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. Under solen
    Sugary but well-acted little emotional button-presser.
  2. How to Lose Friends & Alienate People
    Unfortunately, both Bridges and Anderson are only intermittently in the movie. And when they're not around, How to Lose Friends loses its satirical edge, becoming an alarmingly safe, almost corny romantic comedy.
  3. Sunshine Cleaning
    It's like an elevated form of sitcom acting, which may be inevitable because this movie, and all its quirky/heartfelt kin, are an elevated version of the sitcom itself.
  4. Antichrist
    The trouble is that Antichrist feels progressively symptomatic of a director losing heart.
  5. Feast of Love
    The movie begins to feel more like a buffet of contrivance than a feast of love.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zorro: The Gay Blade
    The real lesson of Zorro the Gay Blade is that Melvin Simon Production had a huge budget to play with - and a lonely little pun to spend it on. [18 July 1981]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  7. 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.
  8. Heartburn
    The script, based by Ephron herself on her own tua culpa memoir of her marriage, is spread wide, but the film never goes deeper into its subject - estrangement and adultery - than a bent dipstick. Heartburn is gentrified Neil Simon. [25 July 1986, p.D1]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Pure Luck
    Gag is short-lived in predictable plot In this empty confection. Martin Short reprises every character he's ever played, while Danny Glover's detective is straight out of Lethal Weapon. [09 Aug 1991]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  10. Big Trouble
    A feature that suffers from the rarity of its wit yet benefits from the briskness of its pace.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Chasing Mavericks
    I don't know if you have to be a surfer to fully appreciate Chasing Mavericks, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.
  12. History of the World: Part I
    Mel Brooks, the writer, director and producer of History of the World, is an ecologically sound filmmaker, a staunch adherent of recycling. If you laugh the second or third time, you defend the repetition as a variation on a theme; if you don't laugh, the charges are self-plagiarism and lack of imagination. [13 June 1981]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Delivery Man
    The director’s avoidance of anything resembling innovative framing or editing will probably pay off when Delivery Man eventually airs on television, where the flimsiness of its jokes and “serious” moments alike should feel less conspicuous.
  14. Triple 9
    Though compelling in the acting and cinematography, Triple 9’s plot is by the numbers and about nothing.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Afflicted
    The gradual ramping up of both the camera calisthenics and the gore quotient suggests a movie that’s been very deliberately paced, but that doesn’t mean that Afflicted really gets anywhere, except back to the very basics its state-of-the-art presentation is supposed to transcend.
  16. Rosewood
    Watching this, we should feel an immense amount, but don't, and somehow, decades after this horrible event, that void only seems to compound the tragedy.
  17. 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.
  18. The Eye of the Storm
    For all the talent involved, The Eye of the Storm is an incident-stuffed but lacklustre affair – a case of lots of sturm, but not enough drang – that reaches for a satiric sting and emotional depth it never achieves.
  19. The In-Laws
    In The In-Laws, there is nothing to keep Alan Arkin and Peter Falk from becoming one of the most enchanting comedy teams in movies - nothing except direction, script and cinematography. [20 Jun 1979]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  20. Gods of Egypt
    It’s all quest, flash and high action.
  21. Over the Top
    When it gets right down to the climactic business at hand and arm, even the imposing skills of a Golan are put to a rigorous test. For, despite its obvious delights, armwrestling just can't compare to 10 bloody rounds from a pair of vigorous maulers or a brace of chattering machine-guns. [17 Feb 1987]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  22. The Other Side
    In the end, the power of Minervini’s pseudo-fiction gives way to a much blander version of pseudo-reality.
  23. White Noise
    But Keaton is a mistake. He's an actor with an innate sense of irony firmly grounded in the here and now. Even as Batman, skepticism was his forte; true belief falls way outside his range.
  24. Now You See Me
    There’s a fine line sometimes, as "This is Spinal Tap" reminded us, between stupid and clever. Now You See Me wobbles along that tightrope for much of its running time.
  25. Deuces Wild
    Brainless, but enjoyably over-the-top, the retro gang melodrama, Deuces Wild represents fifties teen-gang machismo in a way that borders on rough-trade homo-eroticism.
  26. Beyond the Sea
    Vanity: the surest road to mediocrity.
