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 General
    The General may be the most intimate and matter-of-fact of Boorman’s films. Movies like Deliverance and Excalibur revealed Boorman as a master of scope. The General, which is one of his masterpieces, proves the depth at which he’s working.
  2. A Simple Plan
    Holds us in a state of horrified empathy.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Shakespeare in Love
    A corny, old-fashioned backstage farce.
  4. Rushmore
    A work of loopy, original comic genius.
  5. Star Trek: Insurrection
    Outsiders will find this schtick-laden, mildly exciting adventure yarn an inoffensive triviality, while fans will savor one more encounter with Picard, Riker, Data, Worf and the gang, replete with all the well-worn character tics and platitudinous parables about the contemporary world they expect.
  6. Little Voice
    Jane Horrocks saves the annoyingly noisy Little Voice.
  7. Psycho
    May not be anything new, but it's still just as shocking.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Bug's Life
    It's impossible not to be utterly blown away by Pixar's animation.
  9. 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.
  10. Celebrity
    When has Woody Allen ever been interested in anything besides Woody Allen? He has no interest in bringing out new sides of his actors. Jim Henson's casts had more spontaneity.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Meet Joe Black
    The high-concept premise of Death taking a long weekend off to mingle with us mortals brings out the worst in filmmakers.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Elizabeth
    A handsome, diverting coming-of-intrigue story studded with meaty performances.
  13. The Siege
    If The Siege frustrates anyone, it should be the moviegoers who turn up expecting the kind of clean resolution that action movies thrive on.
  14. Velvet Goldmine
    Weighed down with self-important messages, but it's also splashily opulent.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gods and Monsters
    A showcase for a uniquely sympathetic virtuoso performance by legendary stage actor Ian McKellen in an otherwise minor film.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Vampires
    The sort of thing you can't believe anyone would want their name attached to.
  17. Life Is Beautiful
    The point, I think, is the sheer callous inappropriateness of comedy existing within the physical reality of the camps -- even the imagined reality of a movie.
  18. Pleasantville
    It's tough not to respond to the visual cleverness of Pleasantville.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Happiness
    A masterpiece.
  20. Beloved
    When the movie isn't hitting us over the head, it's spooning out the material to us like broth to an invalid, drop by flavorless drop. The excruciating pace mirrors the sluggishness of Morrison's sonorous prose.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Practical Magic
    Like the rest of this new breed of witch story, it's about sisterhood instead of the supreme allure of housewifery, but like all too many witch movies (old and new), it's really just a self-congratulatory paean to banality and shrunken horizons.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Antz
    Katzenberg may or may not have stolen his idea from Pixar, but it's obvious in the film that he spent significant time at Disney. The plot of Antz is pure Disney pastiche:
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    What Dreams May Come
    By the movie's numbingly predictable end, the notion of a visually unleashed cinema seems like a monstrous mistake -- we've handed over the atom bomb to the Teletubbies!
  24. 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.
  25. Rush Hour
    The movie seems to proceed from somebody's notion that it would be hilarious to see a black guy and a Chinese guy working together.
  26. 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.
    • 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.
  28. 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.
  29. 54
    It's a flat, clumsy piece of filmmaking. When Phillippe and Ward are in bed, the shots are so badly matched that I believed they were having sex, just not with each other.
  30. Blade
    Blade in no way resembles a good movie, but its combination of music-video bombast, goth-rock sensibility, high-tech industrial production design, cold-blooded glossy magazine visuals, high-fashion club culture, horror movies, blaxploitation movies, Hong Kong movies and comic-book nihilism make it diverting trash.
  31. Next Stop Wonderland
    Like too many young filmmakers, Anderson seems to equate honesty with choppy editing, bad lighting (so harsh in a couple of shots you can see the pancake on Davis' face) and herky-jerky camera movements.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Your Friends & Neighbors
    LaBute has made a comedy this time around, but it's not so much black as simply bleak.
  33. The Avengers
    The film flails incoherently from set to set, trying to be kicky and madcap and pop, but with no sense of the show's casual acceptance of the absurd.
  34. Slums of Beverly Hills
    They've created far and away the most complex, appealing female character in a summer of soldiers, sword fighters and asteroid blasters.
  35. Ever After
    Casting Barrymore as Cinderella is an inspired idea, and a tribute to director Andy Tennant's ability to see through the public's perception of Barrymore to her essence as a performer.
  36. The Negotiator
    The Negotiator slogs on for two hours and 20 minutes, and there's hardly a real laugh or a genuine thrill in it.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Saving Private Ryan
    Using the overpowering techniques of modern film, Steven Spielberg has cut through the glory-tinged gauze that shrouds World War II to reveal its brutal reality, creating a phenomenology of violence unsurpassed in the history of cinema.
  38. 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.
  39. There's Something About Mary
    The type of comedy the Farrellys love requires dizzy, pell-mell pacing. If There's Something About Mary were tightened up by about 20 minutes, it would be much funnier.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pi
    It's precisely when Pi is the most arty and least "commercial," when it's serving up head scratchers instead of intrigue, that it's most entertaining.
  41. Dr. Dolittle
    A weird delight.
  42. Out of Sight
    What makes "Out of Sight" a grown-up treat is that the mixture of lust and longing is as flawlessly proportioned as the ingredients in a perfect cocktail.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Mulan
    The incredible special effects, which make lush cherry blossoms as vivid as the intense battle scenes, are balanced by Disney's tradition of care and painstaking detail in developing and animating its characters.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The X Files
    It's a two-hour episode of the show, except with better production values and a nicer wardrobe for Scully.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Edge of Seventeen
    From time immemorial, for youths of all orientations, the first few stabs at sex often turn out to be troubling predicaments rather than the romantic events they've imagined, something Edge conveys quite well.
  46. Six Days Seven Nights
    Part of what's so entertaining about Six Days, Seven Nights is the way Reitman happily mixes all the conventions of the stranded-on-an-island motif -- unpleasant encounters with creepy-crawly nature, the building of stuff out of bamboo and found objects, the first kiss in paradise.
  47. A Perfect Murder
    A Perfect Murder is more like a handful of anemic ice cubes floating in a lukewarm puddle.
  48. Mr. Jealousy
    As events in Mr. Jealousy grow more entangled, there is no corresponding escalation in the pace of the movie, and Baumbach misses out on some laughs...But Mr. Jealousy is one of those movies where the less assured passages are a good sign, the mark of a director trying something new.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Last Days of Disco
    There's something kind of sweet about Stillman's enthusiasm for the long-despised era's thumping backbeat, even if the rhythm of his own work is a lot closer to chamber music.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
    It is as deeply satisfying as only the yowling, primal trashing of several rental cars and hotel rooms while in the grips of a hopelessly depraved ether jag and several sheets of blotter acid can be... A cinematic masterpiece.
  51. Bulworth
    As a movie, it's a disaster. As political speech, it's imprecise, shrill and sometimes clichéd, but it's also alive.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Godzilla
    The plot is about as ridiculous as you'd expect, but for the most part its absurdities are tolerable.
  53. 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.
  54. Deep Impact
    Deep Impact is the work of someone crass enough, and in some essential way mad enough, to try to turn the apocalypse into a tear-jerker.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    He Got Game
    Awkward and often downright silly, He Got Game is nonetheless heartfelt, a moving portrayal of a man who finds his long-lost son through faith, hope and basketball.
  56. Les Misérables
    At 2 hours and 20 minutes Les Miserables is an unholy slog. It's the sort of movie where, when a title pops up saying, "Ten Years Later," you sink down in your seat certain it's going to be 20 before you get the hell out of there.
  57. Sliding Doors
    At least entertaining enough to keep you amused for an hour or two.
  58. Two Girls and a Guy
    You slip into the movie so easily that by the time it reaches its emotional climax, you're unprepared.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    City of Angels
    Neither Ryan nor Cage indulges in their usual excesses -- hers a perky, chipmunk vivacity and his a rampant goofiness that's always struck me as disingenuous…doesn't try too hard, doesn't lean on or overexplain its spiritual underpinnings and doesn't push for tears. As a result, it turns out to be pretty effective in drawing them.
  60. The Spanish Prisoner
    The picture is moderately diverting. But it's never much fun.
  61. Mercury Rising
    Unpleasant would be the word for Mercury Rising if "tired" weren't a more appropriate one.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Newton Boys
    You have seen this movie before, every morsel of it.
  63. Primary Colors
    A slack, tepid picture stuck in a no man's land between satire and drama.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wild Things
    One reason Wild Things works so well is that director John McNaughton sustains a darkly comic tone throughout the film without letting it degenerate into farce.
  65. The Man in the Iron Mask
    Not 10 minutes into the smeary mess that is The Man in the Iron Mask, the only sensible question to ask yourself is, "What am I doing here?"
  66. Love and Death on Long Island
    With Love and Death on Long Island, writer-director Richard Kwietniowski makes a very pleasing feature debut.
  67. The Wedding Singer
    Frank Coraci's '80s-nostalgia comedy is predictable and unevenly paced, and it lunges too often for the easy joke.
  68. The Replacement Killers
    The Replacement Killers has a plot -- barely -- but no story.
  69. Nil by Mouth
    This film is a portrait, and it's a mesmerizing, unforgettable one. The story of how a boy like Gary Oldman comes out of this world and becomes something different -- that's a drama, but perhaps its end has yet to be written.
  70. Great Expectations
    Great Expectations is a triumph because Cuarón's vision prevailed. He seems to be one of those artists capable of reminding us how we first experienced movies, as an overpowering enchantment.
