Ty Burr, Boston Globe
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For 1,686 reviews, this critic has graded:
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56% higher than the average critic
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2% same as the average critic
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42% lower than the average critic
On average, this critic grades 5.2 points higher than other critics.
(0-100 point scale)
Ty Burr's Scores
- Movies
| Average review score: | 65 |
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| Highest review score: |
Critic Score
100
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| Lowest review score: |
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0
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Score distribution:
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Positive: 1,160 out of 1686
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Mixed: 283 out of 1686
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Negative: 243 out of 1686
1,686
movie reviews
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Ty Burr 100
To see Au Hasard Balthazar is to understand the limits of religious literalism in movies -- the limits, even, of movies themselves. Bresson pares everything away until all that's left are the things we do and the hole left by the things we could have done but didn't. -
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Ty Burr 100
Moves like hot mercury, and it draws a viewer so thoroughly into its world that real life can seem thick and dull when the lights come up. -
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Ty Burr 88
Why revisit Shoah 25 years after it was first released? Because it matters more a quarter century on, just as it will matter even more in a hundred years, and 200, and - if it and we survive - a thousand.- Posted Jan 20, 2011
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Ty Burr 100
The results bear witness to a time when sacrifice was bleached of everything but itself. -
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Ty Burr 100
Writer-director Cristian Mungiu confirms the Romanian cinema renaissance while creating a paradoxical marvel: a bleak tale of illegal abortion that powerfully affirms one's faith in people. -
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Ty Burr 100
The one aspect of the original Producers that still stuns is the roaring, over-the-top, in-your-face thereness of its two lead performances. -
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Ty Burr 100
Days of Being Wild shows Wong discovering his own cinematic language, and he's as astonished as we are. -
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Ty Burr 100
Is ''Dr. Strangelove" Kubrick's best movie? Along with ''Paths of Glory," absolutely. -
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Ty Burr 100
Chaplin's sentimental politics and peerless comic invention dovetailed more perfectly in this film than in any other he made. -
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Ty Burr 100
On the level of craft, the movie's just absurdly enjoyable. Sorkin's dialogue dazzles; the photography is burnished and sleek; the editing confidently sorts out a complex narrative. -
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Ty Burr 100
It's a movie made with the same coolly fanatical attention to craft the lead character displays in her work. Bigelow is now recognized as one of our true filmmaking naturals.- Posted Jan 3, 2013
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Ty Burr 88
The film, dazzling and poignant and five years in the making, retells the ancient Indian epic "The Ramayana" from a gentle but insistent feminist perspective. -
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Ty Burr 100
The Battle of Algiers is a thinking person's action film in which there are winners -- but no heroes. -
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Ty Burr 100
It's a performance (Giamatti's) so nuanced and so real in its everyday pain that it doesn't stand a chance of winning an Oscar. But it should. -
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Ty Burr 100
So clear-eyed and three-dimensional that it makes the recent ''Pearl Harbor'' look like a bunch of kids playing dress up. Aspects of the film have dated, but in the important things it's more mature than anything proposed lately by modern Hollywood. -
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Ty Burr 88
Yet what I felt when the lights came up at the end of this visionary, titanic, relentless experience was something different: a strange relief that it was, at last, over. -
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Ty Burr 88
Carlos moves like a greyhound out of the gate, fleet and assured and focused on the business at hand. It's a subtle, ultimately staggering portrayal of a bloody-minded ideologue who convinced only himself.- Posted Oct 28, 2010
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Ty Burr 100
What happens between two people? Only the chemistry that keeps us from stumbling through the chaos by ourselves. Is that an illusion, too? Amour says it doesn't much matter. There is no dignity in life except love.- Posted Jan 17, 2013
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Ty Burr 88
As much as this tale of bent love runs in the ruts of its maker’s obsessions, it has an undertow that’s impossible to shake. [22 Nov. 2012]- Posted Feb 21, 2013
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Ty Burr 88
Stories We Tell is one of those movies you watch on a screen and replay in your head for days, moving between its many levels of inquiry and touched, always, by Polley’s compassion toward her relatives in particular and people in general.- Posted May 16, 2013
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Ty Burr 100
The film that many consider the finest of its decade, Raging Bull, has aged well, and not just because it was filmed in black and white. -
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Ty Burr 88
Remains worth seeing as an achingly nostalgic farewell to youthful idealism, tinged with a kind of loving contempt. -
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Ty Burr 100
All you really need to enjoy "Triplets" is a taste for the weird and the wonderful. -
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Ty Burr 100
A subtle, often very funny, ultimately touching tragedy of royal manners and meaning. -
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Ty Burr 88
Waltz With Bashir not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence. -
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Ty Burr 100
The Coens also understand the stark immediacy of this tale, and they visualize it with brilliantly judged details. -
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Ty Burr 100
It’s about spycraft, but it goes to the source. If for no other reason, it deserves to be seen for arranging decades of events in the Middle East into a chronology that, to an outsider, makes dreadful sense.- Posted Feb 28, 2013
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Ty Burr 100
It's those noir bones that give this social-realist drama its punch, as if Humphrey Bogart had been recast as a 17-year-old girl and dropped into the poorest corner of America. -
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Ty Burr 88
Pixar is so good at what it does that every other kiddie-entertainment purveyor -- including parent company Disney -- flounders in comparison. -
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Ty Burr 100
In short, This Is Not a Film is the world within an apartment, and it is quietly devastating.- Posted May 3, 2012
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Ty Burr 100
That rose in the desert, a sequel that improves in every way upon its beloved predecessor and a romance that slowly builds a fire from embers thought dead. -
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Ty Burr 88
Such smart, whiz-bang fun that you may not realize what it's about until you're safely home. -
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Ty Burr 100
The movie is pricelessly comic -- the Harvey/Joyce scenes catalog the couple's neuroses with glee -- but it just as often reaches for something richer. -
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Ty Burr 88
The movie is hard going, not least in the sense of powerlessness it leaves in an audience that knows exactly what will happen. And yet you come out feeling that the filmmakers have done the right thing by these people, and by this day. -
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Ty Burr 100
As the Friedmans split apart like fissile neutrons, their story becomes five stories, none of which is remotely like the others. -
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Ty Burr 100
What's most shocking about The Passenger 30 years later? Seeing Jack Nicholson at the lean, sardonic height of his youthful powers? Finding a Michelangelo Antonioni movie with an actual plot? -
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Ty Burr 88
They're both tales of growing up in the shadow of Islamic fundamentalism, but Persepolis is everything "The Kite Runner" is not. It's a personal memoir rather than fiction, coolly observant instead of melodramatic, female rather than male in sensibility and sense of humor - it has a sense of humor. -
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Ty Burr 100
Longer on atmosphere and observation than on story, but you don't mind: Coppola maintains her quietly charged tone with a certainty that would be unbelievable in a second film if you didn't suspect genetics had a hand. -
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Ty Burr 88
The Lives of Others has similarities to Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 classic "The Conversation" but with undercurrents that resound across an entire century of European political history. -
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Ty Burr 75
It's a perfect example of how far production design and editing WON'T take you when the story's not there. -
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Ty Burr 100
The sight is magical and heartbreaking in equal measure. Look, the movie says: Where so many would fall, a man walks on air. -
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Ty Burr 100
A comic put-on of awe-inspiring crudity and death-defying satire and by a long shot the funniest film of the year. It is "Jackass" with a brain and Mark Twain with full frontal male nudity. -
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Ty Burr 100
Michael Hazanavicius's love letter to classic cinema isn't perfect but it's close enough to make just about anyone who sees it ridiculously happy - and that includes children and grown-ups who have never come across a silent film.- Posted Dec 22, 2011
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Ty Burr 75
This is the art-film Carrey: repressed, lovesick, unshaven. Essentially he's doing the same intellectual sad sack played by John Cusack in "Malkovich" and Nicolas Cage in "Adaptation" -
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Ty Burr 100
A film noir? A backstage musical? A whodunit? A comedy? In truth, it's all of the above -- plus a kinky love story, an absorbing melodrama, and a mordantly jaded snapshot of postwar Paris -- and all of them are wonderful. -
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Ty Burr 100
Once is the first rock musical that actually makes sense. People don't burst into song in this movie because the orchestra's swelling out of nowhere. The guy and the girl are working musicians -- or they'd like to be, if they could make a living at it -- and they're played by working musicians. -
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Ty Burr 88
Richly provocative entertainment, as heady as a cocktail party with the Manhattan literati and as vaguely troubling as the morning after. -
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Ty Burr 88
In the tradition of ethnographic dramas from "Nanook of the North" to "The Fast Runner," Tulpan drops us in the middle of a godforsaken nowhere and marvels at the people who live there. -
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Ty Burr 100
It's the only film that exists of the Ghetto, and it's both revelatory and profoundly suspect. -
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Ty Burr 100
The chance to watch a four-star classic the way it was meant to be seen -- fresh print, big screen -- is so rare as to be worth the trip. -
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Ty Burr 88
With a tranquil fearlessness, it goes beyond the death of memory, to see what might be found in the unexplored country beyond. The answer is both frightening and comforting: More love. Unspecified love. Universal love. -
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Ty Burr 88
Formally, the movie's a lasting pleasure: Reed's incisive direction; Greene's easy yet weighted dialogue; the farseeing deep-focus photography of Georges Perinal; Vincent Korda's luxuriant sets. -
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Ty Burr 100
The miracle is that 'The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is better: tighter, smarter, funnier. -
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Ty Burr 63
The movie isn't badly done, just overdone - a cozy art-house crowd-pleaser coasting on the expectations of its genre.- Posted Dec 16, 2010
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Ty Burr 100
On the most basic level the new film is pure vaudeville: a loopy flyaway fantasy that's hysterically funny if only to keep the darkness at bay. -
