Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,775 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 33% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 64% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 6.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 59
Highest review score: 100 Mulholland Dr.
Lowest review score: 0 Jojo Rabbit
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 4,349 out of 7775
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7775
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7775
7775 movie reviews
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  1. Purple Rain
    Magnoli’s professional, downright neorealistic approach to filming the concert clips almost disguises how audacious a structural conceit is the film’s climax: nearly a half-hour of musical numbers that render the solipsism of Prince’s vanity project entirely justifiable.
  2. Lethal Weapon 2
    But while the story may not be especially memorable, Jeffrey Boam’s brisk screenplay and Donner’s workmanlike direction keep things moving enough to gather enough momentum in preparation for Gibson’s third-act, tear-down-the-house rampage.
  3. Clue
    Clue is comfortable with its pedigree, even giddily enthused by it, which gives its creators freedom to produce not a nostalgic entertainment, but a sustained and sincerely old-fashioned entertainment, laced with wicked miscreancy.
  4. American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
    As Ridgen and Rossier take pains to point out, a man so rigorously committed to putting an end to oppression ought not be so easily dismissed, even if coming to grips with such a challenging figure may be finally as difficult as getting to the bottom of the Arab-Israeli conflict itself.
  5. A Nightmare on Elm Street
    Nightmare’s skill wasn’t that it invented such associations—which had already been thoroughly mined by its ’70s predecessors—but that it refined them in uniquely disturbing ways, drenching itself in an atmosphere of unreality positioned somewhere between waking and slumbering states.
  6. Asylum
    Asylum tries telling similar tales (twice) and comes up pathetically short in the scare department, but the atmosphere and theatrics of the Amicus presentation make it a more than worthwhile trip down memory lane for die-hard horror buffs.
  7. Ong Bak 3
    Most of Ong Bak 3's spectacular shortcomings are forgivable because, to a large extent, the film is everything you came to see and then some.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Let the Bullets Fly
    Let the Bullets Fly is an intentionally overheated and very funny comedy about how the best-laid plans tend to fall apart in spectacular fashion.
  9. 13 Assassins
    Beginning with a series of traps before escalating into sword-to-sword skirmishes, Miike's centerpiece boasts sharp momentum and nasty muscularity.
  10. The Muppets
    The beloved gang's sweet reunion will melt nostalgic adults into laughter and tears, and maybe kids won't mind drippy new Muppet Walter so much.
  11. The Adventures of Tintin
    Fast on its feet, using 3D and motion-capture animation to kick its comedy-adventure into a superhuman gear, Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin is a wittily kineticized adaptation of the internationally loved comic books.
  12. The Hunger Games
    The Hunger Games is more notable for the holes it doesn't fall into than the great heights it reaches.
  13. Final Destination 5
    If the series really does end here, may this final installment be hailed as a triumph of poetic justice.
  14. Warrior
    O'Conner continues to exhibit a deft knack for melding interpersonal drama with athletic competition in ways that, despite his tales' clichés, earn their melodramatic manipulations through genuine empathy for characters' plights.
  15. Drive
    A lot of critics will talk about how the movie is a stripped-down, "pure" genre piece, and there's a lot of truth to that. What may not get as much press is the way stripped-down-ness is an affectation, and always has been.
  16. Arthur Christmas
    A yuletide fable that boasts Aardman Animation's peerless mix of whip-smart comedy and cheery heart.
  17. A Dangerous Method
    As rigorous and stimulating as its thematic inquiries are, A Dangerous Method ultimately rests as much on its performances, and in that regard, it succeeds far more than it fails.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hugo
    Scorsese's affection for cinema is, of course, no surprise, and Hugo doesn't shy away from stumping for the cause of his Film Foundation; which isn't to say it's a vanity project, at least not any more than any film with a budget in the nine figures is.
  19. The Ides of March
    Clooney's films as director often begin with a familiar point A and conclude at a less-familiar point B, deriving much of their interest from the circuitous path required to navigate the shift.
  20. The Three Musketeers
    A moment's patience is soon rewarded by Anderson's vast store of rich, intoxicating imagery.
  21. A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    Overflows with inspired craziness, doling out an all-night odyssey of sex-centric crises, death-defying conflicts, and Neal Patrick Harris-centered insanity with snowballing momentum, as bits pile on top of bits with intoxicating verve.
  22. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    Quibbles dissipate in the face of the giddiness of the action, which builds to such a relentless head that even the serious stakes of the film’s motivation give way to a largely pleasant vibe.
