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. Prisoners
    Don’t get me wrong, I like trash just fine, and the twisty-loo, triple-abduction plot of Prisoners certainly kept me watching to the end. (You’ll figure out some of screenwriter Aaron Guzikowski’s plot twists, but not all of them.) It’s the imitation-David Fincher pretentiousness that gets on my nerves.
  2. Shopgirl
    There's so little sexual chemistry between the actors in this film that it seems like a kind of accomplishment. I've seen shows on C-SPAN that were hotter than this.
  3. All About Steve
    Just when you think your jaw can't drop any lower in appalled amazement, comes a romantic comedy so lunkheaded and ill-conceived that it makes your average, idiotic Kate Hudson-Matthew McConaughey outing look like the reincarnation of Hepburn and Grant.
  4. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    Seriously, this is one of the strangest and most painful films in recent memory.
  5. Eyes Wide Shut
    Kubrick's much-anticipated final film boils down to the most elaborate monogamy lecture ever.
  6. Absolute Power
    The embodiment of every conservative paranoid's slathering fantasies about Paula Jones, Vince Foster and Whitewater.
  7. 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.
  8. A Beautiful Mind
    It's not just our emotions that are being played on here, it's not just our intelligence being insulted because of Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman's presumption that we won't have any interest in a character whom it's not always possible to like. It's John Nash's life, being turned into an Oscar machine and an easy way to jerk tears.
  9. War of the Worlds
    Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.
  10. Crime and Punishment in Suburbia
    Even dressed up in tabloid lighting and cut with jagged edits, this pulp nihilism never goes beyond daytime TV banality.
  11. Harrison's Flowers
    The fact that its sound and photography are gracefully crafted, or that fragments of a tolerable film are visible here and there, only makes its dumb-ass, romance-novel version of tragedy worse. This is one of the most badly botched mainstream movies I've seen in years.
  12. The Watcher
    It stinks pretty bad, but not so bad you'd go out of your way to avoid it.
  13. The Women
    The whole vibe is so shrill and frantic that the truly accomplished actresses, like Bening and Bergen, are left to flounder. The less nuanced ones -- that would be you, Debra Messing -- are, to use the idiom of the movie, as pleasant to watch as a bikini wax is to feel.
  14. A Little Bit of Heaven
    A moment of silence, please, for Kate Hudson's career.
  15. The Butterfly Effect
    It's like receiving a box of Valentine's chocolates in which someone has deliberately hidden ground glass. Flee.
  16. World Traveler
    It's hard to remember a movie that has asked us to care, without giving us reason to, about a character who is so thoroughly and relentlessly a prick.
  17. Jawbreaker
    Despite all their seamed stockings and Wonder Bras, the Reagan High girls are as far removed from their sexuality as Jawbreaker is from comedy.
  18. The Last Song
    Maybe I'm expecting too much of Cyrus. But The Last Song rests heavily on her alleged appeal, and I can't remember the last time I came across such a singularly charmless teenage performer. I hesitate to even use the word "actress."
  19. All the King's Men
    Both the performance and the movie around it are virtually incomprehensible.
  20. Drowning Mona
    The movie is flat-footed, and the pacing gives you time to rest between laughs.
  21. The Bucket List
    Any moron can make a bad movie. But it takes a special breed of schemer to make a picture as shameless as The Bucket List.
  22. Urban Legends: Final Cut
    Predictable, gratuitous and just self-referential enough to believe itself hip and knowing.
  23. Reindeer Games
    Ben Affleck provides a charismatic star turn, but John Frankenheimer's out-of-season heist thriller is dead on arrival.
  24. Nanny McPhee
    There's nothing offhand or spontaneous-feeling about Nanny McPhee; it's a highly mechanical piece of work, and its potentially delightful details are wasted.
  25. Sorority Boys
    They don't even look as if they're having fun. Their stint as cross-dressers is simply an endurance test for them, and for us.
  26. Shoot 'Em Up
    The picture is just a catalog of strained camera moves and preprogrammed gags, with no wit or style.
  27. Where the Heart Is
    Portman and Judd aren't responsible for the mendacious and finally repulsive sentimentality of Where the Heart Is, but by the end their wholesome glow seemed contaminated by it, and that's a shame.
  28. Piñero
    A sustained piece of showboating mythmaking, and something of a snow job.
  29. Titanic
    Cameron manhandles the real story, scavenging it for his own puny narrative purposes. It's a film made with boorish confidence and zero sensitivity, big and dumb and hulking.
  30. Collateral Damage
    Quickly plunges into boggy terrain from which it can never extricate itself.
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