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. Shaft
    Lean, fast and undeniably entertaining.
  2. Jesus' Son
    It has a nobility and modesty, along with a refreshing lack of cynical attitude, that you rarely find in independent films these days.
  3. Love's Labour's Lost
    Love's Labour's Lost is flawed, but Kenneth Branagh remains our greatest living interpreter of Shakespeare.
  4. Gone in Sixty Seconds
    A time-waster with some enjoyably empty zip.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Grass
    A flashy, smoker-friendly documentary on the twisted history of the evil weed -- and the misguided drug war against marijuana.
  6. Big Momma's House
    Martin Lawrence, no Eddie Murphy, takes a reheated cross-dressing shtick and turns it into something to elate your inner fourth-grader.
  7. Shanghai Noon
    Jackie Chan's latest teams him up in 1880s America with Owen Wilson -- and gives a giddy glimpse of what he'll be doing after he gets too old to do his death-defying stunts.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Better Living Through Circuitry
    In this floor-level view of the rave scene, director Jon Reiss keeps it pumping, humming, buzzing and spinning.
  9. 8 ½ Women
    Some viewers may find this movie sexist or misogynist simply based on its premise, but it's a mistake to take Greenaway's symbolic narratives too literally.
  10. Mission: Impossible II
    Even the most spectacular things Woo unleashes here feel strangely impersonal.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Dinosaur
    "Bambi" meets "Godzilla": Disney goes for the goo in a by-turns gory and sappy new epic of computer-generated images.
  12. Small Time Crooks
    The latest from Woody Allen is an enjoyable trifle -- but Tracey Ullman and Elaine May walk off with the picture.
  13. Road Trip
    Like last year's "American Pie," Road Trip crisply delivers the goods: vaguely rakish heroes, vaguely kinky sex and highly naked nubiles.
  14. Center Stage
    Grand, juicy fun regardless, tapping as it does into some archetypal pleasure center.
  15. Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000
    Shot after shot photographed at wobbly, off-center angles for no particular reason, weigh every action sequence down with super-slo-mo in lame imitation of "The Matrix" or end every single scene with a vertical wipe.
  16. Hamlet
    If this Hamlet weren't so perfectly conceived visually, it would probably stand solidly on the basis of its acting alone.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Up at the Villa
    Despite the prestigious talents involved, this is strictly "Minor Piece Theatre."
  18. Gladiator
    For all its grandeur, Gladiator is a canned experience, a film that flails around awkwardly trying to find a reason to exist, or at least a compelling story to tell.
  19. Where the Heart Is
    Portman and Judd aren't responsible for the mendacious and finally repulsive sentimentality of Where the Heart Is, but by the end their wholesome glow seemed contaminated by it, and that's a shame.
  20. Gossip
    Ludicrous trash, but it has style.
  21. U-571
    May be the shoddiest and most incoherent piece of big-budget action moviemaking since "Armageddon."
  22. The Virgin Suicides
    (Coppola) connects with the essential purity of Eugenides' story, stripping it down to its bare essentials and cutting straight to everything that's wonderful about it.
  23. Keeping the Faith
    Edward Norton's dopey directorial debut gives interfaith romance a bad name.
  24. Set Me Free
    Aside from the effectiveness of Set Me Free as a coming-of-age story, it's also one of the most poetic avowals of love for movies that I've seen in years.
  25. American Psycho
    (Harron) has made a passionless movie about a passionless man, and it's all supposed to add up to make us feel or even just think something, but what?
  26. 28 Days
    Not even court-ordered rehab could save this stumbling drunk of a picture.
  27. Where the Money Is
    Lacks any layers beyond its own amiable inconsequentiality. It needs the spark of the distinctively American slapstick craziness that has distinguished Frye's previous work.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Filth and the Fury
    A kinetic and unstoppable ride.
  29. Joe Gould's Secret
    Carefully made, respectful and dull.
  30. Return to Me
    Almost seems like a godsend in this age of romantic-comedy schmaltz.
  31. Ready to Rumble
    Let's be real clear about this: You've got to be suffering from some major trash-culture brain damage to enjoy a movie like Ready to Rumble.
