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. Head of State
    An excruciatingly amateurish production.
  2. Gaudi Afternoon
    The air leaks out of Gaudí Afternoon gradually but steadily, until all we're left with is a limp rag of a balloon.
  3. View from the Top
    There's a good chance that it will make you laugh, but even if it doesn't, you have to give Barreto credit for respecting his audience. The movie's jokes have a light, springy touch; if one doesn't tickle you, it sails by quickly to make room for the next one.
  4. Dreamcatcher
    A pretty good example of how the studios have taken over the junk that used to be left to the exploitation hacks. The hacks here have millions to work with and the end result isn't nearly as much fun as a cheap, gross horror movie can be.
  5. Boat Trip
    It is a testament to our national determination that Nathan is not stymied by his almost complete lack of talent, his slipshod timing or his crude comic sensibility.
  6. Willard
    You're just sitting there, somewhere between mildly amused and fairly bored, watching the filmmakers squander Hollywood's most eccentric character actor and a lot of very fine specimens of the order Rodentia.
  7. Under the City's Skin
    Solidly made and sometimes quite moving chronicle of a working-class family in Tehran.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Spun
    The biggest problem with Spun is that it's really just about speed (and editing). And speed, like most other drugs, is in and of itself boring.
  9. The Hunted
    It's an A-list movie for the most brain-dead elements of the action-movie crowd.
  10. Bend It Like Beckham
    Bend It Like Beckham is supposedly a movie about youth; its biggest shortcoming is that it rarely feels young.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Safety of Objects
    All the acting in it is flawless, an overflowing handful of polished jewels.
  12. Tears of the Sun
    There's a fine line dividing Hollywood tradition and overly manipulative junk, and Tears of the Sun crosses it.
  13. Laurel Canyon
    Cholodenko and her actors pull it off; the performances here are like a wary ballet, ruled as much by the mysterious magnetic attractions and repulsions these characters feel for one another as by anything so dully explicable as psychology or standard rules of social conduct.
  14. Bringing Down the House
    What's offensive in Bringing Down the House is the way the jokes have been calculated not to offend.
  15. Irreversible
    Noé isn't a kid (he'll turn 40 this year) but he's still young as a filmmaker; he may yet learn to control his desire to sear the audience's eyes out with a red-hot poker before he's even started telling a story.
  16. Ten
    The ultimate lesson in less-is-more cinema, an intimate and revelatory character study as well as a brilliant, almost symphonic rendering of the distracted, anxious, half-alienated and half-meditative state in which we spend vast amounts of our lives.
  17. Lawless Heart
    Virtually nothing at all is wrapped up in The Lawless Heart, which is probably why it feels so satisfyingly whole by the end.
  18. Dark Blue
    Shelton has directed Dark Blue in a jacked-up urban thriller style that simply does not play to his gifts. He's a sidewinder, the sort of writer-director who tells his stories through loopy character details and anecdotes.
  19. Old School
    It's blissfully, pants-wettingly funny from beginning to end.
  20. The Life of David Gale
    Becomes more and more preposterous with each scene -- it's almost like performance art.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    The soul of the film, in some ways, is singer Vuyisile Mini, a songwriter and anti-apartheid leader who was hanged in 1964. Amandla! (it's the Xhosa word for "power").
  22. All the Real Girls
    The sad thing about All the Real Girls is that Green seems more in love with his perceived unconventionality than he does with his characters. If that's not a town without pity, I don't know what is.
  23. Gerry
    Gerry moves slowly and deliberately, like a torture technique, leaving us feeling as dry and dusty and lost as its two characters.
  24. Daredevil
    Alone among the cast, Farrell seems to understand that this movie -- which is lazy and stoned, for all its loud music -- needed somebody to go ape-shit, to pretend to give a crap or at least to have fun.
  25. He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not
    Not half as clever as its setup leads you to think it might be: It's all buildup and no payoff, the kind of romantic thriller in which if just one sensible character called the police at the moment as any normal human being would -- well, then, you wouldn't have a movie.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Stone Reader
    What Stone Reader offers that's new is its portrayal of reading not as a supremely civilized and soulful activity but as a lonely, thwarting and sometimes painfully embarrassing one.
