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. Hostel
    I admired the humor, the tremendous craftsmanship and even the shock value of Hostel, but found the Grand Guignol torture scenes excessive. (Unless you're a hardcore fan of Italian, Spanish and Japanese gore flicks, you've never seen anything like this.)
  2. Baby Boy
    Singleton's words are no fitting match for his visuals, and his metaphors are so heavy-handed -- they undermine the smart subtlety of the direction.
  3. Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
    Strangely exhilarating.
  4. Road Trip
    Like last year's "American Pie," Road Trip crisply delivers the goods: vaguely rakish heroes, vaguely kinky sex and highly naked nubiles.
  5. Idlewild
    Idlewild has just about everything a popular entertainment can offer. It also has a soul, and that comes free with the price of a ticket.
  6. The Great Gatsby
    Whether or not Luhrmann’s “Gatsby” will go down in history as a legendary flop is not for me to judge (though all signs currently point toward yes), but it surely belongs to the category of baroque, overblown, megalomaniacal spectacles dubbed “film follies” by longtime Nation film critic Stuart Klawans.
  7. Old School
    It's blissfully, pants-wettingly funny from beginning to end.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    City of Angels
    Neither Ryan nor Cage indulges in their usual excesses -- hers a perky, chipmunk vivacity and his a rampant goofiness that's always struck me as disingenuous…doesn't try too hard, doesn't lean on or overexplain its spiritual underpinnings and doesn't push for tears. As a result, it turns out to be pretty effective in drawing them.
  9. The Men Who Stare at Goats
    There's no doubt we need more movies for grown-ups, with jokes that don't hit us over the head, but The Men Who Stare at Goats doesn't fit the bill. At best, it might hypnotize you into a stupor.
  10. Magic in the Moonlight
    Maybe that pictorial pleasantness will distract summer moviegoers from the fact that shot-to-shot transitions are often awkward, dialogue scenes are forced and poorly staged and that even by rom-com standards the obstacles created to keep Sophie and Stanley apart until a respectable running time has elapsed are idiotic.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Volcano
    A flatulent blast of superheated air from the seething bowels of Hollywood, features all the usual idiocies -- implausibility on an epic scale, bogus "human interest" elements, plot developments that offer all the surprises of a Bob Dole speech.
  14. 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."
  15. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    A truly vulgar movie.
  16. Snow Cake
    The picture is so drab and listless that it often feels like punishment, even though Rickman gives a fine performance, one that's heartfelt as well as characteristically elegant (not to mention sexy).
  17. You Don't Mess with the Zohan
    The movie "Munich" should have been. At the very least, it's got to be the first picture to use smelly-feet jokes as a means of parsing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But more than that, it's a mainstream movie that dares to make jokes about the kinds of complex political realities that most of us don't dare bring up at dinner parties.
  18. Mood Indigo
    This is Gondry at his most liberated and inventive. You simply can’t grab hold of Mood Indigo in its early scenes, and you’re better off surrendering to its crackpot energy and enjoying the ride.
  19. Thor: The Dark World
    It’s a highly capable sequel that drinks long and deep from the established Marvel legendarium and brings back all the key players from Kenneth Branagh’s 2011 hit “Thor.”
  20. The Last Stand
    So to call this a good movie is really a stretch; it's more like 38 percent of a good movie. But it probably has just enough dumb fun and pointless violence and car chases to seem like a highly viable option for large numbers of people this weekend.
  21. 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.”
  22. Angela's Ashes
    Dramatic, massive in scale, at times very moving. And yet, somehow, it comes up short in terms of essential poetry.
  23. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones
    I can't remember ever feeling so glad that a movie was finally over. Lucas may have held my imagination hostage for two hours, but reclaiming it afterward wasn't hard at all.
  24. Entrapment
    It's too bad that the glamour wears off about halfway through Entrapment, when it stops being a movie about art heists and starts being one about stealing (ho-hum) money.
  25. Jersey Boys
    When it comes to any larger questions about what was lost or gained, and whether Frankie Valli’s odyssey was worth it, Eastwood throws up his hands. Who knows? He’s made a thoroughly tolerable and non-insulting summer movie for grown-ups; isn’t that enough?
  26. 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.
  27. Memoirs of a Geisha
    There's no life, no juice, in the picture. Instead of tempting you into submission, it merely drugs you. It's surprising that a filmmaker who gave us such a lively debut, "Chicago," could slap us with a picture as dull and worthy as this one.
  28. All Is Bright
    Ror me its heartbreaking denouement – with shades of a Raymond Carver or William Kennedy ending – packed a prodigious emotional wallop.
  29. Pontypool
    Pontypool is something like a claustrophobic, locked-in-the-barn zombie movie, only almost without zombies.
  30. 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.
  31. 10 Items or Less
    It's nice to see a bit of intimate, offhanded moviemaking that focuses on actors, as opposed to stars.
  32. 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.
  33. Hamlet 2
    So wearying that it makes you feel duped for being open to it in the first place. Hamlet 2 works so hard at being entertaining, in that quirky, Indie 101 sense, that it just grinds you down.