  32. Black and White
    Toback's method of presenting the evidence without judgment backfires, finally appearing just as shapeless as the movie's structure.
  33. The Skulls
    This one's a pile of crap that won't start.
  34. Beau Travail
    Claire Denis' baffling and exhilarating "Billy Budd" smolders with heat-blasted rhythms and supercharged acting.
  35. High Fidelity
    Every single actor here rises to the occasion.
  36. Romeo Must Die
    A canny, ingeniously crafted guilty pleasure.
  37. Erin Brockovich
    Surely one of the canniest and most accurate films about American working-class life ever.
  38. Mission to Mars
    Startlingly inept from start to finish -- it's atrociously written, poorly shot and edited and fatally unfocused.
  39. The Ninth Gate
    Amusing, ultra-deadpan entertainment. The director was lucky enough to have a cast who were in on the joke and tuned in to his wavelength.
  40. What Planet Are You From?
    Bening's prickliness is pure delight, but there's only so much she can do. It's a terrible fate for an actress to be upstaged by a humming p----.
  41. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai
    Every minute he's on screen, Whitaker makes Ghost Dog worth watching.
  42. Drowning Mona
    The movie is flat-footed, and the pacing gives you time to rest between laughs.
  43. The Next Best Thing
    Takes so many wrong turns it's barely an also-ran. It isn't the next best thing at all. Not even close.
  44. 3 Strikes
    A dumb and sloppy movie.
  45. Wonder Boys
    With a cast this terrific and a story this rich and wry, Wonder Boys really can't miss, even if it thumps to an underwhelming and moralistic ending that undoes a fair amount of its goodwill.
  46. Reindeer Games
    Ben Affleck provides a charismatic star turn, but John Frankenheimer's out-of-season heist thriller is dead on arrival.
  47. Judy Berlin
    An almost perfectly realized poetic vision of people who continue in their everyday existence certain that life in a larger sense has passed them by.
  48. Pitch Black
    The movie of the season for sci-fi and horror fans.
  49. The Whole Nine Yards
    Stupid, empty and -- worst of all -- fantastically boring.
  50. Boiler Room
    Made with confidence that borders on bravado, and sometimes it shows more conviction than it does grace.
  51. The Beach
    Boyle's Beach lacks imagination and energy, two things that might have distracted us, at least occasionally, from the material's tepidness.
  52. Scream 3
    I enjoyed every moment of this densely plotted final chapter, and most other fans will too.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Big Tease
    As light as a squirt of styling mousse.
  54. Isn't She Great
    A cupcake of a movie, a sweet and lightweight little thing that's all but served up in a ruffled paper cup.
  55. Fantasia 2000
    There's some sort of gross egotism involved in linking great music to visuals that are so unabashedly kitschy.
  56. Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.
    A strange piece of work, perhaps closer to an imaginative portrait or an experimental fiction that borrows elements from real life than a traditional documentary.
  57. Play It to the Bone
    Doesn't quite have the goods.
  58. Titus
    Like so many self-conscious directors, Julie Taymor wrecks Shakespeare's already disastrous play with her own horrific vision.
  59. The Talented Mr. Ripley
    It must be hard to misread the tone of a book as single-minded as Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Anthony Minghella manages somehow.
  60. Any Given Sunday
    Stone is an undeniably stylish director, and his talent for conveying intense emotion is well put to use here. But more often Stone's in-your-face technique is as exhausting as his steroid-enhanced players.
  61. Angela's Ashes
    Dramatic, massive in scale, at times very moving. And yet, somehow, it comes up short in terms of essential poetry.
  62. Man on the Moon
    Too conventional to capture Kaufman's insanity and too haphazard, too shapeless, to recapture Kaufman's energy in any meaningful way.
  63. Girl, Interrupted
    Always worth watching when Angelina Jolie steps to the fore. Somehow, she takes a thuddingly ill-conceived role and turns it into gold
  64. Stuart Little
    Highly amusing for grown-ups, too.
  65. Simpatico
    Warchus seems as at ease with the complexity of the style as he is with directing actors.
