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 2.9 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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    • 49 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Oh, God! You Devil
    Burns does make an appearance as God to give his fiendish lookalike the get-thee-hence treatment, but not even a miracle could save Oh God! You Devil. [10 Nov 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  2. The Terminator
    An efficient, cold-blooded sci-fi splatter movie that never makes the mistake of forgetting that on some level it is deeply ridiculous.
  3. Body Double
    The trouble with Body Double is not that it sets "new lows" in the treatment of women or anything else, but that a stunningly original talent has willingly hitched itself to a derivative vision. The person De Palma really degrades is himself. [26 Oct 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  4. Firstborn
    The first half of Firstborn is a first-rate domestic melodrama, faultlessly acted by all concerned, though you may wonder if the interactions would not have been a bit more compelling had the invading force been a bit less obviously, obnoxiously evil. The second half goes over the edge into a Hollywood hell. [26 Oct 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  5. The Little Drummer Girl
    A bouillon cube, a bland and boring thing with only a meagre resemblance to its source. [23 Oct 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  6. Places in the Heart
    Sweet and relatively simple, a classic episodic melodrama of unabashed tenderness and unapologetic warmth, but it's not sentimental, and its offhanded explication of racism in rural Texas in 1935 is integrated so seamlessly with its dramatization of the widow Spalding's crusade to keep her farm, that the dark undercurrents of the film are easy to overlook.
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  7. Threads
    The British crew here, headed by writer Barry Hines and producer/director Mick Jackson, accomplish what would seem to be an impossible task: depicting the carnage without distancing the viewer, without once letting him retreat behind the safe wall of fictitious play. Formidable and foreboding, Threads leaves nothing to our imagination, and Nothingness to our conscience. [02 Mar 1985]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  8. Amadeus
    Amadeus needs an additional 20 minutes running time like "The Magic Flute" needs a drum solo. Though the production is gussied up with more frills and decoration than a Viennese dessert trolley, Forman is generally workmanlike in his visual style and very uneven with his handling of actors.
  9. Tightrope
    There are two ways to look at Tightrope: as a Clint Eastwood Hollywood vehicle, or as a world-class movie that deserves to be judged with the best. By the first standard, Tightrope is an exceptionally realized thriller; by the second, it is an interesting failure, a movie that loses its nerve and resolves its contradictions in the slam-bang heroics of formula moviemaking. [18 Aug 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  10. The Woman in Red
    Much less painful than a walk in the summer heat, but not quite as pleasant as a swim in a cool pool. [15 Aug 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Phar Lap
    Phar Lap is another Australian horsy movie starring an American actor, Ron Leibman (Norma Rae), but this time the American's performance is the only redeeming feature in this otherwise tedious, slow-moving Down-Under tale about a fast-moving horse that should have been named Rocky. [20 Jul 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Cloak & Dagger
    The film Cloak and Dagger is like a visit to the midway; fast and noisy and a lot of unsophisticated fun. [10 Aug 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Red Dawn
    It's pure American corn but expertly and entertainingly harvested. The casting is excellent, the performances are so good and the emotional thrust of the film so strong that it is impossible not to enjoy. [10 Aug 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  14. The Bostonians
    The Bostonians, from the novel by Henry James, is the story of their relationship, one of the strangest in literature. Unfortunately, that strangeness has survived the transfer to the screen less than intact, and satiric oddity has been replaced by romantic banality. Redgrave's performance - red-eyed, quivering, opalescent - is peerless, the one incontrovertible reason to see the film. [23 Nov 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  15. Purple Rain
    Purple Rain is not a revolution. It's not even a good movie. What it is, is a cosmic letdown. [27 Jul 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cheech & Chong's The Corsican Brothers
    There is no pot smoking, no pill popping, no booze guzzling and decidedly no laughs...Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong can be skilful comedians. They should stop wasting their talents writing and directing this "more-adventures-of" dross. [31 July 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  17. Stranger Than Paradise
    From beginning to end, Jarmusch carries it off. His vision is stranger than paradise, and his talent is odder than hell. [16 Nov 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  18. The NeverEnding Story
    Petersen seems to be holding back, telling us about the liberating power of the imagination but never really showing us. Of course, to show us would be to spoon feed the audience, thereby blunting the message and defeating the point. [20 Jul 1984, p.E9]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Revenge of the Nerds
    Revenge of the Nerds has some very funny moments and sturdy premise, but the revenge, when it comes, is not nearly as definitive as even the non-nerds in the audience would hope for. [25 July 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Best Defense
    Sitting through this 100 or so minutes of painfully loud sound, and ham-fisted editing might best be likened to being slapped about the head repeatedly. It is insulting; it will give you a headache; and it should make you very angry. [21 Jul 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  21. Electric Dreams
    If Electric Dreams is indicative of what MTV alumni are going to do with the big screen, the big screen is going to be in big need of something to keep it from shrinking to the size of a guitar pick. [21 Jul 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Conan the Destroyer
    Conan the Destroyer is in a class below its predecessor. Director Richard Fleischer (The Vikings, Mandingo) has indeed made a dumb, ridiculous movie. [29 June 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Karate Kid
    The Karate Kid is too long and lyrical, with several tedious scenes between Macchio and Morita as youth and experience. Avildsen is sometimes unsure whether he wants to be tough or forgiving, and the film has a big build-up for the fight scene, but an ending so abrupt it downplays the outcome. [22 June 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  24. The Pope of Greenwich Village
    With its close attention to the Little Italy milieu and its farcical treatment of a safecracking, the picture is designed to turn Martin Scorsese's scathing Mean Streets into a sitcom. It could be done, and done well, in the right hands, but those hands do not belong to the calloused paws of the pugilistically inclined director Stuart Rosenberg. [22 June 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  25. Ghostbusters
    Judged by the standards of the comedies that preceded it (and only by those standards), Ghostbusters is relatively sophisticated: it substitutes the silly for the gross, and even manages at the odd moment to take silliness into the sublime. [9 June 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  26. Top Secret!
    Kilmer is an improvement on Robert Hays of Airplane], but both gents perform with the facility you'd expect from a random sampling of Gentlemen's Quarterly models; like any svelte clotheshorse, Kilmer is good-looking yet self-effacing and he doesn't seem in the least perturbed that his wardrobe upstages him.[25 June 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 58 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
    Star Trek III or The Search for Schlock: a mission that renders the eyelids heavy. What else can you say about a movie whose mechanically inept, gelatinous monsters out-act everyone on the screen and whose poignant moments are simply guffawful. Not to put too fine a Vulcan point on it, it was ba-a-a-d. [2 June 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  28. Streets of Fire
    Walter Hill is a master moviemaker, and when Streets of Fire is speeding by like Mercury on methedrine, the rush left in its wake cancels out questions of content. But the minute the momentum slows, it's another story - a story about a movie with no story at all. [01 June 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
    • 57 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
    The heroic irony that was hilarious in Raiders is merely ridiculous here, and the half-tribute/half-parody of the adventure genre is toyed with to threadbare extremes. [23 May 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
  30. Firestarter
    Fortunately, he has an ace up his sleeve with 9-year-old actress Drew Barrymore: the movie might easily be retitled The Scene Stealer. Barrymore's performance as Charlie McGee has something of the pint-sized coquetry of a Shirley Temple, and something of the shoulders-back, chin- in-the-air hauteur of a Bette Davis, but she seems incapable of hitting a false, precocious or calculating note. She virtually acts her co-stars off the screen. [14 May 1984]
    • The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
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