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 1.3 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. A/k/a Tommy Chong
    This is a small film, but it moved me and made me angry. Both reactions, in this context, are worthwhile.
  2. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
    Given the choice between a movie that's better structured and only half as funny, I'd take The Spy Who Shagged Me (or its predecessor, for that matter) any day.
  3. The Ring
    A deviously engineered parasite that'll crawl under your skin and live in your nervous system for a while if you give it half a chance.
  4. Backcountry
    Another way of reading a movie like this is that it channels our ancient hatred of nature while recognizing that it’s essentially nostalgic, and that the occasional hungry ursine cannot compete with the animal we really have reason to fear.
  5. Detachment
    People will either love Detachment or hate it, and either way it provides powerful testimony to the unrivaled passion and undiminished craft of director Kaye, whose notoriety in the film industry is matched by his near-total invisibility to the general public.
  6. Total Recall (2012)
    Total Recall is a doggone good time, with a bunch of nifty technical and visual flourishes, competently managed plot twists and elegant, Wachowski-esque action choreography that eventually becomes deadening because there's just too much of it and it's dialed up too high.
  7. Lions for Lambs
    This is a weird movie hybrid, both a tasteful picture and an angry one.
  8. Baby Mama
    An essentially sweet-natured picture that doesn't go as far as it could.
  9. Eden
    Thrumming with anguish and erotic vitality, Eden paints a heartbreaking portrait of a newly affluent country (freed from dour priests, whiskey-soaked revolutionaries and shawl-clad women) afflicted with emotional growing pains.
  10. Babel
    I hate to criticize anybody for artistic ambition, but the problem with Babel isn't that it's a bad movie. It's a good movie, or, more accurately, it's several pieces of good movie, chopped up in service of a pretentious, portentous and slightly silly artistic vision.
  11. CBGB
    CBGB has more of the original prankish punk spirit than it even recognizes.
  12. Blood Work
    As much as Eastwood ever expresses pleasure about anything, you sense a flicker of gratification that he can work with actors who can hold their own against him. Lifford does it without breaking a sweat. Howard Hawks would have loved her.
  13. Woman on the Beach
    Dry, wry, difficult-to-capture comedy.
  14. Rubberneck
    Rubberneck immediately put me in mind of the classic slow burn of vintage thrillers like Fritz Lang’s “M” and Michael Powell’s “Peeping Tom,” although Karpovsky and co-writer Garth Donovan have cited all kinds of other things, from “Michael Clayton” to “Caché” to “Fatal Attraction.”
  15. Hot Tub Time Machine
    At its best the film is blissfully, anarchically funny, and director Steve Pink keeps the pace crackling.
  16. Soldiers Pay
    Not among the most memorable works in this genre, but its deliberate lack of artifice and its stitched-together quality possess an undeniable power.
  17. Lords of Dogtown
    There are times when even a director's worst impulses aren't enough to sink a movie, and somehow Lords of Dogtown stays afloat, largely because many of its actors transcend Hardwicke's heavy-handed storytelling.
  18. Tumbleweeds
    A deeply and disappointingly conventional picture masquerading as a free-spirited one.
  19. Free Zone
    Gitai's experimental technique in Free Zone is dizzying, sometimes thrilling.
  20. World War Z
    A genuinely exciting thrill ride that only occasionally feels bloated or painfully dumb.
  21. Surrogates
    Surrogates stays afloat by not taking itself too seriously, but also by recognizing that a movie about robots shouldn't look as if it were made by one.
  22. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
    Pedestrian but appealing.
  23. Hanna
    Hanna is almost a terrific movie, or a partly terrific one, but all its giddy, improvised wonder resolves into nothing more than a ruthless, symmetrical story about a murderous monster.
  24. The Gift
    If you love actors, it's the sort of thing you might be tempted to see a second time, even after you've found out whodunit, just to examine more carefully the way the performers -- particularly the mesmerizing Cate Blanchett -- weave shining silken threads around what's essentially a pretty uninvolving narrative.
  25. Lady Chatterley
    If a film can be both lush and cold, both erotic and cautious, that film is Lady Chatterley. It's a picture to honor and appreciate, not necessarily to love.
  26. Examined Life
    By conducting her conversations in public spaces, and removing her interlocutors from desks and offices and book-lined studies and other appurtenances of intellectual authority, Taylor introduces a degree of playfulness and unpredictability that becomes the movie's M.O.
  27. Sir! No Sir!
    It will change your understanding of the Vietnam era, even if you were alive then.
  28. Jackass Number Two
    Part of what makes "ackass Number Two so frighteningly watchable -- even against your better judgment -- is the way the guys delight in one another's bumps, bangs and bruisings: First, they feel one another's pain; then they laugh like hell.
  29. Factory Girl
    If the filmmaking is in some ways awkward and elementary, Hickenlooper's attitude toward his subject is more complex, and more admirable.
  30. The Baader Meinhof Complex
    This is no art film, but Edel and Eichinger supply an action-packed, reasonably coherent account of youthful rock 'n' roll idealism run amok, and how it produced the craziest phenomenon of the crazy European far left.
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