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 1.3 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. Psycho
    May not be anything new, but it's still just as shocking.
  2. Semi-Pro
    This may be one of the most sluggish sports comedies ever made -- even the supposedly rousing final sequence feels belabored and chubby.
  3. Everybody's Fine
    This is the kind of work a great actor does when he's not preoccupied with giving a great performance. Its very casualness is its big selling point.
  4. Slipstream
    The film has moments of goofy delight, some pseudo-David Lynch spookery and a couple of comic supporting turns.
  5. Just Like Heaven
    It's desperately lifeless.
  6. The A-Team
    Reasonably good fun. If you're a 12-year-old boy riding an intense Cherry Pepsi buzz and totally devoted to destroying some brain cells, that is.
  7. The Passion of the Christ
    Mel Gibson may have changed the face of cinema forever. I think he has: He's made the first true Jesusploitation flick, a picture that, despite its self-righteous air of grave religiosity, is barely spiritual at all.
  8. The Tenants
    Isn't exactly bad and isn't exactly good. It's raw in some places and overcooked in others.
  9. Forces of Nature
    The fault isn't all in the chemistry, or lack thereof. The more pressing conundrum of "Forces" is that writer Marc Lawrence paints his lead character into a morally ambiguous corner.
  10. Autumn
    Autumn is actually pretty damn good. It's a defiantly odd work, a movie-movie set more in the crime-film Paris of Jean-Pierre Melville or Jacques Becker or early Godard than in the real 21st century city.
  11. The Dilemma
    I'm not sure whether Howard and screenwriter Allan Loeb are to be commended for aspiring to something odd and original, or condemned for a result that's so messy and miscellaneous.
  12. Maybe Baby
    Sabotages itself by trying too hard. The worst of it is that Maybe Baby feels very much like an Englishman's attempt to make a Nora Ephron movie, all warm and squishy in a decidedly American way.
  13. Dr. Dolittle
    A weird delight.
  14. Agnes and His Brothers
    Roehler mixes cheap sex humor, existential darkness, buffoonish satire and profound tenderness in almost classic proportions. Maybe this is too uneven to be a masterpiece, but it's somewhere close.
  15. Clay Pigeons
    I wanted to take these two characters somewhere else and make a real movie about them...But Vaughn provides so many spooky, hilarious, unhinged moments, you won't mind sitting through it.
  16. The Nanny Diaries
    An adamantly unterrible picture, a reasonably enjoyable diversion.
  17. Reservation Road
    Dour, ponderous picture.
  18. Picture Perfect
    What Picture Perfect sells as romance is a junior high school health class morality lecture we all got years ago. And it was a crock then, too.
  19. Lolita
    For all of their vaunted (and, it turns out, false) fidelity to Nabokov, Lyne and Schiff have made a pretty, gauzy Lolita that replaces the book's cruelty and comedy with manufactured lyricism and mopey romanticism.
  20. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    Renders Jonathan Safran Foer's best-selling 2005 novel into unconvincing Hollywood mush.
  21. 28 Days
    Not even court-ordered rehab could save this stumbling drunk of a picture.
  22. Beyond the Sea
    You can't BECOME a character if you want to BE that character: Desperation isn't the same thing as acting. Spacey's mimicry is so precise, it's exhausting.
  23. The Ringer
    An odd and not wholly successful little comedy. Its pacing is slack, and although it has a gentle heart, it treads so gingerly across the minefield of potential offensiveness that it sometimes snuffs out its sparks of life as quickly as it throws them off.
  24. Ravenous
    Though it definitely requires a strong stomach, Ravenous may be the best cannibal tragicomedy ever made.
  25. You, Me and Dupree
    Everything about You, Me and Dupree, even the toilet humor, is tepid and rigorously inoffensive
  26. Manderlay
    To state the obvious, Manderlay is often patently offensive in its racial politics, and it surely isn't for everyone. It is, however, very funny, very dark and very skillfully played.
  27. How Do You Know
    In essence, the movie is an ungainly but irresistible romantic-triangle comedy built around Rudd, Reese Witherspoon and Owen Wilson, with Nicholson rambling around its periphery like a demonic bear, part comic relief and part distraction.
  28. King Arthur
    It's hard to care about a valiant groping for accuracy when a story is so badly told you can't tell what the devil is going on.
  29. One Night at McCool's
    Should have been a quick and dirty pulp tall tale. But it pokes along instead of accelerating, and though it isn't exactly smug it's rather too pleased with its own manufactured outrageousness.
  30. Secret Window
    Instead of taking us someplace we fear to go, Secret Window leads us to a place we've already been -- we know it so well, we could write the book on it ourselves.
  31. Fast & Furious
    Spends a lot of time advertising how exciting it is, without actually being exciting.
  32. Fifty Shades of Grey
    I wouldn’t say that Taylor-Johnson has made a good movie from Fifty Shades of Grey, precisely. That’s asking too much. But she and Marcel have risen to the challenge of this bizarre cultural moment with an odd and memorable film.
  33. The Da Vinci Code
    Disappointingly tame.
  34. How the Grinch Stole Christmas
    You will not like it on the screen, you will not like it -- not one scene!
  35. Bruce Almighty
    Unless you like boob jokes and preachy sentimentalism, this comedy isn't funny at all.
  36. 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.
  37. Another Happy Day
    The younger Levinson has considerable storytelling talent, an admirable honesty and a streak of ruthlessness.
  38. Rambo
    The movie is neither cathartic nor entertaining. The action scenes (and there are many of them) feel mechanized and calculated.
  39. Beerfest
    Mediocre raunchy comedy.
  40. 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.
  41. Knight and Day
    Roy is like a meta-Cruise or a Cruise pastiche; even the disturbing, stalkerish aspects of his character seem as if they were constructed from tabloid stories about the actor's marriage, his religious affiliation, his sexual identity.
  42. Must Love Dogs
    It's ostensibly about adults, but there's nothing remotely adult about it.
  43. The In-Laws
    This In-Laws isn't a disaster, it's just not very good.
  44. A Previous Engagement
    I'm not big on those Pauline Kael-style encomiums to great actors in mediocre material, but that's exactly what we've got here. Stevenson is so incandescent -- so funny, so vulnerable, so awkwardly sexy.
  45. El cantante
    Before long, El Cantante disintegrates into a stylized jumble -- even a straightforward jumble would have been preferable.
  46. Yes Man
    With Yes Man, Carrey has bled the well dry, doing everything he knows how to do, over and over again, just to prove that he still knows how to do it. It's exhilarating to see brilliance in a comic; but by the time you start smelling it, the game is over.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Smilla's Sense of Snow
    It doesn't help that Julia Ormond -- perhaps the most un-Smilla-like actress walking the planet -- is cast in the starring role. She gives a competent performance, but she looks like Nancy Drew's pert-nosed cousin who somehow got trapped while sleuthing inside a snow globe, not the prickly, androgynous warrior Smilla is meant to be.
  48. The Heartbreak Kid
    Ben Stiller, the movie's star, pretty much sinks the whole enterprise.
  49. Chasing Liberty
    The kind of bland, perky comedy that neuters whoever is spun into its cotton-candy web.
  50. Greenfingers
    Certainly pleasant enough, and if you can put the preachiness out of mind it's entertaining, in its square, conventional way.
  51. Mad City
    It has, at times, a loopy, edgy humor and moments of genuinely affecting pathos. But somehow the combination doesn't add up to anything.
  52. Pain & Gain
    Michael Bay sends a clear message to those of us who've been making fun of him: He's been in on the joke the whole time.
  53. Crazy in Alabama
    Disappoints with its simplistic, hollow narrative and characters.
  54. The Singing Detective
    Gordon's film is an art-house curio, visually ugly and emotionally and narratively dissonant. Its cheapness and poverty of imagination consistently undermines its ambitions and reduces its complexity to by-the-numbers Freudianism.
  55. The Bone Collector
    There's only one good reason to see The Bone Collector, and her name is Angelina Jolie.
  56. Bully
    If you stick with Bully through its seemingly endless repetition of themes and its hurl-inducing hand-held camerawork, it does build a crude, indefinable power.
  57. Mona Lisa Smile
    In terms of the gap between the movie it's trying to be and the movie it actually is, Mona Lisa Smile is in many ways indefensible. Yet for all its problems, it's satisfyingly movielike. The minutes drift by pleasurably and mindlessly.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Evita
    Lloyd Webber is everything loud, dumb and tiresome, and everything loud, dumb and tiresome in Evita is him.
  59. Evening
    Evening feels like one of those devil's-candy productions that aim to bring artistry to a large audience, specifically a large audience of adult women who don't often go to the movies. Even considering it in that light, I found it miscalculated and overcooked.
  60. Factory Girl
    If the filmmaking is in some ways awkward and elementary, Hickenlooper's attitude toward his subject is more complex, and more admirable.
  61. Pretty Persuasion
    If the resulting film doesn't work equally well at all levels, Wood (who starred in "Thirteen") gives an astonishing performance that pushes it most of the way there.
  62. Whatever Works
    A belabored trifle that's occasionally amusing but often just bewildering.
  63. Extraordinary Measures
    Isn't emotionally manipulative but simply dull.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Proof of Life
    Everything about Proof of Life is intriguing and a little off.
  65. 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.
  66. 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.
  67. 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.
  68. Love Object
    By the end of Love Object a dorky loner who wants a rubber sex doll at his beck and call seems a lot less objectionable than a director who wants a talented flesh-and-blood actress at his.
  69. What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole
    I'd have no problem with the element of rampant, half-wacky speculation at the outer edges of physics in these movies if they came labeled as such.
  70. The Invasion
    The problem with Hirschbiegel's ("Das Experiment," "Downfall") convoluted, car-crash-laden Invasion is that it doesn't know what symbolism it wants to grasp.
  71. Colombiana
    A movie so addicted to the crack pipe of delirious cinematic badness that it has real potential as a camp classic.
  72. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer
    More ambitious than its predecessor. It's also more cluttered and less fleet: The light, pleasingly casual quality of the first picture has evolved into something forced and metallic.
  73. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    To my taste, savvy Hollywood veteran Bill Condon debuts as director of the two-part "Twilight" conclusion in satisfying fashion, delivering a voluptuous if often inert spectacle that splits the difference between high camp and decadent romance.
  74. Get Rich or Die Tryin'
    This isn't Sheridan's most complex or richest picture, but there's lots of life to it: This is an unapologetically glossy pop product, powered by a strong, old-fashioned sense of B-movie melodrama.
  75. Firewall
    There's just not enough of Forster, who has a small role as Ford's work colleague and confidant. ..Sometimes star quality shines out from the corners of a movie, and not from the center.
  76. Mr. Brooks
    Beneath its drab veil of self-seriousness, Mr. Brooks is nothing but just plain silly.
  77. The Deep End of the Ocean
    So finely crafted, so alive with wonderful acting and an extraordinary commitment to realism that most audiences will be happy to surrender themselves to its improbable ride.
  78. 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.
  79. Life as a House
    Forget about cancer -- it's weepy movies like this that are the real scourge.
  80. American Dreamz
    The jokes in American Dreamz whiz by with speed and grace, and Weitz maintains control of the material every minute.
  81. The Possession
    Moody and a little slow, with muted colors and a half-empty, alien-feeling suburban setting, Danish director Ole Bornedal's The Possession is a nifty end-of-summer gift for horror buffs.
  82. Miral
    It isn't the shifting narrative focus of Miral that's the problem, nor is it the purposefully provocative pro-Palestinian perspective. It's Jebreal's screenplay, which uses every scene as a vehicle for delivering news headlines or condensed political rhetoric, and seems incapable of capturing a specific emotion or an individual personality.
  83. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    Marshall delivers old-fashioned swashbuckling action-movie thrills more than computer-engineered grotesquerie.
  84. By the Sea
    The result is something like a weepy Lifetime melodrama told in the languorous, self-indulgent style of European art cinema, as if Michelangelo Antonioni or Bernardo Bertolucci had wound up in debt to multiple ex-wives and were forced to churn out straight-to-cable movies, circa 1986.
  85. The Paperboy
    While the portrayal of Southern race relations in the '60s is less central here than in "The Help," it's also less labored and earnest, and one could argue that it's subtler, more intimate and more honest.
  86. Click
    I don't think any of it really hangs together as anything resembling drama, or that Michael is ever a remotely likable character, before or after his day of reckoning. But Adam Sandler didn't get where he is today by making movies for me and Roger Ebert to like.
  87. Blindness
    An extended metaphor for the condition of man, and boy is it extended. In the course of two hours that crawl by like four and a half.
  88. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Might have been a lavish, silly entertainment. In places it comes close, but no sheaf of tobacco.
  89. Pride and Glory
    What makes the characters in Pride and Glory real -- and raises the movie above the standard corrupt-cop fare -- is their capacity to live and die in shades of gray.
  90. Sweet Home Alabama
    A good-natured but massively flawed little comedy.
  91. Taken 2
    Luc Besson and Liam Neeson and the rest of the furriners who made the inept and offensive Taken 2 don't seem to have gotten the memo from Jason Bourne: Americans don't think our spooks are good guys anymore.
  92. Hall Pass
    Compared to, say, your average Adam Sandler movie it's a master class in film comedy. Oh, you will laugh. You may not forgive yourself for it easily, but you will laugh. You may well laugh to the point of pee stains in your underthings, and if you think that's gratuitous you have no idea.
  93. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
    The problem with contemporary Hollywood isn't that so many of the movies it's churning out are based on formula; it's that so many directors take perfectly good formulas and wreck them with bad filmmaking.
  94. Vanilla Sky
    Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right.
  95. The Statement
    A stiff, clunky piece of work that never builds up urgency or tension. The script, by playwright Ronald Harwood, who wrote the script for Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," is close to atrocious.
  96. Home Fries
    A movie comedy that manages to be consistently funny without becoming assaultive, and that remains consistently sweet-tempered even at its most macabre, isn't so common that we can refuse this one's modest pleasures.
  97. Elizabethtown
    Elizabethtown is a sprawl, perhaps the victim of a kind of ADD of the heart.
  98. The Situation
    An uneven but impressively ambitious picture.
  99. Surrogates
    Surrogates stays afloat by not taking itself too seriously, but also by recognizing that a movie about robots shouldn't look as if it were made by one.
    • 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.
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