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. The Four Feathers
    Hoary epic of British Empire valor and cowardice, remade for seventh time, remains rot, old boy.
  2. Secretary
    It's a liberating, kindhearted picture, one whose ending brings with it the feeling that something has finally been shaken free. How comfortable you feel with that is completely up to you.
  3. Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever
    I don't even care that there's no plot in this Antonio Banderas-Lucy Liu faceoff. It's still terrible!
  4. 8 Women
    iIt sits on the screen in the flattest way imaginable, and the brightest colors in the world can't make up for all that's missing. 8 Women is perfumed kitsch, and it reeks.
  5. Spirited Away
    It will disturb you as much as thrill you, make you wonder whether the boundaries between life and death, reality and fantasy, imagination and insanity are ever what they appear to be.
  6. Alias Betty
    This quiet French thriller gets to the heart of motherhood, and then pays off with comfort and calm.
  7. Igby Goes Down
    Witty and intelligently made. It's also utterly baffling.
  8. Barbershop
    So often loose and funny that you'd have to be pretty stingy not to get some pleasure from it.
  9. City by the Sea
    Robert De Niro and Frances McDormand almost rescue this lifeless, clichéd cop drama! Close isn't good enough!
  10. In Praise of Love
    Gives no indication that Jean-Luc Godard has anything left to say that is worth hearing, no indication that he has any drive or passion to continue making movies. What's on the screen is habit -- accomplished, rote, empty.
  11. Swimfan
    Such a blatant imitation of Adrian Lyne's Reaganite thriller that the only thing you can be grateful for is that it's far too clumsy to get people arguing about it or taking it seriously.
  12. Undisputed
    The picture is entertaining and brutal (it's a movie about tough convicts fighting, after all), but it can't figure out what kind of movie it would like to be.
  13. How I Killed My Father
    The most disturbing and effective thriller I've seen in many moons. Rarely, indeed almost never, is such high-wattage brainpower coupled with pitch-perfect acting and an exquisite, unfakable sense of cinema.
  14. Serving Sara
    Long before Serving Sara drags its butt to the finish line, you wish you were watching a different race.
  15. S1m0ne
    It's not merely that these subjects have already been satirized to the point of ultimate tedium; more importantly, Simone just isn't very funny.
  16. Red Satin
    A sweet and sexy celebration of real women's real bodies.
  17. One Hour Photo
    An art-house horror movie, and like most art-house versions of genre films, all the vitality and juice of genre conventions have been sucked right out. The irony of the movie is that it puts you into the same torpor that's supposed to be afflicting the characters.
  18. Blue Crush
    Offers the most intense visual experience I've had at the movies all year.
  19. Possession
    LaBute, in his infinite and marvelous wrongness, infuses his movie with a delicacy of feeling that couldn't be more right for the material. LaBute obviously approached the project with his hands and his heart open: Frame by frame, it's a humble picture, a movie that isn't afraid to be an entertainment.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    24 Hour Party People
    This dizzying saga of the '80s Manchester music scene is garish, reckless, endlessly self-indulgent and totally untrustworthy. What a blast!
  21. xXx
    Brash, chaotic and jostlingly entertaining.
  22. Blood Work
    As much as Eastwood ever expresses pleasure about anything, you sense a flicker of gratification that he can work with actors who can hold their own against him. Lifford does it without breaking a sweat. Howard Hawks would have loved her.
  23. The Good Girl
    Never quite establishes its own identity, and when you remember it in two years it's likely to be that movie you saw that you kind of liked with that girl in it, what's her name, from TV.
  24. Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams
    Rodriguez is that rare filmmaker who doesn't draw a hard, fixed line between entertaining kids and grown-ups -- he knows that in order to understand what will delight kids, you have to know what will tickle adults as well.
  25. Full Frontal
    Aside from a few well-shaped moments from some of the actors, the editing is about the only thing that keeps your mind occupied in Full Frontal -- and any good editor will tell you that's a problem.
  26. One Last Kiss
    It's in no way a stupid movie. The trouble is that there's only so much emotional energy you can expend on these assholes before you start wondering why you're paying attention to them at all.
  27. Signs
    Once again, the filmmaker gets incredibly wobbly at the end of his story, and his resolution of both the alien incursion and of Graham's crisis of faith feels more like a cheap trick than the product of a genuine belief in anything at all.
  28. The Master of Disguise
    I understand how hard it is for parents to find movies to take their kids to, but the thought of them or their children getting stuck at this stinker galls me. Summer vacation feels short enough as it is.
  29. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    Is legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans feeding us a load of crap in this documentary? When it's this much fun, who really cares?
  30. Austin Powers in Goldmember
    It's a mess, and a ridiculous golden shower of toilet humor. But Mike Myers' superspy spoof still provides the summer's purest movie delight.
  31. Stuart Little 2
    Hits every color note just right. It's a visual antidepressant.
  32. K-19: The Widowmaker
    May be a bit too grim and claustrophobic to become a certifiable summer blockbuster, but it's a pulse-pounding thriller that brings one of the Cold War's darkest and deadliest episodes to the big screen.
  33. Tadpole
    The big problem with it is that the setup is treated as just that, a scheme around which many things that are intended to be funny (but aren't very) are packed like ice around a fish.
  34. Eight Legged Freaks
    Winds up a lot closer to the movies it's taking off from than it cares to admit: cheap, unimaginative and predictable. It's the horror movie equivalent of one of those "Saturday Night Live" sketches that drags on interminably, though nobody in it seems to have any idea of just what the joke is.
  35. Reign of Fire
    Dragons torch the earth as manly men with weird hair battle them in this colossally misconceived dud.
  36. 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.
  37. All About Lily Chou-Chou
    A sprawling and adventurous tale of teen alienation, might just be the movie that pushes the Japanese new wave out of the film-geek ghetto.
  38. My Wife Is an Actress
    A light, enjoyable night out. This happens largely because of Charlotte Gainsbourg, who's simply adorable. Attal shoots her with tenderness throughout, a tenderness that comes from familiarity.
  39. Me Without You
    This film's intelligence and forthrightness about the things women sometimes do to one another -- and its resoluteness about where the line should be drawn in terms of selflessness between friends -- set it head and shoulders above most contemporary movies that deal with friendships between women.
  40. Read My Lips
    It's a wholly amoral movie, but it's honestly amoral. And that's a relief for the audience.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Men in Black II
    Here's an idea: Let's just take that same gizmo-packed alien-attack buddy-flick blockbuster from the summer of '97 ... and make it dumber!
  42. The Powerpuff Girls
    It's a universe invented for our delight and pleasure and nothing else, a world made up of colors not found in nature but in a little girl's sock drawer. In Powerpuff Girls, shapes, images and colors make up the most crucial part of the message. It's a hot-pink little movie.
  43. Lovely & Amazing
    Catherine Keener, Emily Mortimer and Brenda Blethyn shine in a delicate, loose-limbed and tremendously alive indie about women, family, self-image and survival.
  44. Harvard Man
    Sure, sex and drugs can take you to a higher plane. But not if a movie crushes your will to live first.
  45. Mr. Deeds
    Utterly predictable, thoroughly sentimental and -- worse -- not all that funny. It makes your average episode of "Third Rock From the Sun" look like the edgy mutant offspring of John Waters and Ingmar Bergman.
  46. Sunshine State
    Sodden and glum, even in those moments where it's supposed to feel funny and light. It makes you feel trapped and flailing as the minutes tick by. If it encapsulates anything, it's the experience of drowning, not waving.
  47. Minority Report
    It's a dark and dazzling spectacle.
  48. Windtalkers
    Windtalkers is the best of Woo's American movies, and the one with the sturdiest and most direct links to his earlier pictures.
  49. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys
    Undone by simply trying too hard.
  50. The Emperor's New Clothes
    A trifle but an exceptionally civilized, charming trifle.
