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. State of Fear
    One of the most remarkable explorations of recent history ever conducted.
    • 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.
  3. A Band Called Death
    And then would come this generous, spirited documentary, to capture one of the strangest and most inspiring of all family stories of tragedy and triumph that this crazy country has produced.
  4. The Iron Giant
    Surprising as it sounds, as far as examinations of trust, loyalty and identity go, the big metal dude's story winds up far more satisfying than the plodding Kubrick opus any day of the week.
  5. All About My Mother
    So intrinsically rich that it doesn't need any metaphors.
  6. The King's Speech
    It's a warm, richly funny and highly enjoyable human story that takes an intriguing sideways glance at a crucial period in 20th-century history.
  7. Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film
    Burns has accomplished something both remarkable and reassuring. Remarkable because this is a compelling film, blending astonishing historical images with long-winded talking-head interviews, in vintage Burnsian style, and reassuring for almost the same reason.
  8. Flannel Pajamas
    So truly and exceptionally fine, a spiny and dispassionate little masterpiece of a marriage movie.
  9. The Tree of Life
    The Tree of Life is pretty much nuts overall, a manic hybrid folly with flashes of brilliance. But even if that's true it's a noble crazy, a miraculous William Butler Yeats kind of crazy, alive with passion for art and the world, for all that is lost and not lost and still to come.
  10. Gosford Park
    Isn't much more than marvelous entertainment -- but then, that's a lot right there.
  11. Superman Returns
    Superman, born in 1938, is still very much alive in 2006. The Man of Steel has so skillfully bent the bars of our imagination that he seems real to us. And in a sense, he is.
  12. We Need to Talk About Kevin
    There are so many great things happening on almost every level of this movie, from Swinton's haunting, magnetic and tremendously vulnerable performance, which is absolutely free of condescension to the suburban American wife-ness of her character, to the many unsettling individual moments.
  13. The Claim
    One of those rare literary adaptations that finds its fidelity in freedom, that stands as both a fitting version of its source material and as its own creation.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Filth and the Fury
    A kinetic and unstoppable ride.
  15. Omar
    If Alfred Hitchcock had grown up as a Palestinian, he might have made something like Hany Abu-Assad’s Oscar-nominated Omar, which is a tender love story, a haunting tragedy and an expertly crafted thriller with flawed, damaged and not entirely likable characters.
  16. The Others
    An elegantly crafted entertainment, balanced between the psychological and the supernatural, that gets extra credit for not relying on computer effects.
  17. Daybreak
    Masterfully paced and constructed, and the performances are memorable.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Piano Teacher
    When you see The Piano Teacher in a movie theater you get a chance to go back in time, back to the days when French movies were titillating, provocative and kind of smart.
  19. Food, Inc.
    An engaging and often wrenching film, Food, Inc. covers a wide range of material, including the horrific, the humorous and the exemplary.
  20. The House of Mirth
    Anderson's Lily is the kind of heroine who earns our protectiveness by never begging for it; it's an astonishing performance.
  21. The Day He Arrives
    But at his best - and his new movie, The Day He Arrives, is among his very best - Hong offers a strange mixture of magic, mystery, rueful melodrama and dry comedy that's like absolutely nothing else.
  22. The Thomas Crown Affair
    It's a deluxe vacation for adults with all frills included: glamorous settings, glamorous clothes, glamorous sex.
  23. Blackfish
    Cowperthwaite builds a portrait of an intelligent but profoundly traumatized animal who was taken from his family in the North Atlantic as an infant, and has been driven to anger, resentment and perhaps psychosis after spending his life in a series of concrete swimming pools.
  24. Read My Lips
    It's a wholly amoral movie, but it's honestly amoral. And that's a relief for the audience.
  25. Tulpan
    What makes Tulpan remarkable are the extended unbroken scenes, both dramatic and comic.
  26. Hustle & Flow
    In a world of movies that try far too hard to move, entertain and dazzle us, the artistry of Hustle & Flow lies in the way it waits for us to come to it. We can walk as slowly as we want, but sooner or later, it's going to get us.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Dead Man Walking
    Possesses that rarest of qualities: moral humility.