  27. Shanghai Knights
    What Chan represents -- the humor and charm and the sheer physical beauty of seeing him in action -- as well as the lazy, ping-pong repartee he achieves with Wilson, is the essence of the casual, deceptively artless art of movies.
  28. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    There's a pleasantly malevolent ridiculousness hovering around How to Lose a Guy. But the movie would have been so much better if it had jumped into its mean-spiritedness with gusto and passion, instead of just splashing around in it halfheartedly.
  29. The Guru
    Delightful screwball comedy.
  30. Lost in La Mancha
    Watching it is like being trapped in one of those nightmares where you need to get somewhere, fast, and you're distracted and delayed at every turn. Only in this case, the nightmare is happening to someone else, and it's costing an awful lot of money.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Biker Boyz
    There's not enough fast and even less furious.
  32. The Recruit
    Just the latest forgettable thriller that might have been enjoyable if only its conclusion lived up to its windup.
  33. Final Destination 2
    Essentially dumb and sadistic, but it's not like that's something new for pop culture. What we've got here is a solid, grade-B genre sequel, not as scary as the original but a bit funnier, and with a nasty little sting in its tail.
  34. Blind Spot. Hitler's Secretary
    Consistently interesting without feeling essential until, in its last half-hour, it becomes utterly compelling.
  35. Amen.
    Tricked up with so many points that there's barely any flow to it.
  36. Darkness Falls
    Basically brings home the bacon for horror fans -- it offers decent special effects and a nice array of those moments where you shriek and jump and nearly pee your pants but it turns out to be Mom or the cat after all.
  37. A Guy Thing
    Stumbles along laboriously, its jokes following one after another in a sloppy, flat-footed walk.
  38. The Son
    Whatever allure The Son has lies in its very remoteness, in its resolute refusal to show us all but the most delicate emotional vibrations. It also moves very sluggishly.
  39. Just Married
    The groom is a doofus, the bride has genuine screwball talent -- It's too bad that the movie is so disappointing.
  40. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    It's a funny, strange, sad and wonderful picture, packed with delightful performances by Hollywood stars and made by a director with a startling facility for the form and an expansive cinematic imagination.
  41. Love Liza
    May frustrate as many viewers as it delights (if not more) and it is almost relentlessly depressing, but it's also a principled, sharply realistic film that captures a highly convincing vision of Middle America.
  42. Chicago
    Sophisticated, brash, sardonic, completely joyful in its execution. It gives anyone who ever loved movie musicals, and lamented their demise, something to live for.
  43. The Pianist
    The director seems to be saying that, for survivors, art may be a way back to our finer selves -- extraordinary.
  44. Nicholas Nickleby
    To paraphrase a line from another Dickens' novel, Nicholas Nickleby is too much like a fragment of an underdone potato. The chef tended it very, very carefully, and still, it didn't turn out quite right.
  45. The Hours
    Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore bring dignity and Oscar-worthy performances to The Hours, a lovingly crafted meditation on death, loss and literature.
  46. Catch Me If You Can
    Well-enough made and highly watchable, but it lacks the one thing that would put some swing in its step and some swagger in its attitude: a sense of jazz.
  47. Morvern Callar
    A work of astonishing delicacy and force, a tone poem about the Frankenstein jolts that all of us, at one time or another, have to live through.
  48. Two Weeks Notice
    Grant takes every stupid line and makes it funny, just by underplaying.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Narc
    The direction of Joe Carnahan, who also wrote the script, is stylish without being overbearing, the actors look comfortable in their roles and the modest twists unfold at a pace that doesn't seem ridiculous. The film would probably make a good episode of "Homicide: Life on the Streets."
  50. Gangs of New York
    "Gunsmoke" meets "Planet of the Apes" in Martin Scorsese's overlarge, overcooked epic of 19th century Manhattan. You should see it anyway.
  51. Spider
    It isn't likely to drive anybody out of the theater -- although getting people out of the house to see a meticulous, minimalist study of madness and memory may be another story.