  27. Bean
    Bean falls well short of a work of genius. Indeed, the unbearable slightness of Bean feels like nothing so much as a betrayal of the television series on which it is based.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man
    The overall mood of Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man may be one of good-natured idiocy, but it's hard to fault a movie for being stupid when stupidity is its one and only raison d'etre. [23 Aug 1991]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  29. Mortal Thoughts
    Despite the efforts of the talented director, Alan Rudolph (The Moderns, Choose Me), and his experienced cast, Mortal Thoughts is a formulaic TV-sized feature conceived to cash in, and put a feminist spin on, some of the emotions stirred up by Fatal Attraction; unfortunately, it seldom gets intense enough to stir up any emotion. [19 Apr 1991]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  30. The Woman on the 6th Floor
    A sporadically amusing, occasionally off-putting French farce.
  31. 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.
  32. Juggernaut
    There are some small-time twists in this small-time thriller and, naturally, McHattie does solid work as one of the more slippery characters Saxon encounters in his quest for justice, but DiMarco just can't sustain enough tension or drama to power the film through a plodding 105 minutes.
  33. Friday the 13th
    Despite an evident appetite for mayhem, however, Bay is not the right guy to produce slasher movies. Horror requires intimacy.
  34. Goon
    What a disappointment.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Afternoon of a Faun: Tanaquil Le Clercq
    Watching De Clercq dance is not only what Nancy Buirski’s uneven documentary does to best effect, it helps you understand the movie’s otherwise restrictive emphasis on the men who became obsessed by her, primarily her discoverer and husband George Balanchine and the dancer/choreographer Jerome Robbins.
  36. The Adventures of Tintin
    Hergé was the pioneer of an even-handed style of cartooning with solid lines and no shading that became known as ligne claire, but there is a decided lack of clear lines in this erratic movie adaptation of his work.
  37. The Incredible Hulk
    Playing characters familiar to the fans, we have William Hurt as a blustering general, Tim Blake Nelson as a kooky scientist and Tim Roth as an evil soldier who morphs into a monster. All of them seem to be directing themselves.
  38. A Wrinkle in Time
    This pretty movie feels convenient rather than meaningful.
  39. 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.
  40. The Notebook
    The Notebook is meant to be a romantic weepy, and you will shed tears - but only from the consistent and exhausting effort of trying to control your gag reflex. Even a body that welcomes a sugar fix will repel a sugar invasion.
  41. The Expendables 2
    Of course, the result is forgettable, but at least it's efficiently and breezily forgettable. What's more, there are laughs too and here's the best part – one or two of them are actually intentional.
  42. K-19: The Widowmaker
    The movie becomes an American salute to military patriotism, anybody's military patriotism. Think of it as "A Few Good Reds."
  43. S1m0ne
    If this is satire, it's the smug and self-congratulatory kind that lets the audience completely off the hook. Effective satire, the Swiftian brand, seduces us first and then implicates us in the seduction -- we become a target too. But this stuff never gets past the initial step -- it's toothless, as innocuous as the puffery it pretends to skewer.
  44. A Perfect Day
    A Perfect Day, the first English-language feature from the Spanish director Fernando Leon de Aranoa, is in many ways a remarkable film: a taut, darkly comic drama about the dilemmas of international intervention in civil war, all of it neatly symbolized by one elusive length of rope. It is also, sadly, a film much marred by its sexism.
  45. Opus
    Unfortunately, Opus isn’t able to keep up the tension of its cult-horror mystery, speeding through its reveals with a surprising laziness that feels counter to the care it initially took in building out its story.
  46. Shutter Island
    Was it worth slogging through the nearly two hours of damned muddle to get to those last affecting moments? Not often in movies is the destination so much better than the journey.
  47. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    As anodyne as it is, Timothy Green may represent the last gasp of a genre, the live-action family fable, that has been an entertainment staple for a couple of generations of moviegoers.
  48. Identity
    Identity opens with its mind nicely intact, suffers a major crisis about 30 minutes in, then bad turns to worse.
  49. Max
    The whole film occupies pretty much the same continuuum -- glimmers of intelligence followed by moments of outright hysteria punctuated by bouts of sheer haplessness.
