event in a "Jaws/Titanic" sense of blockbuster impact and cultural talking point, but it is not a great movie.
  44. Memoirs of a Geisha
    Full of falling rain, fluttering silk, John Williams's music and whispery voiceover, Memoirs of a Geisha is one long oxymoronic exercise in attempting to show delicacy through overkill.
  45. Brokeback Mountain
    Ledger proves what we've suspected all along -- this is his picture, and he steals it brilliantly.
  46. Mrs Henderson Presents
    The picture is as tastefully pretty as its girls, and just as motionless.
  47. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
    The picture goes exactly where the prose does, enticing all of us, kids and adults and atheists and believers alike, down below the brittle surface of our cold logic and into a richer world of imaginative wonder.
  48. The World's Fastest Indian
    The World's Fastest Indian may be the world's slowest movie.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Æon Flux
    It's all so geekily gorgeous, it hardly matters that the narrative lapses in and out of incoherence and the dialogue is functional at best.
  50. Transamerica
    What a fine, tender, delicate, funny, gender-bending-and-rebending performance this is.
  51. The Ice Harvest
    That may be your lump of coal, but it seems a precious gift to me.
  52. In the Mix
    Forgettable.
  53. Just Friends
    A welcome antidote to the usual seasonal sweetness.
  54. Rent
    Rent, for all its good intentions and sensitivity, is easy to forget but easy to forgive. The music and direction feel generic but the cast deserves credit for squeezing every possible drop of emotion out of the material.
  55. The Libertine
    A movie that serves up what its debauched subject would never have countenanced -- sanitized smut with a moral attached.
  56. Syriana
    Reserved yet still suspenseful and hugely ambitious, Syriana sets out to prove what many have come to suspect -- that oil money is the root of all contemporary evil.
  57. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
    Death, torture, humour and even budding eroticism -- now this is more like it.
  58. Walk the Line
    The problem is that the movie plays down almost everything that made Cash great: the train rumble of a voice, the direct, poetic truth of his best lyrics, the invention of his outlaw image and his constant creativity.
  59. Breakfast on Pluto
    Jordan remains faithful to the looney sensibility of a hero, who is hard to take, but in his refusal to acquiesce to the social humdrum, is like a saint, or at least an artist.
  60. Derailed
    A movie so hysterical it worked best as a black comedy.
  61. Zathura: A Space Adventure
    Zathura involves a lot of yelling, a lot of explosions and a lot of flying objects -- but what else would you expect from a movie that is, honestly for a change, intended for 10-year-old boys?
  62. Pride & Prejudice
    This is Austen as chick-lit, not too deep, but with some integrity and the worthy goal of reaching a younger audience by offering a starch-free version of the story.
  63. Bee Season
    Though bathed in ecclesiastical light and a work of obvious craft and ambition, Bee Season is grimly serious and rather full of itself.
  64. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    Hard-working to a fault, this is a movie that's all effort and no direction, a movie completely lacking in what its hero eventually finds -- a sense of identity.
  65. Chicken Little
    The problem is that Chicken Little settles for what's expedient and safe and, over all, lives down to its title.
  66. Jarhead
    The result is a war picture that, trying to pass off fidelity to the book as objectivity, sacrifices any voice of its own, and ends up not knowing what to think.
  67. The Legend of Zorro
    A big bloated bore-o. Think of a combination of "Wild Wild West" and "Spy Kids."
  68. Prime
    Prime seems aimed at prime-time television, with endless iterations on the same theme of "frustrated relationship" that will finally get resolved during sweeps week in the season before cancellation. Call it: My Mama, the Shrink.
  69. Saw II
    Don't look for logic here. But if gore is your game, a motherlode awaits.
  70. The Weather Man
    One of those purposefully glum studies in alienation that Hollywood occasionally produces as blue-state specials for disenchanted liberals.
  71. Paradise Now
    As a thriller, it's only fitfully suspenseful, and despite the ticking bomb premise, meanders a good deal in its plot convolutions. As a portrait of the absurdity and humiliation of life under occupation, the story is heartfelt but predictable.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ballets Russes
    Ballets Russes should find a wider audience beyond dance aficionados. Like all good documentaries, the human element is the glory of Ballets Russes.
