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. Dark Matter
    Dark Matter has neither the technical command of an art-house film nor the manufactured intensity of a grade-B thriller, yet it's also too cheap and dirty to feel like a Hollywood-scale drama.
  2. Be Cool
    Isn't assaultive or dumb, just slack and de-energized, as if its batteries start running down in the first frame.
  3. We Don't Live Here Anymore
    May be very much about feelings, but it's made with a drab, juiceless, tasteful efficiency that distances us from the characters instead of drawing us closer to them.
  4. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    Any film that begins with one of those fake-news montages, where snippets of genuine CNN footage are stitched together to concoct a feeling of semi-urgency around its hackneyed apocalypse, already sucks even before it gets started.
  5. Battleship
    Its shameless and nonsensical combination of ingredients finally won me over, after a fashion, when I realized that its gung-ho Navy-recruitment propaganda and retrograde gender politics shouldn't be taken any more seriously than the ZZ Top, AC/DC and Billy Squier songs on the soundtrack.
  6. Dreamgirls
    There's so little love to be found in Dreamgirls. It's a product that promises magic, and yet gives us nothing to live on.
  7. Where the Money Is
    Lacks any layers beyond its own amiable inconsequentiality. It needs the spark of the distinctively American slapstick craziness that has distinguished Frye's previous work.
  8. Diary of the Dead
    A limp and dreary experience, at least after you get past its intriguing premise. It's poorly written and woodenly acted, completely formulaic and hopelessly imprisoned by both its genre and finally its form.
  9. Mr. Deeds
    Utterly predictable, thoroughly sentimental and -- worse -- not all that funny. It makes your average episode of "Third Rock From the Sun" look like the edgy mutant offspring of John Waters and Ingmar Bergman.
  10. Ghosts of the Abyss
    James Cameron disgraces those who died on the Titanic -- again.
  11. King Arthur
    It's hard to care about a valiant groping for accuracy when a story is so badly told you can't tell what the devil is going on.
  12. Two Can Play That Game
    Ultimately feels somewhat overprocessed, and its humor is a little too broad at times -- it probably crosses the acceptable threshold of penis and boob jokes.
  13. Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
    I suspect this picture is pretty close to what fans were hoping for, and for their sake, I'm glad it's markedly better than the two that preceded it. But Revenge of the Sith is still crap.
  14. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    Lee Daniels’ The Butler is big, brave, crude and contradictory, very bad in places and very good in others, and every American should see it.
  15. Dallas Buyers Club
    Despite its clichéd elements, Dallas Buyers Club is a fierce celebration of the unpredictable power that belongs to the outcast, the despised, the pariah. That’s not a story of the ‘80s, it’s a story of always.
  16. Body of Lies
    Excessively intricate and extremely dull, the latest example of a filmmaker giving us a disjointed, overlong movie that’s unnecessarily confusing to follow.
  17. The Producers
    Watching The Producers is simply exhausting.
  18. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    You can choose to understand The Force Awakens as an embrace of the mythological tradition, in which the same stories recur over and over with minor variations. Or you can see it as the ultimate retreat into formula.... There are moments when it feels like both of those things, profound and cynical, deeply satisfying and oddly empty.
  19. The Stepford Wives
    The picture is mildly entertaining and stringently unoffensive (provided you're not a supersensitive upper-crusty type from Connecticut). Yet it has problems from the start.
  20. Black Knight
    Too bad it's not so funny. Almost every gag in Black Knight feels forced and contrived, as if the movie is desperate to squeeze laughs out of us.
  21. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    This initial “Mortal Instruments” picture has the vibe of a straight-to-video release from the mid-‘90s, except with a $60 million budget and considerable special-effects expertise.
  22. The Perfect Storm
    Its spectacular special effects threaten to swallow characters whole, and there are times when overwrought and clumsy dialogue... nearly pitch you right out of the movie's mood.
  23. A Knight's Tale
    Works neither as an exuberant rock 'n' roll picture nor as a heroic fable. It will rock you --straight to sleep.
  24. 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.
  25. Sex and the City
    Parker IS to blame for the self-consciousness of her performance. She spends much of the movie swanning, not acting: Nearly every movement, every gesture, seems conceived for the benefit of the camera, as opposed to the truth of the character.
  26. The Devil's Own
    The Devil's Own isn't the disaster its bad advance publicity might lead you to expect. But it's a disjointed, sluggish picture.
  27. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    So ends this enormously important, and enormously extended, chapter of pop culture, with a combination of bang and whimper.
  28. 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.
  29. Amélie
    The problem is that the charm and good spirits of Amélie feel calculated rather than natural.
  30. Bruce Almighty
    Unless you like boob jokes and preachy sentimentalism, this comedy isn't funny at all.
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