  51. The Bourne Identity
    Entertaining, handsome and gripping, The Bourne Identity is something of an anomaly among big-budget summer blockbusters: a thriller with some brains and feeling behind it, more attuned to story and character than to spectacle.
  52. Scooby-Doo
    No serious film fan could stomach the cheap gags and farting contests in this goofball tribute. I laughed myself stupid anyway.
  53. Bad Company
    This cookie-cutter spy thriller depends on the chemistry between Anthony Hopkins and Chris Rock. Um, wait, there isn't any.
  54. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood
    Isn't so much a movie as a tract, a parable in which the charred wisdom of its characters is much more significant than the intricacies of their lives.
  55. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    It's a difficult film to follow and at 172 minutes is maybe a half-hour too long. But simply as a sensory experience The Fast Runner is amazing.
  56. The Sum of All Fears
    Isn't a serious attempt to deal with our vulnerability to terrorism, or to address how established channels of power can bring us to the brink. It's the same damn Tom Clancy picture that's been churned out since "The Hunt for Red October," as humorless and gray and dour as its predecessors.
  57. Undercover Brother
    A joyful mix of high and low humor, pulled off with style and an eye for glamour (Danielle Hollowell deserves special praise for her costumes; she's the high priestess of fitted snakeskin).
  58. CQ
    A frothy, sexy, '60s delight with a movie lover's heart.
  59. Enough
    I think you'd have to be comatose or mentally incompetent not to find Enough ludicrous.
  60. Insomnia
    Like the best thrillers it dives below the ordered surface of the genre into the coldest waters of the individual soul, where Hitchcock and David Lynch and Dostoyevsky have ventured. Does Christopher Nolan belong in that company? Not quite yet, but he's on the way.
  61. The Importance of Being Earnest
    This well-cast adaptation somehow feels obvious and overblown.
  62. About a Boy
    As close to mainstream perfection as I've seen all year. It gives us everything we want, need and deserve without batting an eye.
  63. The Believer
    A bad movie -- really a terrible movie -- with a daring idea behind it. And it's had the sort of crummy luck that, no matter what you think of it, can get you steamed.
  64. 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.
  65. Unfaithful
    It's one of the fullest portrayals of sexual desire and pleasure and fear I've ever seen in a movie.
  66. The Lady and the Duke
    It's dull in a very tasteful way, with none of the reverberating tenderness and sometimes surly vigor that characterize Rohmer's best work, things like "Summer" and "The Aviator's Wife."
  67. Hollywood Ending
    No director in the history of moviemaking has expended so much effort in the service of drying up and blowing off the landscape.
  68. Spider-Man
    What holds the movie together is its modest, sweet spirit.
  69. Rain
    A character who triumphs over a clumsy story line is a very rare creature. It takes a smart director and a sensitive actor to bring him to life, and to keep him breathing all the way through.
  70. Sade
    If you're looking for thrills, you should know that you have to wade through a good seven-eighths of the movie before Sade does anything remotely disreputable, and even then it's a rather mechanical bit of business that would have been more effective (and more disturbing) if it had been handled with a bit of humor.
  71. Life or Something Like It
    Dimly entertaining, the sort of thing that doesn't insult you so much that you feel compelled to flee the theater, but it's too inert to be anything close to charming or compelling.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dogtown and Z-Boys
    This movie is a sun-dappled documentary about skateboarding, about the thrill of speed, the joy of reckless youth. Turning it into an academic example of the problems of history -- of who tells it and how it gets told -- is a lot less fun.
  73. Jason X
    It gets much more watchable in the last half-hour.
  74. The Salton Sea
    To say that the film is unpleasant would imply that there's an emotional reaction to be gotten from it. I'd have to believe that there was someone, somewhere, who would actually care.
  75. Enigma
    Director Michael Apted does a smooth, competent job, but like almost all his work, Enigma lacks excitement and a vivid personality.
  76. Girls Can't Swim
    It's a cynical way to pass time, the cynicism that comes from being presented with something you've seen a hundred times before.
