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. The Master
    The Master is often spectacular and never less than handsome, and it has numerous moments of disturbing and almost electrical power. I can't say, after one viewing, that I found it moving or satisfying as a whole, but I'm also not sure it's supposed to be. This is an almost apocalyptic tale of thwarted emotion - love cut short - set in a pitiless land of delusions.
  2. Bachelorette
    I'm going to suggest, somewhat tentatively, that Bachelorette is most unlike "Bridesmaids" because it fundamentally isn't a comedy at all, but something closer to a dense, dark character drama tarted up in high heels and a short skirt and dosed with pills and coke.
  3. Keep the Lights On
    Not only does this film gloriously fulfill the potential that Ira Sachs has tantalized movie-lovers with for years, it also help explains what took him so long. Out of lost love comes a terrific work of art; it's the oldest story in the world, but it always feels new when it's done right.
  4. Hello I Must Be Going
    If it's too subtle (and too similar to several other low-key indie romcoms) to make a big splash, it's got lovely performances and really builds strength as it goes along.
  5. 2016: Obama's America
    One could and perhaps should use scare quotes around "intellectual" when it comes to someone who would crank out a piece of campaign-season partisan hackwork this crude and sloppy. (By this standard, James Carville looks like Immanuel Kant.)
  6. The Possession
    Moody and a little slow, with muted colors and a half-empty, alien-feeling suburban setting, Danish director Ole Bornedal's The Possession is a nifty end-of-summer gift for horror buffs.
  7. Lawless
    Lawless offers a compelling, gruesome and instructive time-travel exercise.
  8. Samsara
    It demands to be experienced on its own terms or not at all, which creates a significant level of resistance in the contemporary media marketplace – but may also be a source of counterintuitive appeal.
  9. Death by China
    Much of the argument Navarro assembles in Death by China is unassailable as to its basic facts, even if the tone and manner of presentation leave much to be desired.
  10. The Revenant
    It almost continuously gets darker, funnier and edgier as it goes along.
  11. Robot and Frank
    Robot & Frank is such a sly, dry, modest-seeming picture – part science fiction, part social satire, part geriatric comedy – that you don't realize how well it works until it's over.
  12. Hope Springs
    Hope Springs is an oddly ambitious blend of bland humor and startling insight into the realities of married life. It's something like Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage," as translated into the universe of the Lifetime Network.
  13. The Bourne Legacy
    A lean, clean killing machine that supplies some dark, late-summer thrills and chills and breathes new life into a seemingly extinct franchise.
  14. Sushi: The Global Catch
    Unlike most issue-oriented documentaries about the abundant idiocy of the human species and the imminent demise of our planet, Mark S. Hall's Sushi: The Global Catch offers foodies and sushi buffs a refreshing palate-cleanser before the parade of experts and the dire news reports.
  15. 360
    It's easy to hate movies that are abundantly terrible or immoral or stupid, but I almost feel like a jerk telling you that Fernando Meirelles' globetrotting drama 360 is a mistake from beginning to end.
  16. Total Recall (2012)
    Total Recall is a doggone good time, with a bunch of nifty technical and visual flourishes, competently managed plot twists and elegant, Wachowski-esque action choreography that eventually becomes deadening because there's just too much of it and it's dialed up too high.
  17. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    Klayman's riveting, vérité-style film captures this burly, bigger-than-life figure over the past three years, as his activism has heightened, his art has grown increasingly confrontational and he has deliberately blurred the distinction between aesthetics and politics.
  18. Planet of Snail
    This is a love story of uncommon loveliness and simplicity.
  19. Killer Joe
    Friedkin's still got it - the "it" being his ability to infuse every frame of the film with powerful ambiguity and doubt, and also his ability to attract terrific actors and propel them in unexpected directions.
  20. Ruby Sparks
    It's mediocre and half-baked, with flashes of a potential good movie showing through here and there.
  21. Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    With this sober, mournful, gorgeously mounted and marvelously acted drama, Miike connects himself to the greatest traditions of Japanese film and to the period of historical self-examination that followed the debacle of World War II. And he also crafts one hell of a fable of heroism.
  22. The Dark Knight Rises
    If The Dark Knight Rises is a fascist film, it's a great fascist film, and arguably the biggest, darkest, most thrilling and disturbing and utterly balls-out spectacle ever created for the screen. It's an unfriendly masterpiece that shows you only a little circle of daylight, way up there at the top of our collective prison shaft - but a masterpiece nonetheless.
  23. Easy Money
    Easy Money may well be the crime film of the year, or the decade.
  24. The Queen of Versailles
    Like a Theodore Dreiser novel for our time, infused with the vivid, vulgar spirit of reality TV. It often had the sold-out Eccles Center howling, but also has elements of profound tragedy and allegory.
  25. Ballplayer: Pelotero
    While "Ballplayer" is certainly unsettling, must-see viewing for baseball fans - a nonfiction follow-up to Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's outstanding 2009 feature "Sugar" - it's a vibrant tale, alive with color and texture, that's far more than a sports movie.
  26. Savages
    Savages is enjoyable in a way that's almost but not quite intentional camp; it's like eating a dinner made by a 7-year-old, with cake for every course, interspersed with Jell-O, Pepperidge Farm goldfish and chocolate sprinkles.
  27. The Amazing Spider-Man
    Pretty good summer flick!
  28. Beasts of the Southern Wild
    The point of watching the film, and the only reason to see it, is the experience of watching it, which sounds tautological or something, but is just true. It's a powerful visual and sonic creation with unforgettable characters, set in a heartache-inducing imaginary vision of American community, worlds away from hyper-technologized urban existence.
  29. Ted
    In a universe of Hollywood comedies that seem determined to insult the audience and pander to the basest form of post-adolescent fantasy, Ted feels almost sophisticated.
  30. Magic Mike
    Magic Mike is a fascinating film, one of his (Soderbergh's) best in recent years.
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