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 1.4 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:
  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. 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.
  2. The Green Mile
    Above all a cracking good yarn that earns its laughter, its wonder and its tears.
  3. 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!
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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).
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Erin Brockovich
    Surely one of the canniest and most accurate films about American working-class life ever.
  17. I'm Not There.
    One of the most inventive and joyous movies of the year.
  18. 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.
  19. 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.
  20. The Overnighters
    The Overnighters is a documentary about real people in a real place. This is both amazing and frustrating.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. 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.”
  25. 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.
  26. 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.
  27. The Best of Youth
    This is a graceful and enveloping feat of filmmaking.
  28. 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.
  30. 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.
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