Salon's Scores

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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 1.4 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:
  1. Positive: 1,748 out of 3130
  2. Mixed: 1,003 out of 3130
  3. Negative: 379 out of 3130
3130 movie reviews
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  1. Sideways
    Alexander Payne's new movie, Sideways, makes you feel like you're trapped at dinner with a wiseass who's trying to convince you what a sensitive guy he is.
  2. There Will Be Blood
    There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.
  3. Letters from Iwo Jima
    Eastwood is so busy humanizing Japanese soldiers that he ends up rewriting history.
  4. Capote
    While the filmmaking overall suffers from a kind of tasteful, low-key blandness, Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of Capote keeps the blood coursing through it. He's the bright, chilling spot of color at the center of an otherwise beige movie.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Fargo
    To the extent that the joke is on us, the audience, and the decadent taste we've acquired for flashy violence, it works; point taken.
  6. Up
    Save for a few inspired canine gags and a handful of very pretty visual details, Up left me cold. Its charms appear to have been applied with surgical precision; by the end, I felt expertly sutured, but not much else.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shakespeare in Love
    A corny, old-fashioned backstage farce.
  8. Brokeback Mountain
    Takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive.
  9. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    The evident strengths and laudable intentions of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (and even the appeal of Marisa Tomei in her undies) are overwhelmed by an implausible plot verging on unintentional comedy and a panoply of Noo Yawk dirt-bag supporting characters who might've seemed awkward on a 1993 episode of "NYPD Blue."
  10. Ponyo
    His (Miyazaki) stories, and often his character design, just leave me cold. I know I'm supposed to be magically transported by his fanciful tales and his whimsical grandiosity, but they make me listless.
  11. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    So ends this enormously important, and enormously extended, chapter of pop culture, with a combination of bang and whimper.
  12. About Schmidt
    Had Payne the grace or generosity to present the vulgarity and naiveté and tackiness of these characters as something vital and endearing and delightful, the movie might have been explosively funny.
  13. The Dark Knight
    Nolan may want us to believe in the darkness that lurks within each of us, but instead of leading us to it visually, he chops it up and sets it out in front of us, a grim, predigested banquet.
  14. Slumdog Millionaire
    The real star of the film is not a person but a city, the vertiginous, exciting, massively overcrowded "maximum city" of Mumbai. On one hand, this environment of Dickensian, almost hallucinatory contrasts between rich and poor, good and evil feels perfect for Danny Boyle.
  15. Paranoid Park
    If Paranoid Park is mainly an accumulation of the signs and symbols and images inside Van Sant's own head, that's artistically legitimate. When he makes a feeble effort to connect Alex's plight to the Iraq war and the cultural climate of Bush-era America, I just don't buy it.
  16. Calle 54
    Calle 54 doesn't have that coherence or vision of the "Buena Vista Social Club."
  17. American Beauty
    It remains a puzzling dream, vivid in detail and overly obvious in symbolism, fueled by half-digested lumps of malice and wonder.
  18. Shrek
    Am I alone in thinking that computer animation is the work of the antichrist?
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Graduate
    What was once an all-important signpost to adulthood is really little more than a simple romantic comedy whose "countercultural" message, insofar as it has one, is decidedly retrograde. [Review of re-release]
  20. Spider-Man 2
    For a big-budget action movie Spider-Man 2 is modest and not assaultive -- it has a boring decency.
  21. Avatar
    It is a very expensive-looking, very flashy entertainment, albeit one that groans under the weight of clumsy storytelling in the second half and features some of the most godawful dialogue this side of "Attack of the Clones."
  22. Up in the Air
    Comes off not as topical but as opportunist. The picture is brushed with a fine glaze of slickness, a product sealed in a blister pack. It's like airplane air -- it has a packaged freshness that isn't really fresh at all.
  23. Milk
    I can admire the professional flexibility that leads Van Sant from slow-motion, half-experimental works like "Paranoid Park" or "Last Days" to an inspirational, Oscar-season package like Milk, but I wish he could split the difference between his two modes more effectively.
  24. Vera Drake
    When one of the young women Vera attends to nearly dies of complications, the police arrest her -- and the movie goes thud, taking Staunton's performance along with it.
  25. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    The picture throws off no feeling, not even the misanthropic kind; at best, it manages a dull, throbbing energy, as if Burton were dutifully pushing his way through the material instead of shaping it.
  26. Memento
    Whenever Harris or Tobolowsky come on-screen they stop Memento dead in its clever tracks. You want to tell Nolan to stop all the po-mo deconstructive game playing and pay attention to the two human beings in front of him.
  27. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Amid the infoglut that surrounds us, Gibney's film feels too much like more noise. Is it telling the most important business story of our lifetimes, or is it just another fantastical yarn, crammed into the schedule after Scott and Laci Peterson, but before Charlemagne and the ancient Peruvian astronauts?
  28. Howl's Moving Castle
    The plot of Howl's Moving Castle meanders so listlessly that its details become less and less charming.
  29. Captain Phillips
    Not far below the surface Captain Phillips is also an unpleasant and uncomfortable experience, a film that’s not entirely happy with itself.
  30. In the Company of Men
    A singularly unpleasant movie.
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