  23. Submarine
    It cheats a little, using a mix of amateurish extreme close-ups and striking Welsh industrial vistas to substitute for real technical proficiency, but also applies more formal consideration than most films, namely teen-centered comedies, ever do.
  24. The Deep Blue Sea
    Its director's romantic sensibilities wed to Terrence Rattigan's 60-year-old play, this period drama is buoyed by Rachel Weisz's poignant embodiment of a bourgeois wife seeking erotic autonomy.
  25. Life of Pi
    The second act shifts the film from a lazy and comfy litany of introductions to a riveting fantasia of pure cinema, wherein Lee paints an oft-wordless picture of nature's harshness and grace, the perfect arena for Pi to have a Christ-like coming of age.
  26. Joyful Noise
    Joyful Noise certainly has its demographics covered.
  27. Premium Rush
    Proves how invigorating genre filmmaking can be in the hands of a savvy, perpetually inventive director.
  28. The Wizard of Oz
    A true amalgam of creative forces individually pooling their studio-contract talents like a hive of bees.
  29. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    The Lorax is a modest gem, failing to significantly enhance its source material's ideas but still delivering a zany, rollicking, multi-character version of Seuss's environmental cautionary tale.
  30. The Secret World of Arrietty
    Offers exactly what its title promises, unveiling this secret milieu through thoroughly meticulous animation.
  31. 21 Jump Street
    Like many almost-great comedies, 21 Jump Street is frontloaded with the best go-for-broke gags and lines.
  32. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    In spite of its lazy, cookie-cutter screenplay, simple narrative mechanics are only dutifully observed to the extent that they step aside to make way for numerous flights of madness.
  33. The Dark Knight Rises
    Christopher Nolan's capper of his Batman trilogy is a summer blockbuster of grand inclinations in both form and content.
  34. Our Idiot Brother
    Shat makes Our Idiot Brother work is the endless appeal of watching Rudd's lovable idiot run roughshod over the sophisticated New York mini-universe while winning the confidence and admiration of everyone around him.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Expendables 2
    It plays out like a series wet-dream scenarios, performed by a cast of vintage action figures battered and broken from overuse, bleached and slightly molted from sitting in the sun too long.
  36. Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    Andrew Rossi's documentary allows The New York Times a kind of nail-biting self-portraiture as it peers off the precipice of (hopefully) a 2.0 rebirth.
  37. Tabloid
    A slick, entertaining offering, playing at times like a tarted up "E! True Hollywood Story."
  38. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    Throughout this American Graffiti-like Circadian shuffle, we can sense these characters coming to grips with human realities that they dare not vocalize.
  39. The Guard
    The Guard is John Michael McDonagh's caustically funny riff on cop and crime films.
  40. The Five-Year Engagement
    The film proves that neither gross-out gags nor pseudo-sophisticated Woody Allenisms are necessary to make a smart, funny comedy.
  41. Littlerock
    Confronting the concept of alienness in a California desert town, this modest tapestry finds equivalent dignity in history-conscious travelers and natives weighed down by roots or inertia.
  42. Raw Faith
    Peter Wiedensmith's methods aren't as cinematic as they could be, but even this seems to ably mirror Marilyn Sewell's humility.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Mill and the Cross
    Every bit as visceral an experience as Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and with a lead actor whose face radiates the same eternal quality as that of the late Klaus Kinski, The Mill and The Cross also feels a lot like live theater.
  44. One Lucky Elephant
    A uniquely passive reminder of the dangers of showering exotic creatures with anthropomorphic affection.
  45. Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    The film is as emotionally manipulative as the show, but it's never appeared more truthful in its aspiration to inspire - and profit in the process.
  46. Turkey Bowl
    Well acted and wise enough to not excessively linger in its atmosphere of genial camaraderie and underlying regret and nostalgia, Turkey Bowl accomplishes its small-scale goals with aplomb.
  47. Take Shelter
    It's not easy to give a character study concerning mental illness the aspect of a psychological thriller without some notes of exploitation or trivialization creeping in, and Take Shelter makes a few missteps.
  48. Good Deeds
    Simultaneously both archetypal Tyler Perry and another step in the direction of nuance and thoughtfulness for the filmmaker.
  49. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    The film, still only clearing its throat, hints at a wellspring of emotional riches to come.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Agrarian Utopia
    The Northern Thailand pastoral settings are so refreshing and mesmerizing that they alone can provide the movie's raison d'être.
  51. R
    If the trajectory of R foreshadows tragedy early and often (what prison film doesn't?), the filmmakers manage to infuse quiet moments of reflection and panic into each man's traumatic experience.
