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. Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen
    I confess to a deep uncertainty about whether this can be rightly called a movie. A bunch of scenes, maybe... I confess to a cynical belief that Lola isn't actually a role but just a succession of costume changes.
  2. EuroTrip
    But Eurotrip has no provocative central characters, an absolute must for a gross-out teen comedy. As their names suggest, Scott, Coop, Jenny and Jamie are wusses. "Animal House"'s Bluto Blutarsky would've swallowed them whole without belching.
  3. Welcome to Mooseport
    Instead of a madcap farce, the movie grinds along into a series of laboured comic bits.
  4. 50 First Dates
    At each stage of the romance, the movie digresses with a series of swing-and-miss gags, often with an abusive twist.
  5. Osama
    Obviously, this is no easy sell, but give writer-director Siddiq Barmak full credit for portraying his country's social catastrophe with restraint, concision and some real beauty.
  6. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    Think of it as "Cheers" without the beer, or "Friends'" Central Perk with razors and sharper dialogue.
  7. Catch That Kid
    The children are engaging yet the script and direction are not, which leaves the thing to get all bogged down in its own derivative mechanics.
  8. Miracle
    The climax, a 20-minute dramatization of the crucial contest, lacks both suspense and poetry -- essentially, we're left to watch a clumsy recreation of a game whose outcome we already know. That's a sort of resurrection, I suppose, but miraculous it assuredly ain't.
  9. The Dreamers
    Lives down to its title -- what an odd and gauzy reverie this is, a strangely muted picture that unfolds at a distinct remove from the reality around it.
  10. The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
    The Lost Skeleton also reminds you that real filmmaking -- the illusion of one event following another -- is actually a skill.
  11. The Return
    Oh, it's The Return, all right. To any masochist who's been pining for all those clichéd tropes associated with Russian cinema -- ponderous pacing and arcane symbolism shot through a lens darkly -- this will seem a welcome blast from the past.
  12. The Perfect Score
    Oh, it's perfect all right. In fact, The Perfect Score is a flawless example of the classic January movie release -- the kind of studio picture that even the studio loathes, and so consigns to the dumping ground of the year's frosty first month.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    You Got Served
    There ain't much to You Got Served, but at least this teensploitation flick is bookended by two frenzied sequences that fully exploit the visual potential of street dancing.
  14. The Big Bounce
    Breezy, sleazy and a little bit wheezy, The Big Bounce combines a short running time, a portrait of island-life corruption, and a retro surf-and-scam plot. Throw in a vintage, funky-soul soundtrack and you have the ingredients of ever so many bad television shows.
  15. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    Too silly to be taken seriously, it's not silly enough to overcome skepticism.
  16. Touching the Void
    It's also mysterious in fresh ways. Like Hillary, Yates and Simpson climbed the mountain because it was there -- but what strange deity sent down a Boney M song to help Joe Simpson get home?
  17. The Butterfly Effect
    Somewhere, back in the mists of time, co-writers Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber must have flapped their gums in the fond hope of crafting a script; today, that whisper of hot air has swollen into a feature flick that rains down upon us a veritable torrent of inane plot.
  18. Along Came Polly
    [Hoffman] gives gross-out comedy a whole new depth.
  19. Teacher's Pet
    The problem here isn't how the figures look; rather, it's what they do and say -- the story is lame and the dialogue no better.
  20. Torque
    A good stupid movie: an energetic send-up of a discredited genre that does for motorcycle movies, say, what Jonathan Demme's debut, the 1974 drive-in classic, "Caged Heat," did for chicks-in-prison flicks.
  21. Chasing Liberty
    It can be accurately described as a loud soundtrack occasionally punctuated by the faint vestige of a plot. Or as a lush travelogue that sometimes gives way to sporadic bursts of chirping dialogue.
  22. My Baby's Daddy
    The movie is sentimental and reliant on bodily-function humour, but it also has a generous spirit, a multicultural rainbow of characters, and a social message about approaching fatherhood responsibly.
  23. Japanese Story
    The story in Japanese Story grabs you precisely because it's so wonderfully hard to define.
