Salon's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Phantom
    In this classy, taut white-knuckler – largely shot inside a real-life decommissioned Soviet sub – Robinson asks us to consider more than the hypothetical possibility that the world nearly ended in 1968. He reminds us that we have no idea how many other near-misses may have happened in the behind-the-scenes history of the modern age and also, more troubling still, that long after the Cold War has faded into memory we continue to have difficulty telling the crazy people from the sane ones.
  2. Fantastic Four
    Fantastic Four doesn't expand on, or even illuminate, anything much beyond the most basic theme of what it feels like to be an adolescent misfit. This is a comic-book movie that actually makes an effort not to go over kids' heads.
  3. Sleepwalking
    There's loads of suffering in Sleepwalking, piled on until the picture almost becomes an unintentional comedy.
  4. Alexander
    Never have a great historical hero's accomplishments seemed so inconsequential, or so damned hard to figure out.
  5. Bulletproof Monk
    Lightweight but delightful martial-arts romp.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Clockstoppers
    What Clockstoppers achieves in acting and decent special effects, it undermines with weak dialogue and directing. The movie isn't bad; it just makes you wish that certain scenes could be hypertimed into oblivion.
  7. National Treasure
    Jon Voight shows up as Ben's daddy, and Harvey Keitel plays a devilishly goateed FBI agent: They're the only two actors who seem to have a sense of how ridiculous National Treasure is, but there's not enough of them to carry the picture.
  8. Shrink
    Shrink offers a roster of wonderfully eccentric characterizations, shoehorned into a dramatic structure that's just a little too formulaic.
  9. Pay It Forward
    No wonder Arlene (Hunt) keeps a bottle of vodka in the chandelier. You would too with this demonic, passive-aggressive, New Age munchkin (Osment) trying to run your life.
  10. Head in the Clouds
    It's fun, but it isn't believable for a minute.
  11. Jupiter Ascending
    It has the kind of jumbled, pseudo-spectacular, overdecorated digital design that the eye and mind can’t really take in. Individual shots can be gorgeous, but there are just too damn many of them, and the overall experience is the visual equivalent of eating an entire wedding cake.
  12. Trouble Every Day
    A haunting and terrifying film. It's also a film of wonderful spaces and silences.
  13. Deep Impact
    Deep Impact is the work of someone crass enough, and in some essential way mad enough, to try to turn the apocalypse into a tear-jerker.
  14. Wild Wild West
    A movie that's dazzling as you watch it and immediately unsatisfying afterward.
  15. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    A jumble of spare parts and leftover dialogue, as if it had been assembled out of unused bits of every movie where an unknown whatzit threatens our way of life and the government goes into full institutional pants-crapping panic mode.
  16. The Cell
    If The Cell were six minutes long it would blow your mind. At two hours, it's a disordered muddle of hellacious highs and pedestrian lows.
  17. Duets
    A simple entertainment that's by and large carried on the backs of its actors, some who are wonderful and others who are merely likable.
  18. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    The problem with “Wolverine” isn’t that the mythology is detailed and potentially confusing — you could say that about any number of movies based on comic books, even some of the good ones. The bigger issue is that “Wolverine” is so uninvolving that you might not care whether you remember what happened 10 minutes ago.
  19. Green Lantern
    For all the CGI action sequences and butt-rocking Dolby sound effects, in fact, Green Lantern is most satisfying when it sticks close to stodgy comic-book archetype.
  20. Angel Eyes
    Doesn't work at any level, but the total lack of chemistry between its central couple is fatal.
  21. The Change-Up
    It's occasionally funny and a lot painful.
  22. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights
    The plot construction here is especially lazy. The whole movie is built toward the dance competition.
  23. Clash of the Titans
    Unlike the original -- which, in a crazy stroke of genius, allowed Shakespearean thespians like Claire Bloom and Maggie Smith, plus Bond babe Ursula Andress, to mix it up as jealous goddesses -- the new Clash of the Titans is frightfully low on babes.
  24. The Green Hornet
    Entirely watchable and often pretty fun, in a mishmashed, patchy kind of way.
  25. Bait
    It's long. Long movies almost always mean the audience member has time to think, and in this context that's not a good thing.
  26. Bringing Down the House
    What's offensive in Bringing Down the House is the way the jokes have been calculated not to offend.
  27. Nights in Rodanthe
    The movie around Lane and Gere is unreal, a tortured construct, but they open a breathing space in its center.
  28. Man of the Year
    It's a comedy, a political thriller, a love story: Barry Levinson's Man of the Year tries to be all things to all people and fails on every count -- a little like the generic, ineffectual politicians it's pretending to excoriate.
  29. The Gunman
    It’s clearly a directorial accomplishment to assemble this level of acting talent in one movie and come away with something so – well, “bad” is not sufficient to capture the idiot glory of this motion picture.
  30. Daddy Day Care
    One of those comedies that "thinking" people tend to stay away from, but if you look beyond its admittedly aggressive marketing campaign, you can see that it was made with care and intelligence as well as a sense of fun. The pleasures it offers may be modest, but they're not negligible.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »