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. I'll Sleep When I'm Dead
    I'll Sleep When I'm Dead has its problems: As beautifully made as it is, Hodges leaves some crucial portions of the story maddeningly unclear, particularly at the end.
  2. Around the World in 80 Days
    Never as delightful and silly as it needs to be. The action is often manic, and there's a veneer of unapologetic corniness to it.
  3. The Chronicles of Riddick
    Thoroughly enjoyable, but not because it's any good.
  4. The Stepford Wives
    The picture is mildly entertaining and stringently unoffensive (provided you're not a supersensitive upper-crusty type from Connecticut). Yet it has problems from the start.
  5. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
    One of the greatest fantasy films of all time.
  6. The Day After Tomorrow
    Despite the fact that The Day After Tomorrow is harnessed to the very real threat of global warming, it's still just a big, dumb movie, another Hollywood entertainment that, instead of tweaking and teasing our brains for fun, leaves us feeling thick and stupid.
  7. The Mother
    Reid is stunning here.
  8. Saved!
    The reality is that it's neither hip nor funny: Instead, it's excessively broad one minute and unctuously instructional the next.
  9. Raising Helen
    If a couple who belonged to the Christian Coalition, or your maiden aunt, or George and Laura Bush were looking for a reassuring night out, Raising Helen would fit the bill nicely.
  10. Control Room
    A surprising, puzzling and in many ways brilliant work.
  11. Shrek 2
    The picture is clever and vivacious -- at times, like the first "Shrek," it seems a bit taken with its own precociousness. But its moments of sheer inventiveness can still catch you off-guard, and some of them are wittily poetic.
  12. Troy
    Troy isn't so much a simplified retelling of "The Iliad" as a re-imagined version of it, told wholly without imagination.
  13. Coffee and Cigarettes
    Although these vignettes are unified visually -- they're all in black-and-white and they all have the same gorgeous, silky visual texture -- they were shot by several different cinematographers.
  14. Strayed
    It's an impressive, intelligent, compact piece of filmmaking...But Téchiné might be one of those directors whose work is best appreciated by critics and other filmmakers.
  15. Valentin
    The characters in the Argentinean heart-warmer Valentín spend so much time squabbling and yelling that after a while I began to long for a nice movie about a family of mutes.
  16. Van Helsing
    Van Helsing wears its price tag on its ruffled lamé sleeve. And yet it gives off an aura of what I can only call lavish cheapness.
  17. Super Size Me
    Super Size Me is exploratory, as opposed to being just numbingly didactic, and that's what makes it so engaging.
  18. Mean Girls
    There's a sly intelligence at work here -- in the writing, the filmmaking and the acting -- that makes it deeply pleasurable to watch.
  19. The Saddest Music in the World
    The visual originality of The Saddest Music is deceiving: Narratively and spiritually, the movie is bankrupt, even though it's so packed with stuff (including a set of shapely prosthetic glass legs filled with dazzling, fizzy beer) that you can hardly bring yourself to believe that it all adds up to nothing.
  20. 13 Going on 30
    I was so charmed by the opening scenes of 13 Going on 30, and so entertained by the middle portion of it, that I had high hopes for its ending -- hopes that were cruelly dashed. Like a petulant 13-year-old, I'm still pouting over my disappointment.
  21. Man on Fire
    It's dispiriting to see good actors doing smart, solid work with so much unadulterated garbage swirling around them. Scott's art is also death, and we, the audience, are the ones he's jabbing at with his ruthless paintbrush. It's about time someone told him where to stick it.
  22. Kill Bill: Vol. 2
    There's no doubt that Kill Bill is an epic, and no doubt of the skill that's often apparent. But what it leaves us with is awesomely trivial.
  23. Connie and Carla
    Isn't really a movie but a blatant girls' night out vehicle.
