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. Vera Drake
    When one of the young women Vera attends to nearly dies of complications, the police arrest her -- and the movie goes thud, taking Staunton's performance along with it.
  2. Lake of Fire
    Highly compelling, if overlong and overwrought.
  3. Under the Skin
    This stark and intensely controlled film is the work of a powerful visual stylist and storyteller, one who looks like he belongs on the short list of directors who have carried the narrative methods of the silent era deep into modern cinema.
  4. The Magdalene Sisters
    A rip-roaring feminist yarn that should offer relief to viewers anxious for an alternative to the boys-with-guns flicks of summer.
  5. Tyson
    Tyson does succeed in humanizing a deeply troubled individual who has been depicted as an almost animalistic stereotype of African-American manhood.
  6. Eastern Promises
    A dark and mesmerizing immersion into a distinctive world.
  7. Footnote
    Footnote has two of the best performances I've seen in world cinema over the past year: One from Shlomo Bar Aba (apparently best known in Israel as a stand-up comic and stage actor), playing the aging, bitter philologist Eliezer Shkolnik, and the other from Lior Ashkenazi, one of the country's best known movie stars, as his son and rival, Uriel.
  8. 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.
  9. Trouble the Water
    If possible, Roberts' movie-within-a-movie is even more amazing than it sounds. She captures a tale of courage, heroism and tragedy more thrilling than any Hollywood spectacle.
  10. 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.
  11. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    The picture throws off no feeling, not even the misanthropic kind; at best, it manages a dull, throbbing energy, as if Burton were dutifully pushing his way through the material instead of shaping it.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Charade
    Stanley Donen's classy crime caper has charm, wit -- and Cary Grant.
  13. 20,000 Days on Earth
    For the most part, 20,000 Days on Earth – the approximate amount of time Cave has been alive on this planet – is an imagistic and impressionistic work, a Nick Cave-esque tone poem driven by moments of visual and thematic juxtaposition you either have to reject or accept.
  14. 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.
  15. Election
    Wickedly funny, an ode to youthful overachievers that's as blackhearted as "Rushmore" was gently sentimental.
  16. Memento
    Whenever Harris or Tobolowsky come on-screen they stop Memento dead in its clever tracks. You want to tell Nolan to stop all the po-mo deconstructive game playing and pay attention to the two human beings in front of him.
  17. Pride & Prejudice
    Blissful, blazingly intelligent adaptation.
  18. Venus
    Venus belongs to O'Toole. This is, hands down, my favorite performance of the year, largely because I love the way O'Toole (and the filmmakers) refuse to yield to the all-too-pervasive idea that it's "icky" for old people to even think about sex.
  19. Three Times
    In these three potent miniatures, Hou Hsiao-hsien suggests that time passes differently when you're deeply in love. He captures the mystical quality of that time on film, making us feel as if we're living in it, rather than simply watching it.
  20. Ajami
    A remarkable accomplishment, a swirling, choral sea of humanity that forces us to confront that a man who does terrible things can also be a loving father who gives his infant daughter a bath.
  21. 127 Hours
    Franco is up to every bit of Boyle's challenge, capturing Aron's transition from clownish outdoorsman and party boy to an introspective chronicler of his own impending demise and a visionary lunatic.
  22. Tell No One
    Crisply and competently filmed, Tell No One is an intriguing sample of new-school French cinema at the more commercial end of the spectrum.
  23. Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
    Amid the infoglut that surrounds us, Gibney's film feels too much like more noise. Is it telling the most important business story of our lifetimes, or is it just another fantastical yarn, crammed into the schedule after Scott and Laci Peterson, but before Charlemagne and the ancient Peruvian astronauts?
  24. Duma
    Intelligent, visually rich filmmaking.
  25. The Constant Gardener
    Weisz has never been better: She's joyously expressive and alive, but there's gravity beneath that milkmaid complexion. She's grounded even when she's being flirtatious. And Fiennes has never been more moving.
  26. Short Term 12
    It’s both a compelling group melodrama built around an appealing young cast and an immersive introduction into a social reality many of us haven’t thought about.
  27. A History of Violence
    Although Josh Olson's script was originally based on a graphic novel by John Wagner and Vince Locke, it has now unmistakably become a Cronenberg movie, and one of his finest.
  28. Sugar
    A moving, surprising and provocative baseball flick that rises immediately to No. 1 with a bullet on my personal list.
  29. Winged Migration
    Birds are not just the movie's stars, but its whole universe. They inspire in Perrin and his crew, and in us, not just awe but humility. You'll never look at them the same way again.
  30. The Squid and the Whale
    Has so much going for it -- including intelligent performances that mesh beautifully, and a keen understanding of how seemingly small moments can rattle the foundations of families -- that you walk away from it feeling it should add up to more.
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