  24. Cheaper by the Dozen
    The same studio has aimed a remake at the same family market. Translation: The once-modest piece has been redesigned as a vehicle (a lumbering SUV) for Steve Martin, stripped of any vestigial charm, and then thrown into neutral, where its manic engine does nothing but roar loudly and pointlessly for the duration.
  25. Cold Mountain
    All the signs pointed to a major movie achievement...And it does -- sometimes, and dazzlingly so. But the dazzle doesn't add up to the sustained act of brilliance I'd been expecting.
  26. Paycheck
    Slick and slight.
  27. Peter Pan
    Lush, loud and sparkling, and not nearly as innocent as you might imagine.
  28. The Company
    A love letter to performers who put their egos and bodies on the line.
  29. Monster
    As angry, deluded, vulnerable and confused as Aileen is, the character remains an enigma. Apart from serving as an opportunity for Theron's emotionally deep-dredging performance, the movie doesn't know why it exists.
  30. Mona Lisa Smile
    First things first: As one of my wise editors noted, no person who can flash as many teeth as Julia Roberts should ever star in a movie called Mona Lisa Smile.
  31. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    The S in Robert S. McNamara stands for Strange, which is an unusual middle name and perhaps an apt description of the man at the centre of documentary filmmaker Errol Morris's gripping character study, The Fog of War.
  32. House of Sand and Fog
    There is both a sense of disappointment and relief when House of Sand and Fog crosses over into improbability, when the viewer can sit back, breathe easy again. All this trouble over the failure to open an envelope.
  33. Calendar Girls
    Both Mirren and Walters are successfully cast against type.
  34. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    The [final] battle is vast, and undoubtedly required thousands of hours of matching puppetry, robotics and computer code, but it is not without tedium.
  35. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    It isn't an exciting work of art so much as a contemplative reverie on the nature of art -- and what's wrong with a smart essay that unfolds like a sweet dream?
  36. The Statement
    Never comes together as a persuasive whole. Instead of moral complexity, we get an overfamiliar pursuit tale and investigation story. Worse, the movie fails the first test of a thriller: It lacks any significant suspense.
  37. Love Don't Cost a Thing
    The music, at least, is welcome.
  38. Something's Gotta Give
    If the lines in the script were as keenly etched as the ones in her face, Keaton would have had something to work with. Instead, during an especially lovelorn sequence, she's asked to indulge in a crying montage so painfully extended that it has us in tears too -- weeping from embarrassment for her.
  39. Stuck on You
    There's a generosity of spirit to Stuck on You that is a pleasure, even when the movie is slipshod.
  40. Big Fish
    The problem is, there's just not enough Burton in Big Fish.
  41. Honey
    The last thing I want is this: Yet another instance of black culture diluting itself by imitating a white model. Hell, Honey is hip-hop by way of Andy Hardy.
  42. The Last Samurai
    Grandly overblown and deeply cornball.
  43. Monsieur Ibrahim
    Among the lessons that Monsieur Ibrahim conveys to Moses, and the most appealing aspect of the film, is to delight in sensual pleasure.
  44. In America
    In the end, is In America slight in its sentimentality and manipulative in its moral? Sure, but that's the job of any fable or myth.
  45. The Triplets of Belleville
    Bizarre, indeed.
  46. Bad Santa
    Perhaps for Zwigoff, directing someone else's script, this was just a job of work. If not, the talent who made "Crumb" and "Ghost World "has now made his first movie mistake.
  47. The Haunted Mansion
    Can't have an American Thanksgiving without a turkey.
  48. Timeline
    Plays out like a 1950s B-movie with a fat special-effects budget. Brain-numbing dialogue, incoherent action and glaring improbabilities aside, it's a bearable combination of sci-fi paranoia and historical fantasy that drags modern viewers, and the robotic hero of "The Fast and the Furious" movies, Paul Walker, back to the centre of the Hundred Years War.
  49. The Cooler
    It's a comedy, it's a romance, it's a gangster flick. The Cooler is all of that and much, much less. This is a movie without a compass, switching pace and direction as haphazardly as a caffeinated SUV driver on a cellphone.
  50. 21 Grams
    One of the most original, and certainly among the best-acted films this year, 21 Grams focuses on people on the verge of dying, having survived death or grasping at the slender threads of new lives.
