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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    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Crime of Padre Amaro
    How does it all play up here in colder and more secular climes? In a word -- melodramatically.
  2. 8 Mile
    Some movies, a very few, possess the purity of myth, and they don't have to be great to be greatly important. "The Wild One" is an example; "Saturday Night Fever" is another. Now add 8 Mile to that short list.
  3. Far From Heaven
    For all its accomplishments, Far from Heaven remains hermetic, an elegant exercise in deadpan irony. What does the movie ultimately mean? Art, we're told, should not mean, but be -- but Haynes's cinematic essays are designed to provoke commentary.
  4. Femme Fatale
    Even if it's accepted simply as glitter-sprayed trash, sophomorically plotted and incompetently acted, Femme Fatale is a uniquely De Palma kind of effluence, an exercise in auteur self-parody.
  5. Treasure Planet
    This concoction, so bizarre to the adult mind, is actually a charming triumph where its intended under-12 audience is concerned.
  6. The Santa Clause 2
    Frankly, if I were Mrs. Claus, I might be looking for Santa Clause 3, outlining the grounds for annulment.
  7. I Spy
    The missing ingredient, of course, is script.
  8. Roger Dodger
    An unusually smartly written and performed American independent film.
  9. The Truth About Charlie
    With a multiracial cast, an international spy-caper flick with "Mission Impossible" and John Woo overtones, and a series of comic turns, fantasy sequences and sly humour, it should be a fresh delight. Unfortunately, it's not.
  10. Frida
    Visually, this movie is exquisite. Narratively, well, that's a more banal story.
  11. Ghost Ship
    Pretty much what you'd expect -- just another haunted house that happens to float.
  12. Jackass: The Movie
    Essentially a slapstick movie with no plot or -- as my boyfriend called it after recovering from 1½ hours of side-splitting laughter -- "the ultimate big-screen TV experience."
  13. All or Nothing
    Everything you've come to expect, and cherish, in a Mike Leigh movie.
  14. Derrida
    The picture's charm lies in the continuing by-play between the filmmakers and their subject, with each side doing its best to deconstruct the other.
  15. Abandon
    Don't abandon Abandon. In the movies' long weekly line-up, it stands apart -- innocent of banality, and guilty of nothing more damning than intelligent effort that falls a tad short.
  16. The Grey Zone
    When the larger question cannot be answered, the lesser one -- "What would you have done?" -- seems beside the point.
  17. Formula 51
    A formula flick. And the formula is not 51 times more entertaining than usual. Maybe 1.5, at best.
  18. Naqoyqatsi
    Feels like a bloated mass of data without much coherence.
  19. The Ring
    It's a workmanlike, passably engrossing horror flick that copies well from the Japanese original. When it's good, it's not original, and when it's original, it's not so good.
  20. Auto Focus
    When the bloody climax comes, we look on apathetically, as desensitized to the violence as a pornographer is to sex.
  21. Fidel
    Estela Bravo's film Fidel, The Untold Story has the kitsch appeal of a farm implement on a restaurant wall, or an Andy Warhol Mao poster: Interesting, but not for its original purpose.
  22. Brown Sugar
    Exist as extended videos for the accompanying soul and rap soundtrack.
  23. The Rules of Attraction
    Some movies just bring out your inner Matlock: a desire to grab young punks by the lapels, smack them against a wall, knock their cigarettes to the ground and wipe the sneers off their faces. Such is the case with the callow and cynical The Rules of Attraction.
  24. Knockaround Guys
    A layabout movie -- not risibly bad, just relentlessly sub-par.
  25. Bowling for Columbine
    Moore continues another one infinitely more valuable -- the proud line that extends right back to Mark Twain, embracing all those satirists so enamoured with America at its best that they won't stand silent for America at its worst.
  26. The Transporter
    This is a film where there isn't the slightest doubt about the dramatic outcome. But the marketing will be a cliffhanger.
  27. Comedian
    There's plenty of humour in Comedian but not a lot of happiness -- apparently, the sad clown is a cliché for good reason.
  28. Swept Away
    No less laughable is the ending, where Ritchie neatly reflects today's prevailing attitude -- that audiences can't be trusted to handle a hint of ambiguity, but can live happily with flat-out stupidity.
  29. Punch-Drunk Love
    No film this year has offered quite the cerebral tickle, weird invention and slaphappy gusto.
  30. Between Strangers
    Great cast, too bad about the movie.
  31. Welcome to Collinwood
    Filled with a sweet, loopy sensibility and some fresh comic turns, Welcome to Collinwood is a low-budget American film that falls into the good-but-slight category.
  32. Heaven
    The result is a beautifully designed, lyrical fable of a movie, full of God's-eye shots from on high, placing the characters against the Italian scenery and medieval architecture.
  33. Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie
    Spiritual V-8 juice.
  34. Bloody Sunday
    An impressive film accomplishment, a combination of technique and extremely specific detail that reminds viewers how potent a rhetorical force the medium can be.
  35. Red Dragon
    Our time is plagued with primitive directors toiling in the name of entertainment, and protected by an industry that rewards competence over excellence. They're the reason why this movie is simply average, and why all the Red Dragons look so uniformly beige.