  52. Antwone Fisher
    There's nothing in either the conception or execution to lift it above a TV-movie tear-jerker.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    25th Hour
    Of course Spike Lee has the right to transcend movies about race. He also has the talent to do better than this plodding moral fable.
  54. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Yes, there are some "middle-chapter" problems, but Peter Jackson's Tolkien adaptation hasn't lost its devastating humanity, its heart-stopping cinematography or its epic sweep.
  55. The Guys
    The scenes between LaPaglia and Weaver, directed and played with a straightforward austerity that occasionally moved me to tears, make up for every one of The Guys flaws.
  56. Maid in Manhattan
    Everything about it, except the valiantly lifelike Lopez, feels stiff and robotic and mindlessly crowd-pleasing, as if it were a comedy made by a committee instead of a human being.
  57. Evelyn
    May be a weightless picture, but it's hardly torture to sit through. Just watch out for those angel rays.
  58. About Schmidt
    Had Payne the grace or generosity to present the vulgarity and naiveté and tackiness of these characters as something vital and endearing and delightful, the movie might have been explosively funny.
  59. Drumline
    When the camera is floating up high, as the band practices its moves on the field, you can imagine Busby Berkeley watching somewhere, jealous that he never got his mitts on a marching band.
  60. Empire
    Life in the Bronx is hard, all right. Getting through a movie shouldn't be harder.
  61. Analyze That
    The most surprising thing about the movie is the clumsiness of Harold Ramis' direction. Ramis has never equaled the work he did on "Groundhog Day."
  62. Adaptation.
    A highly enjoyable failure, a quandary that can't resolve itself.
  63. Solaris
    Soderbergh's film is probably not the equal of either Tarkovsky's 1972 predecessor or the memorably Byzantine prose of Lem's novel, but in the end, almost despite himself, this able craftsman has made a brave and lovely companion piece to both of them. His ending is pure cinema at its most marvelous and moving.
  64. Die Another Day
    Tamahori's Die Another Day is an imperfect Bond movie. But for every patch where it's dull and lifeless or just plain stupid, there are also sections that are significantly different from anything we've seen before in a Bond movie.
  65. Talk to Her
    Talk to Her is much better than Almodóvar's "bad" movies. But it never soars as freely as his best ones do -- it has a very trim, manicured wingspan.
  66. The Quiet American
    Noyce takes a great deal of care with this adaptation. For one thing, he includes as much of Greene's potent shorthand as he can without weighing the movie down.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    The thing I took away from that opening was that it was small, and looked beautiful. There was some technique and a little confusion. It didn't seem to have a conflict all plotted out and neatly resolved. The thing I didn't like is that the rest of the movie did.
  68. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
    After its deceptively fleet opening 20 minutes or so, Chamber of Secrets settles into a plodding amble, a rickety framework in which many allegedly exciting things happen -- and are forgotten only minutes later.
  69. Standing in the Shadows of Motown
    It's a noble undertaking. But why isn't it a better movie? Told in scattered fashion, the movie only intermittently lives up to the stories and faces and music of the men who are its subject. Part of the problem is the narration.
  70. The Crime of Padre Amaro
    Ends up being nothing more than a stifling morality tale dressed up in peekaboo clothing.
  71. 8 Mile
    Can Eminem act? Who knows? But his star turn in 8 Mile -- is memorable -- even if we've seen it all before.
  72. Far From Heaven
    A movie for hardcore film geeks and regular folk alike, a stunning, and stunningly improbable, fusion of postmodern pastiche and old-school Hollywood melodrama. It's both a marvelous technical accomplishment and a tragic love story that sweeps you off your feet.
  73. Femme Fatale
    In his dazzling and luxuriant new thriller Femme Fatale, De Palma turns trash into chic. It's a sexy, violent, glamorous, sinfully funny movie with a surface as hard and brilliant as diamonds.
  74. The Weight of Water
    It's an intelligently made (and beautifully edited) picture that at the very least has a spark of life to it -- more than you can say for plenty of movies that flow through the Hollywood pipeline without a hitch.
  75. I Spy
    The movie is so thoroughly lousy. It's loud, brash and obvious, full of car chases and explosions and gunplay.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Roger Dodger
    There's a maddening ambiguity at the core of writer-director Dylan Kidd's remarkably cynical, and bracingly intelligent, debut movie. It's the kind of thing that is just nasty enough to start arguments in cafes and bars.
  77. The Truth About Charlie
    As utterly disastrous movies go, this one's really got something.
  78. Frida
    A romance for the deeply romantic, which means that some people will certainly view it as cynical.
  79. All or Nothing
    Mike Leigh returns to the council flats of London -- and delivers a richly Dickensian masterpiece about working-class family life.
  80. Le bossu
    A delight from top to bottom, packed with romance, adventure, beautifully executed swordplay and a sumptuous period look.
  81. Abandon
    This alleged thriller, which might be described as "'Gaslight' Goes to College," is one of the most incoherent features in recent memory.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Formula 51
    If explosive defecation is your idea of a laff riot, this picture -- and the Headrillaz soundtrack, by extension -- should be perfect fun.
  83. The Ring
    A deviously engineered parasite that'll crawl under your skin and live in your nervous system for a while if you give it half a chance.
  84. Auto Focus
    Kinnear's performance has to be one of the most sympathetic acts of decency one actor has ever extended to another. Crane always wanted to be a real, respectable movie actor. Channeled through Kinnear, he finally gets his wish.
  85. Brown Sugar
    The new black movies make those of us sitting in the theater watching feel as if we actually count for something. That good feeling can carry you through this movie's silly and dull patches.
  86. Knockaround Guys
    One of those strained caper movies that's hardly any fun to watch and begins to vaporize from your memory minutes after it ends.
  87. The Transporter
    There's plenty to like here, especially for connoisseurs of the action genre, and there's also plenty to make you wonder whether Besson and co-writer Robert Mark Kamen scribbled their screenplay on a batch of Marseilles cocktail napkins and then lost one or two.
  88. Tuck Everlasting
    A neo-vampire movie for tender-hearted preadolescent girls who are afraid of sex. If that's your thing, go for it. But there's something genuinely creepy, and not in the good way.
  89. Swept Away
    Isn't dubbed. But it sure feels like it. The characters open their mouths and their lips don't seem to be shaping the right words -- you can't believe any human beings would ever utter such ludicrous dialogue, with so little conviction.
  90. 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.
  91. Punch-Drunk Love
    Something we haven't seen before: a manic-depressive romantic comedy that aspires to the soul of a musical. It's a new-fashioned love song.
  92. Welcome to Collinwood
    A bigger problem is that since the movie is a straight remake that reprises many of the original's scenes, we have those scenes playing in our heads, and the Russos' execution just isn't up to Monicelli's. It's painful to see gags that worked so beautifully fall flat, or wither and die because of indifferent timing.
  93. Heaven
    Tykwer's actors seem completely clued in to his intentions. Both Blanchett and Ribisi give performances so restrained they're almost subliminal.
  94. Red Dragon
    If you buy the overprocessed headcheese of the serial killer as refined genius, you'll love Red Dragon. Or maybe not. Even Hannibal Lecter devotees may lose patience with this picture's grandiose, self-serious ponderousness -- that's Lecterese for, "It's kind of boring in patches, actually."
  95. The Man from Elysian Fields
    Mick Jagger acts his age, finally, in an entertaining but ultimately disappointing fable.
  96. The Tuxedo
    Jackie Chan is thoroughly wasted in a bad suit and a witless comedy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Biggie and Tupac
    It's no exaggeration to say that roughly half of the interviews in Biggie and Tupac are worthless, offering no new information or insights about the rappers or their deaths.
  98. Sweet Home Alabama
    A good-natured but massively flawed little comedy.
  99. Moonlight Mile
    A dazzling true-life comedy that might be the funniest movie about grief ever made.
  100. The Banger Sisters
    A highly entertaining and refreshingly nonjudgmental movie
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