  73. Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story
    Certainly not a stinker. Yet despite its squeaky-clean appearance, this family flick has a pervasive and decidedly stale aroma.
  74. Shopgirl
    A glum meditation on isolation and romantic malaise.
  75. Stay
    Stay is all dressed up with no place to go, an eye-popping exercise in lavish style unattached to any discernible content.
  76. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
    The movie is pretty damned funny in its insubstantial, gratuitously violent, gratuitously everything way.
  77. Protocols of Zion
    Too often, Levin confuses passion with focus, intensity with clarity, and deflating lies with discovering truths.
  78. Ushpizin
    Ushpizin takes us to a fascinating place, and hands out the sort of brochure that tourists always need but seldom get -- the charming kind, fun to ponder and rewarding to browse.
  79. Domino
    Scott means for his entertainment package to be hip, hysterical fun. But his stylistic embellishments and indiscriminate appetite for sensation crowds his title character right out of the film.
  80. Elizabethtown
    It's obvious now that the cinematic junk routinely released every Friday can be safely categorized as a mere failure. But this alleged comedy is a whole other species entirely. This is a bona fide, absolute, unmitigated fiasco.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Fog
    Most of The Fog will seem drearily perfunctory even to those viewers who don't know Carpenter's version, which itself emulated the elegant gloom of Val Lewton's horror pics of the 1940s.
  82. North Country
    For all North Country's blockbuster elements, the film remains a curiously uninvolving affair.
  83. The Dark Hours
    In classic B-movie style, The Dark Hours was created in a fever, written in two weeks and hurriedly shot in 16 mm (blown into a crisp 35 mm print). Nevertheless, the film provides evidence of talent everywhere.
  84. Good Night, and Good Luck.
    Good Night, and Good Luck may be simplified history, but it's almost consistently well-crafted.
  85. In Her Shoes
    Although much of the bloat can be traced to the script, via the Jennifer Weiner novel, let's not absolve director Curtis Hanson from his fat share of the blame.
  86. Two for the Money
    Falls somewhere on that aesthetic scale between mediocre and flat-out bad.
  87. The Squid and the Whale
    If the kids give the movie its momentum, its fascination comes from a more static source -- the father.
  88. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    The feeling is like a warm homecoming.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Greatest Game Ever Played
    The Greatest Game Ever Played is far too inconsistent to be great, but at least Paxton has made an honourable attempt to treat this piece of sports history with the gravity it deserves.
  90. Into the Blue
    Stockwell takes an especially leaden screenplay, floats the dull thing up from the depths of mediocrity, and makes it cinematically buoyant. Within limits, that is.
  91. Serenity
    After witnessing the wearying parliamentary debates among good and bad senators in recent Star Wars episodes, it's a pleasure to watch a sci-fi movie where more than just the spaceships move quickly.
  92. Capote
    Beyond the eerily evocative impersonation, Hoffman's brilliance lies in not only playing the shrewd puppet master but also revealing that he too comes with strings attached, the most dominant being his consuming need for acclaim.
  93. MirrorMask
    The surreal visuals are relentless, overpowering the narrative much as they do in the frames of comic books (sorry, graphic novels).
  94. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
    Only an actor of Moore's calibre could begin to add a bit of credible flesh to these hallowed bones.
  95. Forty Shades of Blue
    Delicate, intelligent and honest.
  96. Flightplan
    By the final act, involving possibly the most far-fetched scheme since Dr. Evil aimed his death ray at Earth in "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me," the indifference has become completely contagious.
  97. Roll Bounce
    There's the roller-disco music and skating, which isn't so much hot as a hoot.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dear Wendy
    One part satire, two parts allegory, and several parts dreary sermon on the pernicious effects of America's gun culture.
  99. A History of Violence
    From its quiet opening sequence to its silent final shot, everything about A History of Violence is deceptive, and deceptively simple.
  100. Oliver Twist
    So what's surprising here isn't Polanski's choice of material but his utter failure to put any distinctive stamp on it.
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