  50. Return to Oz
    Dorothy's friends are as weird as her enemies, which is faithful to the original Oz books but turns out not to be a virtue on film, where the eerie has a tendency to remain eerie no matter how often we're told it's not. [22 Jun 1985, p.E3]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  51. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    The difficulty is that Fogel hasn’t got enough plot here to keep things going at this smart pace. Even by the standards of a spy comedy, The Spy Who Dumped Me’s wafer-thin storyline makes precious little sense.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Awakening
    There is a rich movie to be made about this culture of fake seers and gullible marks, but it isn't The Awakening, a dull British import that never lives up to the pretensions of its period setting.
  53. Ella McCay
    Ella McCay, the movie, feels like we’re being bear hugged by a lovable, slightly boozy old grand-uncle who genuinely hopes to find common ground with a new generation, but also can’t help being a little patronizing.
  54. Dolores Claiborne
    Although director Taylor Hackford ("An Officer and a Gentleman") handles the usually cumbersome flashbacks with impressive delicacy, he can't stop the narrative from sinking under its own melodramatic weight.
  55. Dirty Girl
    Dirty Girl isn't. Sorry, but it's just faux grime, a thin layer of bad behaviour that wipes clean with a two-ply tissue to reveal the real movie beneath – all shiny sentimentality.
  56. The Village
    Not only is The Village not credible, its shallowness makes it dislikable, a shopworn gothic plot focusing on stereotypical characters with disabilities, with no ambitions beyond playing a simple-minded audience head game.
  57. Hey Arnold! The Movie
    The updated Dickensian sensibility of writer Craig Bartlett's story is appealing.
  58. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    It goes without saying that the American public’s relationship to the NSA has changed dramatically since the first xXx movie in 2002 – a sea change that this film seeks to play up – but the script, written by F. Scott Frazier, doesn’t quite know what to do with its critique of the NSA’s unchecked power.
  59. Tooth Fairy
    Sorry to disappoint anyone who saw the cast list of this film and presumed Julie Andrews was going to play the horrific serial killer Tooth Fairy from the Hannibal Lecter movies.
  60. The Lion King
    It’s an entertaining and thrilling tale, if you’ve never seen it before. But you have.
  61. Epic
    There’s a worrisome failure of imagination at work in the title of this movie. It’s actually hard to imagine a more generic title. But at least it’s succinct. It rolls off the tongue much better than Movie That Feels Not So Much Inspired As Engineered According to Conventional Animated Kids’ Genre Requirements.
  62. Leave It to Beaver
    All in all, the new movie version of Leave It To Beaver is faithful to the genial instructive spirit of the TV show, as well as to a recurring theme, Ward's constant adjustments to the Beav's underachieving ways. [22 Aug 1997, p.C5]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  63. A Life Less Ordinary
    Here, one begins to suspect that the major impediment is the sensibility of the filmmakers themselves. They don't believe in this stuff, in its unavoidable sentimentality, and that attitude filters down to a perplexed cast.
  64. Dirty Work
    There's an audience for this sort of rude and rough comedy, though it might consist mostly of guys who wear raincoats a lot and prefer their women on glossy paper with staples. [13 Jun 1998, p.C3]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  65. Trust the Man
    A botched adult romantic comedy that strands its leading player, and its audience, in a wearying, sitcom-slight battle of the sexes.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Semi-Tough
    Although Ritchie has blown Semi-Tough as a film, many individual moments are very funny and worthy of praise. [18 Nov 1977]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  67. The Founder
    As limp and cold as The Founder is as a movie, it contains one of the finest Keaton performances of his entire career, maybe the one he’s been working his whole life toward.
  68. The Last Five Years
    This bare-bones adaptation is more of a sop to the musical’s fans than a fully imagined movie musical.
  69. Seed of Chucky
    This movie is about the opposite of political correctness. It's about rooting for the bad guy and the black ending, and shouting at the screen whenever you feel like it. If you like that sort of thing, go see it. If you don't, then don't.
  70. Take the Lead
    The whole thing has all the spontaneity of high-school morning announcements.
  71. The Sentinel
    A contrived and tepid thriller that insists on wanting to interest us in its main plot -- the usual nefarious plan to assassinate the leader of the free world.
  72. Amelia
    Amelia is the Mack truck of flight. Heavy and lumbering, it delivers the goods, but there's not an ounce of magic in the thing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Karate Kid Part II
    Although 18 minutes shorter than the 126-minute original, this picture drags unashamedly, and its conflicts are repeated so predictably that the action becomes a kind of water torture. [24 June 1986]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  74. The Avengers
    Expected too is the result: a kind of sterile opulence or, if you prefer, a magnificent emptiness.