  36. Just a Kiss
    The result is a small independent film suffering from a severe case of Hollywood-itis. A cautionary tale minus the caution, Just a Kiss is just a cop-out.
  37. The Tuxedo
    It's a comic-book idea that might have been fun. But it's beyond the reach of first-time feature director Kevin Donovan, who squanders his main asset, Jackie Chan, and fumbles the vital action sequences.
  38. Sweet Home Alabama
    Light to the point of disposability, Sweet Home Alabama is a small screwball comic idea that spins out far too long.
  39. Moonlight Mile
    Occasionally feels like a Neil Simon rewrite of "In the Bedroom," as it see-saws between hard truths and quirky humour.
  40. Trapped
    There is no pleasure in watching a child suffer. Just embarrassment and a vague sense of shame. Watching Trapped simply makes us feel guilty.
  41. The Banger Sisters
    Could have taken a witty scalpel to baby-boomer posturings. But Dolman, whose instrument of choice is the rubber mallet of smarm, just isn't the man for the job -- he ends up enshrining the very hypocrisy that should be dissected.
  42. The Four Feathers
    What a featherweight epic this is, the kind of uniformed period piece where the watchword is pretty. Pretty costumes, pretty soldiers, pretty battles; pretty silly.
  43. Secretary
    The movie isn't painfully bad, something to be "fully experienced"; it's just tediously bad, something to be fully forgotten.
  44. Invincible
    Invincible lacks Herzog's usual visual and intellectual panache, and is afflicted by weak English-language acting, which makes it more of a career curio than a major work.
  45. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
    About the only fun to be had in the movie is screenwriter Alan McElroy's cartoon spook-speak.
    • 96 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Spirited Away
    The most successful film ever released in Japan, and co-winner of the top prize at this year's Berlin film festival, Spirited Away is a complete reversal of the Hollywood way with animation.
  47. The Experiment
    This is a grimly thrilling movie that falls somewhere between clear-eyed realism and the improbabilities of an action flick.
  48. Igby Goes Down
    This film and Salinger's novel differ greatly in the details of narrative and character. Yet, there's no mistaking the similarity in tone and sensibility and, particularly, in the capacity to split an audience into warring camps fighting on shared ground.
  49. Barbershop
    Comes as a pleasure. It's a comic drama set in a Chicago hair salon where the characters are engaging and the story has a bustling richness.
  50. Quitting
    Quitting begins to seem intriguing in concept. Now comes the best news: It's just as compelling in execution.
  51. Stealing Harvard
    A few early laughs scattered around a plot as thin as it is repetitious. There's talent in this picture, both before and behind the camera, but virtually none of it gets on the screen.
  52. City by the Sea
    Of course, bad writing can undo the best actor. If you doubt that, check out De Niro's soliloquy at the film's climax. He's acting the heck out of the words, but they're still dragging him down with them.
  53. Swimfan
    With his heavy features and grimacing shyness, Dante provides the best entertainment in Swimfan.
  54. FeardotCom
    There's potential here for a macabre cult favourite touching on themes of technology and the body-mind split, but the movie's progression into rambling incoherence gives new meaning to the phrase "fatal script error."
  55. Mad Love
    Nothing more or less than an outright bodice-ripper -- it should have ditched the artsy pretensions and revelled in the entertaining shallows.
  56. *Corpus Callosum
    Surprisingly entertaining.
  57. Undisputed
    Isn't unequivocally bad. Rather, this is what's known in the boxing world as an "opponent" -- shows up on the weekend just to fill out the card, to do battle with its betters, earn a little cash and be completely forgotten come Monday morning.
  58. Serving Sara
    Serving Sara, which often feels more like serving time, is one of those tortured Hollywood romantic comedies that starts with a passable premise and turns into an inventory of flat gags and weak lines set against a travelogue backdrop.
  59. 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.
  60. Red Satin
    Part of the charm of Satin Rouge is that it avoids the obvious with humour and lightness.
  61. One Hour Photo
    One Hour Photo is two-thirds of a movie -- the last act is a bit of a shambles.
    • 12 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Adventures of Pluto Nash
    A limp Eddie Murphy vehicle that even he seems embarrassed to be part of.
  63. Blue Crush
    Frankly, with so much to feast my dazzled eyes upon, I barely noticed that the plot was missing in action. And that's because the action itself is so pure.
  64. Possession
    Some books just aren't meant to be movies -- what once was confidently distinguished now seems merely average and a tiny bit desperate.
  65. Mostly Martha
    It is, in short, a compendium of clichés, yet with a presentation that makes the familiar seem remarkably warm and fresh.
  66. 24 Hour Party People
    So energized by the subject that it overflows with inventiveness.
  67. xXx
    In Hollywood, and perhaps beyond, there's nothing more predictable than a rebel with a cause. XXX pretends otherwise, but isn't really fooling anyone -- ultimately, this is a movie as generic as its title.
