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. Better Luck Tomorrow
    Like his characters, Lin may be an overachiever and the strain of trying to do too much shows. He merges genres the way Ben juggles extracurricular activities.
  2. Ghosts of the Abyss
    Not just a 3-D novelty to amuse school groups, but also a memorial.
  3. House of 1000 Corpses
    Gosh, what to say about House of 1000 Corpses? That it's about 999 too many, for starters. Then again, in a picture where the body count is the whole point and the only purpose, carping about the math rather misses the mark.
  4. Levity
    A redemption allegory so poker-faced you might forget that redemption is supposed to be a good thing.
  5. Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
    With all due respect to Japanese animation fans and pop-culture enthusiasts, life may be just too short to plunge into the busy world of Cowboy Bebop.
  6. The Man Without a Past
    Kaurismaki is a master at infusing his movies with apparently contradictory qualities. The best of them -- and The Man Without a Past is surely that -- are hard to describe precisely because they seem to exist, to balance precariously, in the tension between opposites.
  7. Phone Booth
    Can't spoil the ending, except to say that it spoils itself.
  8. A Man Apart
    A paint-by-numbers vigilante movie with the usual rogue cop, murdered wife and trail of vengeance.
  9. The Good Thief
    It's a nifty caper flick that also ponders the aesthetic nature of deception -- in other words, a solid work of craft that doubles as a little meditation on art.
  10. The Core
    The only pressing burden in this deep interior world is the question: What in or on Earth is a cast this good doing in a movie this ridiculous?
  11. Raising Victor Vargas
    A grownup departure from the teen-romance norm -- it speaks nothing about passion and volumes about trust.
  12. Stevie
    A painful documentary film, partly because of its subject, partly because of the troubling questions raised by the filmmaker's approach.
  13. Assassination Tango
    Assassination Tango is about one commanding performance, fascinating to watch but not strong enough to redeem the muddled story line on which it hangs.
  14. Basic
    Confused, and confusing.
  15. Head of State
    You can see Rock hedging his bets right from the opening frames.
  16. View from the Top
    View from the Top never gets off the bottom -- comedies don't come much flatter.
  17. Dreamcatcher
    Like nightmares, horror movies pull us down with them. And so the film keeps us in thrall for every one of its 134 minutes.
  18. Boat Trip
    If this rings distant Laurel-and-Hardy, or even Crosby-and-Hope bells, it's on purpose. Gooding's and Sanz's performances are almost a tribute to vaudeville-influenced two-guy comedy.
  19. Piglet's Big Movie
    So it's a pretty faded experience. I suggest you get out the books, which for once can truly be said to be more spectacular than the movie.
  20. Willard
    Perhaps too much energy was spent on being stylish rather than simply low-rent horrifying. The upshot is not very stylish and not very scary.
  21. Spun
    Spun is so hip it hurts.
  22. The Hunted
    Friedkin has huffed and puffed and blown up a single chase sequence into the whole damn movie. You got your hunted, you got your hunter, and away they go. And go and go.
  23. Agent Cody Banks
    Of course, none of the film's geopolitical subterfuge will matter a whit to Agent Cody Banks's audience: adolescent boys in need of a surrogate hero. They will respond enthusiastically to this boisterous, well-carpentered kiddy-flick.
  24. Bend It Like Beckham
    Energetic, eager-to-please culture-clash comedy.
  25. The Safety of Objects
    It's a movie located in an interesting place, but without quite enough self-confidence really to inhabit it.
  26. Tears of the Sun
    The fiction that follows can be safely regarded as much more than a war movie -- hell, this is a pro-war movie. Were it a politician, it would be Donald Rumsfeld.
  27. Nowhere in Africa
    Isn't really a dull film so much as an oddly quaint one that seems to find a comfortable perspective about drastic circumstances.
  28. Laurel Canyon
    Inasmuch as Cholodenko has an agenda in her two movies so far -- what appears to be a lesbian-positive theme of openness to experimentation and its accompanying emotional costs -- she's found a model in McDormand's portrayal of Jane.
  29. Bringing Down the House
    Irresistibly funny in its brightest moments. At other times, this comedy about a black-white culture clash sags until it scrapes bottom.
  30. Irreversible
    An integrated work whose form clearly mirrors its content. Often, looking into that mirror is dreadful; but, often enough, it's also dreadfully revealing.
  31. Ten
    Ten may strain your patience but that's the high-stakes gamble of this provocative project.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Poolhall Junkies
    If the art of a true hustler is, as Joe puts it, "beating a man out of his money and making him like it," Callahan blows it big-time with any mark who shells out to see his film.
  33. Cradle 2 the Grave
    When you pay good money to see an action movie, it's understood that you want it to be action-packed. You do not want it to be action-enhanced or action-flavoured or featuring accents of action.
