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. Rampart
    This movie's too small and too dark to have gotten Harrelson into the overcrowded best-actor race, but it's without question one of the year's great performances.
  2. X-Men
    A distinctively absorbing entertainment, offering just enough popcorn thrills for mass audiences and just enough chewiness for hardcore sci-fi fans.
  3. Spellbound
    Blitz captures the intensity of the bee itself, showing how it frazzles the nerves of even the most well-prepared spellers as, one by one, their colleagues and competitors drop away.
  4. The Spectacular Now
    A memorable, imperfect, heartbreaking summer love story, a bit soapy in spots but loaded with power and feeling.
  5. Identity
    So ingeniously constructed that these meta-noir ingredients feel dizzyingly enjoyable, never hackneyed. In fact, the overheated melodrama of Identity is crucial to its method -- and the key, in some ways, to its narrative secrets.
  6. The Waiting Room
    The Waiting Room is a source of both inspiration and hope. The system may be broken, but the people are not.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Butterfly Kiss
    As Eunice, Plummer gets a rare chance to stretch, and she doesn't disappoint. Her performance is a cocktail of despair, charm, self-hatred, bitterness, religious ecstasy, coquetry and homicidal rage. She's genuinely frightening after the fashion of early Robert De Niro, with all the hair-trigger potential violence of the truly mad.
  8. Jar City
    Comic, disturbing and affecting by turns, and often all at the same time. Its funniest scenes are also its most unsettling.
  9. Bridesmaids
    It's a movie that succeeds, often beautifully, not by forcing its characters to be as naughty and gross and pathetic as men are. It soars by letting them be as naughty and gross and pathetic as women are. Three cheers for equality.
  10. Donnie Darko
    A stunning technical accomplishment that virtually bursts with noise, ideas and references, but it's fundamentally a gracefully crafted movie that's about human beings and not images.
  11. The Memory of a Killer
    Wonderfully acted and energetically filmed, and in fact it partly echoes a real-life pedophilia scandal that rocked Belgian society to its foundations in the '90s.
  12. Reality
    While Reality is a mixed bag of satire, allegory and melodrama, it’s a rich mixture that an American remake would likely never pull off. This is a movie that will reward multiple viewings, from a filmmaker of tremendous technical ability, humor and heart.
  13. The Last Winter
    Gruesome and terrifying things happen in The Last Winter, but there's no gratuitous gore or torture, and the film's real power comes from its building sense that something really, really bad is ABOUT to happen.
  14. The Holy Girl
    It's a marvelously acted film, driven by a sweaty-palmed, exponentially mounting tension.
  15. RA. One
    If you're bored by the action scenes or the love story or the dopey domestic comedy, just wait three minutes for something else to come along - and whoever you are, you won't be bored by the musical numbers!
  16. Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul
    Whatever you think you know about Turkey, Crossing the Bridge will change your mind. With a dynamite album of music from the film in simultaneous release, I smell a "Buena Vista"-style crossover hit.
  17. Meet the Parents
    De Niro's performance works because it isn't exactly likable -- he's totally at ease with his own jokes, but he's not out to make us feel relaxed.
  18. The Bourne Identity
    Entertaining, handsome and gripping, The Bourne Identity is something of an anomaly among big-budget summer blockbusters: a thriller with some brains and feeling behind it, more attuned to story and character than to spectacle.
  19. Palo Alto
    A delicate tapestry of suburban gothic, romance and realism, with a surprising sweetness at its core and a wonderful star performance from Emma Roberts.
  20. Commune
    Amid the dozens of documentaries made about various aspects of '60s society and culture, Commune stands out for its ambiguity, honesty and sheer human clarity.
  21. 8 Mile
    Can Eminem act? Who knows? But his star turn in 8 Mile -- is memorable -- even if we've seen it all before.
  22. Constantine
    Pretty much rocks.
  23. Election
    Wickedly funny, an ode to youthful overachievers that's as blackhearted as "Rushmore" was gently sentimental.
  24. Sleep Tight
    Sleep Tight, first of all, is a nifty new Euro-horror film, with several wicked-cold Hitchcockian twists, that shows off the range and craft of terrific Spanish director Jaume Balagueró, co-founder of the "[Rec]" franchise (still the gold standard in found-footage horror).