  52. Attack the Block
    More "Bloody Kids" than "Super 8," more "Assault on Precinct 13" than "Jumanji," and, in the end, more "Be Kind Rewind" than "Adventures in Babysitting."
  53. Leap Year
    Leap Year is a story of survival, and its poised aesthetic is remarkably keyed to its main character's shell-like behavior.
  54. Crime After Crime
    It not only makes for riveting cinematic drama (all the more impressive given that it relies so heavily on recounted words rather than illustrated actions), but for first-rate muckraking.
  55. J. Edgar
    Black's script, in the wrong hands, could have come under fire for confusing Hoover's twisted mind with his homosexuality or his problems with Mother. Eastwood doesn't seem to give a fuck, and only opts for one overt visual match, depicting as mirror images Hoover's lifeless corpse and the remains of the Lindbergh baby.
  56. W.E.
    W.E.'s is a kind of dynamic pleasure that allows for non-shameful identification with the feminine and a fantasy of becoming what we see.
  57. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    Not only sets up the writer's life as representative of the transitions of early modern Jewish life, but posits his oeuvre as an ongoing chronicle of the shift from a vibrant, unified Yiddish culture to a fractured world-in-exile.
  58. Thor: The Dark World
    Superhero movies aren't going anywhere, nor is their standard, on-to-the-next-fight structure, so it's heartening to see a gem that grandly and amusingly fills in the blanks.
  59. Senna
    Asif Kapadia's documentary is ultimately less affecting and insightful on a universal thematic scale than on an individual, personal one.
  60. We Were Here
    Simply and devastatingly letting five residents of San Francisco share their reminiscences of that city's nightmarish "war zone" in the early, horrific years of AIDS, We Were Here creates a harrowing, streamlined oral history.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sleeping Beauty
    Julia Leigh's take on the fairy tale is a study in detachment and unspoken dissatisfaction, traits that imbue the proceedings with a barely-contained sexual energy lurking beneath a thin veneer of calm.
  62. Carnage
    One doesn't have to look too closely at Carnage's final shot to marvel at the way Polanski refuses to haughtily indict his audience in the pettiness of his characters' behavior.
  63. Star Trek Into Darkness
    The film is densely plotted, occasionally bordering on the convoluted, but the clarity and inventiveness of the direction keeps the drama and the action constantly percolating.
  64. The Woman with the 5 Elephants
    Watching Svetlana Geierat work, parsing the wild complexities of language as she converts Russian into German, the doc becomes a meditation on enforcing order in a world that refuses to accept it.
  65. The Optimists
    This autumnal statement compensates for its fixed despair with bracing wit and a willingness to see acceptance of misery as the best of all possible options.
  66. Dredd
    The story places a premium on delivering its disreputable sex-and-violence goods with a minimum of fuss or pretension.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Joy
    Sergei Loznitsa's documentaries are mainly compilations of archival footage, so it makes sense that his first fiction film is also essentially a compilation, an array of dynamic, aggressive bits rather than one coherent text.
  68. Young Adult
    Pairing again after the mad success of "Juno," Cody and Reitman prove a canny team when it comes to capturing frank yet polished modernity, getting at truths of the here and now even if a certain excess of gloss denies them the full Americana humanism of someone like Alexander Payne.
  69. The Last Circus
    Subscribes to the belief that moderation is a four-letter word, flying about with an abandon that begets exhilaration as well as exhausting messiness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    Inescapably and poignantly colored by the revolutionary events that would take place in Egypt in the years since its making, Scheherazade brims with faith in storytelling as art's great way of lifting society's veils.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Francis Lawrence imbues the source material with visceral pleasure in well-wrought scenes vacillating between elaborate spectacle, breathtaking terror, and--occasionally--surprising beauty.
  72. Summer Pasture
    The faces of the culture - a group of nomadic Tibetans who raise yak and harvest caterpillar dung from ramshackle tents in the Chinese mountains - resist all but the most vague of ecological or political calls-to-action.
  73. The Grey
    There's little in Joe Carnahan's previous films, marked by their frenetic, fanboy-friendly overindulgences, to predict the cold blast of The Grey, an old-fashioned, neatly arrayed survival story that almost reads like a reaction to the excesses of his past work.
  74. The Journals of Musan
    If The Journals of Musan indicates anything, it's that people, for the most part, either can't or simply aren't willing to comprehend the circumstances behind others' actions.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Revenge of the Electric Car
    Revenge of the Electric Car, which details the resurgence of interest in the mass production of the battery car, is sometimes too slick for its own good.
