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. Smart People
    Fine actors do their damnedest to make this dumb movie look sharp.
  2. Jupiter Ascending
    It has the kind of jumbled, pseudo-spectacular, overdecorated digital design that the eye and mind can’t really take in. Individual shots can be gorgeous, but there are just too damn many of them, and the overall experience is the visual equivalent of eating an entire wedding cake.
  3. Mystery Men
    Mystery Men is supposed to be an action comedy, but there isn't nearly enough of either.
  4. V/H/S
    I'm not sure V/H/S is brilliant cinema or anything – indeed, I'm not sure it's appropriate to call it cinema at all – but it sure is an ingenious hybrid: part Godardian art film, part abstract video experiment, part sleazy shocker, and all self-castigating interrogation of what film-theory types call the "male gaze."
  5. Intimate Strangers
    To borrow a phrase from Pauline Kael, Intimate Strangers suggests bits of Alfred Hitchcock and bits of Woody Allen. But the wrong bits.
  6. Das wilde Leben
    Deliciously dumb, reasonably well-made.
  7. Bolt
    Bolt is just too knowing; it keeps reminding us, loud and clear, of how culturally savvy it is.
  8. Guess Who
    The super-duper whiteness of Ashton Kutcher is funny. Just not funny enough.
  9. Blow
    Depp aside, the movie is higher on style than it is on substance.
  10. The Night Listener
    The experience of watching The Night Listener didn't make me feel "real" at all, only stuffed.
  11. Evening
    Evening feels like one of those devil's-candy productions that aim to bring artistry to a large audience, specifically a large audience of adult women who don't often go to the movies. Even considering it in that light, I found it miscalculated and overcooked.
  12. Swing Vote
    A maddeningly indistinct picture.
  13. Appaloosa
    If Appaloosa is something to look at, it's also unnecessarily lethargic. Even an intentionally slow-paced picture needs to have its own internal source of energy, and as a filmmaker, Harris can't quite get that motor running.
  14. The Brothers Grimm
    Although The Brothers Grimm is partly an inventive fantasy, it's also a cluttered, jangly action picture, and there's too much noise and commotion for Gilliam's subtler ideas to really resonate.
  15. Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
    Legally Blonde was content to tickle you. The new one is something akin to a band that has a surprisingly successful debut deciding to rerecord all their originals and release a "Greatest Hits" collection for their second CD. It's both familiar and off.
  16. Shall We Dance
    The movie feels choppy and rhythmless. And he's (Chelsom) rather hopeless at dance sequences.
  17. Annapolis
    Like so many disappointing movies, it's peopled by performers who do their damnedest to make the whole thing work.
  18. A Previous Engagement
    I'm not big on those Pauline Kael-style encomiums to great actors in mediocre material, but that's exactly what we've got here. Stevenson is so incandescent -- so funny, so vulnerable, so awkwardly sexy.
  19. Road to Perdition
    Feels like a movie that keeps wishing it were something else: an award-winning play, a grand novel, an epic poem, anything but that populist thing we call a movie. Mendes makes movies as if he hates them.
  20. The Good Shepherd
    The Good Shepherd, soft when it needs to be sharp, is all cloak with very little dagger.
  21. The Longest Yard
    Setting such larger aesthetic questions aside, there isn't much to dislike about The Longest Yard, at least once you've gotten used to the pervasive fear of homosexuality that seems to ooze from the film's pores.
  22. Brokedown Palace
    The penalties for drug trafficking in Thailand are very, very stiff. If there were any justice in the world, the penalties for saddling fine actors with terrible dialogue would be even stiffer.
  23. Changing Times
    It's kind of a mess. An agreeable, even lovable mess, but still a mess.
  24. Matchstick Men
    Matchstick Men isn't even remotely intricate; it's not even particularly interesting.
  25. The Kid
    Perfectly acceptable entertainment in the Mouse Factory's most familiar vein.
  26. 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.
  27. The Passion of the Christ
    Mel Gibson may have changed the face of cinema forever. I think he has: He's made the first true Jesusploitation flick, a picture that, despite its self-righteous air of grave religiosity, is barely spiritual at all.
  28. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    The evident strengths and laudable intentions of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (and even the appeal of Marisa Tomei in her undies) are overwhelmed by an implausible plot verging on unintentional comedy and a panoply of Noo Yawk dirt-bag supporting characters who might've seemed awkward on a 1993 episode of "NYPD Blue."
  29. Leatherheads
    You have to give Leatherheads this much: It's like no other comedy, or movie, out there these days. Clooney, one of our few old-style Hollywood movie stars himself, obviously loves old-fashioned moviemaking.
  30. Cop Out
    Morgan transcends the wayward silliness of Cop Out just by going for the gusto. He grabs it, and he hangs on.
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