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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    • 43 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Meet Joe Black
    The high-concept premise of Death taking a long weekend off to mingle with us mortals brings out the worst in filmmakers.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Elizabeth
    A handsome, diverting coming-of-intrigue story studded with meaty performances.
  3. The Siege
    If The Siege frustrates anyone, it should be the moviegoers who turn up expecting the kind of clean resolution that action movies thrive on.
  4. Velvet Goldmine
    Weighed down with self-important messages, but it's also splashily opulent.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Gods and Monsters
    A showcase for a uniquely sympathetic virtuoso performance by legendary stage actor Ian McKellen in an otherwise minor film.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    Vampires
    The sort of thing you can't believe anyone would want their name attached to.
  7. Life Is Beautiful
    The point, I think, is the sheer callous inappropriateness of comedy existing within the physical reality of the camps -- even the imagined reality of a movie.
  8. Pleasantville
    It's tough not to respond to the visual cleverness of Pleasantville.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Happiness
    A masterpiece.
  10. Beloved
    When the movie isn't hitting us over the head, it's spooning out the material to us like broth to an invalid, drop by flavorless drop. The excruciating pace mirrors the sluggishness of Morrison's sonorous prose.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Practical Magic
    Like the rest of this new breed of witch story, it's about sisterhood instead of the supreme allure of housewifery, but like all too many witch movies (old and new), it's really just a self-congratulatory paean to banality and shrunken horizons.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 70 Critic Score
    Antz
    Katzenberg may or may not have stolen his idea from Pixar, but it's obvious in the film that he spent significant time at Disney. The plot of Antz is pure Disney pastiche:
    • 44 Metascore
    • 30 Critic Score
    What Dreams May Come
    By the movie's numbingly predictable end, the notion of a visually unleashed cinema seems like a monstrous mistake -- we've handed over the atom bomb to the Teletubbies!
  14. Clay Pigeons
    I wanted to take these two characters somewhere else and make a real movie about them...But Vaughn provides so many spooky, hilarious, unhinged moments, you won't mind sitting through it.
  15. Rush Hour
    The movie seems to proceed from somebody's notion that it would be hilarious to see a black guy and a Chinese guy working together.
  16. One True Thing
    This might have worked if the director and lead actress had the kind of intense mutual understanding that, say, Ingmar Bergman had with Liv Ullmann, or John Cassavetes had with Gena Rowlands.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 40 Critic Score
    Permanent Midnight
    Perhaps if Jerry were a three-dimensional character, or the movie had focused on one plot instead of trying to do it all, Permanent Midnight might have been engaging. But in the end, all you see is another rich spoiled brat shoving tar up his arm, and at this point it's just too hard to care.
  18. Rounders
    Neither Dahl nor most of his actors ever quite convince us that there's a good reason to sit in front of a movie screen watching them for more than two hours.
  19. 54
    It's a flat, clumsy piece of filmmaking. When Phillippe and Ward are in bed, the shots are so badly matched that I believed they were having sex, just not with each other.
  20. Blade
    Blade in no way resembles a good movie, but its combination of music-video bombast, goth-rock sensibility, high-tech industrial production design, cold-blooded glossy magazine visuals, high-fashion club culture, horror movies, blaxploitation movies, Hong Kong movies and comic-book nihilism make it diverting trash.
  21. Next Stop Wonderland
    Like too many young filmmakers, Anderson seems to equate honesty with choppy editing, bad lighting (so harsh in a couple of shots you can see the pancake on Davis' face) and herky-jerky camera movements.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Your Friends & Neighbors
    LaBute has made a comedy this time around, but it's not so much black as simply bleak.
  23. The Avengers
    The film flails incoherently from set to set, trying to be kicky and madcap and pop, but with no sense of the show's casual acceptance of the absurd.
  24. Slums of Beverly Hills
    They've created far and away the most complex, appealing female character in a summer of soldiers, sword fighters and asteroid blasters.
  25. Ever After
    Casting Barrymore as Cinderella is an inspired idea, and a tribute to director Andy Tennant's ability to see through the public's perception of Barrymore to her essence as a performer.
  26. The Negotiator
    The Negotiator slogs on for two hours and 20 minutes, and there's hardly a real laugh or a genuine thrill in it.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Saving Private Ryan
    Using the overpowering techniques of modern film, Steven Spielberg has cut through the glory-tinged gauze that shrouds World War II to reveal its brutal reality, creating a phenomenology of violence unsurpassed in the history of cinema.
  28. Lolita
    For all of their vaunted (and, it turns out, false) fidelity to Nabokov, Lyne and Schiff have made a pretty, gauzy Lolita that replaces the book's cruelty and comedy with manufactured lyricism and mopey romanticism.
  29. There's Something About Mary
    The type of comedy the Farrellys love requires dizzy, pell-mell pacing. If There's Something About Mary were tightened up by about 20 minutes, it would be much funnier.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 80 Critic Score
    Pi
    It's precisely when Pi is the most arty and least "commercial," when it's serving up head scratchers instead of intrigue, that it's most entertaining.
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