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. Miles Ahead
    To give a performance this layered and complex and unstinting while also directing the film around it, which is risky and imaginative and full of life, testifies to impressive powers of concentration.
  2. Fury
    Like Ayer’s cop flicks, Fury is a gripping ride all the way through, if somewhat restricted in its emotional and visual range.
  3. To the Bone
    The film itself is an admirable and empathetic work that does not romanticize anorexia or the young woman being ground into nothingness by the disease, as some have feared.
  4. The Young Victoria
    Emily Blunt shines as the tough-minded British queen in this lush, and even sexy, period romance
  5. The Road
    John Hillcoat's The Road is an honorable adaptation of a piece of pulp fiction disguised as high art; it a has more directness and more integrity than its source material, the 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy.
  6. True Crime
    An electrically paced and brilliantly acted death-row thriller.
  7. The Dancer Upstairs
    The Dancer Upstairs, is a haunting and often beautiful work, part doomed romance and part political thriller, that demonstrates the adult command of the medium Malkovich has always demonstrated as an actor.
  8. The Princess and the Warrior
    Promising in its first third, only to end up shambling too aimlessly in the last. But as flawed as this picture is, there's one sequence in it that has already burrowed deep in my memory, and of everything in the movie, it's the one element that convinces me that Tykwer has it in him to one day make a truly great picture.
  9. Inside Deep Throat
    If a movie can be fascinating and tedious at the same time, Inside Deep Throat -- which more or less depicts the America I have just described -- is that movie.
  10. The Road to Guantanamo
    At the risk of retreating into Waffle House aesthetic relativism, I think the unsettling power of Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross' film stems from its contradictions.
  11. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
    What's clear from the film is that there's a massive, almost tribal demand for O'Brien's brand of slightly more upscale comedy (maybe less so for his rock-star stylings), and also that being that famous doesn't do wonders for anyone's personality.
  12. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist
    The movie itself seems to be locked in a kind of adolescence; it never quite blossoms into maturity, into a fully rounded whole.
  13. Ant-Man
    A discombobulated summer movie that’s kind of fun but doesn’t have nearly enough story to fill up two hours.
  14. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    A penultimate chapter without a real ending, but it’s also a thrilling ride full of potent emotions, new characters and major twists of fate, built around another commanding star performance.
  15. La sierra
    The story of how La Sierra moves from a seemingly pointless war to an unexpected peace is a thrilling one, although the impact of seeing what becomes of these three kids is devastating.
  16. The U.S. vs. John Lennon
    Sheds some unexpected light on the uneven and still undigested career of one of the most paradoxical artists pop culture has yet produced.
  17. Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner
    Many years in the making, Freida Lee Mock's documentary Wrestling With Angels paints an intimate and detailed portrait of playwright Tony Kushner, in the years since he became the most important living American dramatist. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that this is something of a booby prize.
  18. If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle
    Offers an introduction to the lean-and-mean, social-realist Romanian storytelling style that's built around a charismatic young actor and a familiar genre.
  19. Chocolat
    A cozy little ode to sensual and culinary pleasure.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grass
    A flashy, smoker-friendly documentary on the twisted history of the evil weed -- and the misguided drug war against marijuana.
  21. Blades of Glory
    While I don't think Blades of Glory is exactly homophobic -- it's not mean-spirited enough for that -- there's something a little too cheap and easy about the way it plays up to the ultra-straight guys in its target demographic.
  22. One Bright Shining Moment
    It's a deeply flawed film but also an important one.
  23. State of Play
    An intelligent adult thriller about the death of newspapers.
  24. Pineapple Express
    The picture is resolutely unhip and proud of it, which can be a good thing in the right hands or, in the wrong ones, just a gimmick. Nearly everything about Pineapple Express is a gimmick.
  25. St. Vincent
    Murray, as always, supplies any number of small, memorable moments — he ultimately relies on the same defanged sentimentality.
  26. Cradle Will Rock
    Obviously influenced by the style of Robert Altman's multi-character extravaganzas, Robbins has seized on this incident as the centerpiece in a carnival about the conflicts among art, politics and commerce.
