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. Daguerreotypes (1976)
    Like many of Agnès Varda's similarly themed explorations, the results are more than they initially seem, casual anthropology with a strongly humanist bent, resulting in a film that's fueled more by compassion than curiosity.
  2. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear now seems much less like Salt of the Earth-as-a-potboiler and a lot more like the spiritual godfather to every testosterone-fueled thrill ride since.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Evil Dead
    The setup and geography are consistent with the original, though the film never makes the mistake of trying to rebottle the lightning that electrified Sam Raimi's movie.
  4. The Gold Rush (1925)
    Some accuse the director of succumbing to sentimentality, but he’s never less sublime than when he reaches for ridiculous, grandiose highs in romance, coincidence, and naked emotion.
  5. The Hunter
    In The Hunter, writer-director Rafi Pitts manages an atmosphere of choked, ambiguous dread, somehow naturalistic and hallucinatory at once, that recalls nothing less than Godard's Alphaville.
  6. Inside Out
    Both wonderfully complex and weirdly reductive at the same time—a formula, though, that seems as sound an embodiment of the human brain as any other.
  7. The Island President
    The film successfully positions its point of view with the developing countries that suffer the most immediate consequences of global warming rather than the developed countries most responsible for climate change and from whose citizenry Jon Shenk's prospective audience is likely to be drawn.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Detention
    High school students (the jocks, the brains, the princesses, the criminals, the basket cases), long the favored prey of serial killers, somehow manage to fight back from the brink yet again in Detention, a bright, witty new genre mash-up.
  9. Toll Booth
    Both as a character study and modern-day parable, Toll Booth sneaks up on you with its subtle use of repeating motifs and audible cues.
  10. How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
    Lionizing a world-class architect without tipping into hagiography, this documentary performs a graceful cinematic dance around his works.
  11. Grey Matter
    Director Kivu Ruhorahoza dares to demolish fiction's inherent distance from what might be considered "reality."
  12. Come Back, Africa (1959)
    A solid, affecting artifact of the cruelty of late 1950s South Africa, in which music often makes despair and long-suppressed anger bearable.
  13. Pretty Poison (1968)
    The movie's big joke is that Sue Ann turns out to be the potent, sociopathic one; for once, Perkins is out-psychoed by an honor-roll student who worries she'll be late for hygiene class.
  14. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    In the race to achieve unadulterated fourth-wall breakage, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie is the new pack leader.
  15. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    Director David Gelb details, among other things, the painstaking process that goes into creating mouthwatering pieces of sushi.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    First Position
    The documentary twists out its six narrative threads with measured compassion and even-handedness.
  17. Grandma, a Thousand Times
    Director Mahmoud Kaabour is Fatima's grandson, and she instantly seizes on--lightly, in her way--the guilt and panic that's inspired him to make this film.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 11, 2012
  18. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    The film ends on a note of courage, and a call-to-action that we "remember," naturally, but we can't completely buy it: What Freidrichs has accomplished is a portrait of unknowability.
  19. The Miners' Hymns
    A study of the this former mining region in both its de-industralized present and its past state as an active coalfield, The Miners' Hymns arranges its two parts as a set of binary oppositions.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Forgotten Space
    If you think of Wall Street as capitalism's symbolic headquarters, filmmakers Allan Sekula and Noël Burch more or less show us in The Forgotten Space how the sea is capitalism's global trading floor writ large.
  21. Cirkus Columbia
    Its lightheartedness and overtly traditional narrative structure become a smart strategy for crafting what is ultimately a very nuanced political critique of capital.
  22. Sound of Noise
    The film is ultimately winning because of its devilish anarchic streak, aiming its arrows at the stuffiness of the traditional musical establishment.
  23. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?
    The film provides a crisp, succinct answer to a question that nags most Americans: What the hell happened?
  24. Safety Not Guaranteed
    More focused on emotion than adventure, it teases out the possibilities and perils of time travel without embroiling itself in the confusion inherent to the subject.
