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 1.2 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:
  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. The Island
    The Island walks a weird, wobbly line between being stupid, falsely fattened-up entertainment and a picture that just might have possibly been made by a person with a brain -- a scrambled one, but a brain nonetheless.
  2. Bad News Bears
    At least Linklater isn't just picking the bones of his forebears; he honors them as they deserve.
  3. The Devil's Rejects
    Much of Devil's Rejects is absolutely hilarious, especially the brief appearance by a Gene Shalit-like film critic who explicates all the Groucho Marx references. Zombie's eye for the faux-'70s detail is perfect.
  4. 9 Songs
    While 9 Songs is sexually explicit in the basic sense, its DIRECTNESS is what's most fascinating, and ultimately most moving, about it.
  5. The Edukators
    An engaging entertainment that packages its thought-provoking ideas in a combination of political thriller, comic adventure and romantic triangle.
  6. Last Days
    It's a meticulous nest of interlocking elements, not at all haphazard. But in its unrelieved bleakness and singularity of vision, it supplies very little in the way of conventional movieness.
  7. Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America
    An engaging, well-made docu that admirably captures the singular importance of its subject.
  8. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is absinthe in movie form, a white chocolate space egg of a picture that has a giddy hallucinatory quality in some places and an overcalculated glossiness in others. But for better or worse, it's fascinating.
  9. 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.
  10. Happy Endings
    The kind of self-conscious puzzle picture in which characters behave in ways that serve the plot but in no way resemble things that actual human beings would be likely to do.
  11. On the Outs
    A scared-straight after-school special, but actually good.
  12. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
    A lovely, faintly sinister travelogue.
  13. Dark Water
    Spins toward its glum, dishwater-gray whirlpool of an ending, which doesn't have nearly as much emotional punch as it should. It doesn't leave you feeling spent -- only soaked.
  14. Fantastic Four
    Fantastic Four doesn't expand on, or even illuminate, anything much beyond the most basic theme of what it feels like to be an adolescent misfit. This is a comic-book movie that actually makes an effort not to go over kids' heads.
  15. Murderball
    Has a lot of integrity, both in visual and conceptual terms, and seamlessly blends entertainment and education.
  16. 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.
  17. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    Might not be as intriguingly odd as the picture that inspired it. But like that earlier picture, it bristles with life and energy. It's a movie made with equal measures of bravado and humility -- the same mix of qualities you need to play Beethoven, Mozart or Bach.
  18. The World
    If a movie can be stark and rapturous at the same time, this is that movie.
  19. War of the Worlds
    Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.
  20. Tropical Malady
    It's a haunted picture, one that feels inhabited not just by actors and scenery but by spirits, too.
  21. Bewitched
    Kidman will have the last laugh; not even Ephron, with her dumb flying house of a movie, can crush her magic.
  22. Yes
    For the most part Yes buzzes with visual life and imagination.
  23. March of the Penguins
    There's more drama, and more heartbreak, in March of the Penguins than in most movies that are actually scripted to tug at our feelings.
  24. Lila Says
    Unsurprisingly, the camerawork in Lila Says is spectacular.
  25. The Great Water
    Despite his reliance on visual cliché, Trajkov mines a rich vein of morbid Slavic comedy, and his young characters have an appetite for adventure that's thoroughly unfake.
  26. Heights
    As enjoyable as Close is, Heights as a whole is a mannered simulation that only occasionally and accidentally feels like real New York life.
  27. My Summer of Love
    Its stars, Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, are film newcomers who give startling performances. The photography is often breathtakingly original.
  28. Batman Begins
    Needs much more energy and kinetic flow -- less dolor and more dolomite.
  29. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    Some people will see Mr. and Mrs. Smith as cynical, but I think its heart is deeply romantic, admittedly in an anvil-on-the-head kind of way. It's a love story not for the faint of heart. In other words, it's a lot like marriage.
  30. High Tension
    Horror fans should see this, at least in geeky admiration for what it pulls off, but in the long run it's no more than a crisp footnote to genre history.
  31. Howl's Moving Castle
    The plot of Howl's Moving Castle meanders so listlessly that its details become less and less charming.
  32. Wild Side
    Wild Side is sometimes maddening to watch, but will haunt you for days afterward.
  33. 5x2
    In the end I respected 5x2 more than I loved it. As we move backward in time, the distance between audience and characters inevitably widens -- we know what's going to happen and they don't -- and I found the effect a little astringent.
  34. Cinderella Man
    Cinderella Man is ostensibly the kind of old-fashioned drama that sends audiences home with a satisfied glow. But like so many of Howard's movies, there's something canned and phony about it -- it left me feeling cooked and dehydrated, as if I'd fallen asleep on a tanning bed.
  35. Lords of Dogtown
    There are times when even a director's worst impulses aren't enough to sink a movie, and somehow Lords of Dogtown stays afloat, largely because many of its actors transcend Hardwicke's heavy-handed storytelling.
  36. Apres Vous (After You)
    Après Vous offers nice sound design and an unfussy presentation of middle-class Paris. It comes and goes with no unpleasant aftertaste.
  37. The White Diamond
    An inexpressibly beautiful and moving film, even though (or because) it seems to be about someone unimportant doing something irrelevant, perhaps something silly, in the face of insurmountable odds and a world that doesn't care.
  38. The Longest Yard
    Setting such larger aesthetic questions aside, there isn't much to dislike about The Longest Yard, at least once you've gotten used to the pervasive fear of homosexuality that seems to ooze from the film's pores.
  39. A League of Ordinary Gentlemen
    Following four players through the first season of Miller's regime, Browne captures not just a high-energy sports spectacle played out in the bowling megaplexes of outer suburbia but, even more interestingly, a clash of cultures between bowling's hallowed past and its possible future.
  40. Saving Face
    It has the heart and spirit of a true romantic comedy, and a lightness of touch that you rarely see in a debut picture.
  41. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it. But Revenge of the Sith is still crap.
  42. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire
    In some ways Shake Hands With the Devil hits harder than either "Hotel Rwanda" or the recent HBO film "Sometimes in April."
  43. Monster-in-Law
    Fonda and Sykes are made for each other, and their incessant bickering and arguing are about the only things that give Monster-in-Law any life.
  44. Unleashed
    Pathos isn't a cheap gimmick when it comes from the soul, and Li knows how to channel it, through his brain, his limbs and his heart.
  45. My Mother
    It's pretentious highbrow trash, but as far as that goes it works pretty well.
  46. Kings & Queen
    With all his artifice, his prodigious narrative risks and seemingly undisciplined mélange of styles and tones, Desplechin has made a film that feels more like real life than anything I've seen in years, from any source. It's a masterpiece.
  47. Tell Them Who You Are
    A strange, strident and finally fulfilling father-son saga.
  48. House of Wax
    Paris Hilton is the big draw in Jaume Collet-Serra's not-really-a-remake horror-slasher thriller House of Wax, and she'd have to be: There's so little else going on in it that you find yourself waiting for her few brief scenes.
  49. Kingdom of Heaven
    This is muddled and oppressive storytelling (the script is by William Monahan) dotted with elaborate but weightless battle sequences.
  50. Mysterious Skin
    Mysterious Skin isn't a picture about existential vacancy; it isn't even about anything so simplistic as the horrors of child abuse. It's more of a meditation on the necessity of making your way past, or through, any obstacle that prevents you from being a thinking, feeling person.
  51. Crash
    These interlocking stories don't move along as swiftly or as urgently as they should, and much of the dialogue thumps along on square wheels.
  52. Writer of O
    An elegant but muddled affair, worth seeing despite (and maybe because of) its own split personality.
  53. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
    Does so many things right, and still doesn't quite hit the mark.
  54. Another Road Home
    It's a fascinating human story and a film as pure as ice water
  55. 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.
  56. The Holy Girl
    It's a marvelously acted film, driven by a sweaty-palmed, exponentially mounting tension.
  57. Ladies in Lavender.
    The sort of small, independent-minded picture that so much of American indie cinema strives, and often fails, to give us. It's a conventional picture, but it feels so deeply alive that it's practically a novelty.
  58. The Interpreter
    The Interpreter is so intent on reminding us that it's a QUALITY piece of work that it forgets to give us the very thing we thought we came in for: a story.
  59. A Lot Like Love
    The big screen doesn't seem to like Kutcher much, or even to GET him, whatever there is to get.
  60. Double Dare
    It's a classic gal-pal movie, perfect for daughters, sisters, moms and the guys whose asses they kick.
  61. 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?
  62. Save the Green Planet!
    The best film in the alien attack, conspiracy theory, "Silence of the Lambs" rip-off, disgraced-cop drama, deranged circus wirewalker, anti-capitalist parable genre I've seen this year.
  63. The Amityville Horror
    As a symbol of what some filmmakers and some studios think the public will buy, it's a horrific piece of work. How dare anyone put this piece of c--- in front of me. How dare anyone put it in front of YOU.
  64. House of D
    The good news is that Duchovny has an undeniable feel for this medium, and a fine rapport with actors.
  65. It's All Gone Pete Tong
    In addition to possessing the most confusing title of the year, Canadian filmmaker Michael Dowse's high-energy dance-club saga It's All Gone Pete Tong arrives in an elaborate package of spoof and deception that should win the admiration of any practical-joke connoisseur.
  66. Torremolinos 73
    This delicious little period piece from Spanish writer-director Pablo Berger is like one of those really expensive chocolates, where you start out expecting a brief sugar buzz and end up surprised by the sophistication and delicacy of the flavor.
  67. Palindromes
    I've never seen anything crazier than Palindromes. You can read that as praise if you're that sort of person, but I don't mean it that way.
