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. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
    As visually arresting as Kill Bill often is, there's a stultifying blankness about it. Despite Tarantino's obvious enthusiasms, he comes off jaded and cynical: He's seen plenty of movies, and this is his proof.
  2. Mystic River
    Mystic River is hard-boiled beyond toughness: It's so tender the skin falls away from the bone. It's Eastwood's most soulful, and most organic, movie.
  3. The Event
    Writer-director Thom Fitzgerald -- his previous feature was "The Hanging Garden" -- has managed to make a comedy about assisted suicide that hardly feels black at all.
  4. Out of Time
    Starts out as noir, takes a shift into something like deadpan screwball comedy and ends up as a comedy of remarriage.
  5. School of Rock
    In its cornball "Let's put on a show!" crudeness, its Cuisinart collapsing of rock history, and its reduction of the ambiguous, libidinal revolt led by Elvis and Mick and Johnny Rotten and Kurt Cobain to the level of pampered middle-school posturing, School of Rock is a clever and sometimes a beautiful thing.
  6. The Station Agent
    It's hard to say why The Station Agent sends you out feeling so benevolent. It may have something to do with being in the presence of a director who treats you with respect. McCarthy allows us to feel without telling us how and what we should feel.
  7. Wonderland
    It's not much fun, and it's not particularly edifying. Even people who are curious about Holmes (he was better known by his screen name, Johnny Wadd; here, he's played by Val Kilmer) won't find out much about him.
  8. Duplex
    Delicious dark comedy.
  9. The Rundown
    Add Christopher Walken, giving one of his patented demented performances as a Kurtz-esque mining tycoon deep in the Amazon jungle, along with some vague Hollywood politics about labor exploitation, and The Rundown is far too cheerful and good-hearted to be terrible.
  10. Under the Tuscan Sun
    The movie has some sex in it, and yet it's as unsexy as a rusty old olive oil can (minus the olive oil).
  11. My Life Without Me
    It's about as phony and manipulative as a movie could be. That Polley seems true every second is maybe the strongest testament yet to her acting. It's exasperating that this movie doesn't have the courage to go places where its actress plainly has the guts to follow.
  12. Demonlover
    It's a consistently exciting piece of moviemaking, but it's not a pleasant experience; it's one of the few recent movies that have the power to leave you genuinely shaken up.
  13. Anything Else
    Anything Else isn't just the latest Woody Allen movie; it's also the smallest. His pictures seem to be getting tinier and tinier, and after you've seen them they leave nothing but a tinny echo and a bad taste. Anything Else is misanthropy writ small. Allen is too stingy to be generous even with his contempt.
  14. Cold Creek Manor
    Feels very nicely made, at least until it falls apart: By its midpoint, you start to recognize that it has acute creepy-thrilleritis, which means that it promises us some things at the beginning that it has no intention of actually following up on.
  15. Underworld
    The funny thing about all this is that a half-hour into Underworld I couldn't wait for it to be over. When it really was over, I couldn't wait for the next installment. Go figure.
  16. To Be and to Have
    This heart-wrenching documentary about a French village schoolteacher at work offers the comedy and pathos of great drama and the visual magnificence of painting.
  17. Matchstick Men
    Matchstick Men isn't even remotely intricate; it's not even particularly interesting.
  18. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
    Make no mistake, this movie is a mess. But, wow, what a mess! It's an exploding piñata, full of low comedy and high drama, deliriously colorful fight scenes and vehicle chases.
  19. Lost in Translation
    The connection between Bob and Charlotte, as Coppola shows it to us at the end of Lost in Translation, is a moment of intimate magnificence. I have never seen anything quite like it, in any movie.
  20. So Close
    Next to the Hong Kong action picture So Close, nearly every Hollywood thriller of the summer looks like an elementary-school project thrown together the Sunday night before it was due.
  21. Carnage
    What emerges is an astonishing debut, unlike anything else you'll see this year.