  51. The Cat in the Hat
    A semi-intriguing abomination, the movie The Cat in the Hat takes a piece of classic childhood Americana and turns it into something garish, dumb, ugly and senseless.
  52. Gothika
    There must be something about the thriller/horror genre that attracts writers with exactly the same dysfunctional tendencies: They're all great at the foreplay but keep on messing up the climax.
  53. The Barbarian Invasions
    As a film about intellectuals, The Barbarian Invasions can sometimes seem maddeningly scattered and contradictory.
  54. The Missing
    It might better be titled The Awkward.
  55. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    In this journey, [Crowe] wears the uniform, the accent and the derring-do with consummate panache. Have him strike a muscular pose on the ship's prow, which Weir does more than once, and the manly sight puts that wussy DiCaprio to titanic shame.
  56. Tupac: Resurrection
    It borders on deification. Yet Tupac: Resurrection is still a strong film, with some genuinely revealing insights into the life of its charismatic and paradoxical subject.
  57. Hukkle
    Unclassifiable and wildly original, it is almost wordless but teeming with sound.
  58. My Architect
    A twofold story of heroic achievements and personal failings.
  59. Elf
    Elf is jolly but could have been jollier, funny but could have been funnier, charming but ... well, point made.
  60. Love Actually
    Overall, it pushes its "love is good" message with such insistence, so many cheery pop tunes, airport hugs, coincidences and teary smiles, that it feels like one long commercial. Surely love is a desirable enough commodity that it doesn't require such a hard sell.
  61. Hidden in Plain Sight
    The producers of Hidden in Plain Sight decided that they couldn't deal with Sept. 11 in the film without losing focus on its principal subject. The result is that the film stands as a testimonial to the world as it existed before that date, a world very different from the one we now live in.
  62. The Matrix Revolutions
    Mostly feels as hackneyed as the first film felt fresh. It's a loud, puffed-up exercise in computer-generated heroics and battles that follows a pattern.
  63. Shattered Glass
    The makers of Shattered Glass ignore this obvious give-and-take reality, and substitute the hoary myth that, save for the odd lying devil, the free press is a bastion of the gospel truth. Even here, then, the facts get shaped to fit the theme. Ironically, had they not, it would have made for a helluva better story.
  64. Beyond Borders
    The mould for all these stories of hot lust and burning cities, creamy-skinned rich girls and their bitter lovers is that grand and grotesque cinema monument, was "Gone With the Wind." You can't go there again and you shouldn't want to.
  65. Radio
    A feel-good flick that doesn't make you feel too bad -- in this genre, that almost qualifies as a ringing endorsement.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Scary Movie 3
    The decision to overhaul the Scary Movie franchise by sending up such non-horror titles as "8 Mile" and "The Matrix Reloaded" also pays dividends.
  67. Brother Bear
    The oddest movie to come out of Disney since Herbie ran out of gas in Monte Carlo, Brother Bear is a cartoon about a boy who becomes a man by learning how to be a bear.
  68. Elephant
    Is it, the debate asks, a truly substantial work or just a stylish cop-out? Well, for once, I'm voting with the French.
  69. The Singing Detective
    At one point, Downey's character is asked, "What are you gonna do with all this rage, this hate?" and he snaps back, "I'll probably just write serious literature." On TV, where the material seemed both serious and literate, that bit of black humour felt prophetic. On film, it's just a good joke.
  70. In the Cut
    More ambitious, but also much harder to swallow than the average Hollywood hack effort, In the Cut is a muddle of thriller and art-house phantasmagoria.
  71. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    Gruesome enough; what it lacks is a distinctive revolting personality of its own.
  72. Runaway Jury
    Does not disappoint expectations: This is not a case of dumbing down literature; it's mediocrity aimed for and successfully achieved.
  73. Pieces of April
    The restraint and wit Hedges and his cast display in putting together Pieces of April pay off in the film's brightly organized, deeply satisfying conclusion.
  74. Sylvia
    Sylvia the movie competently shows us how; but, as always, it's Sylvia the writer who brilliantly tells us why -- then, now and tomorrow, her foreboding words are her finest legacy.
