Salon's Scores

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:
3130 movie reviews
  1. 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.
  2. The plots vary widely in their watchability -- from mildly amusing to stupefyingly godawful.
  3. For all the filmmakers' talk about reinvigorating the franchise for a new generation, and all their attention to technical details, this is a sloppily conceived remake with no passion for the genre or this story behind it, a movie that assumes its audience is brain-dead and likes it that way.
  4. The whole movie is overbright, overloud, antic, telling us the characters and animals are endearing rather than allowing them to reveal themselves as such.
  5. An eminently defensible light entertainment, peopled with characters that are easy to like and care about.
  6. The bitterness of her new comedy, Loser, comes as a shock. It's not a mean-spirited movie.
  7. The movie is so thoroughly lousy. It's loud, brash and obvious, full of car chases and explosions and gunplay.
  8. Startlingly inept from start to finish -- it's atrociously written, poorly shot and edited and fatally unfocused.
  9. Isn't particularly offensive, except in its total mediocrity.
  10. Kidman will have the last laugh; not even Ephron, with her dumb flying house of a movie, can crush her magic.
  11. A dispiriting and thoroughly ineffective romantic comedy, with some juicy morsels provided around the edges by a great supporting cast but no heat whatever in the central coupling between Lopez and Aussie TV hunk Alex O'Loughlin.
  12. The man who showed such promise less than a decade ago has been leaving a diminishing creative footprint ever since.
  13. Less a movie for intelligent moviegoers than a suggestion that we're all brainless chickens.
  14. Cohen had neither the chops nor the clout to prevent Get Hard from ending up, no doubt through the normal process of producer rewrites, focus groups, worried agents and weevil infestations, as a confused and contradictory mess. More to the point, it’s almost never funny, and full of elementary screenwriting blunders.
  15. This Friday the 13th is glossy, good-looking garbage, acted out by a cast of big-chested androids (male and female alike) and with the original series' rough edges smooved over. It's reasonably entertaining.
  16. Year One sets prehistoric comedy back at least 20 years.
  17. For the most part it's a blast.
  18. As irritating as Lake Placid sometimes is, it also has an easygoing sense of fun, along with one of the more memorable movie monsters of recent years. The mismatched ingredients blend into a blissfully, stupidly surreal summer cocktail.
  19. The finest effect in this visceral gouge of a picture is Korean pop star Rain.
  20. 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.
  21. Watching a movie should never be such torture.
  22. A cupcake of a movie, a sweet and lightweight little thing that's all but served up in a ruffled paper cup.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The special effects look model-shop cheesy, as if they'd been created using a handful of action figures and MacPaint, and the rest of the picture has the flat visual finish and phoned-in performances of a TV movie.
  23. The picture, despite the grand panoramic scale Emmerich has tried to give it, is dopey and static. Its finest moments belong to the thundering herd of woolly mammoths who storm through the picture sometime in its first half-hour.
  24. A Garry Marshall movie has to be funny in order to be anything at all, and this one is so deeply involved with its pseudo-meaningful roundelay of beautiful but inexplicably lovelorn people as to be teeth-grindingly, mind-warpingly boring.
  25. The comedy is tepid, the action is dopey and even the violence is boring and occasionally cruel.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    There are several non sequitur subplots woven together -- and that, along with a dearth of acting talent, is Spice World's biggest flaw.
  26. It may be a haphazard mess, but it's actually pretty funny.
  27. What's missing -- apart, of course, from a plot -- is any character development.
  28. It's a challenge to take a comic-book adaptation that stars Josh Brolin, John Malkovich and Megan Fox and drain nearly all the fun out of it. Jonah Hex is one of those movies that combines a certain amount of being ridiculous on purpose with a great deal of pseudo-profound silliness.
  29. Quickly plunges into boggy terrain from which it can never extricate itself.
  30. It's a sloppy, fun, late-'80s style Hong Kong action flick full of pogo-dancing zombies and voracious vampires who look vaguely like Siamese cats with spoiled cottage cheese cooked onto their faces.
  31. Such an inept bundle of work -- crying out for the filmmaking equivalent of Ritalin, but still sluggish as syrup -- that it doesn't even provide an opportunity to ogle properly.
