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. Hunger
    Hunger is a mesmerizing 96 minutes of cinema, one of the truly extraordinary filmmaking debuts of recent years. It's also an uneasy, unsettling experience and is meant to be.
  2. Transporter 3
    Statham isn't an actor who coasts, not even in a recklessly enjoyable picture like Transporter 3. He does the work, so we don't have to: His Frank Martin is the personification of pleasure without guilt.
  3. Four Christmases
    Gordon's best not-so-secret weapons, though, are his two stars: Vaughn and Witherspoon are an inspired pairing, not least because they're such a mismatched set of salt-and-pepper shakers.
  4. Milk
    I can admire the professional flexibility that leads Van Sant from slow-motion, half-experimental works like "Paranoid Park" or "Last Days" to an inspirational, Oscar-season package like Milk, but I wish he could split the difference between his two modes more effectively.
  5. Bolt
    Bolt is just too knowing; it keeps reminding us, loud and clear, of how culturally savvy it is.
  6. Twilight
    Hardwicke still manages to find the sweet spot where Gothic literature and the iPod meet and make goo-goo eyes at each other. Without embarrassment, she and screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg dig right into the almost generic simplicity of the story.
  7. The Betrayal - Nerakhoon
    More than anything, The Betrayal is a cinematic essay about family and loss and home, one that's ironic and elegiac in tone and requires some patience.
  8. Harvard Beats Yale 29-29
    A ripping good yarn, like a Fitzgerald short story rewritten by John Updike, with an uproarious, impossible Hollywood ending.
  9. Australia
    I left Australia feeling drained and weakened, as if I'd suffered a gradual poisoning at the hands of a mad scientist.
  10. Quantum of Solace
    Craig never overreaches, and yet he accomplishes the unthinkable. He's not the Bond we ever asked for or hoped for, yet he's reimagined the character in ways we never could have foreseen. He's Bond with soul.
  11. A Christmas Tale
    The Vuillards are not an easy family, and A Christmas Tale is not an easy movie. But by the end, what Desplechin has given us -- in his own inexplicable way, which is sometimes meandering and sometimes piercingly direct, and sometimes both at once -- is a benediction.
  12. Eden
    Thrumming with anguish and erotic vitality, Eden paints a heartbreaking portrait of a newly affluent country (freed from dour priests, whiskey-soaked revolutionaries and shawl-clad women) afflicted with emotional growing pains.
  13. House of the Sleeping Beauties
    A self-indulgent and icky film, but reasonably well made and undeniably addictive.
  14. We Are Wizards
    It's highly enjoyable even if (like me) you're not much of a Potterphile.
  15. Slumdog Millionaire
    The real star of the film is not a person but a city, the vertiginous, exciting, massively overcrowded "maximum city" of Mumbai. On one hand, this environment of Dickensian, almost hallucinatory contrasts between rich and poor, good and evil feels perfect for Danny Boyle.
  16. Role Models
    Isn't as uproarious as it pretends to be. The foul language, the constant repetition of words like the aforementioned "boobies" -- look, they've even got me doing it -- doesn't feel daring or cathartic, only canned.
  17. JCVD
    Van Damme's remarkable performance -- I say this in all seriousness -- comes pretty close to redeeming the picture's murky and overly complicated artistic intentions.
  18. The Boy in the Striped Pajamas
    Watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, it struck me that weaving a touching little tale about a death-camp friendship is actually a pretty bad way to teach kids about the Holocaust.
  19. Soul Men
    Couldn't be more unhip -- it just never hits the groove.
  20. Zack and Miri Make a Porno
    The jokes are forced, almost mechanical, in their crudeness.
  21. Pride and Glory
    What makes the characters in Pride and Glory real -- and raises the movie above the standard corrupt-cop fare -- is their capacity to live and die in shades of gray.
  22. High School Musical 3: Senior Year
    This is a movie that offers simple, buouyant pleasures.
  23. Changeling
    A glum, listless affair that springs to life now and then, only to sag back into its saggy, depressive cushion.
  24. Let the Right One In
    An ingenious mixture of satire, dead-end suburban realism and gory vampire fantasy.
  25. Synecdoche, New York
    Strives to be a work of greatness. But Kaufman's overarching vision is a lot less interesting than the small insights he gathers along the way. This is what happens when life imitates art, and blows it.
  26. Stranded: I've Come from a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains
    Intimate, terrifying and positively riveting documentary.
  27. W.
    It's when Stone engages in shameless editorializing -- when he lets his freak-flag point of view fly, rather than tempering it -- that W. is most entertaining and most vital. The rest of the time it feels too much like awards bait: stiff, arch and knowing.
  28. Filth and Wisdom
    A charming but silly love letter to a vanished era of urban bohemia?
  29. The Secret Life of Bees
    May be overly sentimental at times, but at least it's about something.
  30. Body of Lies
    Excessively intricate and extremely dull, the latest example of a filmmaker giving us a disjointed, overlong movie that’s unnecessarily confusing to follow.
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