Salon's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. A Mighty Heart
    That sense of one small, private world shattering within the larger and even more unstable one around it is the essence of Michael Winterbottom's unmooring, bleakly beautiful film version of A Mighty Heart.
  2. The Trip to Italy
    I am not the first to make this joke, but The Trip to Italy may live up to the “Godfather: Part II” analogy, at least insofar as it’s better and tighter than its predecessor.
  3. Pollock
    As good as Harris is, though, it's Harden's performance that sticks with you long after you've seen the movie. She understands what Krasner must have known intuitively. Greatness comes not from cleaning up messes, but from allowing them to be made in the first place.
  4. The 40 Year Old Virgin
    This is a superb, delicately calibrated comic performance: Carell never allows the character to swerve into excessive cuddliness.
  5. Mrs Henderson Presents
    This is a shimmery beaded curtain of a movie, a slight, charming picture that's almost all facade. But what a facade!
  6. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    Durkin seems to be aiming for a Hitchcock-style thriller that has the unsettling psychological and narrative ambiguity of, say, Michael Haneke's films, with an ending you can read in many different ways. If he doesn't quite get there, it's still a remarkable feature-directing debut.
  7. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    This is a rip-snorting, barrel-riding adventure movie — perfect for all ages, as they say (though it isn’t for very young kids) — loaded with fast-paced fight scenes, great-looking effects and enjoyable and/or scurrilous supporting characters.
  8. The Deep End
    The Deep End doesn't have a knotty message, but it's a much more meaningful picture than "Suture."
  9. What Maisie Knew
    It’s probably best to approach Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s intimate, unnerving and entirely addictive drama What Maisie Knew by not leaning too hard on its Henry James source material.
  10. Easy A
    A thoroughly delightful surprise, after a summer full of dim and dreary comedies.
  11. Lake of Fire
    Highly compelling, if overlong and overwrought.
  12. Never Let Me Go
    Director Mark Romanek captures the slightly seedy and rundown reality of '70s and '80s British life in astonishing and even tragic detail; this is more like a period piece than a science-fiction movie.
  13. Lake Placid
    As irritating as Lake Placid sometimes is, it also has an easygoing sense of fun, along with one of the more memorable movie monsters of recent years. The mismatched ingredients blend into a blissfully, stupidly surreal summer cocktail.
  14. To the Bone
    The film itself is an admirable and empathetic work that does not romanticize anorexia or the young woman being ground into nothingness by the disease, as some have feared.
  15. Sucker Punch
    Sucker Punch doesn't all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.
  16. Brooklyn Castle
    It honestly makes no difference if you don't even know the rules of chess and have never visited New York; this is a story about human potential and the lingering possibilities of the American dream.
  17. Weekend
    Weekend is such a smart, prickly, sexy, inventive film that it critiques itself and critiques its viewers, gay or straight, even as it spins an archetypal romantic fable.
  18. Margin Call
    Sam Rogers (Spacey) is not an especially enigmatic character, but he is a profoundly wounded one who has given his life to a business and an institution that has relied for years on his unscrupulous conduct and is about to kick him to the curb...It's one of the great performances found in American movies this year.
  19. Iron Monkey
    A guilt-free, no-fat dessert from start to finish.
  20. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    From the too-good-to-be-true desk comes this loving and hilarious portrait of Spinal Tap-esque Canadian metal band Anvil, who were briefly a hard-rock sensation in the early '80s (mainly for the song "Metal on Metal") and have been struggling along in total obscurity ever since.
  21. The Lives of Others
    This is a teasingly complex political thriller, but it's also a sort-of romance.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Wild Things
    One reason Wild Things works so well is that director John McNaughton sustains a darkly comic tone throughout the film without letting it degenerate into farce.
  23. Countdown to Zero
    A terrifying and highly effective documentary.
  24. Samsara
    It demands to be experienced on its own terms or not at all, which creates a significant level of resistance in the contemporary media marketplace – but may also be a source of counterintuitive appeal.
  25. The Band's Visit
    Has an irresistible tragic and romantic undertow.
  26. The Pool
    A lovely, warm, unforced film that gives you time to get to know its characters and isn't propelled by any artificial narrative conventions,
  27. Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow
    It's a gorgeous and resonant work, full of the memorable images and passages of pathos the director's fans expect. It's also a painful, unforgiving film, the kind of thing that sharply divides audiences from critics.
  28. Ballast
    Ballast is an audacious and ambiguous debut from a filmmaker whose motives and aims are not as transparent as they seem.
  29. If I Want to Whistle, I Whistle
    Offers an introduction to the lean-and-mean, social-realist Romanian storytelling style that's built around a charismatic young actor and a familiar genre.
  30. Dark Shadows
    Dark Shadows offers potent atmosphere and delirious '70s fashions and hilarious gags and some really terrific performances, none better than Pfeiffer's triumphant return to the screen as a pitch-perfect family matriarch.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »