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. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die
    Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die’s obviousness only makes its proximity to the real-life A.I. slop invasion more unnerving, and the extent of what humanity has accepted for convenience’s sake more abhorrent.
  2. Send Help
    This is an immensely effective tropical island-set chamber drama in which two characters see their gender and labor relations start to reverse in ways that eventually reveal surprising ambiguities.
  3. The Drama
    Kristoffer Borgli delights in creating a hypothetical trap for his lovers, but he also acknowledges that there’s something romantic about being stuck in it together.
  4. The Plague
    The Plague is vividly, terrifying attuned to the way children create a social order that resists sensible adult intrusion and influence.
  5. Little Amélie or the Character of Rain
    Little Amélie or the Character of Rain changes up its breezy account of a toddler’s growth with the occasional moment of slowed-down rumination.
  6. Crime Wave
    A relentlessly unforced potboiler that gazes at noir through the looking glass.
  7. Blue Film
    On the whole, Blue Film’s raw, skin-crawling interrogations of aberrant sexuality and trauma ring fearless and true.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    How to Make a Killing
    John Patton Ford cultivates an old-school flair while keeping one finger on the pulse of the current moment
  9. Little Trouble Girls
    The film fascinatingly shows how Catholic moral strictures and an underlying paganism where desire is holy are two sides of the same coin.
  10. Hokum
    Damian McCarthy threads the needle between supplying old-school scares and a richly layered character piece that also functions as a meditation on his own perspective as a storyteller.
  11. Forbidden Fruits
    The film is a witchy mall comedy that mostly keeps you under its spell.
  12. Natchez
    With so many engaging voices on offer, Suzannah Herbert wisely chooses to let the locals tell the story rather than providing any explicit narration of her own.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dry Leaf
    Alexandre Koberidze reminds us that not seeing is sometimes a way of seeing the world differently.
  14. A Poet
    This finely shaded character study of a recalcitrant social pariah feels more than anything else like an existential parable.
  15. Fiume o morte!
    Igor Bezinović plays up the farcical side of history in Fiume o Morte!, his innovative docudrama retelling of Italian fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio’s short-lived occupation of Rijeka, Croatia, in 1920.
  16. Heel
    By keeping some of its cards close to its chest, Heel respects our intelligence, which helps it to earn its sneakily moving ending.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Conversation Piece
    Conversation Piece, as a “last will and testament” (as many have come to indentify it), feels both like a stylistic and thematic reconciliation on the filmmaker’s behalf, and as such a work of important insight into one of the cinema’s great anomalies.
  18. The Oldest Person in the World
    Sam Green’s documentary has a knack for finding moments where we can feel the broad sweep of a supercentenarian lifespan, condensed down into a single, everyday occurrence.
  19. The History of Concrete
    The odd and poignant The History of Concrete could be seen as a show of Buddhist acceptance on John Wilson's part of art's, and by extension life's, transience.
  20. Leviticus
    As star-crossed lovers resolve to battle their demons rather than surrender, this at times intensely creepy horror tale reveals itself to also be a potent and poignant teen romance.
  21. To Hold a Mountain
    The documentary ultimately reveals itself as a paean to female strength and resistance.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dao
    As it bounces around from conversation to conversation to paint a portrait of a community at once both fractured and reassembled thanks to these congregations, Dao comes to suggest a less sardonic version of one of Robert Altman’s hangout movies.
  23. Rose
    Freudians will have a field day with Markus Schleinzer’s 17th-century-set folk tale.
  24. Mouse
    This is subject matter that might sound heavy, but the difficult feelings dredged up never overwhelm the film’s gentle, character-driven approach.
  25. Lumiere, Le Cinema!
    Thierry Frémaux’s tribute is at its best when it spotlights just how much can still be rediscovered in the Lumière brothers’ formidable filmography, over 130 years after they filmed workers leaving the factory.
  26. 'Round Midnight
    Jazz music is a state of mind in Bertrand Tavernier’s 1986 film ’Round Midnight.
  27. Star Trek
    Like the original cast’s best movie, The Wrath of Khan, this Star Trek essentially turns out to be a war film, with the occasional philosophical timeout to discuss love, friendship, and duty until the next bone-crunching fistfight or multi-weapon rumble with the Romulans. But Bana’s villain lacks the wit and corny majesty of Ricardo Montalban’s.
  28. Whatever Works
    As it unfolds, Whatever Works assumes an increasing note of poignancy, becoming a quasi-optimistic story about securing whatever little love you can in this fakakta world.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Memories of Murder
    The film is overlong at 132 minutes, but never dull or predictable, especially in delivering an ambiguous ending that goes against the grain of most Hollywood slasher films. One wishes it strayed even further from the land of the Hannibal Lecter, then we’d really have something.