  32. Never having read the book, I found Blood and Chocolate to be a lovely surprise, an imaginative and visually lush picture firmly rooted in the tradition of gothic romance and elegiac horror films about misunderstood monsters.
  33. It's not a full-on go-for-broke love letter to rock 'n' roll or a broad, joyous spoof, but something stuck awkwardly in between.
  34. The good news is that Duchovny has an undeniable feel for this medium, and a fine rapport with actors.
  35. If it were terrible, you could at least sink your teeth into it; but Welcome to Mooseport is like a biscuit soaked in water, ready to be gummed instead of chewed.
  36. A movie that wants to be "Speed" so badly that it runs roughshod over the essentials, including a decent script.
  37. Sucker Punch doesn't all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.
  38. I'm not sure whether to recommend The Baytown Outlaws as a guns 'n' glory time-waster or warn you off it as a piece of mendacious trash. So I'll do both.
  39. It's a limp romantic drama that occasionally lifts its drowsy head to attempt a wan smile, a picture that starts out being harmlessly dull and ends, somehow, in a place that feels insultingly manipulative.
  40. Maybe I'm expecting too much of Cyrus. But The Last Song rests heavily on her alleged appeal, and I can't remember the last time I came across such a singularly charmless teenage performer. I hesitate to even use the word "actress."
  41. As a symbol of what some filmmakers and some studios think the public will buy, it's a horrific piece of work. How dare anyone put this piece of c--- in front of me. How dare anyone put it in front of YOU.
  42. Familiar and profoundly unoriginal.
  43. The nice thing about seeing so much time, money and effort go into a bland film is that it makes you appreciate truly inspired filmmaking even more.
  44. An Adam Sandler comedy, which means it bears only a superficial relationship to the customary conventions of moviemaking, and also that there's no use getting all worked up about that.
  45. It's not merely that Dear Wendy was shot on Danish and German locations that don't look quite right; it's that almost every decision made by the production designers is wrong, or at least discordant.
  46. A dismally unfunny comedy, but that's not what's depressing about it. Worse by far is the palpable desperation in Goldie Hawn's performance.
  47. A chaste, lively and mildly goofy romance to dispel the winter blahs.
  48. Martin Lawrence, no Eddie Murphy, takes a reheated cross-dressing shtick and turns it into something to elate your inner fourth-grader.
  49. This initial “Mortal Instruments” picture has the vibe of a straight-to-video release from the mid-‘90s, except with a $60 million budget and considerable special-effects expertise.
  50. The whole thing seems so perfectly good-natured that you settle in for some harmless, silly fun. But Dukes runs out of gas early on.
  51. 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.
  52. If only Leap Year were an anomaly, the kind of picture that comes along only once every four years. Instead, it's yet more evidence that romantic comedies are only getting worse.
  53. If you can get past the goofy writing, there's lots of noisy action in The Punisher, but little of it is particularly exhilarating. In fact, it's more of an endurance test. If you can sit through it, you should consider yourself duly punished.
  54. Dermot Mulroney is the movie's only genuinely romantic lead. And he's so good that he nearly carries The Wedding Date single-handedly.
  55. That whole aspect of October Baby creeped me out a lot more than the blood-curdling failed-abortion story did, honestly. I've seen a lot of movies where crazy and impossible things happen, and you just have to roll with them. Real life is much more frightening.
  56. 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.
  57. Doesn't quite have the goods.
  58. The Weitzes haven't come up with a masterpiece in Down to Earth, but they have put their stamp on a perfectly pleasant 90-minute diversion
  59. Moves along, taking two steps backward into crassness for every clever or just plain sweet moment it offers. Although many of the movie's problems seem to be rooted in the script, Columbus has such a heavy touch that he sabotages nearly every scene.
  60. See it in one glorious shot, grab as much from it as you can and run like hell. I say that not because I hated Masked & Anonymous, but because I loved it.
  61. 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.
  62. Land of the Lost isn't a terrible movie. It's merely a perplexing one: Who is this thing for?
  63. Feels like every other action thriller we've seen in the past three years, only it's more annoying -- and, in some cases, more appalling -- because it's trying so hard to distinguish itself.
  64. Deliciously dumb, reasonably well-made.
    • 32 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    The plot is about as ridiculous as you'd expect, but for the most part its absurdities are tolerable.
