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. Sideways
    Alexander Payne's new movie, Sideways, makes you feel like you're trapped at dinner with a wiseass who's trying to convince you what a sensitive guy he is.
    • 94 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Days of Heaven
    The pictures — migrants leaping off a westbound train, a quick close-up of a face riven with conflicting emotions, locusts on a stalk of wheat — truly tell the story. [21 March 1997]
  3. 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.
  4. Carlos
    It's a tremendously absorbing blend of history, journalism and drama. As soon as it was over, I wanted to watch it again.
  5. Elevator to the Gallows
    A tightly structured thriller with a brilliantly moody performance by Jeanne Moreau, and depending on your point of view, it's either one of the few genuine French noir films or an early entry in the New Wave.
  6. Masculine Feminine
    Speaks to the teenager in all of us.
  7. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
    This has to be one of the most completely realized comedies ever made, and, in its odd way, one of the most civilized.
  8. McCabe & Mrs. Miller
    The movie haunts you like a ballad whose tune you remember but whose words hang just beyond reach. And like listening to a ballad, we know the outcome of the events we're watching was foretold long ago, but we're helpless to do anything but surrender to the tale.
  9. Inside Llewyn Davis
    For my money, the 33-year-old Isaac – who was born in Guatemala, raised in Florida, and has been working his way toward stardom for years – gives the year’s breakout performance, and Inside Llewyn Davis is one of the Coens’ richest, strangest and most potent films.
  10. Band of Outsiders
    Band of Outsiders is about the tyranny of living a life of movie-fed fantasies, and while it makes us see the poverty of those fantasies, it also makes them unaccountably rich, poetic, sad.
  11. There Will Be Blood
    There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    8½
    The film succeeds, and for many reasons: because of Fellini's wonderfully self-deprecating humor — the way he mocks the idea of the director as a genius, the artist as romantic hero; because of his honesty in expressing both his dreams of glory and his self-hatred, anxiety, and dread; and because visually it’s stunning and exhilarating.
  13. The Wizard of Oz
    Like any classic work of children's entertainment, this best-loved of all Hollywood films almost has more to offer adult viewers; it's still easy to see why it amazed us as kids, but many of us have also grown to appreciate the wonders of its construction and its immense significance as a cultural touchstone.
  14. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be.
  15. The Class
    The Class is a lovely, exhilarating work about the ways in which failure and frustration can open the pathways through which we make sense out of life.
  16. 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.
  17. Chinatown
    But the greatness of Chinatown, unappreciated by my adolescent self, lies not in its cynical view of the California dream (that's too easy) but in its fatalistic, even tragic conception of America and indeed of human nature.
  18. Timbuktu
    An extraordinary accomplishment, a heartbreaking, visually spectacular and largely accessible work from a cinematic master who is more than ready for international attention.
  19. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
    It’s no news to anyone that “E.T.” is one of the loveliest and happiest of American movie entertainments. It’s also a greater picture than we could have known. [2002 re-release]
    • 92 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Apocalypse Now Redux
    I think Apocalypse Now Redux works better at the end now because it spells out the tension within Willard far more clearly than earlier versions did.
  21. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
    I see it as nearly perfect: It's one of the best fantasy pictures ever made.
  22. Leviathan
    Leviathan, the fourth feature from Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev, may be the one true masterpiece of global cinema released in 2014.
  23. Toy Story 3
    A bona fide summer delight loaded with action, humor, nostalgia, a veritable blizzard of pop-culture references and general good vibes.
  24. This Is Spinal Tap
    The group's members come off more like real musicians than parodists.
  25. 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.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    L.A. Confidential
    A movie that refuses to kick into gear until it's far too late.
  27. Lost in Translation
    The connection between Bob and Charlotte, as Coppola shows it to us at the end of Lost in Translation, is a moment of intimate magnificence. I have never seen anything quite like it, in any movie.
  28. Son of Saul
    Son of Saul is a work of superlative filmmaking craft and moral intensity.
  29. Her
    This is a handcrafted, passionate and sometimes impossibly beautiful film that argues for both the past and the future, with a poetic spirit that’s extremely rare in American cinema.
  30. The Triplets of Belleville
    Chomet bows to the tradition of conventional animation even as he tests its limits.
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