  25. Identity Thief
    Melissa McCarthy is riveting in simply-penned moments of remorse and confession, adding tearful depth to her ace timing and formidable physical comedy.
  26. We the Party
    While We the Party can be insensitive, or blind, to the misogyny and homophobia of the general culture (the token gay teen is a finger-snapping, head-bobbing fashionista), it takes the issues of race and class quite seriously.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Surviving Progress
    By turning the idea of progress on its head, the nimble Surviving Progress exquisitely presents to us the possibility that humankind's achievements may cause its downfall.
  28. Whores' Glory
    While Michael Glawogger does make overtures in the wrong directions, he usually seems to know where to steer his material.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Shakespeare High
    These SoCal kids are passionate about their craft and it shows in their renditions of the famous bard's work.
  30. Convento
    Convento is an unusual experimental film that conjures the free-floating aura of a dream, only without the stylized, hyper-symbolic imagery that we generally associate with films attempting to convey dream states.
  31. Dissolution
    The camera is at its most effective when it seems dumbfounded at what it's indexing.
  32. Middle of Nowhere
    In a cinema landscape where the representation of the black female experience is most visibly explored through the modes of outlandish comedy, unironic melodrama, or not at all, Ava DuVernay's take is a decidedly refreshing one.
  33. Downtown Express
    The movie's final act tries, somewhat admirably, to consolidate the plot's myriad interpersonal conflicts.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Loved Ones
    Sean Byrne endows his rote slasher material with the kind of blackly comic wit and levity that virtually guarantee its entry into the contemporary midnight-movie canon.
  35. The Wise Kids
    Hovering over the narrative is the fear of the domino effect that change can enact, the dread that one person's "queerness" may perhaps expose everyone else's.
  36. All In: The Poker Movie
    The film has a shambling charm that actively disputes an unspoken notion that a documentary must be well-structured in order to effectively land its points.
  37. Ruby Sparks
    Succeeds as a satirical fantasy about writerly self-involvement, but it's worth celebrating as a testament to self-made greatness, particularly in regard to the efforts of writer/star Zoe Kazan.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Love in the Buff
    The film has an exhilarating tossed-off quality that characterized many of the most entertaining works of the French New Wave.
  39. Artificial Paradises
    The juxtaposition between the gorgeous natural beauty of a remote beach with the stubborn human need to escape somewhere, no matter what cost, is what really enthralls in the film.
  40. Scenes of a Crime
    A true-crime documentary of invigorating analytical clarity and evenhandedness.
  41. Player Hating: A Love Story
    One of the more intimate and revealing looks at American projects ever made; it's assured and empathetic without indulging in fashionable white guilt.
  42. Kids of Today
    While this uncataloguable and entrancing film gazes back in nostalgia to a time of performance-art priapism when everyone seems to have known Warhol, it also leaves room for a particularly hopeful diagnosis of the present.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Madea's Witness Protection
    The film remains buoyed by the same open heart that makes Tyler Perry's best work so endearing.
  44. Fightville
    Fightville's most worthwhile material tends to lie in the space between what its subjects say and what we know to be true.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Snow on Tha Bluff
    Questions of authenticity aside, Damon Russell evinces a shrewd understanding of how to juxtapose the handheld camera's finite sightline with the bursts of chaos that suddenly invade it.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    American Animal
    It may be baked with the same ingredients that come in your standard mumblecore starter kit, but because of Matt D'Elia's indebtedness to other movies, the film follows a different recipe altogether.
  47. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    There's something to be said about a two-and-a-half-hour war epic that manages to make each of its countless decapitation scenes feel earned, even called for, in the moment.
  48. The Giant Mechanical Man
    It's a simple story of simple people intentionally told in simple terms, and the only issues with which it's concerned are those of pure personal connection.
