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. Wedding Crashers
    Wedding Crashers may be the most optimistic Hollywood comedy of the year, because it restores at least some dim hope that directors, writers and actors with actual brains in their heads can somehow triumph over unimaginative studio execs. In that way, Wedding Crashers isn't just the life of the party, but its pulse.
  2. Changing Times
    It's kind of a mess. An agreeable, even lovable mess, but still a mess.
  3. Blood Diamond
    Preachy infotainment that wants to offer thrills, too -- an uneasy hybrid.
  4. The Other Guys
    It's a mixed bag with plenty of gags that fall flat, not a comic masterpiece. But it's got tremendous zing, a sense of mischief and a big heart, more than enough to mark it as a delicious shot of caffeinated ice cream, and the summer season's funniest comedy.
  5. Something New
    Something New is the perfect date movie, not only because it explores a range of suitably romantic sentiments, but because it's so canny sociologically, as well as being delightfully good-natured.
  6. Star Trek: Insurrection
    Outsiders will find this schtick-laden, mildly exciting adventure yarn an inoffensive triviality, while fans will savor one more encounter with Picard, Riker, Data, Worf and the gang, replete with all the well-worn character tics and platitudinous parables about the contemporary world they expect.
  7. Proof
    Proof isn't just a movie about mathematics; it's a mathematical movie. The scenes may as well have been laid out by diagram.
  8. Amistad
    A little like looking at pictures without a text to unify them… Prestige filmmaking bereft of inspiration -- sometimes even of the nuts and bolts of craft.
  9. Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    One of the strangest and least summarizable motion pictures ever made: tragic and hilarious, tightly constructed and miscellaneous.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gattaca
    Implausible in countless ways and wooden for long stretches, Gattaca at least never collapses into a special-effects barrage or erupts in long, choreographed explosions; it sticks carefully to its pristine vision.
  11. Looney Tunes: Back in Action
    There's a reason why Looney Tunes cartoons were six minutes long. Stretched out over an hour and a half, they're wearying.
  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. In Search of a Midnight Kiss
    Profane, hilarious and ultimately heartbreaking, Alex Holdridge's black-and-white feature In Search of a Midnight Kiss has a gutter purity that makes you root for it all the way and forgive its patches of ultra-indie awkwardness.
  14. Lymelife
    Lymelife offers charm and humor through its young central characters and pathos through its remarkable supporting cast, without pulling punches on its overall atmosphere of autumnal darkness and anomie.
  15. Shortbus
    The sex is the most unremarkable thing about it. What surprised me most about this gentle-spirited sprawl of a movie, set in post-9/11 New York City, is what I can only call the friendly, Midwestern quality of the filmmaking.
  16. Fast Food Nation
    The movie is designed to stir up controversy. (Linklater and Schlosser have admitted as much.) But can you really stir up controversy with a lesson plan?
  17. Tokyo!
    This isn't an art house crowd pleaser along the lines of the 2006 "Paris, je t'aime," a freewheeling mixed bag of shorts made by the likes of Olivier Assayas, Wes Craven and Alfonso Cuarón. Tokyo! demands more patience, patience that it sometimes doesn't deserve.
  18. Dancer in the Dark
    Lars von Trier is a mechanic, not an artist. And his movies are meat grinders he feeds his characters through.
  19. 16 Blocks
    This is a sturdy little cop thriller, and even when it stretches the bounds of plausibility, you go with it, partly because you believe -- almost against your better judgment -- in what the characters are doing.
  20. Songcatcher
    Songcatcher is like an "All Things Considered" report on "a vibrant and lasting folk tradition" that goes on for two hours. It's so relentlessly, goddamn worthy that you long for some cheapness and dirt, some energetic pop trash to liven it up.
  21. Unfaithful
    It's one of the fullest portrayals of sexual desire and pleasure and fear I've ever seen in a movie.
  22. Yves Saint Laurent 5 avenue Marceau 75116 Paris
    Visual tone poem.
  23. One True Thing
    This might have worked if the director and lead actress had the kind of intense mutual understanding that, say, Ingmar Bergman had with Liv Ullmann, or John Cassavetes had with Gena Rowlands.
  24. Sex Is Comedy
    Parillaud's performance is sharp on its surface and soft at its core. And if Jeanne truly is Breillat's alter ego, she is a pitiless self-portrait.
  25. Monsters
    However you slice it, Monsters is a dynamite little film, loaded with atmosphere, intelligence, beauty and courage.
  26. Secretary
    It's a liberating, kindhearted picture, one whose ending brings with it the feeling that something has finally been shaken free. How comfortable you feel with that is completely up to you.
  27. Drumline
    When the camera is floating up high, as the band practices its moves on the field, you can imagine Busby Berkeley watching somewhere, jealous that he never got his mitts on a marching band.
  28. He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not
    Not half as clever as its setup leads you to think it might be: It's all buildup and no payoff, the kind of romantic thriller in which if just one sensible character called the police at the moment as any normal human being would -- well, then, you wouldn't have a movie.
  29. Out of Time
    Starts out as noir, takes a shift into something like deadpan screwball comedy and ends up as a comedy of remarriage.
  30. The Patriot
    This bloody celebration finally gives the American Revolution the epic it deserves.
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