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 1.2 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. Oslo, August 31st
    It's a marvelously constructed personal journey, both wrenching and bittersweet, whose emotional ripple effects stay with you for days and weeks afterward.
  2. The Witch
    Like any truly successful horror film, The Witch operates on various levels at once and is open to interpretation.
  3. Looper
    I'm not ready to proclaim Looper a sci-fi masterpiece just yet; let's let it sit awhile. But it's a lean, mean, smart, violent picture with a bit of Stanley Kubrick edge, fueled by the terrific Gordon-Levitt.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Aliens
    The startling thing about "Aliens" is how obsessed it is with women as child bearers. It's the theme that allows the movie to have all the trappings of a typical science fiction/action movie while creating a primal emotive connection for the audience.
  5. Old Joy
    Old Joy is only 76 minutes long, but it has the contemplative power of Buddhist meditation. Reichardt gives us long, stoned takes of rural roads; shots of birds, insects and slugs in the spectacular Oregon rain forest; interludes with Mark's dog, Lucy. Some viewers may well be bored, or monumentally irritated, by this. I found it masterly, riveting.
  6. Momma's Man
    A highly unusual combination of craft, emotion and integrity.
  7. Ballast
    Ballast is an audacious and ambiguous debut from a filmmaker whose motives and aims are not as transparent as they seem.
  8. Volver
    Part noir-comedy, part ghost story, but it's mostly a potent reflection on how where we come from shapes us, in ways we can't understand until we've been away for a long, long while.
  9. The Descendants
    The Descendants is gentle, witty, audience-friendly entertainment for grown-ups, with a great performance by one of our biggest screen stars.
  10. Snowpiercer
    Politically provocative and visually spectacular Snowpiercer - the best action film of 2014, and probably the best film, period.
  11. Happy-Go-Lucky
    Leigh and his actors work mysterious magic in Happy-Go-Lucky. This is a movie about hitting the groove of everyday life and, nearly miraculously, getting music out of it.
  12. Shrek
    Am I alone in thinking that computer animation is the work of the antichrist?
  13. Dave Chappelle's Block Party
    At a time when our country feels divided to the point of cracking, Dave Chappelle's Block Party feels like a salve. It's a defiant act of optimistic patriotism.
  14. The Quiet American
    Noyce takes a great deal of care with this adaptation. For one thing, he includes as much of Greene's potent shorthand as he can without weighing the movie down.
  15. Weiner
    Mesmerizing documentary.
  16. Iraq in Fragments
    Alone among the works I've seen and read about Iraq in the last three years, Iraq in Fragments captures the tremendous complexity and variability of the country, offering neither facile hope nor fashionable despair.
  17. Mystic River
    Mystic River is hard-boiled beyond toughness: It's so tender the skin falls away from the bone. It's Eastwood's most soulful, and most organic, movie.
  18. The Cove
    What's so remarkable about Louie Psihoyos' documentary The Cove isn't just that it's a powerful work of agitprop that's going to have you sending furious e-mails to the Japanese Embassy on your way out of the theater. That's definitely true, but the effectiveness of The Cove also comes from its explosive cinematic craft, its surprising good humor and its pure excitement.
  19. The Waiting Room
    The Waiting Room is a source of both inspiration and hope. The system may be broken, but the people are not.
  20. Together
    Together is the kind of picture that makes you feel that there are many good reasons to actually LIKE mankind.
  21. 13 Assassins
    Visually spectacular, with wide-screen cinematography from Nobuyasu Kita, impressive, full-scale sets and special effects and exhausting, immersive action scenes, 13 Assassins is pretty nearly the samurai classic it sets out to become.
  22. Crazy Heart
    Bridges performance in Crazy Heart, for my money the finest male performance of the year, reels us right back to understanding why: Instead of dressing up words, he sends them out naked. It's everything he subtracts that matters.
  23. Goodbye, Dragon Inn
    Tsai Ming-Liang always makes you feel that there's a world of life beyond his movies -- a world populated by ghosts that are as real as we are.
  24. Local Hero
    Local Hero is as sweet and loving as movies get. But it's also about as off-kilter as they get, too.
  25. Adaptation.
    A highly enjoyable failure, a quandary that can't resolve itself.
  26. The Secret of the Grain
    Richly enjoyable and consistently surprising.
  27. Trainspotting
    The most original, daring, thrilling movie to be released this year, Trainspotting is one of those occasional, astonishing triumphs of risk and imagination that gets you excited about what smart people, pushing themselves and the medium, can accomplish in the movies.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Welcome to the Dollhouse
    Solondz's staunch commitment to depicting Dawn's humiliation sans sentimentality is honorable, and his eye for everyday human nastiness apt, but his intentions are rather cautious.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Graduate
    What was once an all-important signpost to adulthood is really little more than a simple romantic comedy whose "countercultural" message, insofar as it has one, is decidedly retrograde. [Review of re-release]
  30. The Wind Rises
    A work of immense mystery and strangeness, loaded with unforgettable images, spectacular sweeps of color and nested, hidden meanings. It feels to me like a meditative epic about Japan’s traumatic journey into modernity, and a complicated allegory about the innocence, arrogance and culpability of artists. It’s one of the most beautiful animated films ever made, and something close to a masterpiece.
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