  34. Bruno
    Parts of it are brilliant; some of it feels tired and overplayed. Cohen has come up with some marvelous satirical motifs; elsewhere, he's just showing how far he'll go to get a laugh.
  35. 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.
  36. Get Smart
    Get Smart could have been smarter. But like the show that inspired it, it's still smarter than it looks.
  37. Dear Mr. Watterson
    Schroeder isn’t much of a comic-strip expert or historian, by his own admission, so Dear Mr. Watterson bounces off many of the most interesting issues in and around “Calvin and Hobbes,” noticing them but not exploring them deeply.
  38. Return to Me
    Almost seems like a godsend in this age of romantic-comedy schmaltz.
  39. From Hell
    A brain-dead version of a dark and complex work.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Julien Donkey-Boy
    The filmmaker brings the audience to a precipice of discomfort, implying that the discomfort is itself the point.
  41. Whole New Thing
    Whole New Thing comes unglued toward the end, spiraling into melodrama without ever escaping its whiny, indie-rock soundtrack.
  42. Cymbeline
    If this willfully peculiar and daring Cymbeline isn’t to all tastes, it brings back the blood, the thrills and the sense of moral discovery to a long-neglected work.
  43. Bobby
    Just when you think you've got a handle on the central characters in Bobby, yet more of them appear: The thing is a little like the stateroom scene in "A Night at the Opera."
  44. The Exterminating Angels
    A luminous picture, beautifully made, loaded with symbolism and mystical-religious imagery, about an artist's self-destructive quest for an unreachable grail. It's also a deliberately prurient spectacle designed to be arousing and troubling -- most viewers, I imagine, will have both reactions at various times (and maybe at the same time).
  45. Portraits chinois
    Truly is an ensemble comedy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paper Heart
    At times, the relentless preciousness, the ironic distance, the posture of "We're just adorably like this" gets to be a little too much.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    U Turn
    There's no overt message in this fatuous montage of crowd-pleasing brutality, just double and triple crosses, gory shoot-outs set to ironically cheerful Peggy Lee songs and tons of horrific, technicolor Americana.
  48. Oblivion
    Oblivion is a technical triumph rather than a philosophical breakthrough, demonstrating how beautifully digital effects can be blended with real people and real sets, demonstrating that neither Tom Cruise nor the 1970s will ever die, and announcing the unexpected arrival of a major science-fiction director.
  49. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    Feels deeply calculated rather than genuinely crazy.
  50. Music of the Heart
    Falls flat for its skittish reluctance to bear any resemblance to an actual Wes Craven film.
  51. Gerry
    Gerry moves slowly and deliberately, like a torture technique, leaving us feeling as dry and dusty and lost as its two characters.
  52. Observe and Report
    It's possible Hill has a style, of sorts. But he doesn't work from the heart, or from the gut, as a good comedy director generally needs to. He operates from one guiding question: "How disturbing can we make this sh**?"
  53. Until the Light Takes Us
    As crafty and compelling as Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's Until the Light Takes Us is, it may go too far in its understandable desire to correct the bias and prejudice of mainstream journalism.
  54. Rock Star
    But even here, in a role that doesn't ask much of Wahlberg, I find plenty of evidence that he's among the finest actors of his generation.
  55. Bee Movie
    Just another ambitious, lavish animated adventure, pretty enough to look at, but ultimately foundering on the weakness of its script.
  56. What We Do Is Secret
    This isn't a boring movie or a dishonest one. But it's a relentlessly literal-minded one, light on vision and atmosphere, that moves through the history of the Germs with a checklist.
  57. Assault on Precinct 13
    Pulp needs a pulse -- without one, it's DOA. No matter how hard some of its actors work to resuscitate it, Assault on Precinct 13 is as lifeless as a corpse on a slab.
  58. Felt
    In its own strange way, the tiny, mysterious and occasionally terrifying indie film Felt captures the confusion of this moment in gender relations, and especially the confusion around the term “rape culture.”
  59. Good Dick
    A dark, sweet and sophisticated confection.
  60. 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.
  61. The Notebook
    The movie not only approaches a level of shamelessness you have to see to disbelieve, it does it in a manner that's both inept and crass.
  62. Paranormal Activity 2
    Paranormal Activity 2 suffers from the excessive expository blah-blah that's so common in horror-movie sequels.
  63. Alice in Wonderland
    In the end, Alice in Wonderland comes off as manufactured instead of dreamy. Burton delivers all the wonder money can buy; what's missing is the wonder it can't.
  64. Alpha Dog
    In this mess of a picture, Timberlake may be the rookie actor, but he's also the one to watch, the movie's North Star. The rest may as well be pinholes in a box.
  65. When Brendan Met Trudy
    It's a movie almost doomed to be called "refreshing," in the way that the word is used to excuse the game but amateurish presentation of a quirky premise.
  66. Save the Last Dance
    For all its dumb clichés it offers the basic appeal of teen movies: the pleasure of watching kids be kids, acting as they do among themselves instead of how parents and teachers expect them to act.
  67. Nancy Drew
    Fleming's movie is, at the very least, a tribute to Nancy Drew's longevity -- and a valentine to all of us who, even as we strive to live in the present, just like old things.