  25. Anna Karenina
    Does this crazy idea work? Maybe 70 percent of the time, but when it does it's both daring and brilliant.
  26. Public Enemies
    The picture throws off an aura of wistfulness, which may be Mann's acknowledgment that of course he can't re-create the past. The best he can do is to honor the idea of it, storybook-style, and to remind us that before there was gangsta, there were gangsters.
  27. Results
    After its own unexpected and light-hearted fashion, Results is as subversive as Bujalski’s other films. Yes, I called it a rom-com, and that’s accurate enough, but it’s a love story full of twists and turns, one that tempts us toward incorrect conclusions and deliberately avoids revealing its true heart.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    River's Edge
    No other film captures more accurately what it’s like to be dead inside during the end of the Cold War, the height of MTV and the invasion of concerned but impotent parents.
  29. The Eclipse
    This is another mini-triumph from the resurgent Irish film industry, but much more than that it's a resonant yarn of love, loss, loneliness -- and things that go bump in the night.
  30. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    It leaves you with provocative questions and memorable images rather than neatly wrapped answers, and with that feeling of imprecise mystery I remember so well from my own youthful experiences: Something beautiful and evanescent just happened, or almost happened. But you can’t describe it, and if you try to seize it, it vanishes into sand and salt and sun.
  31. The Help
    The Help definitely worked on me as a consummate tear-jerker with a terrific cast, and it's pretty much the summer's only decent Hollywood drama.
  32. Expedition to the End of the World
    An experience that wrenches you free of the everyday world and urges you to contemplate all sorts of big-picture questions.
  33. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    If at first I tried to resist these hapless Pennsylvania teens who'd never even heard of David Bowie, for Christ's sake, I was won over completely by the time Patrick and Sam are ready to graduate and Charlie has faced down his demons one more time.
  34. Secretary
    It's a liberating, kindhearted picture, one whose ending brings with it the feeling that something has finally been shaken free. How comfortable you feel with that is completely up to you.
  35. The Bay
    Is it, on some level, '70s-style horror schlock dressed up with contemporary gimmicks? Sure, but don't act like that's a bad thing! It's schlock with honor, schlock with a conscience, schlock that speaks to the way we live now.
  36. White Material
    It's a disorientingly beautiful movie at times, which promises -- as Denis always does, I think -- that human madness and human love will balance each other out, in the fullness of time.
  37. Undercover Brother
    A joyful mix of high and low humor, pulled off with style and an eye for glamour (Danielle Hollowell deserves special praise for her costumes; she's the high priestess of fitted snakeskin).
  38. The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
    No one could have held The Fog of War wanting if Morris had concluded that it's impossible to get all the way to the bottom of Robert McNamara. But explicating an enigma is not the same thing as blurring it with artistic ambitions. The thickest fog in this documentary has been conjured not by McNamara, but by Errol Morris.
  39. The Kid Stays in the Picture
    Is legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans feeding us a load of crap in this documentary? When it's this much fun, who really cares?
  40. Welcome to New York
    Lurid but compelling.
  41. Upstream Color
    So Upstream Color is defiantly pitched in its own idiosyncratic key, but it bears the unmistakable influence of Carruth’s fellow Texan Terrence Malick and also of Steven Soderbergh’s early films.
  42. Snow White and the Huntsman
    I resisted this derivative mishmash of classic fairytale and modern epic fantasy for as long as I could, but ultimately it swept me up into its geeky but manly embrace and carried me away on a white charger.
  43. K-19: The Widowmaker
    May be a bit too grim and claustrophobic to become a certifiable summer blockbuster, but it's a pulse-pounding thriller that brings one of the Cold War's darkest and deadliest episodes to the big screen.
  44. Killer of Sheep
    In all honesty, Burnett's writing can be stiff and the acting in Killer of Sheep is indifferent. But the reason to see this film does not lie in the dialogue.
    • 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. Fright Night
    Farrell looks like he's having the time of his 400-year-old life.
  47. The Syrian Bride
    An extraordinary social comedy.
  48. Time
    I'm not sure yet if Time is a masterwork, a deranged folly or just a showman's highly persuasive trick. Whatever else it is, it's a clean, economical and handsome film, terrifically acted, with a heart full of treachery and mystery.