  22. Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star
    The movie's ridiculous good humor -- laced with just enough barbs to keep it from going soft -- suggest that it's been made with some thought and care. I often found myself laughing in spite of no one, not even myself.
  23. Party Monster
    Unwatchable.
  24. The Battle of Shaker Heights
    The nice thing about seeing so much time, money and effort go into a bland film is that it makes you appreciate truly inspired filmmaking even more.
  25. The Medallion
    There are five writers credited with the script for The Medallion, and between them they don't come up with a single original or amusing or clever idea.
  26. Thirteen
    If you boil Thirteen down to its flimsy bones, you'll find that it's not really so much about peer pressure in contemporary teen life as it is a story about a classic bad egg. That right there dilutes its highfalutin aspirations.
  27. American Splendor
    A narrative picture with many of the qualities of a documentary, not to mention a comic book -- is one of those rare, inventively made movies that isn't so taken with its own novelty it loses sight of its characters. Its warmth is for real, and it enwraps you.
  28. Le divorce
    Kate Hudson gives the best performance in the movie, though she seems always on the verge of being funnier and dirtier than she's allowed to be. Elsewhere the cast is accumulated for their cachet more than for any role they're given to play. Some of the casting makes no sense.
  29. S.W.A.T.
    Seems best suited to all the couch-potato swinging dicks who get off watching the police on "Cops" keep the public safe from people in possession of marijuana.
  30. Freaky Friday
    Even though this is a light, cheerful picture about family relationships, it never feels overplayed -- its tone is bright without being garish. And it moves breezily.
  31. The Magdalene Sisters
    A rip-roaring feminist yarn that should offer relief to viewers anxious for an alternative to the boys-with-guns flicks of summer.
  32. American Wedding
    For sheer ineptitude, crassness and unwatchability, American Wedding takes the cake.
  33. Gigli
    Turns out to be merely bad -- not a train wreck, not the crime against humanity it's been rumored to be.
  34. Buffalo Soldiers
    A pleasingly disreputable trifle.
  35. Hotel
    If you're ready to roll with Hotel and take what it gives you, there's some rich entertainment here.
  36. Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life
    This is a highly enjoyable summer thrill ride with an action heroine who likes to be on top, literally and figuratively.
  37. Seabiscuit
    It's deluxe and handsome and has no soul.
  38. Masked and Anonymous
    See it in one glorious shot, grab as much from it as you can and run like hell. I say that not because I hated Masked & Anonymous, but because I loved it.
  39. Dirty Pretty Things
    The grandest and most vigorous movie he's (Frears) made in at least a decade. Like Okwe himself, it rises above its limitations, and it's just a little bit bigger than the landscape around it.
  40. How to Deal
    Janney's role is smaller than Moore's, but it's hardly insignificant. Moore has youth on her side, and youth is timelessly appealing. But Janney is the bigger, more memorable presence, and she's much more fun to watch.
  41. Bad Boys II
    Another Jerry Bruckheimer-Michael Bay demonstration of spectacle -- noise, stunts, the aforementioned incoherent editing -- taking precedence over story and character... by far the most brutal American picture released this summer.
  42. Johnny English
    Malkovich is usually such a numbingly self-serious actor. But he cuts loose here in a way that's outlandishly brilliant: It's his best performance in years.
  43. 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.
  44. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
    The irony of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it has the most literate pedigree of any action movie you're likely to see this year or next -- and it's been made by people who seem to have no sense of how to tell a story.
  45. Northfork
    Just about gets us off the ground on its dreamy, feathery angel wings; it just doesn't have the strength or the stamina to keep us aloft.
  46. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
    When Pirates of the Caribbean is good, it's certainly something to behold.
  47. Swimming Pool
    Even though it has some amusing moments, Swimming Pool crawls entirely too slowly toward -- well, toward nothing much.
  48. 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.
  49. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
    Pedestrian but appealing.
  50. Friday Night
    A rare and tender delight.