  24. The Punisher
    If you can get past the goofy writing, there's lots of noisy action in The Punisher, but little of it is particularly exhilarating. In fact, it's more of an endurance test. If you can sit through it, you should consider yourself duly punished.
  25. The Girl Next Door
    Lost the friskiness and wildness and charm the movie might have had.
  26. Johnson Family Vacation
    The direction on Johnson Family Vacation is numbingly slack; the synapses between the scenes don't spark effortlessly, as they should, and the whole enterprise feels dragged-down and belabored.
  27. Hellboy
    One of the most poetic comic-book adaptations to come along in years, yet it never loses its sense of lightness and fun -- del Toro gives it just enough screwball nuttiness to keep it from bogging down.
  28. Jersey Girl
    As an ode to fatherhood, Jersey Girl is sweet without being particularly deep; but Smith is really onto something when he nudges against the ways in which the geographic landscape of a life merges with the genetic one.
  29. The Ladykillers
    Sructured like a Mad magazine parody where there's a promised joke in each frame. It doesn't add up to a movie.
  30. Dogville
    Anti-Americanism is a small matter when a movie is anti-human. Dogville is as total a misanthropic vision as anything control freak Stanley Kubrick ever turned out.
  31. Mayor of the Sunset Strip
    What comes through most vibrantly in Mayor of Sunset Strip, shining through Bingenheimer's low-key, laid-back, almost monotone manner of speaking, is how much the music has meant to him, even if it never exactly lined his pockets.
  32. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
    Represents a failure of nerve: As if Gondry and Kaufman weren't sure that the story of Joel and Clementine would hold us, the doomed couple's unfolding-in-reverse romance is intercut with a subplot filled with zany touches.
  33. Taking Lives
    Jolie is far too good for this tripe but she does give the film its only believable moments, and for the first half, her concentration makes you watch her intently.
  34. Bon voyage
    Watching it is a little like stumbling upon a frayed valentine you put away years ago and then laughing with pleasure at how much it still means to you.
  35. Secret Window
    Instead of taking us someplace we fear to go, Secret Window leads us to a place we've already been -- we know it so well, we could write the book on it ourselves.
  36. Spartan
    Spartan is the same old stuff, but now it's been thoroughly Mametized, like a spray-on treatment you could spritz out of a can.
  37. Starsky & Hutch
    Even as a nostalgia ride, Starsky & Hutch poops out before it ever gets going.
  38. Hidalgo
    The lost opportunity of Hidalgo isn't that it fails to live up to its potential for romantic adventure, but that it fails to dig into the romance between man and horse that's at the heart of the story.
  39. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
    The plot construction here is especially lazy. The whole movie is built toward the dance competition.
  40. Twisted
    Totally unwatchable if it weren't for Ashley Judd.
  41. 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.
  42. Against the Ropes
    Despite its problems, the picture still satisfies -- more than a lot of allegedly worthy "A list" movies do. In a movie world where heavyweight often means top-heavy, Against the Ropes shows some pretty fleet footwork.
  43. EuroTrip
    Works if you just give yourself over to its exuberant silliness.
  44. Welcome to Mooseport
    If it were terrible, you could at least sink your teeth into it; but Welcome to Mooseport is like a biscuit soaked in water, ready to be gummed instead of chewed.
  45. 50 First Dates
    So unself-conscious and breezy that you find yourself sailing along with it; its flaws become as negligible as harmless barnacles nestled well below the water line.
  46. Love Object
    By the end of Love Object a dorky loner who wants a rubber sex doll at his beck and call seems a lot less objectionable than a director who wants a talented flesh-and-blood actress at his.
  47. Barbershop 2: Back in Business
    Barbershop 2 is like going out for a bad meal with a group of people you love being with. You're happy to be in their company; you just wish you didn't leave feeling hungry.
  48. Miracle
    The best and most moving part of Miracle may be the closing credits, in which we see pictures of the actors accompanied by the names of the real-life characters they played and a strip of type that tells us where they are now.
