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. Anger Management
    Anger Management is so almost-but-not-quite funny that it feels like one colossal gyp.
  2. Better Luck Tomorrow
    Follows a consistently predictable arc. In some sequences, you can tell not just what's going to happen next, but what shot is coming next. And the movie's weird mixture of moralism and affectlessness cancel each other out.
  3. Ghosts of the Abyss
    James Cameron disgraces those who died on the Titanic -- again.
  4. Cowboy Bebop the Movie: Knockin' on Heaven's Door
    There's something to be said for watching an animated movie not with the eyes of a child, but with those of a turned-on grownup.
  5. Phone Booth
    A movie that's laughable without, alas, even being enjoyably awful.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Man Apart
    There's not a single moment when you wonder what might happen next or when the spectacle simply leaps off the screen. You've seen it all before.
  7. The Good Thief
    This long shot pays off -- in spades. Not only has Jordan made a movie that's looser, hipper, freer and -- abetted by his great cinematographer, Chris Menges -- more sheerly beautiful to look at, he's also made the best movie of his career.
  8. The Core
    There's a refreshing surefootedness in the way Amiel, his screenwriters Cooper Layne and John Rogers, and most of his actors recognize how preposterous the idea of traveling to the center of the earth in a souped-up Rototiller really is.
  9. Raising Victor Vargas
    A modest and tightly focused picture, and its very directness makes it piercingly intimate.
  10. Basic
    Watching a movie should never be such torture.
  11. Head of State
    An excruciatingly amateurish production.
  12. Gaudi Afternoon
    The air leaks out of Gaudí Afternoon gradually but steadily, until all we're left with is a limp rag of a balloon.
  13. View from the Top
    There's a good chance that it will make you laugh, but even if it doesn't, you have to give Barreto credit for respecting his audience. The movie's jokes have a light, springy touch; if one doesn't tickle you, it sails by quickly to make room for the next one.
  14. Dreamcatcher
    A pretty good example of how the studios have taken over the junk that used to be left to the exploitation hacks. The hacks here have millions to work with and the end result isn't nearly as much fun as a cheap, gross horror movie can be.
  15. Boat Trip
    It is a testament to our national determination that Nathan is not stymied by his almost complete lack of talent, his slipshod timing or his crude comic sensibility.
  16. Willard
    You're just sitting there, somewhere between mildly amused and fairly bored, watching the filmmakers squander Hollywood's most eccentric character actor and a lot of very fine specimens of the order Rodentia.
  17. Under the City's Skin
    Solidly made and sometimes quite moving chronicle of a working-class family in Tehran.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Spun
    The biggest problem with Spun is that it's really just about speed (and editing). And speed, like most other drugs, is in and of itself boring.
  19. The Hunted
    It's an A-list movie for the most brain-dead elements of the action-movie crowd.
  20. Bend It Like Beckham
    Bend It Like Beckham is supposedly a movie about youth; its biggest shortcoming is that it rarely feels young.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    The Safety of Objects
    All the acting in it is flawless, an overflowing handful of polished jewels.
  22. Tears of the Sun
    There's a fine line dividing Hollywood tradition and overly manipulative junk, and Tears of the Sun crosses it.
  23. Laurel Canyon
    Cholodenko and her actors pull it off; the performances here are like a wary ballet, ruled as much by the mysterious magnetic attractions and repulsions these characters feel for one another as by anything so dully explicable as psychology or standard rules of social conduct.
  24. Bringing Down the House
    What's offensive in Bringing Down the House is the way the jokes have been calculated not to offend.
  25. Irreversible
    Noé isn't a kid (he'll turn 40 this year) but he's still young as a filmmaker; he may yet learn to control his desire to sear the audience's eyes out with a red-hot poker before he's even started telling a story.
  26. Ten
    The ultimate lesson in less-is-more cinema, an intimate and revelatory character study as well as a brilliant, almost symphonic rendering of the distracted, anxious, half-alienated and half-meditative state in which we spend vast amounts of our lives.
  27. Lawless Heart
    Virtually nothing at all is wrapped up in The Lawless Heart, which is probably why it feels so satisfyingly whole by the end.
  28. Dark Blue
    Shelton has directed Dark Blue in a jacked-up urban thriller style that simply does not play to his gifts. He's a sidewinder, the sort of writer-director who tells his stories through loopy character details and anecdotes.
  29. Old School
    It's blissfully, pants-wettingly funny from beginning to end.
  30. The Life of David Gale
    Becomes more and more preposterous with each scene -- it's almost like performance art.
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