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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    • 52 Metascore
    • 10 Critic Score
    The Fifth Element
    As you sit through the interminable two-hours-plus that constitute The Fifth Element -- a colossally stupid, overbearingly pompous new movie by Luc Besson -- you can expect to become acquainted with boredom on the most elemental level.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 20 Critic Score
    Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
    Without a genuinely charming central character to pull it together, the movie is a shamble of tedious passages punctuated by a few desultory chuckles.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Children of the Revolution
    Children of the Revolution won't leave its audiences weak with laughter, but it should have the most perceptive among them arguing in the aisles.
  4. Irma Vep
    Slinky, smart and funny, Irma Vep doesn't send up that sticky-sweet incense smell you usually get in movies about the joy of cinema-with-a-capital-C. It's a languorous love ballad, and a daring one, about the way moving pictures move, the way they hold light, the way they steal from us when we're not looking.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Romy and Michele's High School Reunion
    As lightweight as it is, it's easy to feel real affection for the movie.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Volcano
    A flatulent blast of superheated air from the seething bowels of Hollywood, features all the usual idiocies -- implausibility on an epic scale, bogus "human interest" elements, plot developments that offer all the surprises of a Bob Dole speech.
  7. Grosse Pointe Blank
    As black comedies go, Grosse Pointe Blank is just sort of gray.
  8. Chasing Amy
    The only romantic comedy in quite a while that acknowledges, even celebrates, the fact that love and sex are emotional anarchy.
  9. The Saint
    This Saint is a glum piece of post-Cold War paranoia, and director Phillip Noyce approaches it with the same plodding earnestness he brought to his Tom Clancy adaptations ("Patriot Games," "A Clear and Present Danger").
  10. 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.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Crash
    The astonishing thing, however, is how pleasantly hypnotic the film is -- despite the fact that its subject is confined to peculiarly gruesome sex.
  12. Private Parts
    The real surprise of Private Parts is that it isn't very funny. It's a flat piece of work with long, slack stretches.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Daytrippers
    Daytrippers is so well-crafted that you may make it more than halfway through before wondering whether the story will sustain any lasting emotional power. It does -- but not in the way you think it's going to.
  14. Donnie Brasco
    You wouldn't mistake Donnie Brasco for a great movie or an important one, but it's something that's become almost as rare in American movies: a consistently absorbing and intelligent adult entertainment.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Smilla's Sense of Snow
    It doesn't help that Julia Ormond -- perhaps the most un-Smilla-like actress walking the planet -- is cast in the starring role. She gives a competent performance, but she looks like Nancy Drew's pert-nosed cousin who somehow got trapped while sleuthing inside a snow globe, not the prickly, androgynous warrior Smilla is meant to be.
  16. Lost Highway
    Here, Lynch has traded some of his disturbing originality for noir formula and schticky weirdness.
  17. Absolute Power
    The embodiment of every conservative paranoid's slathering fantasies about Paula Jones, Vince Foster and Whitewater.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    SubUrbia
    Linklater gets great performances from his young cast, and you'll find yourself thinking about the characters and their travails well after the movie's finish.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Fierce Creatures
    Mostly smart enough to stick to pure farce and let its animals take care of their own rights. It's a charming diversion, and it treads lightly even when it has something weightier on its mind.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Prefontaine
    This is filmmaking in a higher-IQ Disney style, frequently verging on terminal sappiness, all heart-quickening-guitar-music, coming-around-the-last-turn, legs-pumping-toward-glory stuff.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Albino Alligator
    Could have been a decent psychological portrait; it ends up being a fairly weak thriller.
  22. The People vs. Larry Flynt
    "Larry Flynt" should have a slick, whorish look, but there's no juice in Forman's sleaze. Hustler's centerfolds look like Renoirs next to the cold-eyed way Forman shoots women's bodies.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Evita
    Lloyd Webber is everything loud, dumb and tiresome, and everything loud, dumb and tiresome in Evita is him.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beavis and Butt-Head Do America
    There are some yucks in this ludicrous movie, but what was amusingly imbecilic at 20 inches becomes simply simian at 20 feet. To paraphrase SCTV's fishing louts, some things just don't blow up real good.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Mars Attacks!
    It turns out to be more a throwaway piece of pop ephemera, like a '90s "Casino Royale," momentarily arresting and soon forgotten.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Citizen Ruth
    Citizen Ruth takes such pains not to take sides that it doesn't have any fun. Each faction gets the same amount of screen time, yells at the same volume, is equally unpleasant.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Sling Blade
    It's Thornton's rough and nuanced performance as Karl, not his modest filmmaking skills, that sucks you so quickly into Sling Blade's vortex.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The English Patient
    Minghella, by brilliantly editing the romantic scenes down to a few jagged, archetypal moments, captures something of the sacred whirlwind.
  29. Ransom
    The 1996 kidnap drama Ransom traverses the parameters of public life in America, from the image public figures present to us to the image they never intended us to see. Neither one tells the whole truth. Luckily, Ransom isn't content with surfaces..
  30. Romeo + Juliet
    It would be destined for the trash heap of Shakespeare adaptations, if not for its female lead, and its heart, 17-year-old Claire Danes.
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