  68. Fever Pitch
    Fever Pitch lacks that Farrelly spark, that warm, crazy glint.
  69. Kung Fu Hustle
    Chow depends way too much on jokey computer graphics that make the whole thing feel like a superhero comic, instead of athleticism or charisma or good storytelling, and that Kung Fu Hustle wears itself out long before it's over.
  70. ...And They Lived Happily Ever After
    Happily Ever After is an exhilarating, joyous picture, but it's sometimes terrifying, too. It offers a vision of marriage as an adventure we embark on together, alone. If you didn't cry, you'd laugh.
  71. Major Dundee (re-release)
    As flawed as it is, Major Dundee maintains its dignity in the face of the injustices that were done to it. Ripped-up and ragtag, it still holds its head high.
  72. Sin City
    Sin City is the first mainstream American picture I've seen this year that feels even remotely brash or original. It's a hard, viciously funny little movie, one with all the subtlety of a billy club. But there's artistry here.
  73. Control
    I'm not going to tell you this is the best European film of the year, but it's definitely the hottest -- it's the one you want to run out and see as soon as you possibly can.
  74. Guess Who
    The super-duper whiteness of Ashton Kutcher is funny. Just not funny enough.
  75. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    I feel prodigious emotion underneath the pretty, preserved features of The Ballad of Jack and Rose, channeled into a vehicle that's a half-successful imitation of "You Can Count on Me" or "In the Bedroom."
  76. Oldboy
    Anguished, beautiful and desperately alive, Oldboy is a dazzling work of pop-culture artistry.
  77. The Ring Two
    Isn't a great work of horror, but it's admirable simply because it serves the genre so serviceably. It's nicely constructed, and it doesn't have one of those ridiculous extended endings.
  78. Melinda and Melinda
    Even these actors -- who, in other pictures, are often wonderful in distinctive ways -- don't seem like themselves: It's as if they've been pulverized and pressed into convenient actor shapes.
  79. Fifty-Fifty
    Schizo is in its way a taut and exciting thriller.
  80. Millions
    A sweet little picture with a sense of humor as well as a mission. If money can't buy you love, at least it can buy you 90 minutes of warmth.
  81. In My Country
    A disappointingly blunt, monochrome work.
  82. Mail Order Wife
    Completely deranged, and the portrait it paints of our beloved country depicts a dangerous place full of neurotics and obsessives. But lots of fun, with porn, booze, backyard barbecues and elaborate revenge schemes!
  83. Nowhere Man
    I'm always grateful to practice a little affirmative action on behalf of grade-C sleaze movies with a budget you could probably locate in your sofa cushions or your dryer, and Tim McCann's digital-video opus Nowhere Man is a fine example of the species.
  84. Be Cool
    Isn't assaultive or dumb, just slack and de-energized, as if its batteries start running down in the first frame.
  85. Gunner Palace
    A nerve-jangling work of visual poetry and ironic juxtaposition, and a powerful human story of a group of brave young Americans.
  86. Intimate Stories
    This is a charming, low-key entry in the burgeoning tradition of travelog indies -- by which I mean feature films that take you to some godforsaken outback you're unlikely to visit personally.
  87. The Best of Youth
    This is a graceful and enveloping feat of filmmaking.
  88. Diary of a Mad Black Woman
    As lousy as it is, Diary of a Mad Black Woman is weirdly fascinating.
  89. Up and Down
    A powerful Czech drama with comic flourishes.
  90. Constantine
    Pretty much rocks.
  91. Downfall
    Hirschbiegel and Eichinger, along with their large, brave and talented cast, have done something extraordinary for their generation of Germans, and for the world. They have willfully entered their grandparents' dirtiest, clammiest chamber of secrets.
  92. Turtles Can Fly
    Although Turtles Can Fly is a lyrical, often lovely film with touches of humor, it's also a remorseless tragedy that doesn't offer its child protagonists any false redemption.
  93. Cinévardaphoto
    Varda's photography is a pure joy, but rereleasing this film four decades later, absent any commentary on the ironic distance between then and now, is a typically challenging gesture.
  94. Hitch
    Smith deserves a better romantic comedy than Hitch, but at least he somehow manages to improve the material around him.
  95. 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.
  96. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
    One of the most beautiful and endearing nature films you've ever seen, despite being filmed almost entirely within a major metropolis, and a love story that will repeatedly reduce you to tears.
  97. The Wedding Date
    Dermot Mulroney is the movie's only genuinely romantic lead. And he's so good that he nearly carries The Wedding Date single-handedly.
  98. Nobody Knows
    Kore-eda doesn't create the simultaneous sense of being destroyed and exalted that the greatest humanist movies do, but he's stayed true to his title.
  99. Daybreak
    Masterfully paced and constructed, and the performances are memorable.
  100. Travelers and Magicians
    It isn't going anywhere, but the journey is highly entertaining.
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