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. Calle 54
    Calle 54 doesn't have that coherence or vision of the "Buena Vista Social Club."
  2. Into the Wild
    If nature -- if life -- is as wild and precious as the movie makes it out to be, Hirsch needs to give us something, someone, to watch on-screen. We need to feel a presence before we can take the measure of an absence.
  3. Vicky Cristina Barcelona
    It's literally difficult to believe that the person who made this picturesque, clueless, oddly misanthropic picture also made "Annie Hall" and "Crimes and Misdemeanors."
    • 70 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Personal Velocity: Three Portraits
    The thing I took away from that opening was that it was small, and looked beautiful. There was some technique and a little confusion. It didn't seem to have a conflict all plotted out and neatly resolved. The thing I didn't like is that the rest of the movie did.
  5. No Such Thing
    May be far from perfect, but those small, odd Hartley touches help you warm to it.
  6. 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.
  7. Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events
    As it ticks by, laboriously, it leaves you feeling that you should be enjoying it more than you are.
  8. Orange County
    A feebly pleasant surprise: It's not as cheap, loud and sleazy as it might have been, but it's also too eagerly well-meaning and indistinct to really stick. It's a piece of mildly entertaining, inoffensive fluff.
  9. Meet Dave
    It's a good-natured if flimsy comedy that, at the very least, suggests that Murphy hasn't completely lost whatever made him funny in the first place.
  10. Broken Flowers
    Well-meaning but remote picture.
  11. Simpatico
    Warchus seems as at ease with the complexity of the style as he is with directing actors.
  12. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
    This version of the Potter saga is fun and harmless rather than memorable or imaginative. That's certainly no crime.
  13. Maybe Baby
    Sabotages itself by trying too hard. The worst of it is that Maybe Baby feels very much like an Englishman's attempt to make a Nora Ephron movie, all warm and squishy in a decidedly American way.
  14. Unstoppable
    If a movie can be both exciting and boring at the same time, that movie would be Unstoppable an adrenaline-infused runaway-train flick that perfectly distills director Tony Scott's talents and limitations.
  15. Rush Hour 3
    Crass, stupid and crudely made. It's also, in places, weirdly brilliant, a picture that plays to the largest possible audience with mechanical efficiency but also, here and there, betrays glimmers of self-deprecating cleverness, as if it were striving, perhaps even unconsciously, to transcend its own dumbness.
  16. Hearts in Atlantis
    The resulting film directed by Scott Hicks is afflicted by terminal nostalgic drift. You come out of the theater with nothing more specific than half-pleasant memories of baseball gloves, Ferris wheels and vintage automobiles. I've had naps that were more exciting.
  17. Date Night
    As a pleasant domestic comedy/action-adventure that, refreshingly, doesn't seem to hate its characters, Date Night is just fine. But is it good enough to merit hiring a baby sitter? I'd rather have some potato skins at the Teaneck Tavern.
  18. Cradle Will Rock
    Obviously influenced by the style of Robert Altman's multi-character extravaganzas, Robbins has seized on this incident as the centerpiece in a carnival about the conflicts among art, politics and commerce.
  19. The Secret Life of Words
    A tantalizing and beautiful picture made with tremendous integrity, and anchored by two marvelous performances, Isabel Coixet's The Secret Life of Words still, somehow, doesn't quite work.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    25th Hour
    Of course Spike Lee has the right to transcend movies about race. He also has the talent to do better than this plodding moral fable.
  21. 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.
  22. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    It's so almost moving -- a meticulously crafted mechanical bird -- that it nearly feels like the real thing.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Seven Years in Tibet
    The bad news is that Pitt, despite this film's high-minded intentions (there are Yo-Yo Ma cello solos on the soundtrack, and China expert Orville Schell acted as an advisor during the shoot), or more likely because of them, finds himself trapped in a long, earnest movie that fails to ever feel very alive.
  24. Trembling Before G-d
    By the end of Trembling Before G_d, you desperately wish that at least some of DuBowski's subjects would see the light.
  25. The Ringer
    An odd and not wholly successful little comedy. Its pacing is slack, and although it has a gentle heart, it treads so gingerly across the minefield of potential offensiveness that it sometimes snuffs out its sparks of life as quickly as it throws them off.
  26. The Man from Elysian Fields
    Mick Jagger acts his age, finally, in an entertaining but ultimately disappointing fable.
  27. Garden State
    Braff, and Garden State, give it the old college try, and at least some, if not all, of the sparks catch. Even if the movie doesn't quite take off, it doesn't leave you feeling stranded, either.
  28. Absolute Wilson
    Absolute Wilson changed my views of Wilson as a person tremendously, and at least gave me some useful context for his art.
  29. Ladder 49
    Might have been an oversized Hollywood dazzler. Phoenix keeps it firmly and modestly on a human scale.
  30. Prime
    Now that Woody Allen is no longer making acceptable Woody Allen movies, it's surprising we're not seeing more comedies like Prime, a slight but well-meaning picture that strives for the same kind of pleasurably neurotic sophistication that Allen, at his best, used to give us.
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