Slant Magazine's Scores

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:
7775 movie reviews
  1. Adrian is too flat as a character, his plight too generic, for his tears to count as something other than a sentimental ready-made.
  2. Theo Who Lived is fascinating, and Theo Padnos is an exacting storyteller, but the film pushes through one story point to the next, occasionally prizing velocity over texture.
  3. This is a work of defiantly simplistic, classically structured Hollywood storytelling, and Mel Gibson takes to its hokey plot points with some gusto.
  4. The film's peculiarly exhilarating effect can be attributed to a sense of social outrage that's transcended for the sake of metaphoric social clarity.
  5. Alison McAlpine's documentary lacks urgency beyond its persistent pondering of the sky's eternal mysteries.
  6. Alexis Bloom’s keenly insightful and deeply depressing documentary is probably best viewed not as a record of the past but a document of what’s to come.
  7. Nicole Holofcener's The Land of Steady Habits often suggests the film that American Beauty might have been if the latter had been pruned of its smug hysteria.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The story arc is somewhat facile, and its lesson about preserving history instead of demolishing it to make way for new, shiny things is too obvious.
  8. As funny and batshit insane as the movie often is, the fact that 22 Jump Street knows it's a tiresome sequel doesn't save it from being a tiresome sequel, even as Lord and Miller struggle to conceal the bitter pill of convention in the sweet tapioca pudding of wall-to-wall jokes.
  9. Slavoj Žižek manages to explain some of Lacanian psychoanalysis's most inscrutable notions with disarming clarity and infectious urgency.
  10. Orson Welles and Dennis Hopper both understand that cinema’s inherent fakeness is the wellspring of its importance and its danger.
  11. While it isn’t an overt examination of it in the manner of The Moment, the film does feel like a natural cinematic extension of Charli XCX’s melancholy party-girl persona.
  12. Jim Mickle plays the scenario deadly straight and unintentionally exposes all of its attendant absurdities, leaving the cast stranded.
  13. 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.
  14. With Gemini, Aaron Katz does his cover of the Los Angeles-set murder mystery, homing in on the genre's evocative loneliness.
  15. The film is less contemptuous of Brad than compassionate: brutally honest about his faults, yet ultimately understanding of them.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    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.
  16. Gambling on the unlikely redemption of a doom metal fuck-up, this potential rock-doc tragedy reveals a bromance of idol and idolator.
  17. A true-crime documentary of invigorating analytical clarity and evenhandedness.
  18. Sophie Hyde barely elaborates on the toll James's transition takes on him and only superficially as it affects Billie's psyche.
  19. A definitive reflection on the work of two great directors and the specific slices of cinema they so fruitfully cultivated.
  20. John Krasinski is most in his comfort zone when the importance of family and legacy drives the film’s tension.
  21. Kelly Reichardt's film is a wry, appealingly raggedy look at the impossibility of conjuring up excitement from boredom.
  22. Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims refuse to use their subjects as test cases for any sort of larger thesis.
  23. The difference between Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and David Fincher's own is not, as some might have hoped, the difference between night and day, but between curdled milk and a warmed-over holiday second.
  24. The Cage Fighter isn't sentimental about the notion of an aging sports hero who needs one more day in the proverbial sun, recognizing that desire as macho folly.
  25. Margarethe von Trotta's documentary reminds us of the reasons for Bergman's continued influence on cinema today.
  26. The action is horrifying, inventive, and heart-pounding, but it’s also the least surprising part of Predator: Badlands.
  27. If the film sometimes feels too small in comparison to its predecessors, it manages to make the most of its quietest moments.
  28. James Marsh carries forward the mood and menace of the opening into the balance of the work, perfectly matching his aesthetic strategies to the story's shifting moral terrain.
  29. The Wonder coheres as a powerful study of the way in which people are cloistered by their own stories.
  30. This lively adaptation plays up the novel’s more farcical elements, granting it a snappy, rhythmic pace.
  31. The inadvertent effect of the oppressive, almost overbearing gloom that shrouds Falcon Lake is that it manages to sap the life out of its initially carefree depiction of young people’s emotional lives.
  32. Sweaty Betty is a reminder that poetry comes in all shapes and sizes, and that art ultimately dictates its own terms.
  33. It’s fascinating to see Benedetta Barzini in academic action, like an ethnographer of the patriarchy herself, bringing back news from its most glamourous yet rotten core.
  34. Lack of clarity, it turns out, is what makes Disco Boy so enjoyable, and imbues it with gravitas.
  35. Vahid Jalilvand's film is so worked out that you know that every nuance is pointed and intentional.
  36. Despite convincing performances, the film is hampered by its stylistic and moral conventionality.
  37. Throughout, director Justin Kurzel's stagey pretensions clash with each of his aesthetic choices.
  38. In its own way, the film is as suitable a final work as a culminating magnum opus.
  39. Brendan J. Byrne's documentary about Bobby Sands colors its familiar formal lines with welcome intelligence.
  40. 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.
  41. Subtlety dissipates as Justin Chon’s film grasps for something louder and more obvious.
  42. The lack of real analysis or consideration leaves this perilously close to a Goldilocks-style depiction of privileged female indecision.
  43. The funny thing about the movie isn't its failure-to-launch humor, but the weird mess of life that rushes in despite it.
  44. While the film lacks the feverish, autocritical neuroses of Hitchcock’s mid- and late-period masterpieces, it often superbly plumbs notions of guilt and vulnerability, all the while cheekily satirizing Scotland Yard as a swayable arbiter of justice.
  45. The film’s aesthetic, understandably fused with its protagonist’s dogged can-do attitude, is both the source and limitation of its power.
  46. It combines the brooding intensity of a slow-burn thriller with the high-flown ornamentation of a gothic melodrama.
  47. Like Shohei Imamura, Argentinian writer-director Gaston Solnicki can be understood as a cinematic "entomologist."
  48. The film gets at the profound truth that our relationship with another person is, at its core, a collection of shared memories.
  49. It sticks firmly to a Kerouac-lite immersion into young love rather than a more provocative portrait of the hazards inherent to modern urban life.
  50. Ingrid Goes West recalls Fear and Single White Female — two films right in the sweet spot of mid-'90s nostalgia that Ingrid's peers love to recall — but is more indebted to Alexander Payne's social comedies, which dwell in the backwash of the American dream.
  51. The Breaking Ice is fixated on intense in-between states that work to separate people from each other and from themselves, as if to say self-acceptance and love aren’t destinations so much as journeys, at once formidable and worthwhile.
  52. Rocky's journey of self-realization undoubtedly has a universal resonance to it that intermittently yields poignant and inspiring moments. But where are the poor Indian kids in all of this?
  53. The film is a quietly gutting ode to Paris’s resilience in the post-Bataclan era.
  54. RBG
    The film rarely presents a clear analysis of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's victories, reducing her work to empty slogans.
  55. Polanski brilliantly evokes an evil society’s almost supernatural ability to recognize weakness in others and to punish all that is good.
  56. A modestly charming bit of whimsy that hopes to speak to anyone who experienced a sense of emotional injustice during their formative years.
  57. Despite the exuberance of the works featured, which are promptly flattened by the film's commitment to a traditional documentary blueprint, Yayoi Kusama's resilience still commands our attention.
  58. The film's sustainment of its corkscrew tension is so elegant and methodical as to feel dance-like.
  59. There's a blank space at the core of Molly's Game that the protagonist cannot fill, unable as she is to represent anything beyond her esoteric narrative of unorthodox self-actualization.
  60. It seems too enamored with the seductive notion of an honorable criminal, too ready to take Bulger's justifications as actual indications of his relative innocence.
  61. The transcendence that the film offers isn't to be taken lightly considering the near impossibility of living professionally as an artist.
  62. Emmanuel Gras resists pitying or sentimentalizing his main subject, or exalting him merely for his resilience in the face of such a harsh, uncaring reality.
  63. The film bottles a palpable emotion of unabashed joy, even when the rest of it seems to barely hold together.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Like its protagonist, the film sells out for the security of convention and complacency.
  64. Biopics ascribe titanic importance to a subject's every gesture, but Ferrara stresses the reality of creation, of its ordinary activities that nonetheless give an artist a sense of fulfillment.
  65. This isn't a film about surfing so much as one about riding a wave that must eventually break and recede.
  66. It has its very powerful moments, but the oddly linear, untroubled journey of its two main characters robs the film of some of its emotional authenticity.
  67. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is pure pedagogic bliss.