  65. Dull and listless from the start, partly because the leads fail to connect and partly because both the script and the direction let them down.
  66. There's almost no such thing as an entertaining holiday trifle anymore -- the kind of casual, cheerful little picture that you might see on a whim and end up enjoying, even beyond the breadth of your modest expectations. The Perfect Holiday is an attempt, at least, to resurrect the idea of the trifle
  67. Even dressed up in tabloid lighting and cut with jagged edits, this pulp nihilism never goes beyond daytime TV banality.
  68. Another insulting women's comedy.
  69. Over and over again, Hoblit misses opportunities to make an engaging picture, instead giving us a merely pedestrian one.
  70. Too bad it's not so funny. Almost every gag in Black Knight feels forced and contrived, as if the movie is desperate to squeeze laughs out of us.
  71. Isn't particularly assaultive, but it can still make you feel that you never want to see another car chase, explosion or gunfight again.
  72. It's sad when a bit of grim futuristic silliness like Repo Men falls short on all counts, down to the most basic level of entertainment value.
  73. There's something refreshing about the way it invites us to splash around in its little wading pool of amorality.
  74. This extremely stupid movie, with its recycled Batman/Spider-Man-style plot involving a dead father, an evil scientist-tycoon (played by the reliably terrific William Fichtner) and a massive criminal underworld of masked thugs, also features the best action sequence of the summer, bar none. I’m not kidding!
  75. Perfect Stranger is one of those movies that two years, or two months, from now, you won't recall having seen. Ostensibly a movie about big secrets, it comes up with few that are worth keeping, or telling.
  76. Gingival surgery would be more fun than watching this brain-draining, spirit-sucking attempt at a stoner spoof, which combines the cutting edge of frat-boy wit, the excitement of a mid-'80s made-for-TV action flick and the authenticity of a Renaissance Faire held in an abandoned field behind a Courtyard by Marriott.
  77. Ludicrous trash, but it has style.
  78. Poops out before it ever really gets going.
  79. Fonda and Sykes are made for each other, and their incessant bickering and arguing are about the only things that give Monster-in-Law any life.
  80. 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.
  81. To his credit, Langenegger keeps things relatively simple instead of resorting to lots of fast cutting and fancy camera angles. To his detriment, the picture he has made barely moves at all. This no-style style isn't restraint; it's a kind of indifference to filmmaking.
  82. The only thing more disappointing than a truly awful film is a merely weak one that has some really fun moments.
  83. Morgan transcends the wayward silliness of Cop Out just by going for the gusto. He grabs it, and he hangs on.
  84. It's impossible to tell what's going on at any given moment in Tomb of the Dragon Emperor; it's even harder to care about being able to tell.
  85. As stupefyng as Idle Hands is while the title appendage is still attached to Anton, it goes into a whole other realm of godawfulness when the demon digits take off on their own.
  86. Becomes more and more preposterous with each scene -- it's almost like performance art.
  87. It’s a thoroughly incoherent, generally inane and surprisingly entertaining tale of witches and monsters and what legendary film critic Joe Bob Briggs calls “beast fu,” all set in a sub-Tolkien, sub-“Game of Thrones” pseudo-medieval universe.
  88. CBGB has more of the original prankish punk spirit than it even recognizes.
  89. 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.
  90. May be the worst romantic comedy I've ever seen, although I hesitate to make such a resolute pronouncement about a movie that's so barely even THERE.
  91. The irony of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is that it has the most literate pedigree of any action movie you're likely to see this year or next -- and it's been made by people who seem to have no sense of how to tell a story.
  92. Grade-B blockbuster.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Just as the author's characters suffer through their immortality, as they crave closure and a death to their blood-sucking madness, so Queen of the Damned demands an end to its own misery.
  93. Does feature one or two jump-out-of-your-skin moments.
  94. Leaves you feeling as if you've been alternately milked and bitch-slapped. Its manipulation is so clumsy and obvious -- and, ultimately, it goes so far astray from its original guiding principles -- that it leaves you feeling dangled and dazed.
  95. The guys abuse each other in what's meant to be fraternal affection but feels more like the discomfort of being stuck together in a terrible movie.
  96. A well-intentioned, profoundly silly and borderline insulting movie.

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