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. Protagonist
    A highly original and at times thrilling use of the documentary medium, and one of the most revealing films about the troubled nature of contemporary manhood I've ever seen.
  2. The Savages
    What makes the movie memorable is the precision of its tone, its finely calibrated combination of bitterness and warmth. Of course the acting is tremendous, and you'd expect nothing less.
  3. Starting Out in the Evening
    It's rare to see a movie adaptation in which a filmmaker has taken so much care in translating the odd little qualities that make a particular novel special, to preserve the complex and fragile threads of feeling between characters that are often much easier to grasp on the page.
  4. I'm Not There.
    One of the most inventive and joyous movies of the year.
  5. Beowulf
    Ambitious, overbearing and hollow; it goes overboard to impress, yet it never feels truly inventive or imaginative. At best, it achieves a level of clumsy camp.
  6. Redacted
    Brian De Palma's Redacted doesn't quite work as a movie. But it works as SOMETHING.
  7. Love in the Time of Cholera
    Forget the heat of passion: The movie never breaks a sweat.
  8. Southland Tales
    If it arrives in final form as (still) a total mess, it's such a passionate and ambitious mess -- overcrowded with extraordinary images, incomprehensible ideas, literary and pop-cultural references and colliding subplots -- that it transcends its adolescent awkwardness and approaches being magnificent.
  9. Fred Claus
    Fred Claus does feature some very nicely groomed reindeer, a far cry from those patchy, depressed-looking creatures you see every holiday season at the petting zoo. They're prancing and dancing as fast as they can, but they can't pull Fred Claus from the rut it's in.
  10. The Life of Reilly
    Charles Nelson Reilly is still alive, dammit, and boy does he have a story to tell.
  11. Lions for Lambs
    This is a weird movie hybrid, both a tasteful picture and an angry one.
  12. No Country for Old Men
    It's the most ambitious and impressive Coen film in at least a decade, featuring the flat, sun-blasted landscapes of west Texas -- spectacularly shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins -- and an eerily memorable performance by Javier Bardem, in a Ringo Starr haircut.
  13. Steal a Pencil for Me
    There have been dozens of Holocaust documentaries, and one could well argue that the world doesn't need another. But Michèle Ohayon's Steal a Pencil for Me offers a simple human story of dignity, levity and romance.
  14. War Dance
    It's the film's reassuring, almost hypnotic visual rhythms, along with its Hollywood-like narrative structure -- which is closer to "Drumline" or "Bring It On" than to most documentaries -- that make it bearable.
  15. American Gangster
    Offers only the stingiest platform for its actors, and as a piece of storytelling -- built on the foundation of a great story -- it's an epic that's been sliced and diced into so many little morsels that almost nothing in it has any weight.
  16. Bee Movie
    Just another ambitious, lavish animated adventure, pretty enough to look at, but ultimately foundering on the weakness of its script.
  17. Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten
    The most powerful documentary I've seen all year, and one of the two or three best films ever made about an artist or musician.
  18. Martian Child
    Before long, the story's conceit -- a loud-and-clear metaphor for the ways in which we all sometimes feel alien when it comes to human relationships -- just becomes wearying.
  19. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
    The evident strengths and laudable intentions of Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (and even the appeal of Marisa Tomei in her undies) are overwhelmed by an implausible plot verging on unintentional comedy and a panoply of Noo Yawk dirt-bag supporting characters who might've seemed awkward on a 1993 episode of "NYPD Blue."
  20. Dan in Real Life
    There's nothing groundbreaking about Dan in Real Life -- it's a picture that could have been made 10 or 20 years ago -- and yet its easygoing, affable nature is exactly what makes it pleasurable.
  21. Jimmy Carter Man from Plains
    I'm still not quite sure why it's so compelling. I think this movie's appeal is overdetermined, as we used to say in sophomore Marxist-theory class, meaning that it derives from so many sources you can't keep track of them all.
  22. Slipstream
    The film has moments of goofy delight, some pseudo-David Lynch spookery and a couple of comic supporting turns.
  23. Lynch
    Lynch offers a fascinating view of Lynch's irascible personality (and insatiable appetite for coffee and cigarettes), and captures him discussing his formative years in Idaho and Philadelphia, as well as his 30-year involvement with Transcendental Meditation.
  24. Gone Baby Gone
    Ben Affleck is smart about setting the scene -- he's even better at it than Clint Eastwood was in another Lehane adaptation, "Mystic River." But he's less adept at defining individual personalities, at making us care about the characters who deserve our sympathy -- or, maybe more important, the ones who don't.
  25. Rendition
    If these new, allegedly topical movies are to make us feel anything -- to move us toward any action or even just toward any fresh realization -- they need to at least seem alive on the screen, instead of just courting our polite, measured applause.
  26. Reservation Road
    Dour, ponderous picture.
  27. Wristcutters: A Love Story
    Simultaneously dark and sweet, always a difficult combination to pull off. It views its characters with both archness and affection, and even as it lovingly recalls films of another era it insists that the painful awkwardness of youth is perennial.
  28. Elizabeth: The Golden Age
    Might have been a lavish, silly entertainment. In places it comes close, but no sheaf of tobacco.
  29. Sleuth
    Sleuth is well acted, and directed by Branagh with chilly, distant ingenuity. It has a certain edge and daring, or more to the point it pretends to.
  30. We Own the Night
    An intriguing blend of mainstream audience-pleaser and a more subtle, even intellectual agenda.
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