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. Food, Inc.
    An engaging and often wrenching film, Food, Inc. covers a wide range of material, including the horrific, the humorous and the exemplary.
  2. Tetro
    Certainly it isn't the greatest of Coppola's pictures, or even of his independent productions, but those are pretty high standards. It has a verve and vitality that's been missing from his pictures for 25 years, and its various and visible flaws all result from too much of that verve rather than too little. I enjoyed it tremendously.
  3. The Hangover
    The Hangover is a shaggy-dog tale that's actually, when you step back from it, perfectly shaped.
  4. Away We Go
    An exploration of self-absorption that is itself too self-absorbed to be either entertaining or enlightening.
  5. Land of the Lost
    Land of the Lost isn't a terrible movie. It's merely a perplexing one: Who is this thing for?
  6. Unmistaken Child
    Unmistaken Child stands above most others in offering us an intimate look at Tibetan Buddhism in action, with no external commentary or narration.
  7. Up
    Save for a few inspired canine gags and a handful of very pretty visual details, Up left me cold. Its charms appear to have been applied with surgical precision; by the end, I felt expertly sutured, but not much else.
  8. Drag Me to Hell
    Unlike so much contemporary horror, it's devoid of sadism and mean-spiritedness. The looseness Raimi allows himself here results in an especially joyous kind of filmmaking, the sort where the filmmaker's delight in scaring us (and making us laugh) becomes part of the movie's fabric.
  9. Pontypool
    Pontypool is something like a claustrophobic, locked-in-the-barn zombie movie, only almost without zombies.
  10. What Goes Up
    Director and co-writer Jonathan Glatzer handles his talented cast well, and the movie is dark, droll and sentimental in roughly the correct proportions. Worth a look.
  11. Terminator Salvation
    Terminator Salvation has no brains and no soul; it's just a mass of stiff, creaking metal joints. Clearly, the machines have won.
  12. Angels & Demons
    Might have been classy, entertaining junk -- if only it were entertaining.
  13. The Brothers Bloom
    High-style goofballing and globetrotting can get you pretty far, but maybe not as far as Johnson wants us to go.
  14. Big Man Japan
    Matsumoto isn't the first Japanese director to go all meta on the superhero tradition (consider also Takashi Miike's 2004 "Zebraman"), but this work of improbable lunacy may well max out the genre.
  15. Jerichow
    Told in lean, tense cinematic gestures, Jerichow also captures a social portrait of newly multicultural Germany, at least as it extends into the country's forgotten rural interior.
  16. Management
    Management is ultimately undone by its own bland idiosyncrasies. It's nothing but a mismanaged opportunity.
  17. Summer Hours
    The magic of Summer Hours is that even in its elusiveness, it gives us something to hang onto.
  18. Star Trek
    An affectionate, exuberant picture that seeks to bring even those who don't know Klingon from Portuguese into the embrace of a pop-culture phenomenon.
  19. Revanche
    Austrian director Spielmann has long awaited discovery by a wider world, and for my money the gorgeous, brooding, unpredictable neo-noir Revanche is one of the year's best films.
  20. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    The problem with “Wolverine” isn’t that the mythology is detailed and potentially confusing — you could say that about any number of movies based on comic books, even some of the good ones. The bigger issue is that “Wolverine” is so uninvolving that you might not care whether you remember what happened 10 minutes ago.
  21. Obsessed
    Takes far too long to get cooking, and it works so hard at NOT being exploitation that it loses sight of its reasons for existing in the first place.
  22. The Soloist
    A triumphant movie about failure.
  23. Tyson
    Tyson does succeed in humanizing a deeply troubled individual who has been depicted as an almost animalistic stereotype of African-American manhood.
  24. Earth
    There's nothing in Earth that's as moving as the sight of the mother penguin "grieving" for her chick in "March of the Penguins." You can applaud Earth for not jerking tears. On the other hand, an occasional tear isn't such a bad thing.
  25. State of Play
    An intelligent adult thriller about the death of newspapers.
  26. Crank: High Voltage
    In Crank: High Voltage, Statham just looks miserable, as if appearing in this lousy picture just sucked all the heart right out of him.
  27. 17 Again
    It's often breezily entertaining.
  28. Every Little Step
    Given that "Chorus Line" is almost the paradigmatic backstage story, I guess Every Little Step is a meta-backstage story, capturing the "American Idol"-scale audition process.
  29. Lemon Tree
    Something like a cross between a torn-from-the-headlines docudrama, a Middle East conflict rendered in miniature and Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," this latest film from the terrific Israeli director Eran Riklis revolves around the amazing lead performance of Palestinian-French actress Hiam Abbass.
  30. Anvil! The Story of Anvil
    From the too-good-to-be-true desk comes this loving and hilarious portrait of Spinal Tap-esque Canadian metal band Anvil, who were briefly a hard-rock sensation in the early '80s (mainly for the song "Metal on Metal") and have been struggling along in total obscurity ever since.
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