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 1.3 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. Tower Heist
    Tower Heist is funny in the way of so many Hollywood comedies, meaning that individual scenes are often crisply written and played, but the whole doesn't add up to anything.
  2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    It's so almost moving -- a meticulously crafted mechanical bird -- that it nearly feels like the real thing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Seven Years in Tibet
    The bad news is that Pitt, despite this film's high-minded intentions (there are Yo-Yo Ma cello solos on the soundtrack, and China expert Orville Schell acted as an advisor during the shoot), or more likely because of them, finds himself trapped in a long, earnest movie that fails to ever feel very alive.
  4. Trembling Before G-d
    By the end of Trembling Before G_d, you desperately wish that at least some of DuBowski's subjects would see the light.
  5. The Ringer
    An odd and not wholly successful little comedy. Its pacing is slack, and although it has a gentle heart, it treads so gingerly across the minefield of potential offensiveness that it sometimes snuffs out its sparks of life as quickly as it throws them off.
  6. The Man from Elysian Fields
    Mick Jagger acts his age, finally, in an entertaining but ultimately disappointing fable.
  7. Garden State
    Braff, and Garden State, give it the old college try, and at least some, if not all, of the sparks catch. Even if the movie doesn't quite take off, it doesn't leave you feeling stranded, either.
  8. Absolute Wilson
    Absolute Wilson changed my views of Wilson as a person tremendously, and at least gave me some useful context for his art.
  9. Ladder 49
    Might have been an oversized Hollywood dazzler. Phoenix keeps it firmly and modestly on a human scale.
  10. Prime
    Now that Woody Allen is no longer making acceptable Woody Allen movies, it's surprising we're not seeing more comedies like Prime, a slight but well-meaning picture that strives for the same kind of pleasurably neurotic sophistication that Allen, at his best, used to give us.
  11. Eagle vs Shark
    It's a perfectly cheerful time at the movies, without any hint of drama or surprise.
  12. Killer Elite
    It's a generically enjoyable action film with a bit of hardboiled based-on-a-true-story-ness about it, and since it's set in the '80s and feels like an '80s movie, it seems a lot like something you must have seen years ago.
  13. Sylvia
    A not-very-good movie about a fascinating and underexplored subject: the unknowability of a marriage.
  14. Roadie
    I simultaneously want to endorse its ambition and nerve and report that it's a very mixed bag.
  15. Defiance
    Defiance comes off as plodding and workmanlike -- and even in the midst of Zwick's too-careful machinations, it's a movie that's unsure of what it wants to be.
  16. Thanks for Sharing
    The singer Pink, also known as Alecia Moore, here plays Dede, one of the group’s only female members, and the connection between Dede and Neil, which at first stretches credibility to the breaking point, may be the best thing about “Thanks for Sharing.”
  17. Injeong sajeong bol geot eobtda
    Lee can't tell a story to save his life, but he's something of a visual magician, laying out glittering piles of goodies that you instinctively want to follow.
  18. W.
    It's when Stone engages in shameless editorializing -- when he lets his freak-flag point of view fly, rather than tempering it -- that W. is most entertaining and most vital. The rest of the time it feels too much like awards bait: stiff, arch and knowing.
  19. Wag the Dog
    Wag the Dog is such a crisply delivered political satire, so packed full of wickedly amusing details and expertly modulated performances and with its heart so obviously in the right place that I really, truly wish I could tell you it was also a good movie.
  20. White Oleander
    Maybe it's only half of what it could be, but at least it's a healthy half. And in this era of mainstream cookie-cutter moviemaking, that's a feat in itself.
  21. Kit Kittredge: An American Girl
    Roughly speaking, the characters in Kit Kittredge may be stereotypes, but they're stereotypes with soul. And they live in a very real place.
  22. 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.
  23. Everything's Gone Green
    Fundamentally, it's a well-executed formula movie, perfect for first-date couples or miscellaneous group outings.
  24. 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.
  25. Firewall
    There's just not enough of Forster, who has a small role as Ford's work colleague and confidant. ..Sometimes star quality shines out from the corners of a movie, and not from the center.
  26. What Goes Up
    Director and co-writer Jonathan Glatzer handles his talented cast well, and the movie is dark, droll and sentimental in roughly the correct proportions. Worth a look.
  27. Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
    At times fun but mostly maddeningly uneven, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back feels less like a full-fledged movie than a side project Smith took on to amuse himself and his buddies.
  28. Brokeback Mountain
    Takes great pains to be a compassionate love story; but the filmmaking itself, self-consciously restrained and desiccated, is inert and inexpressive.
  29. 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.
  30. You, Me and Dupree
    Everything about You, Me and Dupree, even the toilet humor, is tepid and rigorously inoffensive
  31. The Fifth Estate
    This movie isn’t terrible enough to derail the “Sherlock Holmes” star’s upward trajectory toward pop-culture domination, but Cumberbatch’s subtle and intriguing performance as the inscrutable Aussie loner behind WikiLeaks is surrounded by a plodding and minor melodrama that’s ludicrously ill suited to the material.