  71. The Gingerbread Man
    Branagh is appealing here in the way we remember from movie heroes of the '30s: cynical, wisecracking and wised-up.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Spice World
    There are several non sequitur subplots woven together -- and that, along with a dearth of acting talent, is Spice World's biggest flaw.
  73. Live Flesh
    Live Flesh isn't terrible. It's accomplished and watchable.
  74. The Boxer
    In some ways, this is the most conventional of Sheridan's movies. But it never feels sentimental because of the grittiness of his approach.
  75. Oscar and Lucinda
    Whatever the reason, Oscar and Lucinda winds up feeling like a collection of bits in search of vision and an emotional surge.
  76. Jackie Brown
    If Jackie Brown lost 45 minutes, it might have been a snazzy entertainment. As it is, it wears out its welcome well before the end.
  77. Wag the Dog
    Wag the Dog is such a crisply delivered political satire, so packed full of wickedly amusing details and expertly modulated performances and with its heart so obviously in the right place that I really, truly wish I could tell you it was also a good movie.
  78. Kundun
    Kundun, which was written by Melissa Mathison ("E.T.") from interviews conducted with the Dalai Lama, doesn't make you greedy for its images the way some gorgeous films do. It allows you to drink each one in tranquilly.
  79. As Good as It Gets
    Appreciate it instead as an exceedingly well-crafted fairy tale, alive with eccentric, overdrawn Dickensian characters and irresistibly wholehearted sentiment, and you'll enjoy perhaps the most accomplished and satisfying work of Brooks' career as a middlebrow entertainer.
  80. Titanic
    Cameron manhandles the real story, scavenging it for his own puny narrative purposes. It's a film made with boorish confidence and zero sensitivity, big and dumb and hulking.
  81. Tomorrow Never Dies
    The movie is efficient but scores zero in suspense, wit or class.
  82. The Apostle
    This little knockout of a movie, written and directed by Robert Duvall -- who also plays the title character, a roving Texas evangelist -- can strike you in the same way that Bible stories did when you first encountered them as a child.
  83. Scream 2
    Inevitably a little patchier and less startlingly original than its predecessor -- S2 is an ingenious, often hilarious, movie that does nothing to diminish the well-deserved cult reputation of its director.
  84. Deconstructing Harry
    A fever dream about an aging, grasping, neurotic artist who brings his disastrous personal life, thinly veiled, into his work and ends up as a grotesque caricature of himself, alienating everyone who ever loved him.
  85. Amistad
    A little like looking at pictures without a text to unify them… Prestige filmmaking bereft of inspiration -- sometimes even of the nuts and bolts of craft.
  86. Good Will Hunting
    It isn't surprising that the film was originally based on actors' improvisations, since it creates a universe of tremendously enjoyable characters and allows them plenty of room to roam, but has only the most predictable notion of plot and nothing whatever to say beyond be-yourself pieties.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Alien: Resurrection
    Weaver obviously relishes playing this feral, sarcastic new Ripley, and her pleasure is infectious.
  88. Welcome to Sarajevo
    Winterbottom's film is openly a polemic. Messy and visceral, with an articulate, pointed anger that's recognizably British, Welcome to Sarajevo hits with an impact that's not diminished by the fact that Sarajevo's uneasy peace has held.
  89. The Sweet Hereafter
    The movie has a crispness about it, an unwillingness to succumb to sentimentality.
  90. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
    A dragging, rhythmless piece of work.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The Rainmaker
    What filmgoers get is a satisfactory mainstream entertainment, with a handful of major actors in juicy minor roles tossed in for good measure.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Starship Troopers
    In this bizarrely discordant mixture of ultraviolent action footage, bad acting, crisp special effects and futuristic camp, the remnants of Heinlein's rhetoric of military pride stick out like a grimy Marine uniform at a high-toned Hollywood party.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Wings of the Dove
    The rigid distinction usually made between a terrific outfit movie and cinematic art is just another barrier washed away in the overflowing riches of The Wings of the Dove.
  94. Bean
    Whatever the reason, Bean saddles Atkinson with a story that hangs on him like a dead weight and a filmmaking style that surrounds him like dead air.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Eve's Bayou
    Eve's Bayou treads across a fragile and complex emotional landscape, and Lemmons is exceptionally adept at creating characters who are simultaneously despicable and lovable.
  96. 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.
  97. Happy Together
    Happy Together feels joylessly fussed over.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gattaca
    Implausible in countless ways and wooden for long stretches, Gattaca at least never collapses into a special-effects barrage or erupts in long, choreographed explosions; it sticks carefully to its pristine vision.
  99. A Life Less Ordinary
    Gloriously excessive, passionate and messy, A Life Less Ordinary is the kind of picture that's becoming more and more of a rarity in the landscape of American movies: a love story with a hard-on.
  100. The Devil's Advocate
    The picture starts off slick and amusing, gets convoluted, draggy and strange round about the midway point, and ends up just plain ludicrous.
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