  76. The Tiniest Place
    Going back to the scene of trauma is a familiar Latin American strategy for dealing with its wars and dictatorships through art, but The Tiniest Place takes a disturbingly literal approach to such wound-scratching homecoming.
  77. Bullet to the Head
    Walter Hill thoughtfully regards the pummeling power of weaponry at work.
  78. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    Hark's new film is a consummately bizarre crowd-pleaser that throws everything at the viewer from makeshift plastic surgery by acupuncture to death by spontaneous combustion.
  79. Silent Souls
    Folklore, rituals, and the past weigh heavily on Silent Souls, which is somewhat endemic of films from Fedorchenko's home country of Russia.
  80. The Inheritors
    Assembled from short, naturalistic shots of people at work, the documentary becomes a bittersweet testament to labor and a damning representation of a vicious cycle, its images speaking entirely for themselves.
  81. The Three Stooges
    After what seems like an eternity of inanity and incompetence in the realm of Cats & Dogs and Squeakquels, the Farrelly brothers' direction is downright classical.
  82. Shit Year
    Shit Year is a thematic twin to Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," both heightened fables about the slow disintegration of a retired actress mourning her now-dead career by retreating inward.
  83. Art History
    The staging of this dissociative roundelay is still presented in a forcefully lo-fi format, prizing roughly framed shots, improvisation, and flat characters, but there are ever clearer indications that Swanberg is producing something more than empty-headed slacker cinema.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    At the same time that director Carl Colby probes into the true character of his mysterious father through an arsenal of interviews with those that knew him, he gives equal weight to the dark chapters of America's history that his father's life traversed.
  85. The Woman in the Fifth
    Pawlikowski has crafted a film that throbs with substantial personal weight and bristles with a violent, haunting interior life.
  86. Wuthering Heights
    In whittling down Emily Brontë's romance to its most earthly aspects, Andrea Arnold stylizes herself into an unavoidable corner.
  87. Paul Goodman Changed My Life
    This bio-documentary of a New Left godfather presents a formidable character simpatico with today's zeitgeist in his championing of "spontaneous uprising."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Happy Life
    First-time writer-director Michael M. Bilandic's tongue-in-cheek, bare-knuckles approach to his ultra-low budget paean to a dying breed is a welcome piece of independent filmmaking.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Klitschko
    Smartly, Sebastian Dehnhardt's film eschews hype and goes far beyond mere talk, shows as well as tells, by including fascinatingly instructive slow- mo shots of both men's fights to highlight the differences between the brawny duo, often mistaken for identical twins.
  90. Hipsters
    An over-the-top Russian musical about hipsters set in 1950s Moscow, where getting a non-pastel-colored tie is a mafia-mediated operation and a saxophone is considered a concealed weapon? Yes, please.
  91. My Reincarnation
    My Reincarnation has an effective bifurcated structure that testifies to the level of trust Jennifer Fox clearly established with her subjects.
  92. Warm Bodies
    It flouts convention in a number of ways in service of its genre-mash-up agenda while still contributing something original to the tradition of the zombie film.
  93. Pianomania
    Stefan Knüpfer's subtle charisma feels more suited to a beefily human New Yorker article than a documentary film.
  94. The Look
    Rampling is very much aware of the camera's every intention and possibility. Perhaps too aware, like the kind of over-educated narcissist for whom real spontaneity is too costly a risk.
  95. Rampart
    Not only does its incredibly loose aesthetic challenge the traditionally controlled and slick conventions of the cop genre, it adds a certain visceral haziness that compliments Brown's own professional and personal immorality.
  96. Dzi Croquettes
    What's easy to appreciate in the documentary, however, is the way it reassembles the Dzi Croquettes' trajectory without polishing off its jagged edges. It's through their brilliance and their flaws that they become muses.
  97. Lawless
    Lawless may be full of half-hearted overtures toward depth and emotional complexity, but the film's prestige sheen is mostly a sham; the real focus here is the irrepressible lure of bad behavior.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Zero Dark Thirty
    Doubtless, Kathryn Bigelow's greatest strengths emerge when she can more freely flex her muscles as an action filmmaker.
  99. Under Control
    Volker Sattel takes us on a blank-eyed tour of the country's biggest plants (plus a few from Austria), exposing both the tenuous balance of precision and innovation that has provided 20th-century Western society with its most controversial power source.
  100. London River
    Rachid Bouchareb casts his account of the horrifying aftermath of tragedy on an intimate scale, allowing the halting words and frightened faces of his two leads to tell us as much as we need to know about the uncertainties of those faced with tracking down their lost loved ones.
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