  51. On_Line
    There's nothing unconventional or daring about On_Line, but considering how cheap it undoubtedly was to make, the acting, writing and direction all stand up pretty well; this is more intelligent and better structured than at least half the Hollywood movies I see.
  52. 28 Days Later...
    It's undoubtedly a canny and clever twist on the standard zombie-attack yarn, but anybody who's making grand claims for 28 Days Later simply hasn't seen enough horror movies.
  53. Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
    Should have been either a whole lot worse or a whole lot better than it is: If it were worse, we could simply toss aside the things that are fun and entertaining about it and not even think twice. And if it were better -- well, we'd have fewer complaints all around.
  54. From Justin to Kelly
    One of the worst movies you'll ever see -- but it's still not worth seeing.
  55. Alex & Emma
    Dull and listless from the start, partly because the leads fail to connect and partly because both the script and the direction let them down.
  56. Hulk
    The Hulk goes on for two hours and 20 minutes and there's not a stirring or exciting moment in it...At last, a comic-book movie that National Public Radio listeners can be proud to take their kids to see.
  57. Hollywood Homicide
    A definite improvement on the recent spate of dull action movies, if only because it has such a marked sense of humor about itself and the genre it belongs to. But somehow it never quite finds its center.
  58. The Eye
    Although I have mixed feelings about The Eye, there's no question the Pangs have a natural talent for cinema. They create bright, unfussy images and work terrifically with actors.
  59. 2 Fast 2 Furious
    It's a terrible movie, stuck in plot idiocies and big, noisy set pieces like a tire mired in mud.
  60. The Era of Vampires
    It's a sloppy, fun, late-'80s style Hong Kong action flick full of pogo-dancing zombies and voracious vampires who look vaguely like Siamese cats with spoiled cottage cheese cooked onto their faces.
  61. Capturing the Friedmans
    Andrew Jarecki could have done more to lay out the marriage of sexual and religious and social hysteria that made cases like this possible. But he deserves credit for having the guts to say, in this case and in so many like it, who suffered the most.
  62. The Italian Job
    The chase scenes in The Italian Job are the most exciting ones I can remember seeing in a movie in a long time, probably because they're the only ones I can remember -- and that's saying something.
  63. Finding Nemo
    It's all beautiful, all right. But before long I began to feel beaten against the rocks of that beauty -- Finding Nemo smacks of looky-what-I-can-do virtuosity, and after the first 10 minutes or so, it's exhausting.
  64. The In-Laws
    This In-Laws isn't a disaster, it's just not very good.
  65. Bruce Almighty
    Unless you like boob jokes and preachy sentimentalism, this comedy isn't funny at all.
  66. L'Auberge Espagnole
    Klapisch wants his characters shiny bright, and winds up making them excruciatingly dull in the process. Watching L'Auberge Espagnole is like seeing the young Maoist revolutionaries of Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 "La Chinoise" body-snatched by the international touring company of "Up With People."
  67. The Matrix Reloaded
    I found The Matrix Reloaded so exhilarating. It's a sadder, wiser, more grown-up movie than its predecessor. It was made, one might almost say, for a sadder, wiser, more grown-up world.
  68. 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.
  69. The Shape of Things
    This might be the edgiest film of the year -- if the year were 1982.
  70. Washington Heights
    Alfredo de Villa's Washington Heights feels stiff and overworked in places, and sometimes the acting is a bit awkward. And yet the story is both compelling and easy to identify with.
  71. Only the Strong Survive
    All Only the Strong Survive has to offer are scraps, and it's a sad thing to sit through a movie billed as a tribute to a group of terrific performers and to come away with nothing more than scraps.
  72. Down with Love
    The fatal flaw of Down With Love... is that in mining what's kitschily amusing about those movies, it also re-creates far too faithfully everything that's unbearable about them.
  73. Man on the Train
    Watching Man on the Train is like coming across one of those threadbare Persian rugs you see on public tours of private homes. Its elegance is more comfortable than cold, and it carries its worn, battered mien proudly.
  74. 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.