  28. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
    I love Jackson's "Rings" saga despite his propensity for whimsical animation whenever he tries to strike a chord of dread or menace.
  29. When We Leave
    Aladag's point, I think, is that no matter how righteous we may feel about this kind of zero-sum cultural collision, for the human beings involved it often results in unbearable tragedy.
  30. Monkeybone
    A giddy madcap classic, one of the wildest and funniest American comedies in years.
  31. Chi-Raq
    Nick Cannon’s complicated and masterful performance as Chi-Raq, a young man who embodies the contradictions of his community, who is both a perpetrator and a victim of the heartless violence that has surrounded him all his life, accomplishes that.
  32. Duma
    Intelligent, visually rich filmmaking.
  33. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    Intimate, terrifying and positively riveting documentary.
  34. Minority Report
    It's a dark and dazzling spectacle.
  35. Battleship Potemkin
    Battleship Potemkin is first and foremost an action drama, a work of straightforward emotion and pulse-quickening tension.
  36. Kaboom
    It's by far the funniest and warmest movie Araki has ever made, with much less juvenile angst and much more command of his craft.
  37. No Country for Old Men
    It's the most ambitious and impressive Coen film in at least a decade, featuring the flat, sun-blasted landscapes of west Texas -- spectacularly shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins -- and an eerily memorable performance by Javier Bardem, in a Ringo Starr haircut.
  38. Tokyo Sonata
    A work of tremendous passion, daring and delicacy.
  39. The White Diamond
    An inexpressibly beautiful and moving film, even though (or because) it seems to be about someone unimportant doing something irrelevant, perhaps something silly, in the face of insurmountable odds and a world that doesn't care.
  40. The Fallen Idol (re-release)
    This is a fine example of British commercial filmmaking at its highest level of craftsmanship.
  41. Fearless
    There's something grand and enveloping about Fearless.
  42. Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple
    I can't imagine anyone not being both horrified and fascinated by Stanley Nelson's Jonestown: The Life and Death of People's Temple.
  43. Gabrielle
    A haunting and riveting work, unlike anything else you can see at the movies and as such an explicit challenge to the unambitious, anesthetic character of most contemporary cinema. But is it easy, or delightful, or fun? It is not.
  44. She's Beautiful When She's Angry
    Dore does not gloss over the ideological excesses or internal quarrels of feminism, but more than anything else she captures the excitement of that era, the growing sense of solidarity as more and more women discovered that their dissatisfaction was not an individual matter.
  45. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    At a time when our country feels divided to the point of cracking, Dave Chappelle's Block Party feels like a salve. It's a defiant act of optimistic patriotism.
  46. Illuminata
    A masterful accomplishment...teems with its own sense of life, crackles with daring, walks the tightrope between satire and pathos with a rare assuredness.
  47. Nightcrawler
    Nightcrawler executes its ideas with tremendous craft and cool, and the courageous and counterintuitive pairing of its leads — Russo is 60, and Gyllenhaal 33 – produces two electrical, interlocking performances and undeniable erotic chemistry.
  48. Monster
    Monster is a compassionate picture without any obvious agenda. And it's effective precisely because it's not a polemic.
  49. Whores' Glory
    Both a wrenching journalistic exploration of real life and something close to great cinema.
  50. Bamboozled
    Spike Lee's explosive, near-masterpiece media satire balances between brilliance and incoherence.
  51. La faute à Fidel!
    A wrenching, funny and wise little picture, with a diva-like junior star at its center.
  52. Sing Your Song
    Most famously, Belafonte ignited immense controversy both within and without the black community by repeatedly suggesting that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were the "house slaves" of the George W. Bush administration.
  53. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
    It's a funny, strange, sad and wonderful picture, packed with delightful performances by Hollywood stars and made by a director with a startling facility for the form and an expansive cinematic imagination.
  54. Punch-Drunk Love
    Something we haven't seen before: a manic-depressive romantic comedy that aspires to the soul of a musical. It's a new-fashioned love song.