  49. Bad News Bears
    At least Linklater isn't just picking the bones of his forebears; he honors them as they deserve.
  50. Innocence
    This is the weirdest film I've seen all year, or at least the weirdest good film. It's also among the most powerful.
  51. Weiner
    Mesmerizing documentary.
  52. Tell Them Who You Are
    A strange, strident and finally fulfilling father-son saga.
  53. 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.
  54. You Don't Like the Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantanamo
    What comes through repeatedly is that questions of law and reason, or guilt and innocence, played no role in the case of Omar Khadr.
  55. My Winnipeg
    Like all poetic inward journeys, My Winnipeg is likely to resonate with sympathetic viewers in unexpected ways. In viewing his apparently placid prairie city, and his apparently placid prairie childhood, as an intensely symbolic landscape of mystery and terror, Maddin invites all of us to view our own equally ordinary lives in the same light.
  56. Jersey Boys
    When it comes to any larger questions about what was lost or gained, and whether Frankie Valli’s odyssey was worth it, Eastwood throws up his hands. Who knows? He’s made a thoroughly tolerable and non-insulting summer movie for grown-ups; isn’t that enough?
  57. The Rookie
    Quaid doesn't make the best of the movie's baloney; he presents it to us as a believable truth.
  58. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    If The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada has some languid patches, it's also a work of uncommon maturity and remarkable poetry.
  59. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    A comedy embedded with secret tips for better, more enjoyable living.
  60. Kill Your Darlings
    Brash, bristling, highly watchable film.
  61. How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
    A loving tribute to one of the strangest and most enjoyable figures to emerge from American pop culture in its entire history.
  62. Appropriate Behavior
    Akhavan turns out to be a distinctive and oddly charismatic performer with exquisite comic timing.
  63. 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.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Kid with a Bike
    An edge-of-your-seat emotional roller-coaster ride about ordinary people in a nondescript neighborhood, it's sometimes terrifying, often heart-rending and completely worth it.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 80 Reviewed by
      Max Cea
    Beatriz at Dinner
    The discomfort that Arteta elicits serves a purpose and is buoyed by a few very funny moments.
  66. El Crimen Perfecto (The Perfect Crime)
    El Crimen Perfecto is a joyride that leaves you feeling drunk and dizzy and swearing that you haven't touched a drop.
  67. The Skin I Live In
    It's as stylish and kinky as you could want, but compared to his recent female-centric melodramas ("Broken Embraces," "Volver," "All About My Mother"), this is a chilly genre exercise that casts his obsession with gender and sexuality in a harsh new light.
  68. Love Songs
    You could describe Love Songs, as a blend of François Truffaut's wistful Parisian sentimentalism and Pedro Almodóvar's acrid polysexual comedy, which were never far apart to begin with (given the difference in climate and native temperament between France and Spain).
  69. Killer Joe
    Friedkin's still got it - the "it" being his ability to infuse every frame of the film with powerful ambiguity and doubt, and also his ability to attract terrific actors and propel them in unexpected directions.
  70. Moneyball
    A richly detailed and enjoyable American yarn.
  71. Protagonist
    A highly original and at times thrilling use of the documentary medium, and one of the most revealing films about the troubled nature of contemporary manhood I've ever seen.
  72. 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.
  73. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    It’s a middle chapter, for sure, but a vigorous and fast-paced one that leaves you hungry for more.
  74. Horton Hears a Who!
    It's a feature-length reparation for the appalling live-action versions of Seuss' books we've endured over the last few years.
  75. Roman de gare
    A glossy, enjoyable thriller that isn't quite as tricky or Hitchcockian as it wants to be, Roman de Gare gets by on high style and nice central performances by rubber-faced Dominique Pinon.
  76. The ABCs of Death
    The ABCs of Death is one-stop shopping for deviant cinema, a Pu Pu platter of perversity. It made me laugh hysterically, shout with outrage, wince with discomfort and yearn to hide under the sofa, all by the halfway mark.
  77. The Lincoln Lawyer
    It's rare enough to see a Hollywood movie made with this much attention and personality, let alone one that balances comedy and darkness as well as this one does.
  78. The Aura
    This is a tremendously atmospheric movie full of moody mystery, and it'll keep you on the edge of your seat from beginning to end.
