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. The Names of Love
    Chockfull of ideas in a way that's both scattershot and more than a little exciting.
  2. Passione
    Expressionistic rather than analytical, Passione, John Turturro's cinematic ode to the music of Naples, Italy, unfolds as a compendium of tuneful performances bracketed with the barest of contextualization.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Vincent Wants to Sea
    Complacent with road-movie tropes, director Ralf Huettner and screenwriter Florian David Fitz's Vincent Wants to Sea is likeable insofar as it's familiar.
  4. The Iron Lady
    The wonder and terror of Meryl Streep's performance in The Iron Lady is her formidable ability to nail the disheartening talents of not just Margaret Thatcher, but so many conservative politicians like her, who have a tremendous knack for changing minds and beckoning cheers while underlining their own rigid ignorance.
  5. Love Etc.
    Love is both a many-splendored and painful thing according to Love Etc., a multi-subject documentary about the various states of amour that, while never succumbing to glibness, also fails to rise above superficial geniality.
  6. Aurora
    What Puiu seems to be suggesting is that the complexities of human behavior and relationships are beyond the power of the law to comprehend, but are they also beyond the power of the cinema?
  7. Pacific Rim
    Guillermo del Toro doesn't rise above the obligations of staging a film of this sort as a multi-level video game, a stylish but programmatic ride toward an inevitable final boss battle.
  8. Summer of Goliath
    Nicholas Pereda shows nothing short of immense promise here, especially in his enigmatic framing and collaborative effort with his regular DP, Alejandro Colonado.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Rapt
    It presents itself in a sleek suit and tie, carrying itself from the moment it enters the room with a steadfast gait that suggests there's no dotted line it can't get us to agree to sign.
  10. The Ward
    Its ostentatious sense of horror -- think later-day Argento -- is far from suggestive, though some of its queasier moments effectively tap into our fears of not-so-bygone forms of invasive physical therapy.
  11. Farmageddon
    Farmageddon quite piquantly raises questions about the dim figures who determine what's suitable for national consumption, but it's more eloquently an ode to a group of dysfunctional, if essential, underground misfits.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Weird World of Blowfly
    If The Weird World of Blowfly is any different from other documentaries about eccentric characters from music-world obscurity, it's in the contentious topics Clarence touches on in his cantankerous speech.
  13. The Son of No One
    The Son of No One is driven by mood and atmosphere to the extent that the stakes-free story and interest-free characters seem almost incidental, and such is surely the movie's saving grace -- a perverse style that overshadows a severe lack of substance.
  14. Turbo
    As a film about social issues, and simply being yourself, it's commendably progressive, going so far as serving as a kind of coming-out story.
  15. Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    Flip-flopping traditional genre dynamics in a manner more cute than uproarious, Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil charts the Three's Company-style shenanigans that ensue when two West Virginia bumpkins cross paths with a group of camping college kids.
  16. Sleep Furiously
    An affectionate, if uncomfortably stagnant, portrait of moribund rural culture.
  17. All She Can
    The unconventional choice of extra-curricular activity for Luz sheds light onto the strange sport of powerlifting, in which teen girls are constantly weighed and sometimes told that they have 40 minutes to get three pounds off their bodies so they can compete.
  18. Habermann
    Habermann may not be a pragmatic classic of the "Army of Shadows" mold, but it falls within the upper-mid bracket of WWII movies because it doesn't attempt to understand or define the tragedy it approaches.
  19. Epic
    And that's the thing with Epic: It's something close to an animated masterpiece, provided it's watched on mute.
  20. Mozart's Sister
    Mozart's Sister is too often just one more rehashing of the "Aw, didn't women have it tough then" thematic that never forces the viewer to acknowledge that maybe they haven't got it as great as we'd like to think today.
  21. Griff the Invisible
    Director Leon Ford displays a wonderful empathy in his examination of Griff and Melody's lonely environments, allowing their fringe perspectives to flower organically from the mise-en-scène.
  22. The Whale
    When considering the best voiceover artists in cinema history, Ryan Reynolds doesn't immediately come to mind as an especially dynamic one.
  23. Pearl Jam Twenty
    Wholly uninterested in puffing up his subjects into an iconic rock outfit on a par with their idols Led Zeppelin and the Who, Crowe instead merely tells their story free from the constraints of rise-fall-rise clichés.
  24. Hysteria
    Hysteria's happy ending isn't the type that calls for a cigarette, and it certainly isn't the one the film deserves.
  25. My Kingdom
    If this oddly delineated narrative often falls between two stools, then the replacement of brightly bombastic opera battles with dimly lit, more conventional action sequences is a similarly unwelcome development.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Special Treatment
    A portrait of gender-and job-transcending ennui, Special Treatment paints a vulgar picture of two apparently interwoven professions: prostitutes and shrinks.
