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 1.4 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. The Possession
    Moody and a little slow, with muted colors and a half-empty, alien-feeling suburban setting, Danish director Ole Bornedal's The Possession is a nifty end-of-summer gift for horror buffs.
  2. Miral
    It isn't the shifting narrative focus of Miral that's the problem, nor is it the purposefully provocative pro-Palestinian perspective. It's Jebreal's screenplay, which uses every scene as a vehicle for delivering news headlines or condensed political rhetoric, and seems incapable of capturing a specific emotion or an individual personality.
  3. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides
    Marshall delivers old-fashioned swashbuckling action-movie thrills more than computer-engineered grotesquerie.
  4. By the Sea
    The result is something like a weepy Lifetime melodrama told in the languorous, self-indulgent style of European art cinema, as if Michelangelo Antonioni or Bernardo Bertolucci had wound up in debt to multiple ex-wives and were forced to churn out straight-to-cable movies, circa 1986.
  5. The Paperboy
    While the portrayal of Southern race relations in the '60s is less central here than in "The Help," it's also less labored and earnest, and one could argue that it's subtler, more intimate and more honest.
  6. Click
    I don't think any of it really hangs together as anything resembling drama, or that Michael is ever a remotely likable character, before or after his day of reckoning. But Adam Sandler didn't get where he is today by making movies for me and Roger Ebert to like.
  7. Blindness
    An extended metaphor for the condition of man, and boy is it extended. In the course of two hours that crawl by like four and a half.
  8. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Might have been a lavish, silly entertainment. In places it comes close, but no sheaf of tobacco.
  9. Pride and Glory
    What makes the characters in Pride and Glory real -- and raises the movie above the standard corrupt-cop fare -- is their capacity to live and die in shades of gray.
  10. Sweet Home Alabama
    A good-natured but massively flawed little comedy.
  11. Taken 2
    Luc Besson and Liam Neeson and the rest of the furriners who made the inept and offensive Taken 2 don't seem to have gotten the memo from Jason Bourne: Americans don't think our spooks are good guys anymore.
  12. Hall Pass
    Compared to, say, your average Adam Sandler movie it's a master class in film comedy. Oh, you will laugh. You may not forgive yourself for it easily, but you will laugh. You may well laugh to the point of pee stains in your underthings, and if you think that's gratuitous you have no idea.
  13. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift
    The problem with contemporary Hollywood isn't that so many of the movies it's churning out are based on formula; it's that so many directors take perfectly good formulas and wreck them with bad filmmaking.
  14. Vanilla Sky
    Who would have thought that Cameron Crowe had a movie as bad as Vanilla Sky in him? It's a punishing picture, a betrayal of everything that Crowe has proved he knows how to do right.
  15. The Statement
    A stiff, clunky piece of work that never builds up urgency or tension. The script, by playwright Ronald Harwood, who wrote the script for Roman Polanski's "The Pianist," is close to atrocious.
  16. Home Fries
    A movie comedy that manages to be consistently funny without becoming assaultive, and that remains consistently sweet-tempered even at its most macabre, isn't so common that we can refuse this one's modest pleasures.
  17. Elizabethtown
    Elizabethtown is a sprawl, perhaps the victim of a kind of ADD of the heart.
  18. The Situation
    An uneven but impressively ambitious picture.
  19. Surrogates
    Surrogates stays afloat by not taking itself too seriously, but also by recognizing that a movie about robots shouldn't look as if it were made by one.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 40 Reviewed by
      Max Cea
    Snatched
    There are a few strong bits in Snatched — the best of them centering around Joan Cusak as a silent ex-special ops agent — and the film is well-paced. But as Hawn’s Linda should have learned, this time around Amy Schumer isn’t worth leaving the house for.
  21. Meet the Browns
    Meet the Browns, like the rest of Tyler Perry's movies and plays, will find its audience. His talent lies in knowing what people will buy. He's a marketer, not a filmmaker.
  22. Full Frontal
    Aside from a few well-shaped moments from some of the actors, the editing is about the only thing that keeps your mind occupied in Full Frontal -- and any good editor will tell you that's a problem.
  23. EuroTrip
    Works if you just give yourself over to its exuberant silliness.
  24. Descent
    It's a lot like a '70s exploitation movie, with its determination to seduce and shock the viewer with alternating currents of electrical stimulus, and its weird combination of arty arch-decadence and neo-Victorian moralizing.
  25. Mean Machine
    I'm not sure Mean Machine is any worse than "The Longest Yard," but it lacks the nihilistic '70s background that lent the latter's combination of humor and brutality an air of (arguably bogus) social commentary.
  26. The Kid
    Perfectly acceptable entertainment in the Mouse Factory's most familiar vein.
  27. S.W.A.T.
    Seems best suited to all the couch-potato swinging dicks who get off watching the police on "Cops" keep the public safe from people in possession of marijuana.
  28. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
    There's a pleasantly malevolent ridiculousness hovering around How to Lose a Guy. But the movie would have been so much better if it had jumped into its mean-spiritedness with gusto and passion, instead of just splashing around in it halfheartedly.
  29. The Scorpion King
    The Scorpion King, so far from perfect it isn't funny, is nevertheless one of those movies that catches you up in something bigger than yourself, namely, an archetypal desire to enjoy good trash every now and then.
  30. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    This is a really lively, fun and high-spirited comedy. If you leave after half an hour.
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