  49. The Perfect Score
    An eminently defensible light entertainment, peopled with characters that are easy to like and care about.
  50. The Big Bounce
    The movie is a garage-sale conglomeration of anecdotes and oddballs.
  51. Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!
    Suffers from a lack of conviction.
  52. The Butterfly Effect
    It's like receiving a box of Valentine's chocolates in which someone has deliberately hidden ground glass. Flee.
  53. Along Came Polly
    For everyone who's been waiting for a love story between an anal retentive and a flake.
  54. Torque
    For a movie that's supposed to be about speed and movement, Torque is a peculiarly slow kind of torture. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition -- especially not in an action movie.
  55. Chasing Liberty
    The kind of bland, perky comedy that neuters whoever is spun into its cotton-candy web.
  56. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    Visual tone poem.
  57. Secret Things
    Not a great movie, but its daring and seriousness, its refusal to take refuge in the sort of irony that diminishes whatever it touches, its willingness to risk ludicrousness, may be elements that are necessary to achieve greatness.
  58. Cold Mountain
    Cold Mountain is a romance, refreshingly free from the taint of any political realities other than the "War is hell" variety. It's also completely juiceless.
  59. The Company
    Robert Altman's surpassingly beautiful ballet movie feels lighter than air -- but in fact it's the great director's most tender and memorable film in years.
  60. Monster
    Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it's effective precisely because it's not a polemic.
  61. Mona Lisa Smile
    In terms of the gap between the movie it's trying to be and the movie it actually is, Mona Lisa Smile is in many ways indefensible. Yet for all its problems, it's satisfyingly movielike. The minutes drift by pleasurably and mindlessly.
  62. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    No one could have held The Fog of War wanting if Morris had concluded that it's impossible to get all the way to the bottom of Robert McNamara. But explicating an enigma is not the same thing as blurring it with artistic ambitions. The thickest fog in this documentary has been conjured not by McNamara, but by Errol Morris.
  63. House of Sand and Fog
    Features an astonishing pair of lead performances and one of this year's most impressive directing debuts. If this movie isn't quite the contempo-Greek tragedy it wants to be, it's still a powerful, unforgettable meditation on fate, cultural collision and the morality of renovating a house that isn't really yours.
  64. Calendar Girls
    It's too good a story not to have been made into a movie. Yet Calendar Girls, directed by Nigel Cole ("Saving Grace"), is filled with lots of extras it doesn't need, when the bare-naked bones of the story would have been plenty.
  65. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    I love Jackson's "Rings" saga despite his propensity for whimsical animation whenever he tries to strike a chord of dread or menace.
  66. Girl with a Pearl Earring
    What's the point of setting up a historical fantasia around an invented character if you're only going to make her part of the scenery?
  67. The Statement
    A stiff, clunky piece of work that never builds up urgency or tension. The script, by playwright Ronald Harwood, who wrote the script for Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," is close to atrocious.
  68. Something's Gotta Give
    Irritatingly moralistic romantic comedy.
  69. Stuck on You
    It's a friendly, unpretentious little thing -- at times it's a bit too muted and indistinct, but then, you have to at least give the Farrellys credit for not making the mistake of trying too hard.
  70. Big Fish
    It's nicely made, well shot, and reasonably well acted, yet it's enough to filet the life force right out of you. We need stories in order to dream, and to live. But that doesn't mean we have to buy every crappy one that comes down the pike.
  71. Honey
    There's an entertainingly ludicrous movie lurking somewhere inside of the ludicrous, mediocre one this actually is.
  72. The Last Samurai
    Cruise pedals hard through The Last Samurai, and the exertion shows. In fact, the whole picture is belabored and lumbering.
  73. In America
    Jim Sheridan's miraculous In America, a generous but never sentimental fable of Irish immigrants in '80s New York, may be the great movie of 2003.
  74. The Triplets of Belleville
    Chomet bows to the tradition of conventional animation even as he tests its limits.