  34. Lawless Heart
    Gimmickry is death to this sort of artsy endeavour -- it turns a movie with a small budget into a small movie.
  35. Dark Blue
    After a decade of silence, surely Hollywood can do better.
  36. Till Human Voices Wake Us
    Nevertheless, in mid-reverie, there's no denying the pleasure in falling under its little spell -- till human voices wake us, and we frown.
  37. Old School
    Speaking of funny things, director Todd Phillips has been down this path before in "Road Trip." There, toiling in the same lame genre, he actually showed a hint of comic ingenuity. Here, the hint has dwindled to a hoarse whisper.
  38. The Life of David Gale
    Damned if Parker hasn't done it again. An intermittently good filmmaker but a consistently bad polemicist, he may well sway opinion here -- but, oops, not in the hoped-for direction.
  39. Gods and Generals
    General Boredom meets Major Tedium on the Civil War fields of Virginia.
  40. Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    The value of Amandla! is that the film helps the rest of the world understand, both with our ears and minds, where South Africans have come from.
  41. All the Real Girls
    The verdict? Green passes with flying colours -- his is a huge and hugely impressive talent.
  42. Gerry
    Somewhere between profound and ludicrous, kind of like a cross between "Waiting for Godot" and "Dude, Where's My Car?"
    • 38 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Jungle Book 2
    Lame and disrespectful sequel.
  44. Daredevil
    Not woeful, not wonderful, merely watchable.
  45. Shanghai Knights
    Actually a pretty entertaining movie, in a kick-you-in-the-pants kind of way. A relative rarity -- a solid no-brow comedy.
  46. Deliver Us from Eva
    In every way but one, this is just another genre pic on another mundane outing.
  47. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    The picture is actually watchable. What's more, as romance comedies go, it's something of a novelty.
  48. The Guru
    Here is a truly unfunny comedy from Universal Studios, which seems determined to prove that Hollywood can be opportunistic and clueless at the same time.
  49. Lost in La Mancha
    Gilliam himself is a joy to behold. His wit stays sharp even as his fortunes dull, and the conditions that conspire against him only prove the mettle in our man of La Mancha.
  50. Biker Boyz
    The fun of Biker Boyz should be in the racing, and though director Reggie Rock Bythewood throws around a lot of techniques, nothing really ignites.
  51. The Recruit
    Not even Pacino can save it.
  52. Final Destination 2
    This is a miserable sequel to the modestly well-reviewed Final Destination.
  53. Darkness Falls
    God forgive me, but I worship the Bad Dialogue Fairy -- he gets me through these endless nights.
  54. A Guy Thing
    You might believe that a movie comedy requires no visual rhythm, and that entire scenes -- especially those big set-pieces -- benefit greatly from a shooting style devoid of imagination and unremittingly flat. If so, A Guy Thing is surely your thing. Enjoy.
  55. National Security
    Entertaining and well done. Without losing its comic rhythm for a moment, it is also a withering spoof of black victimism and the corrupting effect of racial solidarity on the American legal system.
  56. Kangaroo Jack
    In the life-is-too-short category, file Kangaroo Jack as a sub-Farrelly Brothers, dumb-plus-dumber buddy picture.
  57. City of God
    In God's ghetto, as in so many of the world's forsaken places, warring armies of infants brandish their weapons of self-destruction, while politicians bluster and inspectors sleep.
  58. Crimson Gold
    As in "Taxi Driver," the protagonist is a damaged war veteran, an invisible man who travels about the city and internalizes its contradictions until he explodes.
  59. Just Married
    In the end, a few genuinely funny moments aside, the script is simply too predictable and unvarying to earn the viewer's loyalty.
  60. Love Liza
    In its component parts, then, Love Liza is essentially a battle between opposing clichés.
  61. The Pianist
    Polanski's view of life is like that of Greek tragedy, with the same cold comfort that tragedy implies; from the larger perspective which art gives us, we know even horrors eventually pass.
  62. 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.
  63. Nicholas Nickleby
    You probably have a better chance of stuffing an octopus into a tea cup than capturing one of Dickens's fat novels in a two-hour movie.
  64. The Hours
    This ranks among the highest concentrations of acting talent brought to any screen. But let's spare no praise for David Hare, whose superb script draws heavily on his playwrighting skills.
  65. Catch Me If You Can
    The movie could have used a further dose of the resonance Walken gives it, and a more intellectually adventurous director might have brought the theme close to home.
  66. Pinocchio
    Benigni as a Pinocchio with 5-o'clock shadow and tufts of arm hair poking out from under the sleeves of his puppet costume, it borders on creepy.
  67. The Wild Thornberrys Movie
    Moderately witty children's entertainment.
  68. Morvern Callar
    With little dialogue to assist her -- just the strains of that wonderfully organic music -- she still manages to suggest the internal struggle, and to slowly reveal a fierce toughness that flies in the face of conventional morality.
  69. 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.
  70. Narc
    It's a cop movie that refuses to cop out in the usual way.
  71. Gangs of New York
    While the initial sequence is glorious, the last is a shambles.
  72. Spider
    This is a rare adaptation where the script (by McGrath himself) heads straight for the novel's horrible essence, reproducing it non-verbally and in an even more concentrated form.
  73. Antwone Fisher
    This is the brand of sentimentality that comes with a high concentration of saccharine and every taste of bitterness safely removed.
  74. 25th Hour
    Too bad there's also a final 15 minutes that surely ranks among the worst endings an otherwise good movie has ever received.
  75. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Both a triumph of design and cinematic engineering and, at the same time, long, repetitious and naive.
  76. Maid in Manhattan
    J-Lo, Ralph-Lower, Movie-Subterranean.
  77. The Hot Chick
    For the price of a ticket, and 100 minutes of your time, how many laughs are enough to qualify as just compensation? Will four or five do? Let's be generous and count five.
  78. Evelyn
    Think of it as trope grope. Things are so relatively democratic nowadays that filmmakers have to rummage through the past for a truly shmaltzy story. And they don't come any shmaltzier than this.
  79. About Schmidt
    The movie isn't just about Schmidt as a personality, it's a portrait of his world, and Payne and co-writer Taylor show a rare compassion for the superficially comfortable.
  80. Drumline
    Comes close to collapsing under the weight of drawn-out scenes and an earnest story that piles on minor themes and subplots, but the energy and visual kick of the band numbers saves the day.
  81. Intact
    Shot mostly at night, in high-contrast images, punctuated by rock-video collages, Intacto is nothing if not hip, but its questions are more coffee-shop hypothetical than genuinely profound.
  82. Star Trek: Nemesis
    Once again, perhaps the most impressive effect is Patrick Stewart as Captain Picard, using his Shakespearean training to make long mouthfuls of nonsense sound almost persuasive.
  83. Blackboards
    We've got the trademark elements but not their magical bonding, and the result is a selection of scenes in search of a movie.
  84. Empire
    Empire is just too intent on living up to its imperial name -- colonizing other defenceless movies, plundering their rich natural resources, and leaving us all to feel rather cruelly violated. A postscript: Somebody here -- I'm not saying who -- dies. And still keeps on talking.
  85. Analyze That
    As for De Niro, he seems to have licence to do what he wants here, without much help from the writers.
  86. Adaptation.
    Duelling roles are an actor's dream, and Cage takes full advantage. He and that face of his -- hang-dog homely one minute, vibrantly macho the next -- are perfectly cast. So is Streep as the sophisticated Manhattanite drawn into a steamy realm of Southern discomfort.
  87. Rabbit-Proof Fence
    Not until the final shot does Noyce rise up to the potential of the history: There's a sudden shiver of recognition, that, my God, these people really lived this.
  88. Extreme Ops
    The stunt work is top-notch; the dialogue and drama often food-spittingly funny. I can hardly wait for Extreme Ops II, perhaps set atop a South Sea island volcano, with North Korean agents and parasailing.
  89. Eight Crazy Nights
    Both syrupy and scatological, this is a typical family-dividing Sandler comedy: Parents will hate it but the kids will delight in its rudeness.
  90. Solaris
    That level of acting-without-words demands the likes of a Bruno Ganz or a Klaus Maria Brandauer, not a Clooney. Even when flashing his bare derrière in a sex scene, he isn't revealing nearly enough -- his work is just skin deep.
  91. The Emperor's Club
    Turns a blind eye to the very history it pretends to teach.
  92. Die Another Day
    Every hero needs to be revitalized by a little humiliation, and for at least the first 40 minutes of Die Another Day, Bond's dressing-down seems to do him and the movie franchise a world of good.
  93. Friday After Next
    Dumb and Dumber 'n the hood.
  94. Talk to Her
    Pure cinematic intoxication, a wildly inventive mixture of comedy and melodrama, tastelessness and swooning elegance, bodies with the texture of fresh peaches, and angular faces Picasso would have loved.
  95. The Quiet American
    The result is a rarity on the modern screen -- a film with more brains than heart.
  96. Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    A drama that's often insightful and occasionally powerful but is still, at heart, a piece of television and not a work of film.
  97. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    There's a missing element whose absence, forgive me, I can't help but lament. This is a movie about magic that ultimately lacks the magic of movies."
  98. The Way Home
    If you ever doubted the power and scope of silent film, watch The Way Home. The narrative arc is as broad as any chattering feature, the emotional depth is greater than most, and it's all achieved with virtually no dialogue.
  99. Half Past Dead
    A shoot-'em-up for cynical times. Its only asset is Seagal himself, and frankly, he's is getting a bit past it.
  100. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    The Motown musicians today are in their 60s and 70s but they remain inspiringly colourful, funny in their stories and assured in their musicianship.
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