  79. No End in Sight
    From the first frames of Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight, replaying some of the oddest and twitchiest podium performances of Donald Rumsfeld during those heady days of spring 2003, you may feel the crushing weight of an almost Sophoclean impending doom.
  80. Nowhere Boy
    Scott Thomas' delicate, ferocious performance captures a woman quietly at war with herself, who begins to realize that her vision of respectability may not fit the remarkable young man in her care.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony
    The soul of the film, in some ways, is singer Vuyisile Mini, a songwriter and anti-apartheid leader who was hanged in 1964. Amandla! (it's the Xhosa word for "power").
  82. Drawing Restraint 9
    Conveys an intense sculptural loveliness with something moving beneath it, maybe a sense of menace. And it's leavened, like once per hour, with a teeny dash of humor. This isn't nearly as immediately likable or showy as "Cremaster 3," but in a quiet way just as spectacular.
  83. Le petit lieutenant
    A flinty, almost hardhearted work about characters who have lost almost everything in pursuit of some undefinable abstraction, like honor or their country or doing the right thing. It's an impressive film, but don't expect any warm fuzzies.
  84. The Banger Sisters
    A highly entertaining and refreshingly nonjudgmental movie
  85. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    Maybe if Wes Anderson and Lars von Trier tried to write a sitcom together, the result would be something like A Pigeon Sat on a Branch, which essentially consists of a series of comic sketches whose gags are often revealed in their final seconds.
  86. Shanghai Knights
    What Chan represents -- the humor and charm and the sheer physical beauty of seeing him in action -- as well as the lazy, ping-pong repartee he achieves with Wilson, is the essence of the casual, deceptively artless art of movies.
  87. Let the Right One In
    An ingenious mixture of satire, dead-end suburban realism and gory vampire fantasy.
  88. Nathalie...
    Nathalie becomes a complicated three-handed game, far more concerned with the narcissistic, pornographic and mutually manipulative relationship between Catherine and Nathalie than with the latter's purported affair with Bernard. If you live in New York, run, don't walk to see this on the big screen, because it won't be there long.
  89. A Touch of Sin
    Anyone interested in the current state of China should see it, and it may open up this remarkable filmmaker to a larger audience.
  90. The Way, Way Back
    Beautifully executed, loaded with sharp observational moments, and never cheats either its characters or its audience by descending into raunchy teen-movie cliché. This is a delicately balanced and often very funny holiday alternative suitable for pretty much the entire family.
  91. Hope Springs
    Hope Springs is an oddly ambitious blend of bland humor and startling insight into the realities of married life. It's something like Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage," as translated into the universe of the Lifetime Network.
  92. Exit Through the Gift Shop
    The British street artist's hilarious documentary is a head-spinning, wild ride.
  93. Dogma
    Kevin Smith's comic-religious fantasy turns out to be the sweetest hot-potato movie imaginable.
  94. 20 Feet from Stardom
    This is one of those moving, tragic and triumphant secret histories of American culture where the biggest surprise is that no one’s told it before.
  95. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
    One of the most intriguing tangents in Mea Maxima Culpa involves the Rev. Gerald Fitzgerald, founder of the Servants of the Paraclete, a Catholic congregation established to help priests who were struggling with celibacy, alcoholism and other personal issues.
  96. The Hateful Eight
    My personal view is that Quentin Tarantino is now permanently high on his own supply, but you could just as well say that he has succeeded in reinventing the art film. Is it worth it to put yourself through the brutal and incoherent three-hour ordeal of The Hateful Eight for its moments of brilliance and its ultimate catharsis? Jesus, don’t look at me.
  97. The Impossible
    Both here and in "The Orphanage," Bayona reveals himself as a masterful genre stylist of almost unlimited talent and a storyteller addicted to sentimental happy endings that feel a bit sardonic. Like, it's all OK now – but just wait till next time!
  98. Ghost Town
    Ghost Town is a rarity, a contemporary romantic comedy that honors the traditions of the genre without checking them off some plasticized list. The picture is breathing, and alive, every minute.
  99. The Border
    Jack Nicholson is at his best playing a burned-out border patrol officer in a small Texas town.
  100. '71
    It’s a riveting, man-on-the-run genre movie, almost a combination of “Black Hawk Down” and “After Hours,” rather than an allegory or a historical treatise.
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