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. Taking Woodstock
    So gentle it barely has enough vitality to stick to the screen.
  2. Thirteen
    If you boil Thirteen down to its flimsy bones, you'll find that it's not really so much about peer pressure in contemporary teen life as it is a story about a classic bad egg. That right there dilutes its highfalutin aspirations.
  3. Breaking and Entering
    Breaking and Entering is so bloodless that even Minghella's best ideas come off as wan and pale.
  4. Edtv
    Bleach out the colors, backdate the wardrobes, insert Gary Cooper and Rosalind Russell and you've got one of Frank Capra's lesser films.
  5. JCVD
    Van Damme's remarkable performance -- I say this in all seriousness -- comes pretty close to redeeming the picture's murky and overly complicated artistic intentions.
  6. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    I'm afraid that whoever it was in the New York Film Critics Circle who voted for The Hobbit as best animated film had a point. And so did the people who suspected that this whole thing was a bad idea.
  7. One Night at McCool's
    Should have been a quick and dirty pulp tall tale. But it pokes along instead of accelerating, and though it isn't exactly smug it's rather too pleased with its own manufactured outrageousness.
  8. Next Stop Wonderland
    Like too many young filmmakers, Anderson seems to equate honesty with choppy editing, bad lighting (so harsh in a couple of shots you can see the pancake on Davis' face) and herky-jerky camera movements.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Volcano
    A flatulent blast of superheated air from the seething bowels of Hollywood, features all the usual idiocies -- implausibility on an epic scale, bogus "human interest" elements, plot developments that offer all the surprises of a Bob Dole speech.
  10. Joe Gould's Secret
    Carefully made, respectful and dull.
  11. The Holiday
    The Holiday drags on for more than two hours, long enough for even the most ardent suitor to lose interest. The premise, so delectable at the start, quickly begins to feel tired and oversold.
  12. Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
    "Star Wars" fans deserve better.
  13. 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.
  14. Saved!
    The reality is that it's neither hip nor funny: Instead, it's excessively broad one minute and unctuously instructional the next.
  15. Stalingrad
    Viewed as cinema, it’s an unstable and almost surrealist combination of Soviet-style war propaganda film, Zack Snyder-style action flick and sentimental fairy tale.
  16. Poseidon
    An acceptably entertaining picture. At just 100 minutes long, it feels tight and trim, and unlike so many contemporary action pictures, it boasts only one ending, instead of three false ones. What's more, it's just as dumb as the original.
  17. Oz the Great and Powerful
    Saying that Raimi’s trip to Oz is adequate eye candy with a good heart isn’t the same thing as saying it’s actually good. I was charmed at some moments, profoundly bored by others and almost never felt genuinely excited or emotionally engaged.
  18. The Heat
    What is the point of making a movie that’s just like the dopiest, broadest and most reductive grade of guy-oriented comedy, except with women?
  19. Les Misérables
    At 2 hours and 20 minutes Les Miserables is an unholy slog. It's the sort of movie where, when a title pops up saying, "Ten Years Later," you sink down in your seat certain it's going to be 20 before you get the hell out of there.
  20. Sunshine Cleaning
    How you'll feel about Sunshine Cleaning probably depends on your tolerance for slender, semi-hip comedic dramas about oddball families grappling with sometimes overwhelming problems.
  21. Shine a Light
    It's a late-night infomercial masquerading as a concert movie, more an advertisement for vitality than a picture of vitality itself. There's something self-congratulatory, preening, about both the performance and the filmmaking.
  22. 15 Minutes
    Less a movie for intelligent moviegoers than a suggestion that we're all brainless chickens.
  23. The Switch
    Taken on its own terms, it's a light, sweet, curiously enjoyable misfit romance, whose real star is not Aniston but her magnificently awkward Lothario, Jason Bateman.
  24. Bulworth
    As a movie, it's a disaster. As political speech, it's imprecise, shrill and sometimes clichéd, but it's also alive.
  25. Pearl Harbor
    "Pearl Harbor" is exactly the kind of prestige project you'd expect from a director like Bay, hitting all its targets with plodding precision and never once achieving surprise.
  26. Lights in the Dusk
    So stylized and slow-moving (even at a spare 75 minutes) that you may have trouble adapting to its hypnotic rhythms -- but if you can, there are sumptuous visual rewards to be found, plus the faintest emotional uptick right at the end.
  27. Ruby Sparks
    It's mediocre and half-baked, with flashes of a potential good movie showing through here and there.
  28. Save the Last Dance
    For all its dumb clichés it offers the basic appeal of teen movies: the pleasure of watching kids be kids, acting as they do among themselves instead of how parents and teachers expect them to act.
  29. American Gangster
    Offers only the stingiest platform for its actors, and as a piece of storytelling -- built on the foundation of a great story -- it's an epic that's been sliced and diced into so many little morsels that almost nothing in it has any weight.
  30. Howl
    A very mixed bag. It's an oddly dry fusion of documentary and narrative film that arguably doesn't quite click on either level.
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