  68. The Siege
    If The Siege frustrates anyone, it should be the moviegoers who turn up expecting the kind of clean resolution that action movies thrive on.
  69. Irrational Man
    Let’s give Allen full credit, by the way, for casting Posey as this wounded, sexy and emotionally rich middle-aged woman, a character enormously more interesting than Jill.
  70. Sex and the City
    Parker IS to blame for the self-consciousness of her performance. She spends much of the movie swanning, not acting: Nearly every movement, every gesture, seems conceived for the benefit of the camera, as opposed to the truth of the character.
  71. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    The movie has a perversely unifying effect: Muslims, Christians and Jews may not be able to agree on exactly who the heck Jesus is, but they're fully capable of bonding in boredom.
  72. Lucky Number Slevin
    With its wiry twists and turns, ends up buckling under the weight of its own cleverness.
  73. Rounders
    Neither Dahl nor most of his actors ever quite convince us that there's a good reason to sit in front of a movie screen watching them for more than two hours.
  74. Shooter
    The picture might be entertaining if it didn't take itself so seriously.
  75. Robin Hood
    Despite its abundant flaws and historical howlers and generally dimwitted tone, Robin Hood is a surprisingly enjoyable work of popcorn cinema, if you're willing to take it on its own terms.
  76. Highway Courtesans
    Not many documentaries about poverty in the developing world are so hopeful; you can't help wondering what Brabbée's camera will find among the Bachara in another decade.
  77. The Fluffer
    Stay away from this cautionary tale about the gay porn industry -- it blows.
  78. Flightplan
    An exercise in edgy tedium, and even though it's only 90 minutes or so, it seems to last longer than an actual transatlantic flight. If you bring an eye mask and a few sleeping pills, you should get through it OK. A magazine or book wouldn't hurt, either. It'll be over before you know it.
  79. RocknRolla
    Thinking back on watching these performers, I see them mostly as an arrangement of bewildered actors awaiting orders, as if Ritchie hasn't bothered to tell them what he needs them to do. He’d sure make a lousy Mob boss.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crash
    The astonishing thing, however, is how pleasantly hypnotic the film is -- despite the fact that its subject is confined to peculiarly gruesome sex.
  81. John Dies at the End
    Is this an "indie" film with a deliberately messed-up chronology and an ambitious narrative you'll appreciate even more the second time through? Yes. Is this a deliberately trashy horror-comedy with a few decent jolts and several big laughs, best viewed with a gang of friends and a consciousness-altering agent of your choosing, parasitical or not? That too.
  82. Tea with Mussolini
    The 76-year-old Zeffirelli will make many more movies, but Tea With Mussolini has the unmistakable feeling of a personal testament. Its sunny disposition and modest wit are well-suited to the genial temper of this born entertainer.
  83. Vanity Fair
    There may be filmmakers whose own vision is vast enough to take on Thackeray's, but Mira Nair isn't one of them. Her new film of Vanity Fair is a disaster. Scene by scene and moment to moment, it's a woeful misreading of the book.
  84. 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.
  85. Lost Highway
    Here, Lynch has traded some of his disturbing originality for noir formula and schticky weirdness.
  86. 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.
  87. We Are Marshall
    There are so many emotions in We Are Marshall that there's hardly any room for football -- and when we finally get some, even THAT'S clogged with excess feeling.
  88. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
    It's difficult to make this mediocre adaptation of perhaps the best-loved book in C.S. Lewis' Narnia series -- seem particularly interesting.
  89. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    Honestly, one can only wish that Hollywood made movies for non-teenagers and non-comics fans with this much care and reverence. Are superhero movies dying? Well sure, but you and I and the planet may die first.
  90. Enemy at the Gates
    This is spectacle cinema made with individual flair; maybe someone in Hollywood will notice that it's still possible.
  91. Late Bloomers
    An entertaining diversion, mostly because Rossellini and Hurt are a pair of seasoned and graceful pros who know how to work every line and every gesture, and it's great to see them playing characters who are exactly their age.
  92. Rent
    I wasn't sure a movie musical could be worse than last year's styrofoam-and-gilt swan-boat travesty "Phantom of the Opera," but I'm afraid Rent proves me wrong.
  93. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    There's no story beyond the utterly formulaic and not the slightest semblance of realism, but your kids will enjoy it if they're young enough and pretty easy to please.
  94. 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.
  95. The Killer Inside Me
    Winterbottom's adaptation of the novel is spellbinding cinema, with all the atmosphere, technical excellence and expert pacing the British director is known for.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Rocker
    A pleasant but unimpressive experience.
  97. Bachelorette
    I'm going to suggest, somewhat tentatively, that Bachelorette is most unlike "Bridesmaids" because it fundamentally isn't a comedy at all, but something closer to a dense, dark character drama tarted up in high heels and a short skirt and dosed with pills and coke.
  98. The Book of Eli
    Somewhat entertaining, in its own little mud-brown way.
  99. Australia
    I left Australia feeling drained and weakened, as if I'd suffered a gradual poisoning at the hands of a mad scientist.
  100. O
    The film is a plodding, earnest adaptation that strips the source of its richness and ambiguity.
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