  68. Alex Ross Perry doesn’t insert himself into something he views as bigger than himself, and that sense of reverence lends an emotional anchor to even the driest, disaffected parts of Videoheaven.
  69. Malcolm D. Lee's film at least it goes down easy. Easy like a Sunday-morning hangover.
  70. What progressively mounts tension is the film's understanding of a boy's gradually realized homosexuality as being inextricable from the central metaphor of compromised vision.
  71. The film champions coddling people like Florence Foster Jenkins and treats critical thinking as the enemy.
  72. Is Josh "Skreech" Sandoval the least deserving documentary subject ever?
  73. Despite the subdued anger and drawn-out suffering on display, the documentary is primarily a work of hope.
  74. A neatly balanced tragicomedy about the easily blurred line between assisted living and assisted death.
  75. For all its congratulatory spirit, the film has the persistent feeling of an elegy bidding adieu to a bygone time.
  76. Less precise and cohesive than much of Joe Swanberg's recent work, as its small, improvisational skeleton struggles to meet the demands of the more ambitious story it's trying to tell.
  77. Meticulous in its adherence to conventional narrative inducement, this biopic only offers a sanded-down and embossed vision of Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde's 30-year marriage.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Format owes much to Short Cuts, but Haneke’s wintry vision lacks Altman’s sense of life overflowing beyond the frame.
  78. Hancock lays the groundwork for Eastwood to transform what might have been an admirable, tightly told entertainment into something far more emotionally resonant, slyly self-aware, and rich in subtext.
  79. The film only succeeds at evoking a firm sense of place and an accompanying air of alluring grotesquerie.
  80. For a spell, the film gets by on its unpretentious flair for atmosphere, even its disconcerting nonsensicality.
  81. Romero’s distinctly Pittsburghian sensibilities can’t be underestimated when explaining Dawn’s appeal; the Monroeville Mall perfectly evokes the feel of a hollow monument standing at the center of a community that couldn’t be bothered to define itself any more distinctively than could be represented by their choice between Florsheim or Kinney’s shoes. The mall, in essence, shoulders the burden of their identity.
  82. Lili Horvát’s film delights in wallowing in ambiguity, contradiction, and doubt.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Dante makes films that Spielberg’s id might make, movies that double down on pop cultural know-how and riotous thrills without pausing for anything so unentertaining as an earnest assessment of humanity.
  83. As if taking a cue from its own title, the movie emphatically sets its sights on the upward trajectory of Brown's career.
  84. Blitz is an earnest, broad-strokes portrait of a bustling city that occasionally succeeds in communicating the unprecedented sensory shock of modern warfare, but its uncritical craftsmanship and quarantining of past atrocities from present-day concerns also render the proceedings mostly lifeless.
  85. Cinema has rarely mined the consequences of being a child of a Holocaust survivor and Big Sonia adeptly explores how, in many cases, losing much of one's family led many survivors to put undue pressures on their future children.
  86. Renata Pinheiro’s film boasts the pleasures of shlock while sacrificing none of its philosophical rigor.
  87. 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.
  88. The main character’s condition feels like a dramatically dubious attempt to shroud the somewhat spindly nature of the film’s plot.
  89. Alison Klayman’s fly-on-the-wall documentary cuts Trump’s Rasputin down to size but doesn’t completely dismiss his power.
  90. Shazam! sees DC combining the golden-age optimism espoused by Wonder Woman and the jubilant, self-aware silliness of Aquaman into a satisfying whole.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Raimi's script is riotously deadpan, his compositions undeniably breathtaking and inventive. [6 March 2002]
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Roberto Minervini’s camera ably conjures the melancholy and alienation that afflict his characters across scenes that merge documentary and neorealist techniques, but it’s far from realistic to expect a troop of soldiers to act aloof around each other when they’re all in the shit.
  91. A relentlessly unforced potboiler that gazes at noir through the looking glass.
  92. Now, Voyager is the stuff of young lovers and hare-brained idealists, and if it can feel pretty foolish at times, it’s unforgettable for how sincere and affectionate it is toward one particularly time-honored cliché: that only fools falls in love.
  93. Centering the impermanence of human existence in the euthanasia drama The Room Next Door doesn’t indicate resignation to a “late period” style so much as it suggests a natural outgrowth of Almodóvar’s formidable body of work.

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