  27. Appaloosa
    If Appaloosa is something to look at, it's also unnecessarily lethargic. Even an intentionally slow-paced picture needs to have its own internal source of energy, and as a filmmaker, Harris can't quite get that motor running.
  28. X-Men
    A distinctively absorbing entertainment, offering just enough popcorn thrills for mass audiences and just enough chewiness for hardcore sci-fi fans.
  29. Bright Young Things
    in its best moments, Bright Young Things is as lithe and as wicked as its source material. Depending on how much of a Waugh purist you are, its flaws may trouble you as you're watching it. But afterward, they might not matter so much.
  30. Stage Beauty
    An entertainment as billowy as a Shakespearean nurse's sail-shaped hat.
  31. Wedding Crashers
    Wedding Crashers may be the most optimistic Hollywood comedy of the year, because it restores at least some dim hope that directors, writers and actors with actual brains in their heads can somehow triumph over unimaginative studio execs. In that way, Wedding Crashers isn't just the life of the party, but its pulse.
  32. Changing Times
    It's kind of a mess. An agreeable, even lovable mess, but still a mess.
  33. Blood Diamond
    Preachy infotainment that wants to offer thrills, too -- an uneasy hybrid.
  34. The Other Guys
    It's a mixed bag with plenty of gags that fall flat, not a comic masterpiece. But it's got tremendous zing, a sense of mischief and a big heart, more than enough to mark it as a delicious shot of caffeinated ice cream, and the summer season's funniest comedy.
  35. Something New
    Something New is the perfect date movie, not only because it explores a range of suitably romantic sentiments, but because it's so canny sociologically, as well as being delightfully good-natured.
  36. Star Trek: Insurrection
    Outsiders will find this schtick-laden, mildly exciting adventure yarn an inoffensive triviality, while fans will savor one more encounter with Picard, Riker, Data, Worf and the gang, replete with all the well-worn character tics and platitudinous parables about the contemporary world they expect.
  37. Proof
    Proof isn't just a movie about mathematics; it's a mathematical movie. The scenes may as well have been laid out by diagram.
  38. Amistad
    A little like looking at pictures without a text to unify them… Prestige filmmaking bereft of inspiration -- sometimes even of the nuts and bolts of craft.
  39. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    One of the strangest and least summarizable motion pictures ever made: tragic and hilarious, tightly constructed and miscellaneous.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gattaca
    Implausible in countless ways and wooden for long stretches, Gattaca at least never collapses into a special-effects barrage or erupts in long, choreographed explosions; it sticks carefully to its pristine vision.
  41. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    There's a reason why Looney Tunes cartoons were six minutes long. Stretched out over an hour and a half, they're wearying.
  42. Blood Work
    As much as Eastwood ever expresses pleasure about anything, you sense a flicker of gratification that he can work with actors who can hold their own against him. Lifford does it without breaking a sweat. Howard Hawks would have loved her.
  43. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    Profane, hilarious and ultimately heartbreaking, Alex Holdridge's black-and-white feature In Search of a Midnight Kiss has a gutter purity that makes you root for it all the way and forgive its patches of ultra-indie awkwardness.
  44. Lymelife
    Lymelife offers charm and humor through its young central characters and pathos through its remarkable supporting cast, without pulling punches on its overall atmosphere of autumnal darkness and anomie.
  45. Shortbus
    The sex is the most unremarkable thing about it. What surprised me most about this gentle-spirited sprawl of a movie, set in post-9/11 New York City, is what I can only call the friendly, Midwestern quality of the filmmaking.
  46. Fast Food Nation
    The movie is designed to stir up controversy. (Linklater and Schlosser have admitted as much.) But can you really stir up controversy with a lesson plan?
  47. Tokyo!
    This isn't an art house crowd pleaser along the lines of the 2006 "Paris, je t'aime," a freewheeling mixed bag of shorts made by the likes of Olivier Assayas, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuarón. Tokyo! demands more patience, patience that it sometimes doesn't deserve.
