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. 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.
  2. Clerks II
    Clerks II has its problems: It rambles into sentimentality, and it doesn't need to -- the movie is more affecting when the characters are just cracking jokes. But Smith, an inherent optimist, has made a movie full of crude humor that also manages to explore the enduring qualities of friendship.
  3. Tetro
    Certainly it isn't the greatest of Coppola's pictures, or even of his independent productions, but those are pretty high standards. It has a verve and vitality that's been missing from his pictures for 25 years, and its various and visible flaws all result from too much of that verve rather than too little. I enjoyed it tremendously.
  4. Washington Heights
    Alfredo de Villa's Washington Heights feels stiff and overworked in places, and sometimes the acting is a bit awkward. And yet the story is both compelling and easy to identify with.
  5. Sleepy Hollow
    The look of Burton's Gothic dream landscape, both lulling and energizing, is vested with so much power that it could almost substitute for narrative drive.
  6. Oliver Twist
    This is that rare movie version of a great novel in which watching IS reading.
  7. Coherence
    After the fundamental problem of Coherence has become clear, or clear-ish – there’s another dinner party, at that other house, that looks an awful lot like this one – the movie becomes slightly too much like an unfolding mathematical puzzle, although an ingenious one that reaches a chilling conclusion.
  8. The Overnight
    It takes discipline in this age of bloat to bring your movie in under 80 minutes, closing credits included, and still make the audience feel we’ve been taken on a genuine journey with these people, a few big laughs and jagged left turns included.
  9. 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.
  10. Pacific Rim
    This is a noisy, chaotic, technology-crazed 21st-century action film, but also one made with tremendous excitement, vigor and heart, along with a myriad of wonderful details.
  11. We Were Soldiers
    Isn't a great movie; I'd say it's barely a good one. But it's a war movie that at least acknowledges the distinction between macho and masculinity, always putting the dignity of the latter over the bluster of the former.
  12. L'Auberge Espagnole
    Klapisch wants his characters shiny bright, and winds up making them excruciatingly dull in the process. Watching L'Auberge Espagnole is like seeing the young Maoist revolutionaries of Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 "La Chinoise" body-snatched by the international touring company of "Up With People."
  13. Red Flag
    If it's all reasonably familiar indie-comedy terrain, it's delivered at a brisk, economical clip with plenty of laughs, and a series of running gags that keep getting funnier.
  14. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I
    The seventh and last volume in J.K. Rowling's series of best-selling fantasy novels has been split in half for Hollywood purposes, making this long, dour, impressive and handsome motion picture the penultimate chapter, largely designed to build up the heavy-duty suspense before the climax is delivered next year.
  15. Down in the Valley
    While Jacobson navigates the first half of Down in the Valley deftly, he loses his way in the second.
  16. Close to Home
    I won't argue for the cinematic virtues of this film; they don't exist. But as a pseudo-documentary portrait of real life behind the explosive headlines, it's absorbing.
  17. The Way
    If The Way is sometimes shaggy and inelegant, and flirts with sentimentality the whole way through, I was finally overcome by its dignity and sincerity, and by the rough, rude, gorgeous magic of its journey.
  18. Dr T and the Women
    Almost all of the movie's romantic lunacy is too calculated and sly; the picture never quite sweeps us away.
  19. Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow
    So captivating to look at that you can almost forget there's virtually nothing to it.
  20. Marie Antoinette
    Coppola captures the luxe insularity of Marie Antoinette's world in a way that leaves no doubt why the revolution had to happen. The picture's final image is a moment of devastating stillness that wouldn't be out of place in Luchino Visconti's end-of-an-era masterpiece "The Leopard."
  21. Suffragette
    Perhaps the most startling aspect of Suffragette, which for better or worse is a standard-issue historical drama, well constructed but not especially capacious or original, is its depiction of how far female activists were willing to go in order to prove that they could stand alongside men.
  22. Interview
    Whatever we may make of van Gogh's life and death, Buscemi's talky, stagey Interview -- the first of three van Gogh adaptations planned by American actor-directors -- doesn't make much of a case for him as an important or original artist.
  23. Sunshine
    One of those unapologetically cerebral space-exploration sci-fi movies that's both boring and compelling at once.
  24. The Prince of Egypt
    Middlebrow kitsch, but kitsch straining for respectability and therefore without the energy that can make kitsch entertaining.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    He Got Game
    Awkward and often downright silly, He Got Game is nonetheless heartfelt, a moving portrayal of a man who finds his long-lost son through faith, hope and basketball.
  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. Frailty
    Starts out, and ends up, as a thriller trying valiantly to show us layers of moral depth. But in between that beginning and ending, Paxton's vision (as well as that of Brent Hanley, who wrote the script) becomes wavy and indistinct, a blurry muddle of sensationalistic, prurient grisliness masquerading as a meditation on the nature of evil.
  28. 8 Women
    iIt sits on the screen in the flattest way imaginable, and the brightest colors in the world can't make up for all that's missing. 8 Women is perfumed kitsch, and it reeks.
  29. Sleeping with Other People
    Sleeping With Other People is one of the best and funniest recent attempts to update the rom-com – but the container feels too antiquated for the world it captures, which is so furiously alive.
  30. Wanted
    Fast-moving and bloody, enjoyable even within its unapologetically generic limits. But McAvoy is its real secret weapon: With his X-ray blue eyes and lips that look bitten with anxiety, he has the miraculous ability to fool us into thinking there's really something at stake here.
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