Salon's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Life or Something Like It
    Dimly entertaining, the sort of thing that doesn't insult you so much that you feel compelled to flee the theater, but it's too inert to be anything close to charming or compelling.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Dogtown and Z-Boys
    This movie is a sun-dappled documentary about skateboarding, about the thrill of speed, the joy of reckless youth. Turning it into an academic example of the problems of history -- of who tells it and how it gets told -- is a lot less fun.
  3. Jason X
    It gets much more watchable in the last half-hour.
  4. The Salton Sea
    To say that the film is unpleasant would imply that there's an emotional reaction to be gotten from it. I'd have to believe that there was someone, somewhere, who would actually care.
  5. Enigma
    Director Michael Apted does a smooth, competent job, but like almost all his work, Enigma lacks excitement and a vivid personality.
  6. Girls Can't Swim
    It's a cynical way to pass time, the cynicism that comes from being presented with something you've seen a hundred times before.
  7. Chelsea Walls
    Does become more engaging as it lurches along, perhaps because you give up hoping that anything will really happen and settle into the Nicolas Roeg-meets-David Lynch-at-the-cast-party-for-"Taxi Driver" atmosphere of mid-'70s nothingness.
  8. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
    As Tolstoy observed, all sappy ethnic family comedies are the same. None is sappy in its own way.
  9. The Scorpion King
    The Scorpion King, so far from perfect it isn't funny, is nevertheless one of those movies that catches you up in something bigger than yourself, namely, an archetypal desire to enjoy good trash every now and then.
  10. Murder by Numbers
    This premise could, just maybe, make for a decent thriller, but everything about Murder by Numbers is so flavorless and rote, so devoid of real suspense and human interest, that you never suspect for a moment that the answers are likely to be engaging.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Nine Queens
    If the movie isn't true, it's at least true to itself. When Nine Queens spirals out of the realm of believability, we've already been won over enough that we don't care.
  12. World Traveler
    It's hard to remember a movie that has asked us to care, without giving us reason to, about a character who is so thoroughly and relentlessly a prick.
  13. Murderous Maids
    There's a curiously ho-hum quality to the murders, despite the fact that the two victims are bludgeoned, sliced, chopped and jabbed, and also (the movie suggests) get their eyeballs gouged out.
  14. The Triumph of Love
    This intelligent, breezy romantic comedy sings a love song to theater. Plus, there's a hunky lug and Mira Sorvino in drag.
  15. Human Nature
    The second movie by "Being John Malkovich" writer Charlie Kaufman is even weirder than his first.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 60 Critic Score
    Changing Lanes
    Despite some solid acting and cinematography -- mistakenly turns what should have been a fast-paced thriller into a cerebral sermon about the slippery slope of corporate law.
  17. Frailty
    Starts out, and ends up, as a thriller trying valiantly to show us layers of moral depth. But in between that beginning and ending, Paxton's vision (as well as that of Brent Hanley, who wrote the script) becomes wavy and indistinct, a blurry muddle of sensationalistic, prurient grisliness masquerading as a meditation on the nature of evil.
  18. The Cat's Meow
    If there were any justice in the world, The Cat's Meow would be the beginning of the rehabilitation of Davies' image.
  19. Lucky Break
    Perfectly inoffensive and harmless, but it's also drab and inert.
  20. High Crimes
    High Crimes does offer good, often sharp and funny work from its two stars. But you can't fake excitement, and it's a lousy feeling to know that the best commercial movie I can point you to right now is this shallow, self-erasing nonsense.
  21. Big Trouble
    Such a feebleminded, good-natured comedy that it actually makes you laugh with that timeless gag of somebody pretending to cough while calling someone else a bad name.
  22. Crush
    The most depressing movie I've seen all year; in fact, I'm hard-pressed to name a movie aimed specifically at women that has ever made me feel as insulted and disgusted.
  23. The Rookie
    Quaid doesn't make the best of the movie's baloney; he presents it to us as a believable truth.
  24. No Such Thing
    May be far from perfect, but those small, odd Hartley touches help you warm to it.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 90 Critic Score
    The Piano Teacher
    When you see The Piano Teacher in a movie theater you get a chance to go back in time, back to the days when French movies were titillating, provocative and kind of smart.
  26. Death to Smoochy
    All noise with very little fun, and almost no restraint.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Clockstoppers
    What Clockstoppers achieves in acting and decent special effects, it undermines with weak dialogue and directing. The movie isn't bad; it just makes you wish that certain scenes could be hypertimed into oblivion.
  28. Panic Room
    Might be entertaining for those who like seeing a terrified teenage girl watch a loved one get beaten to a pulp while she slides into a diabetic coma. For the rest of us it's both stagnant and vaguely unpleasant.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Blade II
    Suffers from way too many fight scenes that last way too long and look way too computer-generated.
  30. Sorority Boys
    They don't even look as if they're having fun. Their stint as cross-dressers is simply an endurance test for them, and for us.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »