Salon's Scores

For 3,130 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 53% higher than the average critic
  • 2% same as the average critic
  • 45% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 The Wolf of Wall Street
Lowest review score: 0 Event Horizon
Score distribution:
3130 movie reviews
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Max Cea
    There are a few strong bits in Snatched — the best of them centering around Joan Cusak as a silent ex-special ops agent — and the film is well-paced. But as Hawn’s Linda should have learned, this time around Amy Schumer isn’t worth leaving the house for.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 60 Reviewed by
      Max Cea
    No one — not McMahon (or McChrystal), the military, the State Department, President Obama or the press — comes out looking good. And yet, none of these characters or institutions comes away looking all that bad either.
  1. For deeply steeped Marvel Comics aficionados it will probably be fairly satisfying, and there’s no reason on earth why anyone else should even bother.
  2. I personally find the Russo brothers’ lightning-fast action scenes difficult to process — it’s as if cinema editing now exceeds the speed of human brain functions — but they’re undoubtedly exciting and skillfully constructed.
  3. This movie isn’t nearly as terrible as I was expecting, largely due to Snyder’s OCD-level attention to the visual details. And, yes, due to Wonder Woman (played by Israeli actress Gal Gadot), who brings in a badly needed dose of “Dragon Tattoo”-style female energy.
  4. Joy
    From a narrative and cinematic point of view, the problem with Joy is simple. Russell is almost totally uninterested in the story of how Joy Mangano explored a bizarre and unknown new business model and became its first self-made tycoon, and as a result we aren’t interested either.
  5. For a while, at least, this one feels like Iñárritu’s masterpiece, until that familiar too-muchness begins to take over.
  6. You can choose to understand The Force Awakens as an embrace of the mythological tradition, in which the same stories recur over and over with minor variations. Or you can see it as the ultimate retreat into formula.... There are moments when it feels like both of those things, profound and cynical, deeply satisfying and oddly empty.
  7. It’s also true that toward the end of a big series the story eats the stars, and everybody in this movie, even Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen, the Artemis-style revolutionary icon, is pretty much part of the furniture.
  8. The result is something like a weepy Lifetime melodrama told in the languorous, self-indulgent style of European art cinema, as if Michelangelo Antonioni or Bernardo Bertolucci had wound up in debt to multiple ex-wives and were forced to churn out straight-to-cable movies, circa 1986.
  9. To say that this undercover operation does not go well is an understatement, and the resulting portrait of the domestic anti-terrorism campaign, although it’s admittedly a portrait in miniature, could hardly be more disheartening.
  10. The Walk is much less than the sum of its parts, except when the parts are so good you can’t ignore them.
  11. A discombobulated summer movie that’s kind of fun but doesn’t have nearly enough story to fill up two hours.
  12. Trainwreck is not very good, but Schumer is frequently amazing in it. Officially, her fans will not be disappointed; not far below the surface, it’s a bummer.
  13. If anything, Boulevard is the apotheosis of Williams’ later career, not an anomaly. I wish I could tell you it was a better and more satisfying film, but even its odd, strangled and almost antique quality – it plays out like a well-intentioned Sundance drama from about 1986 – feels curiously appropriate.
  14. The ultra-tangled plotline of Terminator Genisys makes the rhythm of the action beats especially weird; we see the entire world nuked into rubble by the machine overlords really early in the movie, which makes it hard to get excited about a few buildings falling down later on.
  15. Jurassic World unquestionably “delivers.” It feels like a hit; it offers a professionally crafted blend of blandness, predictability, watered-down cultural commentary and manufactured excitement.
  16. Considered as pure spectacle, San Andreas is gripping and effective.
  17. Ultimately I’m going to vote with my heart and say you should see it, largely for the brooding, physical performance of Tom Hardy, an actor still a shade too peculiar for Hollywood stardom, along with the ominous evocation of Stalin’s Russia on the cusp of change. But that recommendation comes with many asterisks, and in various respects Child 44 is a lost opportunity or, as they teach us to say in film-critic academy, an “interesting failure.”
  18. There’s enough unfulfilled possibility in True Story to make it an intriguing introduction to this story of deception and self-deception, but the balance between true-crime cable soap and the darker, richer layers of Franco’s performance never quite adds up.
  19. I wouldn’t say that Taylor-Johnson has made a good movie from Fifty Shades of Grey, precisely. That’s asking too much. But she and Marcel have risen to the challenge of this bizarre cultural moment with an odd and memorable film.
  20. It has the kind of jumbled, pseudo-spectacular, overdecorated digital design that the eye and mind can’t really take in. Individual shots can be gorgeous, but there are just too damn many of them, and the overall experience is the visual equivalent of eating an entire wedding cake.
  21. It’s a thoroughly incoherent, generally inane and surprisingly entertaining tale of witches and monsters and what legendary film critic Joe Bob Briggs calls “beast fu,” all set in a sub-Tolkien, sub-“Game of Thrones” pseudo-medieval universe.
  22. The scenes with Johnson and Wallace, although intrinsically interesting, drag down the drama somewhat, and...every minute we're away from the firecracker atmosphere of rural Alabama detracts from the overall impact.
  23. Some fragments of that Dostoevskian romance linger on here: Just enough so that Wyatt and Wahlberg nail the climactic scene, when Jim is literally playing for his life, and make it momentarily seem to mean something. But not quite enough that you’ll remember what that something might be the next day.
  24. If I had the power to turn back time and start the tortuous production process that led to the “Hobbit” trilogy over again, with a different director in charge and a completely different approach, I would do it. But that’s precisely the problem with the One Ring, right? Once you put it on you are changed, and those changes cannot be undone.
  25. Aided by witty and understated work from Baldwin and Stewart and the capable direction of Glatzer and Westmoreland, Moore does her utmost to pull Still Alice toward the realm of meaningful social drama. Let’s put it this way: It’s a way better movie than it ought to be, but not good enough to escape its pulpy, mendacious roots.
  26. Murray, as always, supplies any number of small, memorable moments — he ultimately relies on the same defanged sentimentality.
  27. The Judge is watchable but thoroughly specious. It’s dull and reassuring, an infantile fantasy of homecoming and forgiveness set in a mythical version of America no one in the target audience has ever seen.
  28. Frequently irritating and occasionally insulting.

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