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. Capturing the Friedmans
    Andrew Jarecki could have done more to lay out the marriage of sexual and religious and social hysteria that made cases like this possible. But he deserves credit for having the guts to say, in this case and in so many like it, who suffered the most.
  2. The Italian Job
    The chase scenes in The Italian Job are the most exciting ones I can remember seeing in a movie in a long time, probably because they're the only ones I can remember -- and that's saying something.
  3. Finding Nemo
    It's all beautiful, all right. But before long I began to feel beaten against the rocks of that beauty -- Finding Nemo smacks of looky-what-I-can-do virtuosity, and after the first 10 minutes or so, it's exhausting.
  4. The In-Laws
    This In-Laws isn't a disaster, it's just not very good.
  5. Bruce Almighty
    Unless you like boob jokes and preachy sentimentalism, this comedy isn't funny at all.
  6. L'Auberge Espagnole
    Klapisch wants his characters shiny bright, and winds up making them excruciatingly dull in the process. Watching L'Auberge Espagnole is like seeing the young Maoist revolutionaries of Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 "La Chinoise" body-snatched by the international touring company of "Up With People."
  7. The Matrix Reloaded
    I found The Matrix Reloaded so exhilarating. It's a sadder, wiser, more grown-up movie than its predecessor. It was made, one might almost say, for a sadder, wiser, more grown-up world.
  8. Daddy Day Care
    One of those comedies that "thinking" people tend to stay away from, but if you look beyond its admittedly aggressive marketing campaign, you can see that it was made with care and intelligence as well as a sense of fun. The pleasures it offers may be modest, but they're not negligible.
  9. The Shape of Things
    This might be the edgiest film of the year -- if the year were 1982.
  10. Washington Heights
    Alfredo de Villa's Washington Heights feels stiff and overworked in places, and sometimes the acting is a bit awkward. And yet the story is both compelling and easy to identify with.
  11. Only the Strong Survive
    All Only the Strong Survive has to offer are scraps, and it's a sad thing to sit through a movie billed as a tribute to a group of terrific performers and to come away with nothing more than scraps.
  12. Down with Love
    The fatal flaw of Down With Love... is that in mining what's kitschily amusing about those movies, it also re-creates far too faithfully everything that's unbearable about them.
  13. Man on the Train
    Watching Man on the Train is like coming across one of those threadbare Persian rugs you see on public tours of private homes. Its elegance is more comfortable than cold, and it carries its worn, battered mien proudly.
  14. The Dancer Upstairs
    The Dancer Upstairs, is a haunting and often beautiful work, part doomed romance and part political thriller, that demonstrates the adult command of the medium Malkovich has always demonstrated as an actor.
  15. Owning Mahowny
    Just doesn't give us enough to hold onto, perhaps partly because it's executed with so much restraint and subtlety. It's often a tense, uncomfortable little movie.
  16. X2: X-Men United
    In some ways, X2 is an obvious improvement on its predecessor: It looks more expensive, and its special effects seem to swoop out of nowhere...But "X-Men" was undoubtedly the most elegiac comic-book adaptation of the past few years.
  17. Spellbound
    Blitz captures the intensity of the bee itself, showing how it frazzles the nerves of even the most well-prepared spellers as, one by one, their colleagues and competitors drop away.
  18. Identity
    So ingeniously constructed that these meta-noir ingredients feel dizzyingly enjoyable, never hackneyed. In fact, the overheated melodrama of Identity is crucial to its method -- and the key, in some ways, to its narrative secrets.
  19. Confidence
    A long plod to the finish line. It's a movie about a long con that, like its leading man, has no wit or style to speak of.
  20. It Runs in the Family
    The picture never quite finds its footing.
  21. People I Know
    The picture has a lax, sleepy vibe: There's never anything taut or electric about it. And so, like Pacino's character, we sleepwalk through it.
  22. House of Fools
    The thing is, it works. Or at least it works for me. I left the theater convinced that House of Fools is Konchalovsky's best work in almost 20 years (which it is) and that it might be something close to a masterpiece.
  23. Malibu's Most Wanted
    If only Malibu's Most Wanted had been a little more daring, it might have managed to satirize the playacting ludicrousness of gangsta style.
  24. Lilya 4-Ever
    Not without its own bleak integrity. But the movie wipes you out and leaves you with nothing, not even the feeling of exaltation that can be present in the most tragic works of art.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Holes
    The movie is a similarly ingenious clockwork contraption that interlocks the most unlikely combination of stories without ever jamming its gears.
  26. Winged Migration
    Birds are not just the movie's stars, but its whole universe. They inspire in Perrin and his crew, and in us, not just awe but humility. You'll never look at them the same way again.
  27. Bulletproof Monk
    Lightweight but delightful martial-arts romp.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    Love and Diane
    An epic documentary...as rich and teeming as a Balzac novel.
  29. A Mighty Wind
    It's a fine-grained picture that goes for the sideways laughs rather than the straight-ahead ones. This is sketch comedy as method acting.
  30. The Young Unknowns
    It isn't a masterpiece; there are occasional clunkers in Jelski's dialogue (adapted from a play by Wolfgang Bauer) and the acting, although superior to maybe 85 percent of Hollywood movies, is a little uneven.
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