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. The Life of David Gale
    Becomes more and more preposterous with each scene -- it's almost like performance art.
  2. Whatever Works
    A belabored trifle that's occasionally amusing but often just bewildering.
  3. The Barbarian Invasions
    Which would all be well and good, if only Arcand's approach weren't so deliberate and stupefyingly superior.
    • 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.
  5. Rambo
    The movie is neither cathartic nor entertaining. The action scenes (and there are many of them) feel mechanized and calculated.
  6. The Tuxedo
    Jackie Chan is thoroughly wasted in a bad suit and a witless comedy.
  7. The Golden Compass
    Whatever complex or interesting ideas might have been found in the source material have been watered down, skimmed over, mashed into nonsense or simply ignored.
  8. The Spirit
    Miller seems to have brought neither his brains nor his heart (both of which we know he's got) to this project. The style is willing. But the spirit is weak.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Max Cea
    Snatched
    There are a few strong bits in Snatched — the best of them centering around Joan Cusak as a silent ex-special ops agent — and the film is well-paced. But as Hawn’s Linda should have learned, this time around Amy Schumer isn’t worth leaving the house for.
  10. Man of Steel
    Despite looking, feeling and (especially) sounding expensive – this is one of the loudest summer spectacles of recent years – Man of Steel is second-tier and third-generation Chris Nolan-flavored neo-superhero material.
  11. Double Jeopardy
    An intermittently engaging thriller.
  12. Balls of Fury
    Intended as nothing more than a here-today, gone-tomorrow zany entertainment, and at the very least, it has a good-natured, slightly raunchy spirit about it. But ultimately, it's a hollow enterprise, all ping and no pong. It doesn't bounce; it splats.
  13. Stay
    Forster and Benioff are able craftsmen who apparently thought it might be interesting to seal themselves into a narrative box with no way out. Sorry about that, guys -- I hope it was a growth experience.
  14. Beowulf
    Ambitious, overbearing and hollow; it goes overboard to impress, yet it never feels truly inventive or imaginative. At best, it achieves a level of clumsy camp.
  15. Sleepwalking
    There's loads of suffering in Sleepwalking, piled on until the picture almost becomes an unintentional comedy.
  16. In the Cut
    Isn't just a movie about decapitation; it's a decapitated movie. It has no idea where its head is at.
  17. 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.
  18. Happy Endings
    The kind of self-conscious puzzle picture in which characters behave in ways that serve the plot but in no way resemble things that actual human beings would be likely to do.
  19. Dudley Do-Right
    Enough flickers of Jay Ward's gloriously subversive sensibility to make it watchable, but it also has enough lengthy stretches of pure triteness to make it easy to skip altogether.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Count of Monte Cristo
    To say the film doesn't quite recapture the thrill of the novel is like saying that soda pop doesn't really have the same kick as heroin.
  21. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    A time-waster with some enjoyably empty zip.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Legend of 1900
    But it tries to be (many) things -- and fails at them all.
  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. She Hate Me
    The problem with She Hate Me is that there's no playfulness in Lee's provocations. He doesn't have the style or the naughty joie de vivre that you need to make a sex farce.
  25. 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.
  26. This Is Where I Leave You
    Frequently irritating and occasionally insulting.
  27. Basic Instinct 2
    If you're trying to reinvigorate the art of the stylish thriller, the movie you come up with needs to be stylish and it needs to be thrilling. Basic Instinct 2, is neither.
  28. 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.
  29. The Shipping News
    Spacey mucks up an otherwise pretty and pleasantly vague take on E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.
  30. The Horse Whisperer
    The Horse Whisperer is just the latest example of tab-A-into-slot-B moviemaking to come out of Hollywood, a weeper that's built according to a solid set of rules.
  31. Land of the Lost
    Land of the Lost isn't a terrible movie. It's merely a perplexing one: Who is this thing for?
  32. Birthday Girl
    It's that sense of ardor that's missing from Ben Chaplin's performance in Birthday Girl.
  33. I Don't Know How She Does It
    The major drawback of I Don't Know How She Does It, however, is Parker herself. She seems pathologically drawn to characters who don't possess believable flaws or complications -- just annoying tics.
  34. Pineapple Express
    The picture is resolutely unhip and proud of it, which can be a good thing in the right hands or, in the wrong ones, just a gimmick. Nearly everything about Pineapple Express is a gimmick.
  35. Kingdom of Heaven
    This is muddled and oppressive storytelling (the script is by William Monahan) dotted with elaborate but weightless battle sequences.
  36. The Invisible Circus
    The Invisible Circus isn't junk. It's carefully, competently made, though with no particular feeling for technique or rhythm.
  37. The Maid's Room
    Let’s be clear right up front that The Maid’s Room doesn’t quite work, intriguing premise and all, and that the fault lies with Walker’s labored script and wooden characterization.
  38. The Break-Up
    The Break-Up doesn't know whether it wants to be a facile, enjoyable date movie or an unnerving examination of the dark, pockmarked underbelly of everything we expect out of romantic relationships, and it settles for a deeply unsatisfying nowheresville.
  39. 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.
  40. Tears of the Sun
    There's a fine line dividing Hollywood tradition and overly manipulative junk, and Tears of the Sun crosses it.
  41. 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.
  42. A Christmas Carol
    The 3-D film is flat, the CGI-enhanced characters oddly waxen. In the center of the action is Jim Carrey -- or at least a dead-eyed, doll-like version of Carrey -- playing Scrooge, the ghosts, a younger version of himself, and probably a dozen other parts. As a general rule of thumb, one Jim Carrey is plenty for any movie.
  43. Brotherhood of the Wolf
    Whatever it is, it's simultaneously on speed and Quaaludes; I don't know if any movie this profoundly insane has been seen in general release since Antonia Bird's Gold Rush cannibal comedy "Ravenous."
  44. Troy
    Troy isn't so much a simplified retelling of "The Iliad" as a re-imagined version of it, told wholly without imagination.
  45. The Wedding Date
    Dermot Mulroney is the movie's only genuinely romantic lead. And he's so good that he nearly carries The Wedding Date single-handedly.
  46. Hereafter
    A movie that opens with a sensational bang and then proceeds to pursue the Big Questions about life and death in lovely, lugubrious and increasingly off-putting fashion, until all its drama has been frittered away in a dreamy, drifty haze.
  47. Bandits
    Nothing is more dispiriting than forced high spirits. Bandits keeps reminding you of what a good time you should be having. You leave with a feeling of being swindled, and that's the only genuine thing about it.
  48. Borstal Boy
    As drama it feels forced and highly conventional.
  49. 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.
  50. One True Thing
    This might have worked if the director and lead actress had the kind of intense mutual understanding that, say, Ingmar Bergman had with Liv Ullmann, or John Cassavetes had with Gena Rowlands.
  51. Colombiana
    A movie so addicted to the crack pipe of delirious cinematic badness that it has real potential as a camp classic.
  52. Seven Days in Utopia
    Seven Days in Utopia is flawed in so many ways -- the editing, writing, acting and Matthew Dean Russell's direction are uniformly weak -- that this well-intentioned film does its positive messages a disservice.
  53. 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.
  54. Mad Money
    The picture has no legs, no style, no sense of movement other than the meandering, dawdling kind.
  55. Crazy in Alabama
    Disappoints with its simplistic, hollow narrative and characters.
  56. Jeepers Creepers
    Gets off to a great start and then simply shuts down, like an awesome vintage car on an ambitious road trip.
  57. Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
    Disjointed and disorganized, and it meanders when it needs to gallop.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Permanent Midnight
    Perhaps if Jerry were a three-dimensional character, or the movie had focused on one plot instead of trying to do it all, Permanent Midnight might have been engaging. But in the end, all you see is another rich spoiled brat shoving tar up his arm, and at this point it's just too hard to care.
  59. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
    Revenge of the Fallen just comes off as a bratty kid showing how many swear words he knows.
  60. 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.
  61. 200 Cigarettes
    The plots vary widely in their watchability -- from mildly amusing to stupefyingly godawful.
  62. Sanctum
    Whatever his faults as a filmmaker may be, Cameron would never make an adventure flick that felt this bland and generic.
  63. Songcatcher
    Songcatcher is like an "All Things Considered" report on "a vibrant and lasting folk tradition" that goes on for two hours. It's so relentlessly, goddamn worthy that you long for some cheapness and dirt, some energetic pop trash to liven it up.