  30. Silent Hill
    Despite its often-overwhelming nonsensicality, there’s ultimately something irresistibly fiendish about Silent Hill, which not only condemns holier-than-thou religious zealots, but also—if I understand its gruesome finale—seems to be firmly on the side of the Devil.
  31. Mission: Impossible III
    Shallow to its core and as propulsive as a runaway locomotive, it's the most blatantly summer movie-ish of the Mission Impossibles. And also, surprisingly, the most viscerally entertaining.
  32. Sólo con tu pareja
    This sexy, often funny comedy about AIDS is missing one important thing: a crucial sense of danger.
  33. The Nightmare Before Christmas
    Whereas the film is a marvel to look at, it’s unfortunately not much in the song or story department, as Danny Elfman’s musical numbers are—save for the opening’s boisterous “This Is Halloween”—generally banal and unmemorable, and the plot, despite only having to fill out a paltry 76 minutes, ultimately as emaciated and insubstantial as its leading bags of bones.
  34. Maelstrom
    Maelström earns its haunting, unpredictable ending, never exaggerating Evian’s moral dilemma. Still, without non-stop techno or the existential overtones of a Kieślowski morality tale, Maelström is just another Winter Sleepers.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    25th Hour
    With all of its oversights and indulgences, 25th Hour is still a persuasive, undeniably fascinating film—watching Lee throw everything on his mind into the fray, no matter how irreconcilable with the story, makes for an interesting experience.
  36. Springtime in a Small Town
    The film exudes a sense of fleetingness; however static these lives may be, Tian's narrative perfectly evokes a changing season.
  37. Malcolm X
    With Malcolm X, Lee doesn’t so much inject his sensibilities into the lifeline of his subject, but rather comes to see how his place as a film director can be integrated within the social movement of X’s message.
  38. The Lion King
    Although far from the worst offender in Disney's canon, The Lion King is nevertheless host to many of the less savory qualities common to the studio's output.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    El Norte
    El Norte deserves credit for being one of the first films to engage American cinema in a discourse on the immigrant experience, but its approach to the material—shallow, condescending, and hectoring—undermines its stabs at brutal realism.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Bottle Rocket
    Anderson has a great deal of empathy for his charming band of fuck-ups, but the characters are thinly drawn, and Anderson's attempts to lend the story emotional weight, like giving Anthony a ludicrously one-dimensional love interest in South American housekeeper Inez (Lumi Cavazos), largely fall flat.
  41. Bonnie and Clyde
    Though Bonnie And Clyde may have been conceived as a proto-European hybrid and The Graduate a California thoroughbred, the violent hemorrhage that closes the Depression-era/Vietnam-era touchstone makes as good a case as anything in filmed entertainment that American mass media operates in the declarative.
  42. Aliens
    Cruder than the original, Aliens is a distinctly greedy mega-production.
  43. The Killer Inside Me
    The result isn't drama so much as a waking nightmare of play-acting and predestined doom.
  44. The Wayward Cloud
    Tsai's most off-putting work is nonetheless worthy of intense and ongoing consideration.
  45. World on a Wire (1973)
    Fassbinder's sumptuous 205-minute epic is intriguing as a prototype for later and more palatably cynical sci-fi standards like "Blade Runner" or even "Total Recall."
  46. The Debt
    Its performances are resourceful and affecting, with Chastain and Worthington in the past sequences, and Mirren and Wilkinson in the later chapters, exuding a complicated mess of responsibility, guilt, sacrifice, revenge, and regret.
  47. Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance
    Evangelion 2.0 evolves the original show’s central conceit of being alone together with other people in leaps and bounds. The problem with that is: Neon Genesis Evangelion was never a leaps-and-bounds kind of show.
  48. Sacrifice
    A historical melodrama that retains an ancient, elemental pull even as it insufficiently charts motivation and the self-denying values of antiquity.
  49. Friends with Kids
    With the foul-mouthed dramedy Friends with Kids, writer/producer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt is juggling so much, it's a wonder there aren't more jokes about balls.
  50. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Characters are better employed; emotions are, for once, palpable; and the selfishness of Bella, author Stephenie Meyer's avatar, is finally somewhat squelched.
  51. Captain America: The First Avenger
    Tommy Lee Jones provides wisecracking levity as Rogers's commanding officer, Hayley Atwell supplies the aforementioned buxom chest and accompanying tough-girl grit as Rogers's British love interest, and Johnson directs with flair, his set pieces defined by both muscularity and clarity.
