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76
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60
9
17
All About Steve
37
Amelia
53
Astro Boy
66
Bandslam
45
Box, The
61
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55
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43
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
66
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29
Collector, The
23
Couples Retreat
80
District 9
61
Extract
39
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30
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34
Fourth Kind, The
60
Funny People
32
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra
27
Gamer
41
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39
Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard, The
46
Halloween II
73
Hangover, The
78
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
55
I Can Do Bad All By Myself
66
Informant!, The
69
Inglourious Basterds
58
Invention of Lying, The
47
Jennifer's Body
66
Julie & Julia
34
Law Abiding Citizen
33
Love Happens
54
Men Who Stare At Goats, The
67
Michael Jackson's This Is It
51
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42
Orphan
28
Pandorum
63
Perfect Getaway, A
86
Ponyo![]()
35
Post Grad
48
Proposal, The
30
Saw VI
53
Shorts
24
Sorority Row
83
Star Trek![]()
33
Stepfather, The
45
Surrogates
55
Taking Woodstock
47
Time Traveler's Wife
96
Toy Story/Toy Story 2 3D![]()
35
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
28
Ugly Truth, The
88
Up![]()
71
Where the Wild Things Are
67
Whip It
28
Whiteout
73
Zombieland
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
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58
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96
35 Shots of Rum![]()
56
Adam
72
Adela
39
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78
Afghan Star
61
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66
Afterschool
xx
All the Best
58
American Casino
72
Amreeka
48
Antichrist
73
Araya
62
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55
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76
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86
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13
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70
Beeswax
35
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
71
Big Fan
66
Black Dynamite
51
Blind Date
xx
Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly
76
Bliss
35
Blue Tooth Virgin, The
26
Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day, The
57
Boys Are Back, The
45
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
81
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70
Bronson
45
Burning Plain, The
xx
Carriers
55
Casi Divas
57
Chelsea on the Rocks
62
Cloud 9
65
Coco Before Chanel
69
Cold Souls
59
Collapse
44
Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus-ItchyFooted Mutha
82
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75
Crude
82
Damned United, The![]()
67
Departures
xx
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71
Disgrace
xx
Do Knot Disturb
70
Earth Days
24
Eating Out 3: All You Can Eat
85
Education, An![]()
55
Endgame
xx
Eulogy for a Vampire
xx
Everyone Else
xx
Fatal Promises
56
Fifty Dead Men Walking
62
Five Minutes of Heaven
74
Flame & Citron
49
Food Beware: The French Organic Revolution
80
Food, Inc.
28
Free Style
xx
From Mexico with Love
50
Fuel
25
Gentlemen Broncos
50
Give Me Your Hand
58
Gogol Bordello Non-Stop
72
Good Hair
89
Goodbye Solo![]()
52
Grace
64
Harmony and Me
81
Headless Woman, The![]()
xx
Heretics, The
63
Horse Boy, The
73
House of the Devil, The
xx
How to Seduce Difficult Women
74
Humpday
94
Hurt Locker, The![]()
29
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
16
If One Thing Matters: A Film About Wolfgang Tillmans
75
In Search of Beethoven
83
In the Loop![]()
61
Intimate Enemies
42
Irene in Time
70
It Might Get Loud
46
Killing Kasztner
19
Labor Day
xx
Laila's Birthday
41
Little Ashes
41
Little Traitor, The
66
Liverpool
34
Looking for Palladin
80
Lorna's Silence
83
Maid, The![]()
xx
Ministers, The
59
More Than a Game
67
Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, The
34
Motherhood
62
My One and Only
xx
Mystery Team
48
New York, I Love You
73
Night and Day
66
No Impact Man
47
Ong Bak 2: The Beginning
34
Other Man, The
xx
Painter Sam Francis, The
54
Paper Heart
xx
Paradise
68
Paranormal Activity
68
Paris
44
Peter and Vandy
35
Play the Game
77
Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire
xx
Pretty Ugly People
65
Providence Effect, The
76
Rembrandt's J'accuse
69
September Issue, The
79
Serious Man, A
40
Shrink
61
Skin
77
Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake, A
xx
Skiptracers
46
Splinterheads
39
St. Trinian's
89
Still Walking![]()
50
Stoning of Soraya M., The
55
Storm
65
Tetro
70
That Evening Sun
72
Thirst
xx
Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas 3D (re-release)
61
Trucker
xx
Turning Green
83
U2 3D![]()
66
Unmade Beds
66
Unmistaken Child
70
Visual Acoustics
55
Walt & El Grupo
67
Way We Get By, The
69
We Live in Public
64
Wedding Song, The
64
Where is Where?
xx
White on Rice
74
Woman in Berlin, A
69
World's Greatest Dad
70
Yes Men Fix the World
69
Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg
xx
You, the Living
Stars indicate the most critically-acclaimed movies.
Salton Sea, The

Mixed or average reviews
Based on 30 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 22 votes
Read user comments
Rate this movie >
Movie Info
Genre(s): Suspense/Thriller
Written by: Tony Gayton
Directed by: D.J. Caruso
Release Date:
Theatrical: April 26, 2002
DVD: September 10, 2002
Running Time: 103 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for strong violence, drug use, language and some sexuality
Starring Val Kilmer, Vincent D'Onofrio, Adam Goldberg, Luis Guzmán, Doug Hutchison, Anthony LaPaglia, Peter Sarsgaard, and Deborah Unger
After witnessing the murder of his wife, a man (Kilmer) goes undercover to avenge her death.
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Disturbia Taking Lives Two for the Money
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
New Times (L.A.) Luke Y. Thompson
As a gallery of the grotesque, however, the cinematic equivalent of a Joe Coleman painting or Adam Parfrey publication, The Salton Sea is a blast.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
Strikes out toward freakishly original territory after all. Fans of the off-beat, your movie has arrived.
Read Full Review >Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman
A twisty, showy, atmosphere-saturated drama that revels (in a post-post-Tarantino-and-''Trainspotting'' way) in sadism and in-your-face seediness -- and attracts a cast of coolios primed to play extreme.
Read Full Review >Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea
A slick, stylish hardboiled caper filtered through a druggy haze and borrowing a bit of a "Memento" revenge motif and "Pulp Fiction" playfulness.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
It contains one element of startling originality: its bad guy, nicknamed Pooh-Bear and played by Vincent D'Onofrio in a great weird demented giggle of a performance; imagine a Batman villain cycled through the hallucinations of "Requiem for a Dream."
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Unlike in many thrillers, the movie doesn't sandbag us with one last, cheap twist at the end. The Salton Sea contains its share of surprises, but none of them feels forced or artificial.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
It's Vincent D'Onofrio as Pooh-Bear, a drug lord who's snorted so much meth his nose had to be replaced by a plastic one, who kicks ass.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
Might be thought of as "Memento" for people who didn't get "Memento."
Boston Globe Sam Allis
A commercial Hollywood movie without pretensions. If there's no art here, it's still a good yarn - which is nothing to sneeze at these days.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Manohla Dargis
The Salton Sea isn't without interest or ideas, though some of the better ones are cribbed from David Fincher and, especially, Martin Scorsese.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Maitland McDonagh
This is a thoroughly conventional story of one man's search for redemption in the neon slime; its multiple flashback structure is just a way of parceling out information, not a device used to undermine the narrative.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Robert K. Elder
Sacrificing content for style, Caruso gives us a lot to look at but little to ponder.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Ray Conlogue
It uses violence as a drug, injecting it into the audience and hoping to addict it. Once the dependence is created, it is simple to feed it with formulaic films.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Hank Stuever
Adheres to the whacked notion that Hollywood does drugs so the rest of us don't have to.
Read Full Review >Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt
The more the picture reveals, the less interesting it gets, transforming its hero from an intriguing mystery man into a standard-issue screen vigilante -- and steadily upping the violence, complete with harrowing torture scenes, in a lame effort to keep our juices flowing.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold
The cumulative effect of the movie is repulsive and depressing.
Read Full Review >Village Voice Michael Atkinson
Eccentric enough to stave off doldrums, Caruso's self-conscious debut is also eminently forgettable.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
It's been a month since I attended a preview, and I'm more grateful than sorry that I no longer remember it well. Drug thrillers and revenge plots bore me.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
A truly baffling late entry in the "Pulp Fiction" sweepstakes that ends up drowning in its own pretensions -- along with, quite possibly, what's left of Val Kilmer's movie career.
Read Full Review >Variety Robert Koehler
This extremely plot-thickened tale finally offers little more than the usual genre elements pushed to the kind of extremes that recall the acrid "The Way of the Gun."
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
Far too slick and manufactured to claim street credibility.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Charles Taylor
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.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Patrick Starkey
Regardless of the poison of choice, I'm always a little miffed when an actor onscreen is supposedly on a specific drug but too lazy to learn what the actual side-effects are.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Schickel
Yet how can one possibly recommend The Salton Sea? If it could, this nasty film would make you smell the disgusting food on the table. And that says nothing about its casual sadism.
The New York Times Stephen Holden
Quickly curdles into a nasty variation of the one-last-score genre.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle
All the movie's narrative gymnastics can't disguise the fact that it's inauthentic at its core and that its story just isn't worth telling.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps
A grimy mess set among L.A.'s speed-abusing "tweakers," Salton has neither the substance to justify first-time feature director D.J. Caruso's pretentious flourishes, nor the skill to make those flourishes work on their own terms.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
Let's just say that in spite of its malignant sun-scorched palette, absurdist visions, and narrative loop the loops, the picture looks in hindsight like the same old vigilante crap.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
Taking issue with efforts like The Salton Sea, cold and unemotional films that couldn't be more pleased at the opportunity to enthusiastically drag audiences through unhappy material, is as futile as getting mad at the wind.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 7.2 (out of 10) based on 22 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Rich R. gave it a0:
Five minutes into this was five minutes too long. Pure, anti-social crap.
Ana W. gave it a 10:
I loved the way Val Kilmer tones down the ego for this role. Vincent D'Onofrio is nothing short of amazing as he is in EVEYTHING he does!
Tyler T. gave it a 10:
..Pooh Bear..one of the most origional characters ever created Vince D is a genious.
Matt W. gave it an 8:
A combination of a number of films, but with some memorable characters (e.g. Pooh-Bear) and memorable scenes. If you focus on that and not the reality you'll enjoy the ride.
Phil M. gave it a 10:
Finally a good movie that "hater" will despite to their core.
Doug M. gave it a 10:
I think this film is a NewWorld type flick that leaves the "haters" so angry that a real movie finally came out that recognizes other lifes that people live and there importance and meanings.
Ryan M. gave it a 0:
About the biggest zero of a movie you could fathom. It's got absolutely no plot acceleration, and the whole thing feels like it just woke up from a hangover.
