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. RA. One
    If you're bored by the action scenes or the love story or the dopey domestic comedy, just wait three minutes for something else to come along - and whoever you are, you won't be bored by the musical numbers!
  2. Analyze This
    Ramis has made a fleet, unself-conscious, eminently enjoyable picture, where one-liners carom merrily like stray bullets, and where there's casual ease, like the drape of a sharpster's trousers, in the rapport between its two stars.
  3. Kumaré
    When Vikram Gandhi set out to become a guru, he didn't expect to really become a guru. But that's what happens in his slippery, ambiguous, tense and finally moving Kumaré, which is officially termed a documentary but could also be considered as the video corollary to a thorny work of performance art.
  4. Red Dragon
    If you buy the overprocessed headcheese of the serial killer as refined genius, you'll love Red Dragon. Or maybe not. Even Hannibal Lecter devotees may lose patience with this picture's grandiose, self-serious ponderousness -- that's Lecterese for, "It's kind of boring in patches, actually."
  5. The Beaver
    I suppose the perfect ending to the chapter would be to report that The Beaver is a masterpiece. It isn't quite, but it does offer an astonishing and resonant performance by Gibson, who spends most of the movie playing two simultaneous characters, often in the same shot.
  6. Calendar Girls
    It's too good a story not to have been made into a movie. Yet Calendar Girls, directed by Nigel Cole ("Saving Grace"), is filled with lots of extras it doesn't need, when the bare-naked bones of the story would have been plenty.
  7. Happy Here and Now
    It's perhaps most remarkable as a sweet, mysterious portrait of pre-flood New Orleans, which Almereyda not incorrectly portrays as a land of wandering, uncertain souls.
  8. 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.
  9. Lone Survivor
    Lone Survivor has no politics in the sense that it presents a more or less factual story about Luttrell and his comrades trying to fight their way out against overwhelming odds, and tells the truth that most of them didn’t make it. But the visual symbolism and the iconography of this movie are not apolitical or ideologically neutral at all.
  10. Bandits
    Nothing is more dispiriting than forced high spirits. Bandits keeps reminding you of what a good time you should be having. You leave with a feeling of being swindled, and that's the only genuine thing about it.
  11. Middle Men
    Even as this film unravels into incoherent, self-justifying moral instruction, it never becomes boring to watch.
  12. Life of Crime
    With the genial pairing of Jennifer Aniston as a rich guy’s trophy wife and John Hawkes as a low-rent criminal at the center of a colorful cast and a pitch-perfect rendering of caste-divided Detroit, Life of Crime is a bittersweet end-of-summer surprise.
  13. Lonely Hearts
    Hayek, with that old-time movie-star pout, those dark, reflective eyes (they could be Satan's twin swimming pools), is the shivery, chilling backbone of Lonely Hearts. Martha Beck couldn't get away with murder. But Salma Hayek can.
  14. Fantasia 2000
    There's some sort of gross egotism involved in linking great music to visuals that are so unabashedly kitschy.
  15. The Perfect Storm
    Its spectacular special effects threaten to swallow characters whole, and there are times when overwrought and clumsy dialogue... nearly pitch you right out of the movie's mood.
  16. Only the Strong Survive
    All Only the Strong Survive has to offer are scraps, and it's a sad thing to sit through a movie billed as a tribute to a group of terrific performers and to come away with nothing more than scraps.
  17. The Rundown
    Add Christopher Walken, giving one of his patented demented performances as a Kurtz-esque mining tycoon deep in the Amazon jungle, along with some vague Hollywood politics about labor exploitation, and The Rundown is far too cheerful and good-hearted to be terrible.
  18. Beowulf
    Ambitious, overbearing and hollow; it goes overboard to impress, yet it never feels truly inventive or imaginative. At best, it achieves a level of clumsy camp.
  19. Spider-Man 3
    The good news about Spider-Man 3 is that it's more of the same -- except better.
  20. Mission: Impossible II
    Even the most spectacular things Woo unleashes here feel strangely impersonal.
  21. Unbroken
    A rousing old-fashioned yarn with numerous exciting set-pieces and an uncomplicated hero you root for all the way through. It’s entertaining throughout and made with a high level of technical skill. If made 40 years ago, it would have been a leading Oscar contender and a huge hit, whereas today it’s a bit “meh” in both categories
  22. A Home at the End of the World
    At the movie's end, nuance is all we have left; beyond the admirable efforts of some of the actors, the picture leaves behind nothing so human as a fingerprint.
  23. Copying Beethoven
    Copying Beethoven has an ace up its sleeve: the wonder and drama of the Ninth Symphony itself (heard here in Bernard Haitink's tremendous 1996 recording with the Royal Concertgebouw).
  24. Nights and Weekends
    Nights and Weekends knocked me out when I saw it last March at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas; I wrote at the time that it offered exactly the "prickly, flawed, urgent SXSW experience I'd been waiting for."
  25. Tower Heist
    Tower Heist is funny in the way of so many Hollywood comedies, meaning that individual scenes are often crisply written and played, but the whole doesn't add up to anything.
  26. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    If I had the power to turn back time and start the tortuous production process that led to the “Hobbit” trilogy over again, with a different director in charge and a completely different approach, I would do it. But that’s precisely the problem with the One Ring, right? Once you put it on you are changed, and those changes cannot be undone.
  27. Anywhere But Here
    Despite its stellar leading ladies, Anywhere But Here is still a predictable generation-gap drama.
  28. The First Wives Club
    But as badly as the younger women in The First Wives Club are treated, none of the three central characters, with whom we're supposed to identify so strongly, comes off that well either.
  29. The Ballad of Jack and Rose
    I feel prodigious emotion underneath the pretty, preserved features of The Ballad of Jack and Rose, channeled into a vehicle that's a half-successful imitation of "You Can Count on Me" or "In the Bedroom."
  30. The Contender
    The most gutless and naive political drama of recent memory.
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