  77. Chelsea Walls
    Does become more engaging as it lurches along, perhaps because you give up hoping that anything will really happen and settle into the Nicolas Roeg-meets-David Lynch-at-the-cast-party-for-"Taxi Driver" atmosphere of mid-'70s nothingness.
  78. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    As Tolstoy observed, all sappy ethnic family comedies are the same. None is sappy in its own way.
  79. The Scorpion King
    The Scorpion King, so far from perfect it isn't funny, is nevertheless one of those movies that catches you up in something bigger than yourself, namely, an archetypal desire to enjoy good trash every now and then.
  80. Murder by Numbers
    This premise could, just maybe, make for a decent thriller, but everything about Murder by Numbers is so flavorless and rote, so devoid of real suspense and human interest, that you never suspect for a moment that the answers are likely to be engaging.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nine Queens
    If the movie isn't true, it's at least true to itself. When Nine Queens spirals out of the realm of believability, we've already been won over enough that we don't care.
  82. World Traveler
    It's hard to remember a movie that has asked us to care, without giving us reason to, about a character who is so thoroughly and relentlessly a prick.
  83. Murderous Maids
    There's a curiously ho-hum quality to the murders, despite the fact that the two victims are bludgeoned, sliced, chopped and jabbed, and also (the movie suggests) get their eyeballs gouged out.
  84. The Triumph of Love
    This intelligent, breezy romantic comedy sings a love song to theater. Plus, there's a hunky lug and Mira Sorvino in drag.
  85. Human Nature
    The second movie by "Being John Malkovich" writer Charlie Kaufman is even weirder than his first.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Changing Lanes
    Despite some solid acting and cinematography -- mistakenly turns what should have been a fast-paced thriller into a cerebral sermon about the slippery slope of corporate law.
  87. Frailty
    Starts out, and ends up, as a thriller trying valiantly to show us layers of moral depth. But in between that beginning and ending, Paxton's vision (as well as that of Brent Hanley, who wrote the script) becomes wavy and indistinct, a blurry muddle of sensationalistic, prurient grisliness masquerading as a meditation on the nature of evil.
  88. The Cat's Meow
    If there were any justice in the world, The Cat's Meow would be the beginning of the rehabilitation of Davies' image.
  89. Lucky Break
    Perfectly inoffensive and harmless, but it's also drab and inert.
  90. High Crimes
    High Crimes does offer good, often sharp and funny work from its two stars. But you can't fake excitement, and it's a lousy feeling to know that the best commercial movie I can point you to right now is this shallow, self-erasing nonsense.
  91. Big Trouble
    Such a feebleminded, good-natured comedy that it actually makes you laugh with that timeless gag of somebody pretending to cough while calling someone else a bad name.
  92. Crush
    The most depressing movie I've seen all year; in fact, I'm hard-pressed to name a movie aimed specifically at women that has ever made me feel as insulted and disgusted.
  93. The Rookie
    Quaid doesn't make the best of the movie's baloney; he presents it to us as a believable truth.
  94. No Such Thing
    May be far from perfect, but those small, odd Hartley touches help you warm to it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Piano Teacher
    When you see The Piano Teacher in a movie theater you get a chance to go back in time, back to the days when French movies were titillating, provocative and kind of smart.
  96. Death to Smoochy
    All noise with very little fun, and almost no restraint.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Clockstoppers
    What Clockstoppers achieves in acting and decent special effects, it undermines with weak dialogue and directing. The movie isn't bad; it just makes you wish that certain scenes could be hypertimed into oblivion.
  98. Panic Room
    Might be entertaining for those who like seeing a terrified teenage girl watch a loved one get beaten to a pulp while she slides into a diabetic coma. For the rest of us it's both stagnant and vaguely unpleasant.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blade II
    Suffers from way too many fight scenes that last way too long and look way too computer-generated.
  100. Sorority Boys
    They don't even look as if they're having fun. Their stint as cross-dressers is simply an endurance test for them, and for us.
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