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. The Island
    The Island walks a weird, wobbly line between being stupid, falsely fattened-up entertainment and a picture that just might have possibly been made by a person with a brain -- a scrambled one, but a brain nonetheless.
  2. Bad News Bears
    At least Linklater isn't just picking the bones of his forebears; he honors them as they deserve.
  3. The Devil's Rejects
    Much of Devil's Rejects is absolutely hilarious, especially the brief appearance by a Gene Shalit-like film critic who explicates all the Groucho Marx references. Zombie's eye for the faux-'70s detail is perfect.
  4. 9 Songs
    While 9 Songs is sexually explicit in the basic sense, its DIRECTNESS is what's most fascinating, and ultimately most moving, about it.
  5. The Edukators
    An engaging entertainment that packages its thought-provoking ideas in a combination of political thriller, comic adventure and romantic triangle.
  6. Last Days
    It's a meticulous nest of interlocking elements, not at all haphazard. But in its unrelieved bleakness and singularity of vision, it supplies very little in the way of conventional movieness.
  7. Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America
    An engaging, well-made docu that admirably captures the singular importance of its subject.
  8. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
    Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is absinthe in movie form, a white chocolate space egg of a picture that has a giddy hallucinatory quality in some places and an overcalculated glossiness in others. But for better or worse, it's fascinating.
  9. Wedding Crashers
    Wedding Crashers may be the most optimistic Hollywood comedy of the year, because it restores at least some dim hope that directors, writers and actors with actual brains in their heads can somehow triumph over unimaginative studio execs. In that way, Wedding Crashers isn't just the life of the party, but its pulse.
  10. Happy Endings
    The kind of self-conscious puzzle picture in which characters behave in ways that serve the plot but in no way resemble things that actual human beings would be likely to do.
  11. On the Outs
    A scared-straight after-school special, but actually good.
  12. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus
    A lovely, faintly sinister travelogue.
  13. Dark Water
    Spins toward its glum, dishwater-gray whirlpool of an ending, which doesn't have nearly as much emotional punch as it should. It doesn't leave you feeling spent -- only soaked.
  14. Fantastic Four
    Fantastic Four doesn't expand on, or even illuminate, anything much beyond the most basic theme of what it feels like to be an adolescent misfit. This is a comic-book movie that actually makes an effort not to go over kids' heads.
  15. Murderball
    Has a lot of integrity, both in visual and conceptual terms, and seamlessly blends entertainment and education.
  16. Chronicles
    Despite all that South American sunshine, this lean and brilliantly constructed thriller is a dark realm of secrets and lies, illuminated by TV lighting and the glitter of John Leguizamo's eyes. Those in search of life-affirming family entertainment might want to stick with Ingmar Bergman.
  17. The Beat That My Heart Skipped
    Might not be as intriguingly odd as the picture that inspired it. But like that earlier picture, it bristles with life and energy. It's a movie made with equal measures of bravado and humility -- the same mix of qualities you need to play Beethoven, Mozart or Bach.
  18. The World
    If a movie can be stark and rapturous at the same time, this is that movie.
  19. War of the Worlds
    Extravagant in movie terms but stingy in emotional ones, it embodies all of Spielberg's bad impulses and almost none of his good ones: It's a grand display of how well he knows how to work us over, and yet the desperation with which he tries to get to us is repulsive.
  20. Tropical Malady
    It's a haunted picture, one that feels inhabited not just by actors and scenery but by spirits, too.
  21. Bewitched
    Kidman will have the last laugh; not even Ephron, with her dumb flying house of a movie, can crush her magic.
  22. Yes
    For the most part Yes buzzes with visual life and imagination.
  23. March of the Penguins
    There's more drama, and more heartbreak, in March of the Penguins than in most movies that are actually scripted to tug at our feelings.
  24. Lila Says
    Unsurprisingly, the camerawork in Lila Says is spectacular.
  25. The Great Water
    Despite his reliance on visual cliché, Trajkov mines a rich vein of morbid Slavic comedy, and his young characters have an appetite for adventure that's thoroughly unfake.
  26. Heights
    As enjoyable as Close is, Heights as a whole is a mannered simulation that only occasionally and accidentally feels like real New York life.
  27. My Summer of Love
    Its stars, Emily Blunt and Natalie Press, are film newcomers who give startling performances. The photography is often breathtakingly original.
  28. Batman Begins
    Needs much more energy and kinetic flow -- less dolor and more dolomite.
  29. Mr. & Mrs. Smith
    Some people will see Mr. and Mrs. Smith as cynical, but I think its heart is deeply romantic, admittedly in an anvil-on-the-head kind of way. It's a love story not for the faint of heart. In other words, it's a lot like marriage.
  30. High Tension
    Horror fans should see this, at least in geeky admiration for what it pulls off, but in the long run it's no more than a crisp footnote to genre history.
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