  48. Dancer in the Dark
    Lars von Trier is a mechanic, not an artist. And his movies are meat grinders he feeds his characters through.
  49. 16 Blocks
    This is a sturdy little cop thriller, and even when it stretches the bounds of plausibility, you go with it, partly because you believe -- almost against your better judgment -- in what the characters are doing.
  50. Songcatcher
    Songcatcher is like an "All Things Considered" report on "a vibrant and lasting folk tradition" that goes on for two hours. It's so relentlessly, goddamn worthy that you long for some cheapness and dirt, some energetic pop trash to liven it up.
  51. Unfaithful
    It's one of the fullest portrayals of sexual desire and pleasure and fear I've ever seen in a movie.
  52. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    Visual tone poem.
  53. One True Thing
    This might have worked if the director and lead actress had the kind of intense mutual understanding that, say, Ingmar Bergman had with Liv Ullmann, or John Cassavetes had with Gena Rowlands.
  54. Sex Is Comedy
    Parillaud's performance is sharp on its surface and soft at its core. And if Jeanne truly is Breillat's alter ego, she is a pitiless self-portrait.
  55. Monsters
    However you slice it, Monsters is a dynamite little film, loaded with atmosphere, intelligence, beauty and courage.
  56. Secretary
    It's a liberating, kindhearted picture, one whose ending brings with it the feeling that something has finally been shaken free. How comfortable you feel with that is completely up to you.
  57. Drumline
    When the camera is floating up high, as the band practices its moves on the field, you can imagine Busby Berkeley watching somewhere, jealous that he never got his mitts on a marching band.
  58. He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not
    Not half as clever as its setup leads you to think it might be: It's all buildup and no payoff, the kind of romantic thriller in which if just one sensible character called the police at the moment as any normal human being would -- well, then, you wouldn't have a movie.
  59. Out of Time
    Starts out as noir, takes a shift into something like deadpan screwball comedy and ends up as a comedy of remarriage.
  60. The Patriot
    This bloody celebration finally gives the American Revolution the epic it deserves.
  61. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    Funniest in its first half, when you're not quite sure where it's going, and drags in the second, by which time you realize it's going nowhere.
  62. The Lincoln Lawyer
    It's rare enough to see a Hollywood movie made with this much attention and personality, let alone one that balances comedy and darkness as well as this one does.
  63. Kingdom of Heaven
    This is muddled and oppressive storytelling (the script is by William Monahan) dotted with elaborate but weightless battle sequences.
  64. Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic
    The picture consists mostly of performance footage of Silverman, which, despite the fact that it's shot on grainy, anemic-looking digital video, is a pleasure to watch.
  65. Chronicles
    Despite all that South American sunshine, this lean and brilliantly constructed thriller is a dark realm of secrets and lies, illuminated by TV lighting and the glitter of John Leguizamo's eyes. Those in search of life-affirming family entertainment might want to stick with Ingmar Bergman.
  66. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Does so many things right, and still doesn't quite hit the mark.
  67. Zombie Honeymoon
    The film's strange blend of tragedy and surreal gore, à la Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, is surprisingly effective. For the right person, and you know who you are, this one's a must-see.
  68. The Game
    Fincher is still working on the assumption that he has better things to do than entertain an audience. Which would be fine if he weren't drawn to such schlocky material.
  69. Anna Karenina
    Does this crazy idea work? Maybe 70 percent of the time, but when it does it's both daring and brilliant.
  70. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2
    It's a relief to go to the movies and see teenage girls acting like teenage girls, as opposed to grown women acting like teenage girls.
  71. Chéri
    Chéri is a perfect example of a movie that gets many of the details right and the vibe all wrong.
  72. Friends with Benefits
    On the whole, Friends With Benefits is a rewarding summer diversion, albeit one that's fatally torn between what it wants to be -- riotous, anarchic and anti-moralistic -- and the disappointing wet-blanket formula it reverts to in the end.
  73. Sade
    If you're looking for thrills, you should know that you have to wade through a good seven-eighths of the movie before Sade does anything remotely disreputable, and even then it's a rather mechanical bit of business that would have been more effective (and more disturbing) if it had been handled with a bit of humor.