  75. House at the End of the Street
    I doubt that Lawrence is conscious of this process. Nevertheless, stuck in a dull commercial feature, a very good actor happens upon a new solution to an age-old problem: She improves the script by transcending it, and steals the picture by abandoning it.
  76. 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.
  77. Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
    All dull thunder without a spark of illumination.
  78. Kill the Irishman
    A big, bloated, though frequently engaging gangster movie, Kill the Irishman should properly be viewed late night on TV, flipping back and forth between the film, David Letterman and a west-coast ball game.
  79. Mission: Impossible II
    In keeping with the purloining spirit of sequeldom, Woo plunders his own past. [24 May 2000, p.R1]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  80. The Smurfs
    Sitcom star Harris puts his smart-aleck chops to good use as Patrick Winslow.
  81. Two Weeks Notice
    Lawrence isn't nearly as adept at romantic comedy as his stars. His rushed jokes and insensitivity to tone are yet more sad reminders that the genre is an endangered species not because we lack new Hepburns and Cary Grants, but because there are no more George Cukors.
  82. Holy Man
    Holy Man sure isn't raucous; instead, in the main, it's just quietly unamusing.
  83. The Skeleton Key
    A fine, solid cast and fully exploited settings cannot make up for the by-the-numbers screenplay, which is filled with all-too-convenient plot points.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Words
    The Words suggests that a story, whether true or not, can help get us through, if we believe it enough. Though this film can't quite pull it off, a good enough thief can get away with it.
  85. The Leisure Seeker
    Sometimes an outsider’s perspective is a breath of fresh air. In this one, you feel the director holding his nose.
  86. The Elephant Man
    In David Lynch's film, the Elephant Man has become a drooling Latex monster. There is nothing wrong with Hurt's performance - it is quite moving - but there is a great deal wrong with a movie that adds insult to injury by unconscionably holding back the revelation of the make-up. [04 Oct 1980]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  87. An Unfinished Life
    By the conclusion, the movie turns into the ursine answer to "Free Willy," veering dangerously close to New Age parody: Free your inner bear -- and begin to heal from the last time you got mauled.
  88. The Ghost Writer
    The result is a political thriller refreshingly long on grown-up dialogue yet lamentably shy on, well, thrills. This chatty thing does go on.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Life and Nothing More
    The acting is strong, but the uneven pacing means there is so much to absorb in the end, that it’s impossible to discern.
  90. Creed
    For the first time in the series, Stallone did not write the script, yet director Ryan Coogler and his co-writer Aaron Covington aren’t exactly brimming over with fresh ideas: Worn thin with repetition, the sentimental old premise muffles suspense and dampens emotion.
  91. The Iron Lady
    The Iron Lady is a performance in search of a film.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
    Adds more cosmic cliff-hangers than it resolves, and it's not as satisfying as the original. A star war can be an exhausting bit of business, especially when, in the end, it turns out to be something of a cheat.
  93. The Book of Eli
    So we're back on "The Road ," but this time Eli's coming – better hide your heart and, while you're at it, put your brain on hold, the easier to enjoy the action-filled sermon to come.
  94. Life of the Party
    A truly gifted comedic actress, McCarthy is wasting her talents with this vanilla-flavoured story.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Milton's Secret
    Based on the picture book co-authored by Power of Now superstar Eckhart Tolle, Milton’s Secret carries a powerful and important message, but the film feels ham-fisted, clichéd and overearnest at times, especially for adult viewers.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mirrors
    An occasionally inventive but ultimately plodding horror film.
  97. Sergio
    Wagner Moura (Narcos’s Pablo Escobar himself) does what he can as the sturdy Sergio, and the actor has strong, near-instant chemistry with a love interest played by Ana de Armas.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Inkheart
    This is a stunning-looking film with a dark romantic cloud (quite literally) hanging over its every shot.
  99. Project Power
    Most of the film’s action happens at night, so we really don’t get a good look at the colourful city. Why hire New Orleans as a location if you’re not going to show it off?
  100. The Sum of All Fears
    How's this for frightening: The casting of the lightweight Ben Affleck as a CIA agent who holds the fate of the entire world in his pretty-boy hands. Can't deny it, that got my heart pumping like a bunny.
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