  52. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    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.
  53. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    While I still protest Bay's too-hasty cutting (many shots are good enough to warrant a few extra seconds), his set pieces, and his sets, are magnificently entertaining.
  54. Winnie the Pooh
    Pooh's moral triumph isn't all that weighty, but it's almost existentially profound to see the silly old bear forgo honey a little while longer because of someone else's needs.
  55. Fright Night
    One of the minor triumphs of this Fright Night remake is Farrell's coolly assured performance, a cocksure spectacle of masculine virility far more intimidating to his character's victims, male and female alike, than the razor-sharp fangs Jerry uses to munch on human neck meat.
  56. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    Even the use of the 3D format -- and the 4D "Aroma-Scope," which allows the viewer to enjoy various odors in sync with the film -- adds to its good-natured earnestness.
  57. Colombiana
    Zaldana is such a sultry and surprisingly heartfelt executioner that she often finds a way to make this by-the-numbers genre retread feel, if not fresh, then at least sporadically electric.
  58. Footloose
    If the Footloose remake had its own signature dance, it'd be called the Push-Pull, as this hip-to-be-sorta-square movie, much like the small-town teens within it, has a mind for propelling itself toward a progressive future while continually being yanked back by cherished hallmarks of the past.
  59. The Grandmaster
    The film, more likely to invite comparisons to the writings of Marcel Proust than the previous Ip Man films, is a gorgeous folly that never entirely emerges from its creator's head.
  60. The Skin I Live In
    This is a beautiful vision, but in telling too many flowery secrets, it's also one that unnecessarily keeps its queerness in the closet.
  61. The Cabin in the Woods
    The Cabin in the Woods, regardless of its many genealogical links to prior Whedon creations, is an ideal Hollywood film in the Age of Pixar: spectacle for spectacle's sake, but infiltrated by intelligent commentary and an atmosphere of generosity and inclusion.
  62. Dream House
    A modest genre entry, Dream House also benefits from the fact that any movie with good enough sense to cast Elias Koteas is automatically better as a result, even if he is utterly wasted here.
  63. Real Steel
    If familiarity is endemic to this feel-good drama, there's nonetheless also something to be said for competent amalgamation and regurgitation of tired genre tropes.
  64. Margin Call
    A portrait of the eve of 2008's financial crisis that plays out with funereal inevitability, Margin Call loves speechifying, but the film is far more assured when lingering in the silence of its morally compromised characters.
  65. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    The film is home to some unique redeeming factors, but it panders to viewers by diluting its lesson, which teaches that some comfort zones can only be truly abandoned on the other side of the world.
  66. Horrible Bosses
    As its titular tyrants, Spacey, Aniston, and Farrell all revel in their over-the-top noxiousness, though the latter is mysteriously given short shrift even though his performance is far and way the most novel and gonzo.
  67. Wanderlust
    Wagging a limp dick at a host of up-to-the-minute issues, Wanderlust, manages to feel current, and relatively funny, without ever becoming particularly pointed, resulting in a floppy but satisfactory middlebrow comedy.
  68. Coriolanus
    Though his film's feel is pure Iraq and Afghanistan, Fiennes doesn't push those parallels unduly, and his central performances prove clear, nuanced, and incisive.
  69. 50/50
    The movie is far more successful in its execution of the young-man-meets-mortality element, warranting its existence by bringing some well-considered verisimilitude to what feels like rare movie territory.
  70. Take This Waltz
    Take This Waltz is full of chance encounters, some less likely than a lobby with nine hundred windows or a bed where the moon has been sweating.
  71. Incendies
    An enormously effective piece of filmmaking, Incdendies unfolds as a series of eye-opening disclosures which Villeneuve plays as much for (admittedly enthralling) sensation as for any kind of wider-ranging inquiry, a questionable approach given the thorny nature of the material.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Beautiful Boy
    This complex emotional texture no doubt owes a lot to Bello's stunning performance, which works by screwing with the familiar conventions of reaction shots; she goes cold when we expect her to freak out and explodes when we expect her to be silent.
  73. Dolphin Tale
    If its plotting can be slight, the film's restraint and earnestness help prevent it from ever tipping over into outright mawkishness, and its performances similarly avoid over-the-top histrionics.
  74. Safe House
    It'd be unwise to dismiss Safe House as merely a clone of Tony Scott's manically inclined vision.
  75. Lockout
    Luc Besson's producing career has been so geared toward lean, tough genre films that it's somewhat apt that he'd ape--or, if we're being kind, pay homage to--John Carpenter's preeminent sci-fi actioner Escape from New York with his latest, Lockout.
  76. One Day
    One Day conveys a real sense of the poignancy of individual lives unfolding over time, but the film's ultimate embrace of conventionality ultimately undercuts the not inconsiderable accomplishments the project had worked so hard to achieve.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Public Speaking
    If you’re a longtime fan of the truly iconoclastic essayist...expecting to learn what makes her tick then Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese’s loving profile of the early bloomer who subsequently spent a decade with “writer’s blockade,” is certain to disappoint.
  78. The Bourne Legacy
    One successful set piece in 135 minutes, and it involves very little running, no parkour, and no genetically enhanced superheroes from clandestine government projects.
  79. Rise of the Guardians
    This spirited enough yarn is sincere and heartening in its belief that our devotion to these youthful myths is healthy for our sense of wonderment.
  80. The Avengers
    While The Avengers exhibits exemplary craftsmanship, Joss Whedon hasn't made a great film.
  81. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    The script leaps forward with an absurdity almost as great as Lincoln's own strength.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    While it may not pack the rollicking drama of his first feature, Street Fight, Marshall Curry's timely If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front likewise chronicles the personal tale behind political headlines.
  83. Thunder Soul
    Forcefully traditional and sentimental, Thunder Soul benefits most from the cinematic turn of the actual events it documents, which allowed the beloved teacher's life to end on a perfectly bittersweet note.
  84. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    Even as an "18 months later" epilogue ensures us that everything's hunky dory, this is one surprisingly grim celebration of a group Rapaport obviously loves.
  85. Chimpanzee
    The astonishing footage of apes in their natural environment is made perfectly accessible and then nearly undone by a narration track that plays to the audience's basest desires for gag-inducing cuteness.
  86. A Better Life
    Save for its loving, plaintive, and thorough tour of the seldom-filmed East L.A., A Better Life is, top to bottom, derivative-of Polanski in its direction and of "Bicycle Thieves" in its plot (even Alexandre Desplat's gussy score suggests Angelo Badalamenti playing Mariachi Night).
  87. Another Earth
    The hanging specter of a phantom planet puts a lot of pressure on Another Earth, a resolutely small parable of grief that often feels menaced by its big-idea concept.
  88. Terri
    Terri, a generously spirited dramedy in the high-school-misfit genre (indie division), finds director Azazel Jacobs taking a calling-card approach to his second feature.
  89. Road to Nowhere
    The script is busy and unconvincing, and much of the acting is lousy, but there are haunting touches.
  90. The Last Mountain
    Haney's movie is not great cinema, nor was meant to be, but as an introduction to one of the myriad dangers threatening our earth, it serves its cause well enough. And that, after all, is the whole point.
  91. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    A unique restaurant like El Bulli probably deserves a more creative documentary than El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a static portrait that comes off as less than inspired by its unusual subject.
  92. Magic Trip
    At its best, Magic Trip evokes the freewheeling, idealistic, psychedelic vibe of an era's origins; at worst, it's a film in which people narrate their own druggie home movies.
  93. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    Handsomely mounted and shot with an eye for nocturnal Parisian mystery by Guillaume Schiffman, Gainsbourg somewhat mercifully peters out after the grande scandale of the provocateur's reggae version of "La Marseillaise," which earned him the wrath of French patriots.
  94. ParaNorman
    The tagline for the film reads "You Don't Become a Hero by Being Normal," and the film mostly lives up to that assertion, but only up to a point.
  95. Safe
    Safe's primary contribution to the burgeoning Jason-Statham-kicks-everyone's-ass subgenre is setting three of its set pieces in crowded New York City venues (a subway car, a hotel dining room, and a Chinatown nightclub) where shootouts lead to believable mass-exodus pandemonium.
  96. Elysium
    A cheekily gruesome and genuinely urgent entertainment, Blomkamp's latest nevertheless can't help but beg the question: Where's Snake Plissken when you need him?
  97. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    Queen of the Sun is honey pornography with an activist heart.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Django Unchained
    While the rush toward a conventional climax is confusing, and more than a little disappointing, there's an undeniable pleasure that emerges in seeing Tarantino juggle the dynamite of his ideas, even when they prematurely pop off in his face.
  99. Killer Elite
    Killer Elite is pleasurable enough, but with a steadier hand, it could've been one for the books.
  100. Jig
    Jig doesn't twist itself into the self-important, exploitative think piece on youth ambition that Spellbound was, but it does convincingly suggest that its subjects are in it for more than sport.
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