  49. Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story
    Documentarian and subject, past and present blur together like bleeding watercolors in Raymond De Felitta's gripping memoir.
  50. Red Hook Summer
    The seamless juxtaposition of faith and pain, innocence and guilt, allows the film to transcend Spike Lee's occasional bombastic moments and become a strong examination of internal suffering.
  51. Under African Skies
    It does lightly suggest scintillating questions about the responsibility artists have in reflecting current political moments in their music.
  52. The Observers
    Goss's film carries its unique forms of narrative suspense, but her 16mm images imbue both the forbidding landscape and her characters' scientific aerie, though the observatory only dates from 1932, with a poetry of the seemingly eternal.
  53. 5 Broken Cameras
    The documentary provides a birdsong of perseverance in the face of irrational violence, immense historic anger, and grim, seemingly insurmountable realities.
  54. The Woman in the Septic Tank
    A lighthearted critique on the fetishized notion of the "non-actor," the ethics (or lack thereof) of the "docudrama," and the packaging of national despair for exportation.
  55. The Sessions
    It's the rare film to sell sex as something truly tender and life-affirming, and Helen Hunt, in particular, is lovely and poignant.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Tall Man
    Illustrates the problem of class mobility with a dark, troubling premise that holds a harsh light up to our own assumptions and expectations.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Queen of Versailles
    Lauren Greenfield's film evolves from an ode to entitled obliviousness to a more evenhanded character study, tracing the fault lines that develop within the Siegel family.
  58. Found Memories
    Julia Murat shows a fine grasp of form, letting her technique reflect the elements and moods of her story.
  59. Pink Ribbons, Inc.
    A righteously outraged documentary targeting the "warm and fuzzy" iconography of the breast cancer fundraising bureaucracy and its camouflage of corporate priorities.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Invisible War
    Kirby Dick's spartan use of graphics and statistics conveys arguments with little grandstanding.
  61. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    This is a summer blockbuster contingent on grand bargains, tactical retreats, and a ferocious, inevitable shock-and-awe campaign.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Corpo Celeste
    Once Corpo Celeste began to recede a little in my rearview mirror, my initial impatience softened a little.
  63. We Won't Grow Old Together (1969)
    A wild, furious, and genuinely unsettling ego is on display in Maurice Pialat's second proper feature.
  64. Tahrir: Liberation Square
    A direct-cinema document of the Cairo protests that toppled Mubarak, Stefano Savona's film doesn't pretend that Egypt's resolution has yet won a lasting victory.
  65. 2 Days in New York
    It keeps the entrances, exits, and misunderstandings rolling while rooting the action in emotions and character traits that are only slightly exaggerated for comic effect.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nate & Margaret
    Nathan Adloff's Nate & Margaret is an endearing, hopeful, and quietly radical film.
  67. Arbitrage
    If the film covers well-tread territory (a morally bankrupt player trying to prolong his own influence), it does so with pinpoint control of mood and theme.
  68. Hello I Must Be Going
    Thanks to Melanie Lynskey's performance, the movie feels like a believably worked-out, sympathetically presented study in thirtysomething uncertainty.
  69. Unforgivable
    The layered, character-driven drama may subvert expectations of a sunny Venetian noir, but observes its five principal characters with a probing, egalitarian eye.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Neil Young Journeys
    As great and intimate as Live at Massey Hall 1971 may be, it's not as transportive as this filming of a Neil Young performance at the venue 30 years later.
  71. Starry Starry Night
    A modestly charming bit of whimsy that hopes to speak to anyone who experienced a sense of emotional injustice during their formative years.
  72. Invisible
    One can see the difference between the two traumatized main female characters right in their faces.
  73. Ballplayer: Pelotero
    The doc is a sly, interesting achievement: It opens as an entertaining sports story and closes as a metaphor for government corruption.
  74. Family Portrait in Black and White
    Julia Ivanova, a Canadian filmmaker, doesn't judge Olga; she refuses to see her through the eyes of a presumably better-off first-world citizen.
  75. The Waiting Room
    Documents emotionally charged interactions between patients and hospital staff without any signs that the subjects are being made to feel self-conscious or that they're behavior is being affected.
  76. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    As a metaphor for the way we respond to the media, and the way our politics are funneled through the media lens, the film succeeds most when it revels in ambiguity.
  77. Killer Joe
    It thrills in seeing dumb people getting their due in hyper-stylized displays of violence, and yet it never feels contemptuous of them.
  78. Chicken with Plums
    A fable about the damage done when a young couple is forced to part, Chicken with Plums is deeply melancholic, yet so full of humor and humanity that it pulses with life even while tracing the trajectory of a slow suicide.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nuit #1
    It works--quite successfully, in places--as a warming tonic against this emotional nippiness of the cinema of Canadian coldness.
  80. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    The director's clear-minded approach allows her subject's more challenging aesthetic-political mix to shine through, even if it's at the inevitable expense of her own filmmaking proclivities.
  81. Planet of Snail
    Even with the heaviness of some of its subject matter, the documentary remains limpid and unsentimental until the very end, in keeping with its subject.
  82. The Internship
    Shawn Levy's occasionally uproarious, warm-hearted comedy is about different generations educating each other, but it never seems rote.
  83. Celeste and Jesse Forever
    An honest and breezily melancholic film, thoroughly clear-sighted in its intentions and ideas and bravely committed to the emotional rigors of its central relationship.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Mosquita y Mari
    Most of what transpires between the two girls feels as internal as something you only keep to yourself.
  85. Drought
    Everado González isn't above capturing some striking landscape shots, seemingly for the shear desolate prettiness of it, but they always double as a reminder of the very real plight facing the subjects.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Samsara
    Ron Fricke's film is a brightly hued bauble, fit for rapturous contemplation.
  87. Bachelorette
    This nearly pitch-black comedy is better than its tiresome use of '90s pop references, no matter how much they illuminate what the gals bonded over back in the day.
  88. Sister
    Ursula Meier's film is sustained by a sturdy emotional engine and some intrepidly thoughtful characterization.
  89. The Collection
    Whereas the later "Saw" films were hampered by bloated backstory, various ostentatious agendas, and self-satisfied sadism, The Collection feels utterly unburdened by anything but its lean, fleet-footed plot.
  90. West of Memphis
    By taking a disturbing and sometimes conflicted look at the prejudices that led to the West Memphis Three's imprisonment, it asks murky questions about how people could get something so wrong for so long.
  91. The Bullet Vanishes
    It's a prevailing sense of decency that explains why The Bullet Vanishes is such an effective tonic for summer-movie fatigue.
  92. The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate
    Tsui Hark's film is the veteran director's chance to let his imagination run riot in the context of a high-budget, 3D IMAX production.
  93. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    In keeping his actors on his sober-yet-buoyant plane, Kenneth Branagh presents a convincing romance that doesn't stall the film's brisk clip.
  94. Keep the Lights On
    More than just a relationship drama of striking specificity, this is a naked confession about addiction.
  95. Toys in the Attic
    Jirí Barta's film is a disturbing through-the-looking-glass reflection of traditional fairy tales.
  96. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    These films, and Tolkien's entire oeuvre, are most affecting in their depictions of friendship, and the performances here represent plutonic male intimacy in convincing, often moving ways.
  97. I'm Carolyn Parker
    What keeps the documentary from lapsing entirely into a generic human-interest story superficially peppered with local color is, oddly enough, the slowness with which Parker's goals are achieved.
  98. Step Up To The Plate
    Paul Lacoste's almost purely observational approach allows him to come about as close to documenting the process of creation as anyone ever has.
  99. Kung Fu Panda 3
    It finds a benefit in its genre affiliation, evenly distributing its action in quick bursts of fluidly animated fight choreography.
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