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 1.2 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
view
per page
  1. Fast Five
    Fast Five is a fantasy that in no way resembles real life; ordinary morality doesn't apply, and the audience knows that as well as the filmmakers do.
  2. Prom
    A would-be tween-oriented hit so scrubbed and sanitized and not worthy of paying attention to that it can barely be said to exist at all.
  3. 13 Assassins
    Visually spectacular, with wide-screen cinematography from Nobuyasu Kita, impressive, full-scale sets and special effects and exhausting, immersive action scenes, 13 Assassins is pretty nearly the samurai classic it sets out to become.
  4. Cave of Forgotten Dreams
    My first thought was: It's a temple, a church, a cathedral -- maybe the first one ever built -- and the better-known ones in Rome and Jerusalem and Istanbul are just later versions of the same thing.
  5. Stake Land
    Horror fans will celebrate Stake Land, and future horror-film directors should go to school on it. The flame is still burning -- and it keeps the undead away, at least for a while.
  6. Water for Elephants
    You know how they say to find one thing and do one thing well? Well, Pattinson's thing is glowering. It doesn't help matters that the movie itself is so painfully mediocre.
  7. Square Grouper
    If "Cocaine Cowboys" was an epic, ironic yarn of murder and madness and the building of a boomtown built largely on drug money, Square Groupers is a more rueful tale.
  8. Armadillo
    It's a brilliant work of cinema, a nonfiction film as intense and visceral as any drama, and an emotional and moral experience that feels horrifying and exhilarating at almost the same moment.
  9. Scream 4
    It's almost really cool, without quite being really cool.
  10. Arthur
    Misfires on multiple levels but isn't all that terrible.
  11. Hanna
    Hanna is almost a terrific movie, or a partly terrific one, but all its giddy, improvised wonder resolves into nothing more than a ruthless, symmetrical story about a murderous monster.
  12. Your Highness
    Gingival surgery would be more fun than watching this brain-draining, spirit-sucking attempt at a stoner spoof, which combines the cutting edge of frat-boy wit, the excitement of a mid-'80s made-for-TV action flick and the authenticity of a Renaissance Faire held in an abandoned field behind a Courtyard by Marriott.
  13. Meek's Cutoff
    In this quiet, beautiful and terrifying fable about a group of lost pioneers, Reichardt combines epic ambition with a focus on intimate, personal detail.
  14. Rubber
    Mostly it's got a barely tolerable level of metaness.
  15. Source Code
    Everything we learn about Stevens and Christina and Goodwin by the end of the film comes from their actions, not their words. That lends Source Code an elusive, almost arty shimmer beneath its glossy, action-movie surface.
  16. Insidious
    The pleasant surprise when you actually watch Insidious is that it turns out to be a moderately effective suburban-family creep show, majorly in debt to "Poltergeist" and "The Exorcist" and capturing at least a little of their spirit.
  17. Super
    Super is occasionally brilliant, sometimes awful and terribly confusing overall.
  18. Sucker Punch
    Sucker Punch doesn't all work by a long shot, but it confirms my sense that Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.
  19. Miral
    It isn't the shifting narrative focus of Miral that's the problem, nor is it the purposefully provocative pro-Palestinian perspective. It's Jebreal's screenplay, which uses every scene as a vehicle for delivering news headlines or condensed political rhetoric, and seems incapable of capturing a specific emotion or an individual personality.
  20. The Lincoln Lawyer
    It's rare enough to see a Hollywood movie made with this much attention and personality, let alone one that balances comedy and darkness as well as this one does.
  21. Paul
    The hit-to-miss gag ratio is atrocious, and we spend most of the movie hanging out with these borderline-agreeable characters, waiting for something to happen.
  22. Limitless
    Begins as pseudo-realism before descending into weird and mangled wank-job fantasy.
  23. Jane Eyre
    Jane Eyre is a passionate, impossible love story, one of the most romantic ever told. But it's also a cold, wild story about destruction, madness and loss, and this movie captures its divided spirit like none before.
  24. Battle: Los Angeles
    Reasonably effective.
  25. Red Riding Hood
    It's strange and stupid and half-compelling and sometimes beautiful.
  26. Take Me Home Tonight
    I don't begrudge Take Me Home Tonight or the whole "I Love the Eighties" juggernaut its fight for its right to party, but there is something touchingly off-base about it.
  27. The Adjustment Bureau
    Nolfi's dialogue is lean and often funny, while Damon and Blunt play appealing and clearly delineated characters drawn together by the kind of old-fashioned romantic passion you don't often see in contemporary movies.
  28. Rango
    It's hyperactive, often hilarious and ultimately exhausting.
  29. Of Gods and Men
    What he (Beauvois) conveys, through austere but spectacular visual language, magnificent liturgical singing and an ensemble cast headed by the terrific French veteran actors Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale, is something of the "why."
  30. Hall Pass
    Compared to, say, your average Adam Sandler movie it's a master class in film comedy. Oh, you will laugh. You may not forgive yourself for it easily, but you will laugh. You may well laugh to the point of pee stains in your underthings, and if you think that's gratuitous you have no idea.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »