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. Over Her Dead Body
    May be the worst romantic comedy I've ever seen, although I hesitate to make such a resolute pronouncement about a movie that's so barely even THERE.
  2. Rambo
    The movie is neither cathartic nor entertaining. The action scenes (and there are many of them) feel mechanized and calculated.
  3. Untraceable
    Over and over again, Hoblit misses opportunities to make an engaging picture, instead giving us a merely pedestrian one.
  4. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
    Despite their terrible ordeal these women are heroes, not victims. As Mungiu makes clear in the casual, brilliant final scene of this amazing movie, heroes persevere.
  5. Teeth
    This is going to be a notorious film that young audiences will be daring themselves to see, but it's actually funnier, darker and more troubling before it turns into a carnival of repeated dismemberment.
  6. Cassandra's Dream
    Cassandra's Dream, an earnest meditation on greed, desire, murder and class struggle, is one of Woody Allen's funniest movies in years -- except Allen doesn't know it.
  7. Cloverfield
    It pretends to examine how self-absorbed we are as a culture, only to be consumed by its own self-absorption. It's also badly constructed, humorless and emotionally sadistic .
  8. Mad Money
    The picture has no legs, no style, no sense of movement other than the meandering, dawdling kind.
  9. 27 Dresses
    The biggest disappointment of 27 Dresses is that it inhabits a Harlequin romance New York City, one remarkably short on homosexuals and divorce.
  10. First Sunday
    First Sunday is simply a case of wasting gifted performers on material that feels slapped together and unshaped.
  11. Woman on the Beach
    Dry, wry, difficult-to-capture comedy.
  12. The Business of Being Born
    Lake and Epstein are not in fact trying to stigmatize other women's choices about how and where to give birth. Instead, they're trying to introduce an entire universe of history and information that should inform those choices, and that the medical establishment has virtually erased from American memory.
  13. Honeydripper
    Honeydripper offers a leisurely, atmospheric production with lots of time to appreciate his largely African-American cast, along with rocking musical interludes and just the faintest wash of spirituality.
  14. The Orphanage
    The Orphanage is a careful, elegant work that looks a little rough around the edges; it was shot largely with natural light and employs minimal special effects.
  15. There Will Be Blood
    There are epic impulses everywhere you look in There Will Be Blood; what's missing is character development, focused storytelling and, most significantly (apart from that terrific opening sequence), any sense of raw, intuitive drama.
  16. The Bucket List
    Any moron can make a bad movie. But it takes a special breed of schemer to make a picture as shameless as The Bucket List.
  17. The Great Debaters
    About midway through Denzel Washington's new film The Great Debaters comes a raw and terrifying scene that exemplifies why the movie's worth seeing, despite its hackneyed and awkward story.
  18. Charlie Wilson's War
    Philip Seymour Hoffman utters one of the year's most refreshing lines in this terrific tale of political wheeling and dealing.
  19. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
    The picture throws off no feeling, not even the misanthropic kind; at best, it manages a dull, throbbing energy, as if Burton were dutifully pushing his way through the material instead of shaping it.
  20. Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
    Funniest in its first half, when you're not quite sure where it's going, and drags in the second, by which time you realize it's going nowhere.
  21. I Am Legend
    I Am Legend is a blockbuster like no other, one that finds its grandness in modesty. It's a star vehicle with a star who knows his place in the universe.
  22. The Kite Runner
    What results is a patchy, uncertain motion picture, full of incidents and images but fundamentally unfocused and superficial.
  23. Youth Without Youth
    It's merely nutty, a picture that appears to have been made by an individual who has fallen off the edge of reason. Watching it was misery.
  24. The Perfect Holiday
    There's almost no such thing as an entertaining holiday trifle anymore -- the kind of casual, cheerful little picture that you might see on a whim and end up enjoying, even beyond the breadth of your modest expectations. The Perfect Holiday is an attempt, at least, to resurrect the idea of the trifle
  25. Nanking
    Nanking both calls attention to a horrifying set of war crimes that remains little known in the West and crafts an impossible-but-true hymn to the power of the individual conscience.
  26. Atonement
    May not hit every note perfectly, but the picture they've come up with is full-bodied and intelligent.
  27. The Golden Compass
    Whatever complex or interesting ideas might have been found in the source material have been watered down, skimmed over, mashed into nonsense or simply ignored.
  28. Juno
    As lively and entertaining as Juno is, Reitman and Cody have also done the work of shaping the story into something emotionally direct, unsparing and generous.
  29. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
    The picture is so imaginatively made, so attuned to sensual pleasure, so keyed in to the indescribable something that makes life life, that it speaks of something far more elemental than mere filmmaking skill: This is what movies, at their best, can be.
  30. Oswald's Ghost
    Lee Harvey Oswald's guilt or innocence or accomplices are not the point of the film; Stone is more interested in the fact that much about the Kennedy murder is now so shrouded in myth and mystification as to be permanently unknowable, and that that fact alone has gnawed away at the self-confidence of middle-class white America ever since.
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