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. Boyhood
    In its own quiet way, it’s a world of marvels.
  2. Army of Shadows
    Not just one of the great films of the '60s but one of the great films, period -- and the chance to discover it at the beginning of the 21st century, in an era when we think we've seen it all, is an unquantifiable privilege.
  3. The Rules of the Game
    Like the very greatest artists in all media -- here I go with the meaningless superlatives again -- Renoir was able to transcend his own perspective, his own prejudices, and glimpse something of the terror and wonder of human life, the pain of misapplied or rejected love, for rich as for poor.
  4. Pan's Labyrinth
    This is a true fairy tale, and one of the finest fantasy pictures ever made, but please do not take your young children to see it unless you want them to be scarred for life.
  5. Some Like It Hot
    If Some Like It Hot isn’t the funniest movie ever made, you can’t blame it for not trying. The first time you see Billy Wilder’s 1959 farce, you might not believe that anything can make you laugh so hard for so long. Where most comedies wear out their audience after an hour and a half, “Some Like It Hot” goes on for 122 minutes and leaves you ebullient.
  6. The Third Man
    What has perhaps been lost over the years, however, is the cultural freshness and vitality of Reed’s masterpiece...The Third Man is important not just because of its technique but because of its theme.
  7. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Despite their terrible ordeal these women are heroes, not victims. As Mungiu makes clear in the casual, brilliant final scene of this amazing movie, heroes persevere.
  8. Battleship Potemkin
    Battleship Potemkin is first and foremost an action drama, a work of straightforward emotion and pulse-quickening tension.
  9. Spirited Away
    It will disturb you as much as thrill you, make you wonder whether the boundaries between life and death, reality and fantasy, imagination and insanity are ever what they appear to be.
  10. Killer of Sheep
    In all honesty, Burnett's writing can be stiff and the acting in Killer of Sheep is indifferent. But the reason to see this film does not lie in the dialogue.
  11. Breathless
    It's a thrilling and sometimes maddening experience that raises more questions than it can answer. Its legacy and range of influence are enormous, but let's not pretend it's all to the good.
  12. 12 Years a Slave
    12 Years a Slave offers no false Hollywood catharsis along with its muted happy ending, because we’re not free from the curse of slavery yet. Looking at it, as it really was, is a start.
  13. A Hard Day's Night
    It's 85 minutes of screen time that represents one crystallized moment not in the Beatles' career per se but in the parallel career they forged inside all of us, the one that will last beyond any breakup, retirement or death.
  14. Ratatouille
    Bird is one of the great modern animators -- as well as an astonishingly gifted filmmaker, period -- precisely because he doesn't set out to wow us.
  15. Gravity
    While the tension never lets up for a second, how you respond to the boundary-fudging and wildly improbable ending of Gravity – meaning both how it makes you feel and how you interpret it – will determine whether you think the movie is a genuine pop masterpiece or a canny artifice. Maybe there’s no difference.
  16. The Bride of Frankenstein
    Film scholars and queer-theory types will long argue over the intricacies of Whale's Bride as a study of artistic creation and an acidic fable of homoerotic love, but for fans it's simply the most beautiful horror film ever made.
  17. The Social Network
    All I can say about Timberlake's performance as the thoroughly odious, desperately seductive, textbook-case metrosexual Parker is that he brings so much reptilian fun that he unbalances the movie, almost fatally.
  18. I Am Not Your Negro
    It’s an enormously resonant work of cultural history that should do much to renew attention to the lonely, prophetic voice of James Baldwin.
  19. Amour
    This is an unforgettable love story set at the close of day, as tragic and beautiful in its way as "Tristan und Isolde," and a portrait of the impossible beauty and fragility of life that will yield new experiences to every viewer and every viewing.
  20. The Hurt Locker
    The drawback is that even though The Hurt Locker is extremely effective in places, it ultimately feels unformed and somewhat unfinished.
  21. Zero Dark Thirty
    A sweeping and magnificent work of cinematic craft, by far the best film of Bigelow's career.
  22. A Separation
    Something close to a contemporary masterwork, and maybe the best foreign-language film of the year, right at the tail end.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Double Indemnity
    Double Indemnity is full of tense, gritty pleasures, including one of Robinson's strongest bulldog-style turns. But Stanwyck holds the brassy key to its success. She was that Hollywood rarity -- a thoroughly unsentimental big star.
  24. WALL-E
    The picture feels weirdly, and disappointingly, disjointed, something that starts out as poetry and ends as product.
  25. Carol
    Carol is one of the greatest American screen romances of any era, period – and perhaps that serves as the ultimate vindication of Haynes’ outspoken commitment to “queer cinema.”
  26. Yi Yi
    Quietly overwhelming.
  27. Mr. Turner
    Mr. Turner is a rich, ruthless and profoundly compassionate study of life and love and art, for those who find themselves on its wavelength, but it also presents itself as a challenge.
  28. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
    There's so much dreamy beauty in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon that it's almost like a narcotic.
  29. Stop Making Sense
    Stop Making Sense is so beautifully choreographed that in some ways it's more like theater than a rock show. [Review of re-release]
  30. Inside Out
    It’s a lovely film that requires a little patience and a friendly disposition, and may be too low-impact to thrive amid a summer of grotesquely overengineered sequels.
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