  68. Blood Work
    At his best, Clint directed as he acted -- sparely, laconically, but concisely, with a clean precision. There are flashes of that trademark style early on, but it soon degenerates badly.
  69. Secret Ballot
    A beguiling, slow-moving parable.
  70. The Good Girl
    The Good Girl isn't really the title of this movie at all. Instead, it's now widely known as The Movie That Proves Jennifer Can Act.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
    Blissfully entertaining sequel to last year's Spy Kids, Rodriguez is once again just as good -- if not better -- than the gadgets at hand.
  72. Full Frontal
    Despite (or maybe because of) its showy cleverness, Full Frontal merely seems full of itself -- it's a small film made by a big ego pretending to a modesty he no longer feels.
  73. Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat
    While Lawrence doesn't come close to the fireworks wit and satire of Pryor in his postfreebase-accident film, "Live On The Sunset Strip," his riveting story saves Runteldat from becoming just a routine slapped on the big screen.
  74. One Last Kiss
    Though credibly performed and photographed, it's hard to care about a film that proposes as epic tragedy the plight of a callow rich boy who is forced to choose between his beautiful, self-satisfied 22-year-old girlfriend and an equally beautiful, self-satisfied 18-year-old mistress.
  75. Signs
    The problem with Signs is not that the movie is pretentious -- or ambitious -- enough to try to combine "The Book of Job" and "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." The problem is that Signs manages to be both so terribly serious and so unimportant at the same time.
  76. The Master of Disguise
    Quite an artful dissembler. Despite all evidence to the contrary, this clunker has somehow managed to pose as an actual feature movie, the kind that charges full admission and gets hyped on TV and purports to amuse small children and ostensible adults.
  77. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    The best thing the film does is to show us not only what that mind looks like, but how the creative process itself operates: messily, erratically, outside of most people's morality, but with a force and purposiveness that makes the machinations of the rest of us look irresolute by comparison.
  78. I Am Trying to Break Your Heart
    May be anticorporate, it's by no means hype-free.
  79. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    Myers's sheer fertility of invention is of a different order, and even if he misses as often as he hits, he's definitely a swinger.
  80. Happy Times
    Happy Times may be the last of the "little" films from this remarkable director for some time.
  81. Lan Yu
    It's a good film. But its exotic allure may lead some to mistake it for a great one.
  82. Stuart Little 2
    Vacillating between sappy and snappy, Stuart Little 2 is featherweight family fare, perfectly timed for viewers with short attention spans.
  83. 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."
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Tadpole
    Smart and sophisticated entertainment, whatever its shortcomings, and it deserves to be encouraged. Not the behaviour it portrays, of course; but the worldly common sense of knowing that most people have a secretly ambiguous view of sexual prohibitions, and that this is the fertile ground of great comedy.
  85. Ayurveda: Art of Being
    Although filmmaker Pan Nalin is a believer in Ayurveda,there is little in the film to convince anybody else.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eight Legged Freaks
    So if you're in the mood for a scary flick, the kind where people can't resist going into the huge hole in the wall where the family Pekinese just disappeared to the sounds of being masticated, this is the one.
  87. The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course
    The question is, is the interspecies wrestling match really worth the ineptly acted spy antics, the big flatulence jokes and Steve-o's endless grandstanding? Not without a handy remote control with a mute button, it isn't.
  88. Sex and Lucia
    Nothing in this explicit display is remotely engaging. That's because the sex is a metaphor here. In fact, most everything is a metaphor here. Or a symbol -- the picture is a veritable cacophony of jangling symbols.
  89. Reign of Fire
    Reign of Fire never comes close to recovering from its demented premise, but it does sustain an enjoyable level of ridiculousness.
  90. Road to Perdition
    This is a remarkably good-looking near-corpse of a film, with a pulse that fades in and out.
  91. Halloween: Resurrection
    It's all very pat and, ultimately, annoying.
  92. Never Again
    Rarely does a film so graceless and devoid of merit as this one come along.
  93. My Wife Is an Actress
    None of this quite gets off the ground, and I found myself wanting to bid farewell to Yvan and Charlotte quite a while before the final credits rolled. Not every wannabe Woody Allen is Woody Allen.
  94. Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars
    Musically, it's a mixed bag -- The concert remains more of an historical curiosity than a must-see rock film.
  95. Read My Lips
    Offers you the ostensible bargain of two movies in one -- a character study at the outset and the crime caper that follows. The first picture is intriguing, the second stinks.
  96. Men in Black II
    Short, flashy and about as complex as a beer belch, Men in Black II is also brisk. The film clocks in at 88 minutes total running time, and it's loaded with new special effects and monsters.
  97. Like Mike
    It's not so much a movie as a joint promotion for the National Basketball Association and teenaged rap and adolescent poster-boy Lil' Bow Wow.
  98. Songs from the Second Floor
    The film is like an Ingmar Bergman movie as realized by Monty Python: It's seriously gloomy about the loss of spirituality in the world, but at the same time rudely, sometimes hilariously, absurd.
  99. The Powerpuff Girls
    One of the more ingenious and fresh surprises of the summer.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lovely & Amazing
    This is a fine, funny, humane film.
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