  75. Owning Mahowny
    Just doesn't give us enough to hold onto, perhaps partly because it's executed with so much restraint and subtlety. It's often a tense, uncomfortable little movie.
  76. X2: X-Men United
    In some ways, X2 is an obvious improvement on its predecessor: It looks more expensive, and its special effects seem to swoop out of nowhere...But "X-Men" was undoubtedly the most elegiac comic-book adaptation of the past few years.
  77. Spellbound
    Blitz captures the intensity of the bee itself, showing how it frazzles the nerves of even the most well-prepared spellers as, one by one, their colleagues and competitors drop away.
  78. Identity
    So ingeniously constructed that these meta-noir ingredients feel dizzyingly enjoyable, never hackneyed. In fact, the overheated melodrama of Identity is crucial to its method -- and the key, in some ways, to its narrative secrets.
  79. Confidence
    A long plod to the finish line. It's a movie about a long con that, like its leading man, has no wit or style to speak of.
  80. It Runs in the Family
    The picture never quite finds its footing.
  81. People I Know
    The picture has a lax, sleepy vibe: There's never anything taut or electric about it. And so, like Pacino's character, we sleepwalk through it.
  82. House of Fools
    The thing is, it works. Or at least it works for me. I left the theater convinced that House of Fools is Konchalovsky's best work in almost 20 years (which it is) and that it might be something close to a masterpiece.
  83. Malibu's Most Wanted
    If only Malibu's Most Wanted had been a little more daring, it might have managed to satirize the playacting ludicrousness of gangsta style.
  84. Lilya 4-Ever
    Not without its own bleak integrity. But the movie wipes you out and leaves you with nothing, not even the feeling of exaltation that can be present in the most tragic works of art.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Holes
    The movie is a similarly ingenious clockwork contraption that interlocks the most unlikely combination of stories without ever jamming its gears.
  86. Winged Migration
    Birds are not just the movie's stars, but its whole universe. They inspire in Perrin and his crew, and in us, not just awe but humility. You'll never look at them the same way again.
  87. Bulletproof Monk
    Lightweight but delightful martial-arts romp.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Love and Diane
    An epic documentary...as rich and teeming as a Balzac novel.
  89. A Mighty Wind
    It's a fine-grained picture that goes for the sideways laughs rather than the straight-ahead ones. This is sketch comedy as method acting.
  90. The Young Unknowns
    It isn't a masterpiece; there are occasional clunkers in Jelski's dialogue (adapted from a play by Wolfgang Bauer) and the acting, although superior to maybe 85 percent of Hollywood movies, is a little uneven.
  91. Anger Management
    Anger Management is so almost-but-not-quite funny that it feels like one colossal gyp.
  92. Better Luck Tomorrow
    Follows a consistently predictable arc. In some sequences, you can tell not just what's going to happen next, but what shot is coming next. And the movie's weird mixture of moralism and affectlessness cancel each other out.
  93. Ghosts of the Abyss
    James Cameron disgraces those who died on the Titanic -- again.
  94. Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
    There's something to be said for watching an animated movie not with the eyes of a child, but with those of a turned-on grownup.
  95. Phone Booth
    A movie that's laughable without, alas, even being enjoyably awful.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Man Apart
    There's not a single moment when you wonder what might happen next or when the spectacle simply leaps off the screen. You've seen it all before.
  97. The Good Thief
    This long shot pays off -- in spades. Not only has Jordan made a movie that's looser, hipper, freer and -- abetted by his great cinematographer, Chris Menges -- more sheerly beautiful to look at, he's also made the best movie of his career.
  98. The Core
    There's a refreshing surefootedness in the way Amiel, his screenwriters Cooper Layne and John Rogers, and most of his actors recognize how preposterous the idea of traveling to the center of the earth in a souped-up Rototiller really is.
  99. Raising Victor Vargas
    A modest and tightly focused picture, and its very directness makes it piercingly intimate.
  100. Basic
    Watching a movie should never be such torture.
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