The Globe and Mail (Toronto)'s Scores

For 7,297 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:
7297 movie reviews
  1. In its second half, the movie tips into familiar Gallic farce territory before settling for a formulaic sentimental kicker. As middling comedies go, the French approach has certain virtues. If good wine and long talks with friends can't prevent the inevitable, at least they make the waiting more tolerable.
  2. The film commands our attention again as more connections emerge -- not enough to fully solve the mystery, but sufficient to convince us that Café de Flore amounts to more than the triumph of style over substance.
  3. The utterly bizarre story made national news when it broke, has since provided much magazine fodder, and popped up only two years ago adapted into a dramatic feature. Now it receives the documentary treatment and, in the devilishly manipulative hands of director Bart Layton, what a treatment it is – the weirdness just gets weirder.
  4. A farther-fetched fantasy: In addition to asking we believe our loosely packed academic can play Rocky, Here Comes the Boom imagines a world in which butterball Everyman Scott and the fabulously lush Bella (Salma Hayek) might argue and bill and coo and eventually fall in love.
  5. A good-looking but anecdotally slight dramedy about life and lifestyles in Los Angeles's hip Silver Lake district.
  6. A mixed bag of old-school and contemporary horror tricks that occasionally raises a hair prickle of intrigue.
  7. In the end, cast and audience are having such fun that it seems almost mingy to complain when the church, lacking a foundation, collapses under the weight of its own cleverness.
  8. Argo is a movie of many parts, the sum of which can probably be best described as enjoyable Hollywood hokum.
  9. Just a mediocre action franchise with a solid actor at the head and a travelogue in its heart.
  10. You have to feel pleased just for the existence of a film like Tim Burton's Frankenweenie. A 3-D, black-and-white, stop-motion animated film, it's a one-man blow for cinematic biodiversity.
  11. Roughly-made but illuminating, the Iraq documentary In My Mother's Arms is a brief immersion into life in a Baghdad boys' orphanage.
  12. As a movie trying to make the case for parental management of the education process, Won't Back Down, doesn't make an entirely convincing case.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pitch Perfect pitches itself between "Bridesmaids" and "Glee," which is to say it celebrates the low-down raunchiness of girls being girls among girls, while delivering a snap-crackle-and-pop music catharsis. Yes, folks, rock is dead, but long live showbiz.
  13. After six years in development, this comedy starring and produced by Adam Sandler feels as slapped together one of the comedian's live-action buddy movies.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    As many of the most memorable and darker thrillers have, Arbitrage plays with affinities in order to completely confuse the drawing of any clear lines between good and evil, criminal and executive, skilled pro and callous cad.
  14. As long as Chbosky sticks to the story of surviving high school, Perks has a modest charm. But a melodramatic last-act bombshell about Charlie's troubled past, is jarring – like the giant foot of Godzilla descending to squash tender Bambi. It's a case of too much, too late and, ultimately, from a different kind of movie.
  15. Looper ups the ante like a poker player on speed. What a potpourri of genres we have here – noir again, but sci-fi too, and action and horror and psycho-drama with existential trimmings, the latter designed to invite the thinking viewer into the fray.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Finally, there's a sports movie for people who are caught between admiration and fear of athleticism. Neither a triumphant underdog like "Rudy" nor a total weepie like "The Pride of the Yankees," Head Games also deals with the illnesses and premature deaths of talented players.
  16. Like Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut," Anderson's latest is enigmatic. But if you have eyes and can see, The Master it is unmistakably some kind of wonder. At least, it's an exhilarating demonstration of big-screen moviemaking in dreamlike colours and a sense-heightening 70-mm format.
  17. Clint has a script. Actually, Clint has too much script, one of those schematic by-the-number jobs that telegraphs its every pitch.
  18. 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.
  19. No doubt, these twin saviours are a likeable tandem, and they bear their cross lightly. Still, End of Watch suffers from no end of sanctimony. Sainthood is all well and fine but it ain't drama and, on screen at least, the question cries out: Where's a corrupt cop when you need him?
  20. The results are generally refreshing. Much of the film takes place inside a theatre, as if to suggest the shenanigans of the Saint Petersburg aristocracy were a form of public entertainment.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Lawrence and Cooper have electric chemistry, and the director pulls off one of the most satisfying romantic Hollywood endings seen in years.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A few striking images keep our attention – like evil warrior Rain (Michelle Rodriguez) seated menacingly with an assault rifle on a playground swing in the 'burbs. But the film's title promises payback, without offering ample compensation.
  21. The Impossible looks back at a natural calamity with unflinching honesty. It sees fear and pain, it sees fortitude and bravery, but mainly it sees this: In that raging instant when the sea becomes its own monster, there's precious little to separate the devoured from the spared – nothing but the thin wedge of luck.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    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.
  22. 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.
  23. It is hard to know whether to applaud directors David Redmon and Ashley Sabin for exposing the underside of the fashion business – or demand they abandon their documentarian stance and rescue young Nadya on the spot.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Easily the daffiest movie you've ever seen that also references incestuous role-playing games.

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