  66. Magnolia
    None of the characters in Magnolia feel as vividly imagined as the porn stars and filmmakers and hangers-on of "Boogie Nights."
  67. Cradle Will Rock
    Obviously influenced by the style of Robert Altman's multi-character extravaganzas, Robbins has seized on this incident as the centerpiece in a carnival about the conflicts among art, politics and commerce.
  68. The Green Mile
    Above all a cracking good yarn that earns its laughter, its wonder and its tears.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The End of the Affair
    I'd put The End of the Affair just beneath the top rung of Jordan movies or Greene-based films (it's no "The Fallen Idol" or "The Third Man"), with Moore the critical element that makes it necessary viewing.
  70. Holy Smoke
    Kate Winslet is a mesmerizing force in her own right, but too much of Holy Smoke turns out to be hot air.
  71. Sweet and Lowdown
    Undeniably pleasant, but British actress Samantha Morton quietly explodes it: Her performance is like nothing I've seen in recent years.
  72. Tumbleweeds
    A deeply and disappointingly conventional picture masquerading as a free-spirited one.
  73. Ride with the Devil
    Ang Lee's dark and sober fable might be the most interesting and least dogmatic view of the Civil War to wend its way into the multiplexes.
  74. End of Days
    For the most part it's a blast.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Toy Story 2
    Just as good as the original. In fact, it might even be better. Not only is it just as visually stunning and witty as the first, but it's funnier, more thoughtful and more grown-up.
  76. Flawless
    You need a pair of huge, hairy ones to make a picture this bad and call it Flawless.
  77. The World Is Not Enough
    If Bond long ago became part of your fantasy life or your pop iconography, then the anticipation of a good Bond movie would probably survive even if The World Is Not Enough were worse than it is.
  78. Sleepy Hollow
    The look of Burton's Gothic dream landscape, both lulling and energizing, is vested with so much power that it could almost substitute for narrative drive.
  79. All About My Mother
    So intrinsically rich that it doesn't need any metaphors.
  80. Dogma
    Kevin Smith's comic-religious fantasy turns out to be the sweetest hot-potato movie imaginable.
  81. Felicia's Journey
    As is typical with Egoyan, the structure is complicated and the layers of cinematic technique and texture are even more so.
  82. Anywhere But Here
    Despite its stellar leading ladies, Anywhere But Here is still a predictable generation-gap drama.
  83. The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc
    A truly vulgar movie.
  84. The Bachelor
    The only thing more disappointing than a truly awful film is a merely weak one that has some really fun moments.
  85. Portraits chinois
    Truly is an ensemble comedy.
  86. The Bone Collector
    There's only one good reason to see The Bone Collector, and her name is Angelina Jolie.
  87. The Insider
    A marvelous ensemble cast and all the visceral impact and moment-to-moment tension of a fine thriller, together with the distinctive visual style of an art film.
  88. American Movie
    Extraordinary.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    The Legend of 1900
    But it tries to be (many) things -- and fails at them all.
  90. Dreaming of Joseph Lees
    Along with Sheryl Lee, Morton is probably the best actress to have emerged in this decade.
  91. Music of the Heart
    Falls flat for its skittish reluctance to bear any resemblance to an actual Wes Craven film.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    House on Haunted Hill
    I would rather feed Jesse Helms a rancid peanut butter sandwich, and then have him slowly lick my face off, than sit through House on Haunted Hill again.
  93. Princess Mononoke
    A big movie for the ages, full to the brim with sympathy, imagination and sheer visual delight.
  94. Being John Malkovich
    It's a gleeful, nitrous-oxide high.
  95. Body Shots
    A grim, sour view of single life.
  96. Crazy in Alabama
    Disappoints with its simplistic, hollow narrative and characters.
  97. Bringing Out the Dead
    Curiously and disappointingly lethargic.
  98. Show Me Love
    Isn't a good movie. It's drab, visually ugly and a little pokey...but the two heroines are so recognizable as real girls, and the young actresses who play them are so appealing, that you keep rooting for these kids.
  99. The Story of Us
    Fragmented and contrived, like a badly mapped-out scrapbook.
    • 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.
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