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Ty Burr 88
Spare and elegant and harrowing, it's an ode to childhood trust being stretched until it snaps. -
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Ty Burr 88
Even more than "Chicken Run," Were-Rabbit is a tiny plasticine masterpiece. -
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Ty Burr 88
Elena reveals a filmmaker in full command of his art and not much interested in catering to an audience. If you want this film, you have to meet it more than halfway.- Posted May 31, 2012
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Ty Burr 88
Fateless looks man's inhumanity to man square in the eye and pronounces it standard operating procedure, and that may be the greater horror. -
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Ty Burr 88
Brokeback may be too polished for some people, too elegantly dispassionate in its study of choked passion. -
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- Posted Mar 29, 2012
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Ty Burr 88
A fitting, expertly made final chapter, freighted with hard-won emotions, shot through with a sense of farewell, and fully aware of the epic stakes involved.- Posted Jul 13, 2011
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- Posted Oct 11, 2012
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Ty Burr 100
Murderball is a paradox: a movie about quadriplegics that insists we look beyond their disability. -
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Ty Burr 88
Moneyball is a hilarious and provocative change-up, entertaining without feeling the need to swing for the fences.- Posted Sep 22, 2011
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Ty Burr 88
Epic in scope, ambition, and execution, it's a classic swords-and-samurai film with postmodern blood and guts, and it's completely satisfying.- Posted May 5, 2011
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- Posted Nov 8, 2012
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Ty Burr 100
You may even feel like dancing in the aisles yourself. Sure, the real world doesn't always work this way. Have you forgotten that this is one of the reasons why we go to movies in the first place? -
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Ty Burr 100
More than "Unforgiven," more than "Mystic River," it is Clint Eastwood's autumnal masterpiece. -
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Ty Burr 100
Movies like The Kids Are All Right -- beautifully written, impeccably played, funny and randy and true -- don't come along very often. -
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Ty Burr 88
Like the best spiritual movies, of whatever faith, "Of Gods and Men" moves us toward a union with the infinite, and when we come to the monks' last supper, the moment is staggeringly powerful.- Posted Mar 17, 2011
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Ty Burr 88
It isn't often you get to meet the devil in all his glory, but here he is in Deliver Us From Evil, and his name is Father Oliver O'Grady. -
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Ty Burr 100
As its title implies, This Is England isn't a hyperstylized head-trip a la "Trainspotting" but a straightforward calling to account. -
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Ty Burr 88
Compston's performance and the downer milieu, presented with appropriate paint-peeling profanity, are more than enough to keep an audience riveted and ultimately moved close to tears. -
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Ty Burr 88
When The Departed roars to life, as it does in so many of its scenes, you feel like nobody understands movies -- the delirious highs, the unforgiving moral depths -- as well as this man does. Welcome back, Marty. -
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Ty Burr 100
She's (Hushpuppy) trying to make sense of this world, and the movie, pitched between realism and fable, is the story of how she finally does. That balance is the key to the movie's magic.- Posted Jul 5, 2012
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Ty Burr 88
The subject is the privileged state of childhood itself - how we're all lucky to have had it and how it so easily floats away from our grasp. -
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Ty Burr 100
There are three Poles in The Pianist -- Szpilman, Polanski, and Frederic Chopin. Of the three, fittingly, Chopin speaks the loudest. -
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Ty Burr 88
Smartly written and beautifully played, The Savages is about that point in life where you look around and realize that where you are is probably as far as you're going to get. In spite of this, the movie's a comedy, dry and humane. -
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Ty Burr 88
Lebanon gives us viscerally violent, intensely distressing glimpses into war's annihilation of people, places, and communities. -
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Ty Burr 100
One of the best, most karmically satisfying comedies of the year, much to the chagrin of the people who are in it. -
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Ty Burr 100
Ghobadi shows us a world where a village pond can hold both rare goldfish and unforgivable evil, and where every step is onto booby-trapped terrain. -
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Ty Burr 88
The film is as spare and unvarnished as a wooden temple floating on a lake, but its reflections run deep, and it can ripple your thoughts for months. -
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Ty Burr 75
Best of all, An Education isn’t alarmist. It knows other people can’t seduce us if we don’t seduce ourselves first and that Jenny is level-headed enough to handle it and learn. -
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Ty Burr 88
In its attention to detail and awareness of betrayals both political and human, "Tinker Tailor'' is a movie for grown-ups.- Posted Dec 15, 2011
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Ty Burr 75
How you feel about About Schmidt may depend in large part on how you feel About Jack. -
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Ty Burr 88
That film remains an electrifying testament to pop music as a communal creative act. -
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Ty Burr 88
Take Shelter plays Curtis's unraveling at daring length. The film will be too slow and dark for some, and it's definitely overlong.- Posted Oct 20, 2011
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Ty Burr 88
Just don't expect the truth. An extremely bent, highly amusing form of the truth, maybe, but not the truth. 24 Hour Party People shares with the current Robert Evans documentary ''The Kid Stays in the Picture'' an awareness that a good anecdote often trumps the facts, but here the cheats are cheekily laid bare. -