  74. The Blood of My Brother
    Much of the picture is exciting and terrifying.
  75. The Last Exorcism
    So some good acting and decent scares get entombed within too many dull postmodern iterations.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Citizen Ruth
    Citizen Ruth takes such pains not to take sides that it doesn't have any fun. Each faction gets the same amount of screen time, yells at the same volume, is equally unpleasant.
  77. Howl
    A very mixed bag. It's an oddly dry fusion of documentary and narrative film that arguably doesn't quite click on either level.
  78. Hot Tub Time Machine
    At its best the film is blissfully, anarchically funny, and director Steve Pink keeps the pace crackling.
  79. Spy Game
    Manages to be entertaining and reasonably exciting. Scott's style may be slick and tricky but, if this and his last film, "Enemy of the State," are any indication, he's lost the glossy sadism that characterized his previous work.
  80. Two Brothers
    Unless you're a lover of tigers, there's probably no reason to see Jean-Jacques Annaud's Two Brothers. And maybe not even then.
  81. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
    It has a pleasing, noodly elasticity about it -- the picture knows what its limits are and proceeds to boogie unself-consciously far outside them.
  82. Changeling
    A glum, listless affair that springs to life now and then, only to sag back into its saggy, depressive cushion.
  83. Zoo
    Quiet, sensitive, resolutely unsensational documentary about virtually the most sensational subject you can imagine.
  84. Rocky Balboa
    Even as Sylvester Stallone's long goodbye to the heroic underdog who made him famous descends from pathos into silliness, and from fairy tale into hallucination, you can't help liking the big galoot.
  85. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
    When Pirates of the Caribbean is good, it's certainly something to behold.
  86. Lunacy
    One of the best films of the year.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Biggie and Tupac
    It's no exaggeration to say that roughly half of the interviews in Biggie and Tupac are worthless, offering no new information or insights about the rappers or their deaths.
  88. Green Zone
    This is a movie that recognizes there's no straight line to the truth, which is part of what makes it vaguely unsatisfying -- though it's also what keeps it honest.
  89. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    After its deceptively fleet opening 20 minutes or so, Chamber of Secrets settles into a plodding amble, a rickety framework in which many allegedly exciting things happen -- and are forgotten only minutes later.
  90. The 11th Hour
    Arguably a more important movie, which more clearly lays out what must be done to save the world, and how we can begin.
  91. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day
    Watching McDormand navigate that transformation is the kind of thing that can keep your hope in movies, and in actors, alive.
  92. Spring Breakers
    Fitzgerald’s influence could have crept in there by osmosis, and whatever other charges you want to level against Spring Breakers – such as incoherence, plotlessness, salaciousness and mind-numbing monotony – it has no lack of high concept.
  93. The Cat's Meow
    If there were any justice in the world, The Cat's Meow would be the beginning of the rehabilitation of Davies' image.
  94. Open Water
    Kentis and Lau succeed in doing what all filmmakers worth their salt strive to do: They make us care about their characters.
  95. Revenge of the Electric Car
    Paine seems delighted to root for all three companies and essentially declares a three-way tie, which may be fine for the moment.
  96. Eden
    Thrumming with anguish and erotic vitality, Eden paints a heartbreaking portrait of a newly affluent country (freed from dour priests, whiskey-soaked revolutionaries and shawl-clad women) afflicted with emotional growing pains.
  97. World War Z
    A genuinely exciting thrill ride that only occasionally feels bloated or painfully dumb.
  98. Hannah Takes the Stairs
    The film's intimacy never feels fake, it's sporadically and unpredictably funny (I didn't exactly enjoy the cacophonous trumpet duet of the "1812 Overture," but I won't soon forget it), and the nonprofessional cast is surprisingly good.
  99. À Tout de Suite (Right Now)
    Le Besco gives an unforgettable performance in a movie that's sweet and sad, formally near-perfect but never cynical.
  100. I Capture the Castle
    May not be a very grand picture, but it's a gently satisfying one. And if it brings Smith's book just a few hundred more readers, it's admirably done its job.
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