  32. Music of the Heart
    Falls flat for its skittish reluctance to bear any resemblance to an actual Wes Craven film.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Rocker
    A pleasant but unimpressive experience.
  34. The Truth About Emanuel
    The film has an odd and striking energy, and the chemistry between Scodelario and Biel has an electrical charge to it. There are a couple of genuinely creepy moments, and Gregorini keeps us on an emotional knife edge.
  35. Detroit Rock City
    It's not a full-on go-for-broke love letter to rock 'n' roll or a broad, joyous spoof, but something stuck awkwardly in between.
  36. Meet the Fockers
    If there's any reason to bother with Meet the Fockers, it's to see Hoffman and Streisand.
  37. Evelyn
    May be a weightless picture, but it's hardly torture to sit through. Just watch out for those angel rays.
  38. Behind Enemy Lines
    Sometimes stylish flashiness can be fun, and the movie does have a terrific, bleached-out, ice-blue look. But anyone who cares about what actors do has a right to be distrustful of a director who puts more emphasis on the look of his movie than on the performances.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Osmosis Jones
    Remains stubbornly one-dimensional. The gags are so resoundingly and innocently pre-adolescent that it's really hard to see how the film managed a PG rating.
  40. The Business of Strangers
    Stettner must be one of the luckiest and unluckiest debut directors in years, blessed with actors who both take the focus away from his limitations and wind up shining a spotlight on them.
  41. Smart People
    Fine actors do their damnedest to make this dumb movie look sharp.
  42. Jupiter Ascending
    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.
  43. Mystery Men
    Mystery Men is supposed to be an action comedy, but there isn't nearly enough of either.
  44. V/H/S
    I'm not sure V/H/S is brilliant cinema or anything – indeed, I'm not sure it's appropriate to call it cinema at all – but it sure is an ingenious hybrid: part Godardian art film, part abstract video experiment, part sleazy shocker, and all self-castigating interrogation of what film-theory types call the "male gaze."
  45. Intimate Strangers
    To borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, Intimate Strangers suggests bits of Alfred Hitchcock and bits of Woody Allen. But the wrong bits.
  46. Das wilde Leben
    Deliciously dumb, reasonably well-made.
  47. Bolt
    Bolt is just too knowing; it keeps reminding us, loud and clear, of how culturally savvy it is.
  48. Guess Who
    The super-duper whiteness of Ashton Kutcher is funny. Just not funny enough.
  49. Blow
    Depp aside, the movie is higher on style than it is on substance.
  50. The Night Listener
    The experience of watching The Night Listener didn't make me feel "real" at all, only stuffed.
  51. Evening
    Evening feels like one of those devil's-candy productions that aim to bring artistry to a large audience, specifically a large audience of adult women who don't often go to the movies. Even considering it in that light, I found it miscalculated and overcooked.
  52. Swing Vote
    A maddeningly indistinct picture.
  53. 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.
  54. The Brothers Grimm
    Although The Brothers Grimm is partly an inventive fantasy, it's also a cluttered, jangly action picture, and there's too much noise and commotion for Gilliam's subtler ideas to really resonate.
  55. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    Legally Blonde was content to tickle you. The new one is something akin to a band that has a surprisingly successful debut deciding to rerecord all their originals and release a "Greatest Hits" collection for their second CD. It's both familiar and off.
  56. Shall We Dance
    The movie feels choppy and rhythmless. And he's (Chelsom) rather hopeless at dance sequences.
  57. Annapolis
    Like so many disappointing movies, it's peopled by performers who do their damnedest to make the whole thing work.
  58. A Previous Engagement
    I'm not big on those Pauline Kael-style encomiums to great actors in mediocre material, but that's exactly what we've got here. Stevenson is so incandescent -- so funny, so vulnerable, so awkwardly sexy.
  59. Road to Perdition
    Feels like a movie that keeps wishing it were something else: an award-winning play, a grand novel, an epic poem, anything but that populist thing we call a movie. Mendes makes movies as if he hates them.
  60. The Good Shepherd
    The Good Shepherd, soft when it needs to be sharp, is all cloak with very little dagger.
  61. 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.
  62. Brokedown Palace
    The penalties for drug trafficking in Thailand are very, very stiff. If there were any justice in the world, the penalties for saddling fine actors with terrible dialogue would be even stiffer.
  63. Changing Times
    It's kind of a mess. An agreeable, even lovable mess, but still a mess.
  64. Matchstick Men
    Matchstick Men isn't even remotely intricate; it's not even particularly interesting.
  65. The Kid
    Perfectly acceptable entertainment in the Mouse Factory's most familiar vein.
  66. 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.
  67. The Passion of the Christ
    Mel Gibson may have changed the face of cinema forever. I think he has: He's made the first true Jesusploitation flick, a picture that, despite its self-righteous air of grave religiosity, is barely spiritual at all.
  68. 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."
