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. 10 Items or Less
    It's nice to see a bit of intimate, offhanded moviemaking that focuses on actors, as opposed to stars.
  2. Melinda and Melinda
    Even these actors -- who, in other pictures, are often wonderful in distinctive ways -- don't seem like themselves: It's as if they've been pulverized and pressed into convenient actor shapes.
  3. Hamlet 2
    So wearying that it makes you feel duped for being open to it in the first place. Hamlet 2 works so hard at being entertaining, in that quirky, Indie 101 sense, that it just grinds you down.
  4. Bruno
    Parts of it are brilliant; some of it feels tired and overplayed. Cohen has come up with some marvelous satirical motifs; elsewhere, he's just showing how far he'll go to get a laugh.
  5. Puccini for Beginners
    Puccini for Beginners may divide individual audience members. It divided me; rarely have I seen a film simultaneously so good and so bad.
  6. Get Smart
    Get Smart could have been smarter. But like the show that inspired it, it's still smarter than it looks.
  7. Dear Mr. Watterson
    Schroeder isn’t much of a comic-strip expert or historian, by his own admission, so Dear Mr. Watterson bounces off many of the most interesting issues in and around “Calvin and Hobbes,” noticing them but not exploring them deeply.
  8. Return to Me
    Almost seems like a godsend in this age of romantic-comedy schmaltz.
  9. From Hell
    A brain-dead version of a dark and complex work.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Julien Donkey-Boy
    The filmmaker brings the audience to a precipice of discomfort, implying that the discomfort is itself the point.
  11. Whole New Thing
    Whole New Thing comes unglued toward the end, spiraling into melodrama without ever escaping its whiny, indie-rock soundtrack.
  12. Cymbeline
    If this willfully peculiar and daring Cymbeline isn’t to all tastes, it brings back the blood, the thrills and the sense of moral discovery to a long-neglected work.
  13. Bobby
    Just when you think you've got a handle on the central characters in Bobby, yet more of them appear: The thing is a little like the stateroom scene in "A Night at the Opera."
  14. The Exterminating Angels
    A luminous picture, beautifully made, loaded with symbolism and mystical-religious imagery, about an artist's self-destructive quest for an unreachable grail. It's also a deliberately prurient spectacle designed to be arousing and troubling -- most viewers, I imagine, will have both reactions at various times (and maybe at the same time).
  15. Portraits chinois
    Truly is an ensemble comedy.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Paper Heart
    At times, the relentless preciousness, the ironic distance, the posture of "We're just adorably like this" gets to be a little too much.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    U Turn
    There's no overt message in this fatuous montage of crowd-pleasing brutality, just double and triple crosses, gory shoot-outs set to ironically cheerful Peggy Lee songs and tons of horrific, technicolor Americana.
  18. Oblivion
    Oblivion is a technical triumph rather than a philosophical breakthrough, demonstrating how beautifully digital effects can be blended with real people and real sets, demonstrating that neither Tom Cruise nor the 1970s will ever die, and announcing the unexpected arrival of a major science-fiction director.
  19. Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters
    Feels deeply calculated rather than genuinely crazy.
  20. Music of the Heart
    Falls flat for its skittish reluctance to bear any resemblance to an actual Wes Craven film.
  21. Gerry
    Gerry moves slowly and deliberately, like a torture technique, leaving us feeling as dry and dusty and lost as its two characters.
  22. Observe and Report
    It's possible Hill has a style, of sorts. But he doesn't work from the heart, or from the gut, as a good comedy director generally needs to. He operates from one guiding question: "How disturbing can we make this sh**?"
  23. Until the Light Takes Us
    As crafty and compelling as Aaron Aites and Audrey Ewell's Until the Light Takes Us is, it may go too far in its understandable desire to correct the bias and prejudice of mainstream journalism.
  24. Rock Star
    But even here, in a role that doesn't ask much of Wahlberg, I find plenty of evidence that he's among the finest actors of his generation.
  25. Bee Movie
    Just another ambitious, lavish animated adventure, pretty enough to look at, but ultimately foundering on the weakness of its script.
  26. What We Do Is Secret
    This isn't a boring movie or a dishonest one. But it's a relentlessly literal-minded one, light on vision and atmosphere, that moves through the history of the Germs with a checklist.
  27. Assault on Precinct 13
    Pulp needs a pulse -- without one, it's DOA. No matter how hard some of its actors work to resuscitate it, Assault on Precinct 13 is as lifeless as a corpse on a slab.
  28. Felt
    In its own strange way, the tiny, mysterious and occasionally terrifying indie film Felt captures the confusion of this moment in gender relations, and especially the confusion around the term “rape culture.”
  29. Good Dick
    A dark, sweet and sophisticated confection.
  30. People I Know
    The picture has a lax, sleepy vibe: There's never anything taut or electric about it. And so, like Pacino's character, we sleepwalk through it.
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