  55. What We Do in the Shadows
    For a loose-limbed spoof with no real plot, “What We Do in the Shadows” is startlingly effective at creating characters we care about, which testifies to the fact that Clement and Waititi have created a world with clear governing laws (albeit ridiculous ones) and never violate those parameters.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Das Boot
    Absolutely devastating filmmaking that makes you simultaneously feel the glory and the absolute futility of war. [Director's Cut]
  57. Bright Star
    The film works on its own as an unfussy, passionate and gently erotic love story that never tips into sentimentality.
  58. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
    So much modern animation is technically brilliant and yet comes off as cold and indifferent. But Wallace, Gromit, and the people and creatures in their world always look warm to the touch. Someone made, and moved, all those bunnies by hand. It's impossible NOT to believe in them.
  59. In the Mood for Love
    Smolders with more reserved passion than "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon."
  60. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Almost as exhilarating as it is depressing. Puiu's filmmaking technique is remarkable, and all the more so because it's almost invisible.
  61. Keep the Lights On
    Not only does this film gloriously fulfill the potential that Ira Sachs has tantalized movie-lovers with for years, it also help explains what took him so long. Out of lost love comes a terrific work of art; it's the oldest story in the world, but it always feels new when it's done right.
  62. The Green Mile
    Above all a cracking good yarn that earns its laughter, its wonder and its tears.
  63. The Beaver
    I suppose the perfect ending to the chapter would be to report that The Beaver is a masterpiece. It isn't quite, but it does offer an astonishing and resonant performance by Gibson, who spends most of the movie playing two simultaneous characters, often in the same shot.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    24 Hour Party People
    This dizzying saga of the '80s Manchester music scene is garish, reckless, endlessly self-indulgent and totally untrustworthy. What a blast!
  65. After the Wedding
    What feels at first like a quiet, straightforward picture builds into one of the richest and most satisfying of the year so far, in any genre or any language.
  66. Nebraska
    It’s a career-capping performance by Dern, who is so convincing as an addled, drunken, embittered and probably dying man that he doesn’t appear to be acting, but Forte is just as good playing a preoccupied, emotionally constricted man-child.
  67. Bad Santa
    But Bad Santa does feature one last turn from the late John Ritter as a twittery department-store manager (his name, Mr. Chipeska, is a stroke of brilliance that I still can't quite put my finger on).
  68. The Social Network
    All I can say about Timberlake's performance as the thoroughly odious, desperately seductive, textbook-case metrosexual Parker is that he brings so much reptilian fun that he unbalances the movie, almost fatally.
  69. Declaration of War
    In the case of French actress and director Valérie Donzelli's striking and imaginative film Declaration of War, the autobiographical element is so strong that the movie's virtually a docudrama – but a dazzlingly strange docudrama with musical numbers, choreographed interludes and prodigious cinematic verve.
  70. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner
    It's a difficult film to follow and at 172 minutes is maybe a half-hour too long. But simply as a sensory experience The Fast Runner is amazing.
  71. Hellboy
    One of the most poetic comic-book adaptations to come along in years, yet it never loses its sense of lightness and fun -- del Toro gives it just enough screwball nuttiness to keep it from bogging down.
  72. Analyze This
    Ramis has made a fleet, unself-conscious, eminently enjoyable picture, where one-liners carom merrily like stray bullets, and where there's casual ease, like the drape of a sharpster's trousers, in the rapport between its two stars.
  73. Broken Embraces
    This really is Cruz's movie: Almodóvar is her North Star -- following his lead, she's always found her surest and most graceful footing as an actress.
  74. Los Muertos
    It's a tremendous experience, whatever it is; the kind of thing supposed art-movie audiences used to tolerate and pretty much don't anymore.
  75. Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson
    Gibney's immensely funny and sad new motion picture Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson -- the "Dr." was a mail-order divinity degree -- is principally intended to rehabilitate Thompson and introduce his work to a new audience.
  76. Erin Brockovich
    Surely one of the canniest and most accurate films about American working-class life ever.
  77. I'm Not There.
    One of the most inventive and joyous movies of the year.
  78. Horses of God
    Horses of God is one of the most forceful entries in a growing body of cinema that interrogates the causes and effects of terrorism, nationalism and fundamentalism in the Arab world.