  75. Bad Santa
    But Bad Santa does feature one last turn from the late John Ritter as a twittery department-store manager (his name, Mr. Chipeska, is a stroke of brilliance that I still can't quite put my finger on).
  76. The Cooler
    The heart of The Cooler is in the performances, and in the way Kramer shapes the interplay between the characters with the right amounts of ease and tension.
  77. 21 Grams
    Uprooted from their home soil, González Iñárritu and screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga can't quite manage to make this gloomy, improbable stew of romance, film noir and pseudo-metaphysical speculation hang together.
  78. The Cat in the Hat
    The movie is crass and vulgar almost beyond belief.
  79. Gothika
    More of a women's-prison movie than a supernatural thriller, and not a very good one at that.
  80. The Barbarian Invasions
    Which would all be well and good, if only Arcand's approach weren't so deliberate and stupefyingly superior.
  81. The Missing
    The movie is an unpleasant slog, the gruesomeness working in concert with humorlessness to lend the whole picture a queasy deadliness.
  82. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
    Magnificent and heartfelt.
  83. 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.
  84. Tupac: Resurrection
    In the end, Tupac: Resurrection gives us too much raw Tupac, and yet somehow not enough. He remains a mystery -- one who still sells lots and lots of records.
  85. Elf
    How many human beings among us are capable of making a comedy with wit and intelligence that also takes bold pleasure in unabashed silliness? I think this is what happens when you let an elf loose with a movie camera.
  86. Love Actually
    I would have hated Love Actually less if it had been a total, clumsy disaster; the problem is that Curtis does pull off some amazingly well-tuned moments, as well as some very funny ones.
  87. The Matrix Revolutions
    Isn't a terrible movie, but it is a tremendous disappointment.
  88. The Human Stain
    It's melodrama that rises to the complexity of art. The Human Stain takes a complex work of literary art and reduces it to tasteful melodrama. Its smallness is simply crushing.
  89. Shattered Glass
    Smart, tightly coiled.
  90. Beyond Borders
    Has a TV Movie of the Week righteousness about it -- you can feel the way the filmmakers and the director are struggling to educate us, even as they must surely know, deep in their hearts, that the florid, doomed romance is the real focus of the movie.
  91. Elephant
    Elephant is not as bad as the National Rifle Association's decision to hold a pro-gun rally near Columbine High School shortly after the killings. Unlike the NRA, Van Sant doesn't have blood on his hands. But he shares something of its callousness.
  92. The Singing Detective
    Gordon's film is an art-house curio, visually ugly and emotionally and narratively dissonant. Its cheapness and poverty of imagination consistently undermines its ambitions and reduces its complexity to by-the-numbers Freudianism.
  93. In the Cut
    Isn't just a movie about decapitation; it's a decapitated movie. It has no idea where its head is at.
  94. Morning Sun
    The story they are telling here is still in the process of being written. It's as good a sign as any of how absorbing Morning Sun is that the film's sudden ending makes you greedy for more.
  95. Runaway Jury
    Here's a real mystery: How can John Cusack, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, acting in a John Grisham thriller, be so dull?
  96. Pieces of April
    Although Pieces of April doesn't quite stick together as a whole -- in some places it's conventional and a bit contrived, particularly the ending, which feels rushed and a little tough to buy -- Hedges peppers it with enough wonderful moments that you can't help warming up to it.
  97. Sylvia
    A not-very-good movie about a fascinating and underexplored subject: the unknowability of a marriage.
  98. Veronica Guerin
    Schumacher's crude bio-drama never comes close to asking the real questions.
  99. Intolerable Cruelty
    Has a solid farce structure, a bunch of ripe second bananas, and two sinfully attractive stars ready to raise comic hell. So why is a movie with so many genuine laughs and so many good bits only fitfully amusing? The short answer is that the Coen brothers seem to be incapable of trusting their material.
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