  69. Leatherheads
    You have to give Leatherheads this much: It's like no other comedy, or movie, out there these days. Clooney, one of our few old-style Hollywood movie stars himself, obviously loves old-fashioned moviemaking.
  70. Cop Out
    Morgan transcends the wayward silliness of Cop Out just by going for the gusto. He grabs it, and he hangs on.
  71. Lonely Hearts
    Hayek, with that old-time movie-star pout, those dark, reflective eyes (they could be Satan's twin swimming pools), is the shivery, chilling backbone of Lonely Hearts. Martha Beck couldn't get away with murder. But Salma Hayek can.
  72. Miral
    It isn't the shifting narrative focus of Miral that's the problem, nor is it the purposefully provocative pro-Palestinian perspective. It's Jebreal's screenplay, which uses every scene as a vehicle for delivering news headlines or condensed political rhetoric, and seems incapable of capturing a specific emotion or an individual personality.
  73. Bringing Out the Dead
    Curiously and disappointingly lethargic.
  74. Fred Claus
    Fred Claus does feature some very nicely groomed reindeer, a far cry from those patchy, depressed-looking creatures you see every holiday season at the petting zoo. They're prancing and dancing as fast as they can, but they can't pull Fred Claus from the rut it's in.
  75. The Unknown Woman
    It's an exceptionally well-made example of the kind of delirious, semi-Gothic, overcooked melodrama filmmakers from the Boot have long specialized in.
  76. Bewitched
    Kidman will have the last laugh; not even Ephron, with her dumb flying house of a movie, can crush her magic.
  77. The Da Vinci Code
    Disappointingly tame.
  78. Al Franken: God Spoke
    For me, Franken is funniest at his least guarded and his most incorrect, and as he inches toward becoming a politician himself, we get less and less of that.
  79. A Good Woman
    This is one of those movies destined to be watched by family groups who can't agree on what to see: You'll all get a few chuckles, and then it's home for dessert.
  80. Down in the Valley
    While Jacobson navigates the first half of Down in the Valley deftly, he loses his way in the second.
  81. 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.
  82. Gangster Squad
    As a capable imitation of better movies by Martin Scorsese, Brian DePalma and Roman Polanski – it's reasonably successful entertainment.
  83. Valkyrie
    Neither a masterpiece nor an embarrassment, but a workmanlike picture that sits, inoffensively, in the middling space between.
  84. The Karate Kid
    At times, the movie feels less like a coming-of-age tale and more like an extended promo for the Chinese tourism bureau.
  85. National Treasure
    Jon Voight shows up as Ben's daddy, and Harvey Keitel plays a devilishly goateed FBI agent: They're the only two actors who seem to have a sense of how ridiculous National Treasure is, but there's not enough of them to carry the picture.
  86. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    A truly vulgar movie.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Finding Forrester
    A farrago, with a few morsels of deft social observation and likable performances floating around in a conventional stew of overblown, bogus emotion and rigged catharsis.
  88. Private Fears in Public Places
    I found the interlocking bitterness of Ayckbourn's play irritating and overly neat, and these people don't seem to belong to Paris or London or anywhere else, at least not anytime in the last 20 years.
  89. The Judge
    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.
  90. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    This movie feels a little half-baked to me in the sense that it carries an exceedingly complicated intellectual agenda below the surface of a conventional thriller, and doesn’t execute either level as well as it might.
  91. My Blueberry Nights
    My Blueberry Nights may not quite be what fans of either Jones or Wong Kar-wai -- directing his first film in English -- are expecting. It's a late-night, lovelorn mood piece in a minor key, not complicated or convoluted, finally more confection than substance.
  92. 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."
  93. 2012
    2012 is totally, certifiably nuts, without being quite as off-the-wall kitschy as Emmerich's last special-effects extravabanzoo, "10,000 BC."
  94. Stranger Than Fiction
    The picture is an overworked trifle: There's so much going on in it that it becomes hard to care about ANYTHING that's going on in it. The story in Stranger Than Fiction is stranger than fiction. But what good is it if it's unreadable?
  95. I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry
    With its tepid gags and faltering pacing, may not be a very good movie. But at least, within its clumsiness, it strives for some kind of solidarity.
  96. The Eagle
    Bastardizes the source material to no good purpose, ending up with a strained combination of rah-rah, boy-bonding adventure and p.c. cross-cultural exploration.
  97. Daddy Day Care
    One of those comedies that "thinking" people tend to stay away from, but if you look beyond its admittedly aggressive marketing campaign, you can see that it was made with care and intelligence as well as a sense of fun. The pleasures it offers may be modest, but they're not negligible.
  98. St. Vincent
    Murray, as always, supplies any number of small, memorable moments — he ultimately relies on the same defanged sentimentality.
  99. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
    Represents a breakthrough in the moviegoing experience. It may be the first time we've been asked to watch a book on tape.
  100. Puccini for Beginners
    Puccini for Beginners may divide individual audience members. It divided me; rarely have I seen a film simultaneously so good and so bad.
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