  79. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    The resulting film is both beautiful and fascinating, and offers a thrilling travelogue through a spectacular landscape few of us will ever see first-hand.
  80. The Overnighters
    The Overnighters is a documentary about real people in a real place. This is both amazing and frustrating.
  81. Tuya's Marriage
    A compact near-masterpiece that combines a slow-motion romantic comedy with a docudrama-style portrait of a remote, nomadic culture as it is gradually eroded by the tides of the 21st century.
  82. Restrepo
    Junger and Hetherington take our conflicted ideas about war and its let's-make-a-man-out-of-you purpose and throw them in our faces, in a way "Hurt Locker" never does.
  83. Gravity
    While the tension never lets up for a second, how you respond to the boundary-fudging and wildly improbable ending of Gravity – meaning both how it makes you feel and how you interpret it – will determine whether you think the movie is a genuine pop masterpiece or a canny artifice. Maybe there’s no difference.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 90 Reviewed by
      Max Cea
    Paterson
    Jarmusch has a tendency (which is intentional) to turn away from what is obviously beautiful and popular, and to instead beautifully render what is rarely noticed and perhaps slightly ugly. He credits the cinematographer Robby Müller with teaching him, “Don’t look for the obvious, always keep your eyes open, keep thinking on your feet.”
  85. House of Fools
    The thing is, it works. Or at least it works for me. I left the theater convinced that House of Fools is Konchalovsky's best work in almost 20 years (which it is) and that it might be something close to a masterpiece.
  86. The Secret of Kells
    A gorgeous transcription of medieval decorative art and its themes into a contemporary animated narrative, one that should enthrall children older than 8 or so, along with the adults lucky enough to watch with them.
  87. The Best of Youth
    This is a graceful and enveloping feat of filmmaking.
  88. Godzilla
    This is a movie of tremendous visual daring, magnificent special-effects work and surprising moral gravity.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Stalker
    Stalker abounds with moments of baffling beauty and philosophical heft within its vast finitude, in which the seeming mundanity of the action casts moments spiritual and philosophical rapture further into relief.
  90. Time Out of Mind
    It certainly is possible that Gere’s memorable performance as George – one that is far more physical than verbal, and that pushes the star’s legendary charm in unexpected directions – will put him in line for his first Oscar nod. George is never a cliché of homelessness, and neither the actor nor the film ever makes the expected or automatic choices.
  91. Looper
    I'm not ready to proclaim Looper a sci-fi masterpiece just yet; let's let it sit awhile. But it's a lean, mean, smart, violent picture with a bit of Stanley Kubrick edge, fueled by the terrific Gordon-Levitt.
  92. The Bourne Supremacy
    As a piece of craft, and with the exception of "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," it's miles beyond any studio film this summer.
  93. Gilles' Wife
    You can't imagine a soapier setup, but Gilles' Wife taken on its own terms is a spectacular achievement, a heartbreaking cinematic work that finely balances melodrama, family love story and devastating tragedy.
  94. Oldboy
    Anguished, beautiful and desperately alive, Oldboy is a dazzling work of pop-culture artistry.
  95. The Martian
    You can argue that the plot of The Martian doesn’t offer many surprises, but this is a movie of innumerable delightful moments and small discoveries, and even more of infectious enthusiasm.
  96. It Follows
    It Follows pretty much earns its buzz as the scariest and best-engineered American horror movie of recent years, and that’s all down to Mitchell’s sophisticated understanding of technique and the trust and freedom he accords his youthful cast.
  97. Star Trek
    An affectionate, exuberant picture that seeks to bring even those who don't know Klingon from Portuguese into the embrace of a pop-culture phenomenon.
  98. Fat Girl
    It's a lean, mean movie, and not a pretty one, but it leaves no question as to Breillat's angular originality as a filmmaker.
  99. Wuthering Heights
    This may test your patience, it's not for everyone, it's a stretch to call this "entertainment" and so on. As far as Heathcliff being black – well, deal with it. Arnold's simply right about that one, and it's Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes and all those costume-drama versions of the story that are wrong.
  100. No
    A troubling, exhilarating and ingeniously realized film that’s part stirring political drama and part devilish media satire.
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