  64. Premonition
    Premonition doesn't know when to stop. The picture can't decide between cheap scares or deep thoughts, so it goes for both.
  65. The Saint
    This Saint is a glum piece of post-Cold War paranoia, and director Phillip Noyce approaches it with the same plodding earnestness he brought to his Tom Clancy adaptations ("Patriot Games," "A Clear and Present Danger").
  66. 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.
  67. The Good Night
    There's a gloomy quality to The Good Night I sort of appreciated -- much of it was shot in London, although it's supposed to occur in New York -- but after the initial acerbic setup fades, Gary becomes less and less likable and the movie evaporates into nothing.
  68. Life as a House
    Forget about cancer -- it's weepy movies like this that are the real scourge.
  69. Chapter 27
    There's virtually no context provided here, about Lennon or the Beatles or New York or Chapman himself. To put it another way, the film's entire context IS Chapman.
  70. 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.
  71. Georgia Rule
    [Georgia Rule] is clearly intended to be an uplifting multigenerational drama about abuse, healing and forgiveness. Yet there's something unsavory about the way it uses a character's emotional and psychological scars as a gimmick.
  72. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    The jokes are forced, almost mechanical, in their crudeness.
  73. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
    This is a glazed, inhuman, cluttered piece of work, a storytelling mishmash that buries the considerable charms of its actors under heavy drifts of silt.
    • 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.
  75. Red Riding Hood
    It's strange and stupid and half-compelling and sometimes beautiful.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mars Attacks!
    It turns out to be more a throwaway piece of pop ephemera, like a '90s "Casino Royale," momentarily arresting and soon forgotten.
  77. 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.
  78. Vertical Limit
    Wants to be a dizzy, precarious thrill ride. Glenn provides the only gravity that doesn't seem dull, literal and earthbound.
  79. 360
    It's easy to hate movies that are abundantly terrible or immoral or stupid, but I almost feel like a jerk telling you that Fernando Meirelles' globetrotting drama 360 is a mistake from beginning to end.
  80. 88 Minutes
    The picture is humorless and witless. The barrage of allegedly important details is supposed to keep us intrigued, but it barely keeps us occupied.
  81. Gigli
    Turns out to be merely bad -- not a train wreck, not the crime against humanity it's been rumored to be.
  82. Away We Go
    An exploration of self-absorption that is itself too self-absorbed to be either entertaining or enlightening.
  83. The People vs. Larry Flynt
    "Larry Flynt" should have a slick, whorish look, but there's no juice in Forman's sleaze. Hustler's centerfolds look like Renoirs next to the cold-eyed way Forman shoots women's bodies.
  84. 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.
  85. 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.
  86. Obsessed
    Takes far too long to get cooking, and it works so hard at NOT being exploitation that it loses sight of its reasons for existing in the first place.
  87. 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.
  88. 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.
  89. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    As Tolstoy observed, all sappy ethnic family comedies are the same. None is sappy in its own way.
  90. Nights in Rodanthe
    The movie around Lane and Gere is unreal, a tortured construct, but they open a breathing space in its center.
  91. Angels & Demons
    Might have been classy, entertaining junk -- if only it were entertaining.
  92. Friday Night Lights
    There's some good acting in this mess.
  93. Sex and Death 101
    Even if the actual movie is an awkward, uncinematic mishmash. Waters has at least tried to write a sex comedy that isn't aimed at titty-fixated 17-year-olds, and at its best Sex and Death 101 has a fast, clever rhythm that almost sings.
  94. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Forget the heat of passion: The movie never breaks a sweat.
  95. Elizabethtown
    Elizabethtown is a sprawl, perhaps the victim of a kind of ADD of the heart.
    • 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.
  97. Eat Pray Love
    A minor and superficial summer diversion that offers female viewers not much more than a two-hour escape fantasy, but that's not a crime.
  98. The Happening
    The man who showed such promise less than a decade ago has been leaving a diminishing creative footprint ever since.
  99. 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.
  100. The Quiet
    Babbit is skilled at creating atmosphere and mood, all of it creepy or sodden, and actresses Elisha Cuthbert and Camilla Belle put their hearts into their roles, which are, unfortunately, encased in a sleazoid TV movie of the week tarted up in art-school clothes.
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