  75. Veronica Guerin
    Speaking of that deadly finale, it's easily the best part of the picture. Beautifully edited, shot in fluid slow-motion, scored to a traditional Irish ballad crooned in a child's tremulous voice, the violence of the climax is anthemic. The whole sequence is undeniably moving.
  76. Good Boy!
    In the right hands, Good Boy! might have been a ripe bit of mischief. But except for an endless drum roll of fart jokes, what we get is stuffy liberal humanism that would bore the Oshkoshes off Al Gore's littlest nieces and nephews.
  77. Intolerable Cruelty
    Mostly, it's a Coen brothers movie so slick, so careful in rationing its darkly perverse and personal elements, that it seems suspiciously sweet. Intolerable Cruelty feels like the Coens' peculiar new way of being cynical, by pretending they're not.
  78. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    Simultaneously a spectacular act of movie-making and a slight movie. Or is that impossible: When the means are so gloriously abundant, can the end ever be merely trivial?
  79. House of the Dead
    Somewhere between cartoonishly bad for comic effect and bad because the filmmakers didn't really give a damn, The House of the Dead is, at least, unpretentiously dumb.
  80. Dopamine
    A determined romantic comedy with a theme, and damned if it won't see it through.
  81. Small Voices
    Features an excellent cast, in particular the child actors. These elements, as well as the director's light unsentimental touch, make the struggles and triumphs in Small Voices ring truthful.
  82. Mystic River
    The acting throughout is exceptional, rooted in observed realism, but suggestive of more mythical agents at work through the lives of human beings.
  83. Bus 174
    Riveting and courageous documentary.
  84. The Event
    It's a movie about a nice guy with a lot of friends who dies. It's not really about the wider tragedy the film aspires to represent.
  85. Out of Time
    Out of Time is severely out of whack, and the problem isn't hard to locate: It's all that flab in the thriller. It's a suspense flick so pillowy soft that the star gets bumped from the centre of the frame and the comic relief sneaks in to swipe the picture.
  86. School of Rock
    A picture with pop's delicious energy yet none of its attendant risk, a flick that no one will love but everyone will like.
  87. The Station Agent
    The movie's main attraction isn't hard to find. It's essentially a character study, but one where the nature of the study is as unique as the stature of the character.
  88. Wonderland
    The main interest here is the acting, which is, by turns, entertaining or just entertainingly bad, with lots of grungy seriousness and Method-trained twitching, but also some moments of real gusto.
  89. Bollywood/Hollywood
    Fabulous idea/faulty execution is the review.
  90. Duplex
    Not terribly funny. When it does strain for humour, it opts for Farrelly brothers-style gross-outs -- vomit and chewed food and blocked drains -- which makes the movie itself seem like some kind of undigested expulsion rather than a well thought-out idea.
  91. The Rundown
    An amiable action-comedy, amiable enough that the laughs come in a steady drizzle if not a torrent, and that the action is something blissfully less than the usual full-out assault on our battered senses.
  92. Under the Tuscan Sun
    While both the scenery and star Diane Lane are highly watchable, the movie is pure froth, a plate-sized helping of zabaglione.
  93. My Life Without Me
    There are a thousand ways you can imagine My Life Without Me going gruesomely wrong but, somehow, it doesn't.
  94. Anything Else
    Biggs, in particular, seems positively frozen by his imitative efforts -- less Woody than wooden. Ricci is a bit looser, and has the added advantage of hiding behind those saucer-eyes.
  95. Cold Creek Manor
    The most disturbing aspect of Cold Creek Manor -- a predictable, disjointed "Cape Fear" knockoff -- is that a script this disjointed and unoriginal could actually get the Hollywood green light.
  96. The Fighting Temptations
    Gospel music not only saves Darrin's plastic yuppie soul -- Praise the Lord -- it also gives an otherwise wasted hour and a half some warmth and buoyancy.
  97. Secondhand Lions
    One of those headed-for-cable oddities that must have sounded like a good idea at the time.
  98. Underworld
    All of this is accomplished with buckets of blood, but almost no sense of flesh: It's hard to recall a more sexless vampire flick.
  99. Casa de los babys
    John Sayles's heartrending new film is a many-splendoured thing.
  100. In This World
    Always well-meaning, not always well-executed, In This World ends by suffocating us in its good intentions.
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