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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    • 38 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Confessions of a Shopaholic
    A loud, garish and very untimely romantic comedy.
  2. The International
    This is a thriller where the cutting, even in most of the action sequences, is meticulous but leisurely. The elaborate set pieces are so beautifully worked out that you could take them apart, shot by shot, and fit the pieces back together like an intricate Chinese puzzle.
  3. The Uninvited
    As is generally the case with Hollywood movies that use Asian horror films as their inspiration, the Guard brothers seem to have glanced at the original, borrowed a few images and then made the movie according to some preconceived template of what makes audiences jump -- instead of burrowing into the stuff that haunts our dreams.
  4. Taken
    The delirious and sometimes nasty little pleasures that Taken offers don't hinge as much on surprise as they do on the action (which is crisp and fast, with a minimum of computer enhancement) and on the story's unabashedly sentimental underpinnings.
  5. New in Town
    On second thought, maybe just about everyone should stay away from this drearily cheerful little picture that isn't nearly as funny or as heartwarming -- or even as topical, given the economic climate -- as it thinks it is.
  6. Inkheart
    Graced with so many fanciful touches and features such a marvelous assortment of U.K. and American actors that it seems almost unjust that the final product is so curiously lacking in magic.
  7. Notorious
    Surprisingly and pleasantly unflashy, a straightforward picture that makes a distinction between classiness and bling.
  8. Bride Wars
    It's both slack and bloated; I've been to Catholic wedding masses that had more zip. I think it clocked in at fewer than 90 minutes, but it seemed to last longer than most marriages do.
  9. Just Another Love Story
    You could call Just Another Love Story nothing more than an exercise in style, but A) Bornedal's got style to burn and B) that's not quite fair. Beneath all the dazzling cinematography, propulsive score and overcommitted acting, I found this movie an affecting, mordant comedy about male midlife crisis in its most extreme form.
  10. Silent Light
    It's amazingly beautiful and it tests your patience; both things are par for the course with Reygadas, After that, you've either surrendered to his idiosyncratic sense of rhythm, or you're out of there.
  11. Defiance
    Defiance comes off as plodding and workmanlike -- and even in the midst of Zwick's too-careful machinations, it's a movie that's unsure of what it wants to be.
  12. Revolutionary Road
    This is a movie about two people in pain; the last thing they need is for Mendes to turn his cool camera on them. But that's all Mendes knows how to do. He's a clinical director, and whatever feeling he puts into a movie is measured out in careful quarter-teaspoon increments.
  13. The Spirit
    Miller seems to have brought neither his brains nor his heart (both of which we know he's got) to this project. The style is willing. But the spirit is weak.
  14. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
    It's so almost moving -- a meticulously crafted mechanical bird -- that it nearly feels like the real thing.
  15. Marley & Me
    Marley & Me gets so much surprisingly right. It may be designed to reach a broad audience, but it doesn't pander.
  16. Valkyrie
    Neither a masterpiece nor an embarrassment, but a workmanlike picture that sits, inoffensively, in the middling space between.
  17. Waltz with Bashir
    The results, in my judgment, are stunning...and at certain moments during the film I wondered whether I had myself fallen asleep and was dreaming its hellish, haunted images.
  18. The Secret of the Grain
    Richly enjoyable and consistently surprising.
  19. Yes Man
    With Yes Man, Carrey has bled the well dry, doing everything he knows how to do, over and over again, just to prove that he still knows how to do it. It's exhilarating to see brilliance in a comic; but by the time you start smelling it, the game is over.
  20. The Class
    The Class is a lovely, exhilarating work about the ways in which failure and frustration can open the pathways through which we make sense out of life.
  21. Seven Pounds
    Overall Seven Pounds is too heavy-handed and maudlin to be comprehensible, let alone moving. The real shocker is that not even Smith can rescue it.
  22. The Wrestler
    Whatever Aronofsky did -- or didn't -- do, Rourke's performance comes off beautifully. The Wrestler may not be the "best" Aronofsky movie in any technical sense. But the director clearly feels a great deal of tenderness toward his lead character.
  23. The Day the Earth Stood Still
    A jumble of spare parts and leftover dialogue, as if it had been assembled out of unused bits of every movie where an unknown whatzit threatens our way of life and the government goes into full institutional pants-crapping panic mode.
  24. Doubt
    Shanley offers no resolution to this Sharks vs. Jets conflict. For that, we have to wait for "Doubt! The Musical."
  25. Gran Torino
    Until Gran Torino starts rumbling headlong toward its tone-deaf, self-serious ending -- the script is by Nick Schenk -- it's often enjoyable, satisfying and funny.
  26. Che
    I was never bored, in four hours-plus. Whether or not it ends up becoming a great film (or films), this is miles and miles beyond anything I thought Soderbergh could create from this material.
  27. The Reader
    The Reader feels weighty, all right; but it's an unsatisfying kind of weight, and Fiennes' presence, as the grown-up Michael, doesn't help much.
  28. Wendy and Lucy
    Reichardt is a tremendously conscientious filmmaker, and not out to torture the audience. Yes, this is a fraught and agonizing story, but the way it ends, although heartbreaking, is absolutely right.
  29. Frost/Nixon
    Howard has made a picture for grown-ups, a well-constructed entertainment that neither talks down to its audience nor congratulates it just for showing up.
  30. Cadillac Records
    Such an exhilarating, spirited piece of work that its embellishments and omissions cease to matter.
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