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. Forever Mine
    One of the best American movies of the year and one of the lushest movies in recent memory.
  2. Momma's Man
    A highly unusual combination of craft, emotion and integrity.
  3. Outside Providence
    Wonderful...It's funny and offbeat, sometimes raucous, but it still manages to come at you in gentle layers.
  4. The GoodTimesKid
    The GoodTimes Kid has a whimsy, a passion, a sophistication and, above all, a vigor that's mostly drained out of Amerindie cinema over the last decade or so.
  5. Flight of the Red Balloon
    It's both happy and sad. That's exactly the way to describe Hou's marvelous film as well.
  6. All or Nothing
    Mike Leigh returns to the council flats of London -- and delivers a richly Dickensian masterpiece about working-class family life.
  7. American Splendor
    A narrative picture with many of the qualities of a documentary, not to mention a comic book -- is one of those rare, inventively made movies that isn't so taken with its own novelty it loses sight of its characters. Its warmth is for real, and it enwraps you.
  8. The Italian
    It's a carefully and almost classically balanced combination of ingredients, blending dirty-faced realism (so much more damning because it judges and condemns no one) with mystical fable of quest and homecoming.
  9. Red Riding Trilogy
    Of course the films and the books each have to stand on their own, but Grisoni's stripped-down narrative definitely offers advantages, throwing some of the story's archetypal themes into sharper relief.
  10. Unknown
    A stylish and muscular thriller with some nifty twists and turns, a wicked sense of humor, several terrific performances and not one or even two but three of the best car chases in recent action-flick history.
  11. The Artist
    In the long and fraught history of Franco-American cultural relations, this movie is more than a peace offering; it's a loving, goofy, joyous French kiss.
  12. The Innocents
    Fontaine and cinematographer Caroline Champetier create many subdued and unexpected moments of simple humanity, or of what a more generous Catholic than the Mother Superior might call grace.
  13. So Close
    Next to the Hong Kong action picture So Close, nearly every Hollywood thriller of the summer looks like an elementary-school project thrown together the Sunday night before it was due.
  14. Safe
    Safe is both a slavish imitation of cinema gone by and a movie for our time. I found it wickedly entertaining and perversely refreshing in its total lack of contemporary piety.
  15. Cymbeline
    If this willfully peculiar and daring Cymbeline isn’t to all tastes, it brings back the blood, the thrills and the sense of moral discovery to a long-neglected work.
  16. Le bossu
    A delight from top to bottom, packed with romance, adventure, beautifully executed swordplay and a sumptuous period look.
  17. The Legend of Zorro
    The picture is almost shamefully entertaining, bold and self-effacing at once: Its intelligence reveals itself as a devilish gleam, not a pompous layer of shellac. Why can't more Hollywood movies be like this one?
  18. 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.
  19. Two Lovers
    Gray's peculiar accomplishment here is to turn this story into an intense emotional drama, beautifully photographed and profoundly ambiguous, suspended somewhere between realism and psychosexual allegory.
  20. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
    Yes, there are some "middle-chapter" problems, but Peter Jackson's Tolkien adaptation hasn't lost its devastating humanity, its heart-stopping cinematography or its epic sweep.
  21. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    What a handful of patient moviegoers may find in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, however, is a subtle, gorgeous and mysterious allegory that may be Ceylan's masterwork to date.
  22. House of Sand and Fog
    Features an astonishing pair of lead performances and one of this year's most impressive directing debuts. If this movie isn't quite the contempo-Greek tragedy it wants to be, it's still a powerful, unforgettable meditation on fate, cultural collision and the morality of renovating a house that isn't really yours.
  23. Together
    Together is the kind of picture that makes you feel that there are many good reasons to actually LIKE mankind.
  24. 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.
  25. Sugar
    A moving, surprising and provocative baseball flick that rises immediately to No. 1 with a bullet on my personal list.
  26. Fish Tank
    Absolute dynamite.
  27. Street Fight
    It's an electrifying, suspenseful film, full of street-level political drama.
  28. A Simple Plan
    Holds us in a state of horrified empathy.
  29. Pan's Labyrinth
    This is a true fairy tale, and one of the finest fantasy pictures ever made, but please do not take your young children to see it unless you want them to be scarred for life.
  30. Contagion
    A chilly, fascinating thriller at odds with itself.
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