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. Bubble
    I'd rate Bubble at no better than a C-plus for artistic achievement and a D-minus for audience appeal. In one sense, it accomplishes its goals efficiently by making you feel, in less than 80 minutes, as if you've gotten permanently trapped in the dead-end, trailer-park lives of its working-class characters. I've never been so grateful to get out of a theater, turn my cellphone back on and plug myself into a $4 Starbucks latte.
  2. Annapolis
    Like so many disappointing movies, it's peopled by performers who do their damnedest to make the whole thing work.
  3. Nanny McPhee
    There's nothing offhand or spontaneous-feeling about Nanny McPhee; it's a highly mechanical piece of work, and its potentially delightful details are wasted.
  4. Manderlay
    To state the obvious, Manderlay is often patently offensive in its racial politics, and it surely isn't for everyone. It is, however, very funny, very dark and very skillfully played.
  5. Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story
    A comedy embedded with secret tips for better, more enjoyable living.
  6. Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World
    The movie has a perversely unifying effect: Muslims, Christians and Jews may not be able to agree on exactly who the heck Jesus is, but they're fully capable of bonding in boredom.
  7. Why We Fight
    A film that stands out for its passion, ambition and clarion-call sincerity, even amid the contemporary onslaught of political documentaries.
  8. Underworld: Evolution
    The plot is so convoluted that missing even five minutes at a stretch won't make any difference in your comprehension of the story.
  9. Pizza
    The kind of little indie you'll either hate or find impossible to resist. I fall into the latter camp, but can appreciate opposing views.
  10. How to Eat Your Watermelon in White Company (and Enjoy It)
    A loving tribute to one of the strangest and most enjoyable figures to emerge from American pop culture in its entire history.
  11. The Fall of Fujimori
    It's a fascinating, haunting, unintentionally gruesome spectacle with, as Perry has said, echoes of Shakespearean tragedy.
  12. Glory Road
    When a movie plays every card, it's bound to win a hand or two. You can't exactly call that approach craftsmanship. But in the case of the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced inspirational sports drama Glory Road, it at least amounts to a kind of blunt effectiveness.
  13. Last Holiday
    Watching Last Holiday, I kept waiting for the moment I could decree the movie truly terrible, the instant I could comfortably put my pen and notebook away and give it up for lost. But that moment never came, partly because I never fail to take pleasure in Latifah, and partly because I couldn't shake the eerie feeling that the movie I was watching was something of a ghost from another time.
  14. When the Sea Rises
    A delightfully off-kilter love story. I don't want to oversell this winsome little movie, but if you want a bittersweet but cheerful pick-me-up on a cold winter evening, it's just the ticket.
  15. Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Impassioned Eye
    This is an ambling, relaxed talking-head docu in the grand European style.
  16. State of Fear
    One of the most remarkable explorations of recent history ever conducted.
  17. Fateless
    One of the greatest of all Holocaust films.
  18. Hostel
    I admired the humor, the tremendous craftsmanship and even the shock value of Hostel, but found the Grand Guignol torture scenes excessive. (Unless you're a hardcore fan of Italian, Spanish and Japanese gore flicks, you've never seen anything like this.)
  19. Match Point
    Match Point is a fatally neat exercise in detached craftsmanship, and maybe that's the best we can expect from Allen at this point.
  20. Casanova
    Among the least-heralded of the Christmas releases, Casanova is one of the few that's wholly enjoyable.
  21. The New World
    This is like a Tony Scott movie on quaaludes: Words and pictures are matched up in counterintuitive ways, and although the cutting is much slower than in Scott's hyperactive showboating, it makes just about as much sense. The movie's leisureliness is aggressive; the picture is artfully designed to make you feel that if you're bored, it's your own damn fault.
  22. The Matador
    Undeniably clever.
  23. Munich
    Munich is both astonishing and frustrating. It's not easy to tell how much of the tone comes directly from Spielberg and how much comes from Kushner, who was called in to polish the script after Roth completed it.
  24. Caché (Hidden)
    A tightly constructed drama that will keep you on the edge of your seat.
  25. The Ringer
    An odd and not wholly successful little comedy. Its pacing is slack, and although it has a gentle heart, it treads so gingerly across the minefield of potential offensiveness that it sometimes snuffs out its sparks of life as quickly as it throws them off.
  26. The Intruder
    Exhilarating and exhausting, the kind of picture you don't bounce back from immediately. Yet its elusiveness is the very source of its poetic energy.
  27. The Family Stone
    If there was ever a testament to the resilience of actors, in the face of a flawed script and wonky direction, The Family Stone is it.
  28. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada
    If The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada has some languid patches, it's also a work of uncommon maturity and remarkable poetry.
  29. The Producers
    Watching The Producers is simply exhausting.
  30. Trapped by the Mormons
    Director Ian Allen (a longtime playwright and stage director) has lovingly re-created the look and indeed narrative style of silent film -- and he's from Salt Lake City, so if he says Mormons are vampires with hypnotic powers, who am I to argue? I suppose this is a one-note joke, more in the style of '70s avant-garde camp than anything else. But, hey, at least it's a funny joke.
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