  27. Benda Bilili!
    The film's inquiry into the artistic method remains somewhat at the superficial level, but the directors do a fine job of emphasizing both the circumstances that lead to the music's creation and the satisfying result of the irrepressible sounds.
  28. The Lady
    The goings-on can rarely be called truly compelling, even if they're almost always generally pleasant.
  29. I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    An understated--and at times, clinical to a fault--Oedipal drama of long-simmering resentment and familial love's ambiguities, I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive risks bringing chilly subjectivity to sensational raw material.
  30. Undefeated
    What sets Undefeated apart from the usual underdog sports story is how the filmmakers emphasize the importance of mentorship as something separate from on-the-field interactions between coach and player.
  31. Pariah
    It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story.
  32. Sound It Out
    The film mostly works because it doesn't overplay the consequence of its subject.
  33. Hope Springs
    A decidedly adult drama about love and sex, wherein the comedy is largely incidental.
  34. Anna Karenina
    The film contains far more passion and a tad more complexity than the dominant and typically more staid model of middlebrow costume drama.
  35. Step Up Revolution
    The film busts a fierce move but never relishes the unique cultural essence that its gentrifying baddie threatens to snuff out.
  36. The Raid: Redemption
    This mostly no-nonsense, floor-by-floor ass-kicking panorama is admirably humble.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    White Wash
    "Why are there so few black surfers?" That's the question posed by Ted Wood's incisive, if ultimately repetitive, documentary White Wash, and to answer the question the film digs deep into US political and social history.
  38. There Was Once...
    A not insignificant act of oral history, Gabor Kalman's There Was Once… makes for considerably less compelling cinema whenever it turns its focus away from the talking-head testimony of the Holocaust survivors of Kalosca, Hungary.
  39. Inni
    As a document of a live show it looks like nothing else, but Vincent Morisset's greater aspirations, attempts to define or sum up the band through the inclusion of external material, come off as muddled and oblique.
  40. Journey from Zanskar
    It's the rare urgent-issue movie that refuses to pummel you with the importance of its subject matter, which in this case involves the shameful, potential extinction of a culture.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    As thorough as the filmmakers are in providing a political context for Fishbone, they're often reduced to tunnel vision in an attempt to lift the unheralded band to its rightful place in music history.
  42. To Be Heard
    This arc may sound particularly familiar on paper, but To Be Heard finds the unique passions and heartaches in all three stories, allowing the viewer to become invested in whatever outcome befalls each subject.
  43. You All Are Captains
    Oliver Laxe goes full-on meta by casting himself in the role of a visiting moviemaker who travels to Morocco to shoot footage with disadvantaged children living in a shelter.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Great Gatsby
    This is a film which takes classic source material and imbues it on screen with a sense of wonder commensurate to its prior form, perhaps offering an even more visceral impression of the possibilities inherent to this beautiful, tragic world.
  45. God's Land
    The movie's understanding of how the group taps into people's deep need to believe ensures that the film remains not only fair-minded, but sensitive to the tortured emotions of its conflicted central characters.
  46. Retreat
    Retreat's wheels are constantly spinning, but they're not always taking us anywhere.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Magic Mike
    It's as if Soderbergh expects the film to mostly resolve itself, rounded out by the asses-in-the-seats appeal of the material, rote thematic underpinning, and ample charms of the cast.
  48. The Last Rites of Joe May
    Watching Dennis Farina dominate every scene is a joy, and thankfully the actor makes the most of this opportunity.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Assault
    The Assault raises many more questions than it answers, and its overall objective is puzzling and remains shrouded in political agenda.
  50. The Conquest
    Even as it takes pleasure in imagining the wheeling and dealing that politicos make when no one is looking, it never offers as much insight into the process by which a president is made as its premise would seem to promise.
  51. The Love We Make
    The Love We Make is mostly about placing viewers in an icon's shoes as he makes a rehabilitative gesture toward a city with which he's grown considerable roots.
  52. Dog Sweat
    With six protagonists serving as a cross-section of Tehran's youthful population, director Hossein Keshavarz's Dog Sweat is a somber, minor-keyed debut feature about the daily manifestations of oppression in contemporary Iran.
  53. Garbo: The Spy
    Using a whirlwind of archival footage, maps, and split screens, Edmon Roch conveys Juan Pujol Garcia's reign as Europe's premiere spy in a constantly fluid fashion, aesthetically mimicking his crafty and cagey nature.
  54. Addiction Incorporated
    The most dramatic material, such as Victor DeNoble's much-applauded congressional testimony, more or less traffics common knowledge without bothering to provide fresh emotional context.
  55. Declaration of War
    The surest sign that a filmmaker recognizes the insularity of his or her project is the presence of perfunctory attempts to hint at a wider political context.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Lads & Jockeys
    Half-formed expressions of disappointment, hope, struggle, confusion, and boyish playfulness on faces otherwise marked by youth's inexperience, and a self-consciousness brought on by the curiosity of being filmed, constitute the most memorable moments of Lads & Jockeys, a documentary on 14-year-old aspiring jockeys in France.
  57. Captain Phillips
    It works too hard to keep matters on an even, we're-all-more-alike-than-different keel, which is just one part of its chief problem of forcefully conveying information and intent.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Norwegian Wood
    Even if this Haruki Murakami adaptation amounts to a gorgeous but lethargic emo ballad, there's no denying the stately lyricism of its melancholy.
  59. The Pill
    At the very least, The Pill could have been a pleasant exercise in screenwriting sharpness if Fred and Mindy's situation had been confined and (un-)resolved within the confines of its very promising first scene.
  60. Sleepless Nights Stories
    A freeform, New York-based variation on the Arabian Nights tales by Jonas Mekas is both a pan-narrative and a disarming portrait of its sweetly curious maker.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Tyler Perry's Temptation
    When its third act erupts into full-blown theatrical maximalism, Tyler Perry's Temptation practically turns into Brian De Palma's Temptation.
  62. Monsieur Lazhar
    There's great potential for the kind of issues that are taken on, but nothing is resolved, and the biggest questions, of guilt and shame, the gulf of understanding between the first world and the third, remain unengaged.
  63. Turn Me On, Dammit!
    Nothing here is wrong, but beyond pointing out that sexually charged teenage girls are likely to be misunderstood in an oppressive small town, there's nothing that's especially insightful here either.
  64. Black Butterflies
    A reasonably sensitive and occasionally insightful look into the mind and psyche of an impassioned and deeply troubled artist.
  65. Last Days Here
    Gambling on the unlikely redemption of a doom metal fuck-up, this potential rock-doc tragedy reveals a bromance of idol and idolator.
  66. Won't Back Down
    One of its strengths is a knowledge of when to unfurl information, particularly for the strongest emotional effect.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sing Your Song
    It's likely, then, that the film was directed by Susanne Rostock the same way Belfonte's new memoir, My Song, was written with Vanity Fair's Michael Shnayerson: to articulate, polish, and edit what the vociferous and at times alarmingly honest Belfonte wants to tell us without injuring his credibility outside of the left any further.
  68. The Snowtown Murders
    Whatever one ends up thinking about The Snowtown Murders, it's difficult to deny that it's a deeply impressive work.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Decoy Bride
    The film recognizes how resolutely derivative it is, and it deigns to relish rather than efface that quality. The result is a trifle, but a fairly amusing one.
  70. We Have a Pope
    Nanni Moretti's latest is a mixed bag that too often settles for easy, superficial laughs.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos
    Manages to be an entertaining and faithful expansion on the original material while being inconsequential to it.
  72. The Moth Diaries
    This is one vampire film whose sexless, generic ending betrays a promise of revisionist complexity.
  73. Keyhole
    A night of reckoning by a hoodlum in his haunted former home is a more sober and remote Freudian farrago than one expects from Guy Maddin.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Hell and Back Again
    Unlike most war documentaries, which tend to only skim the surface of its gun-toting subjects' lives, photojournalist Danfung Dennis's Hell and Back Again isn't content to merely capture warriors in combat.
  75. Return
    As director Liza Johnson understands, simply being over there changes someone, no matter if anything unusually traumatic happened to the person.
  76. Windfall
    Whatever the legitimate arguments Windfall makes against the industry it targets, Meredith's feuding becomes just as inaccessible as the windmills that incite it.
  77. The Wolverine
    This may be the year's best superhero movie because, for a sufficient amount of time, it doesn't feel like a superhero movie at all.
  78. Jess and Moss
    A strange and intoxicating indie constructed as a series of vignettes that capture two children grappling with the overlap of trauma and nostalgia.
  79. Your Sister's Sister
    For long stretches in its first two acts, Lynn Shelton's film is distinguished by a disarming sense of freedom and spontaneity.
  80. The Fairy
    Re-employing the tools of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, this pleasant fable reclaims artful slapstick with a bliss that's hard to deny.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Easy Money
    The humanization of these antiheroic outlaws doesn't feel forced, but it does feel engineered, and there's never a viewer investment to match the story's wide expanse.
  82. Natural Selection
    The film works because what it documents is less a transformation and more a return to a former, more natural state for its troubled protagonist.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Trouble with Bliss
    Populated with unlikely occurrences and oddball characters, it plays out, to put it most complimentary, like a dull, slower moving "After Hours."
  84. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    Intimacy doesn't completely give rise to insight in this loving, if largely for-fans-only, posthumous portrait of Memphis-bred punk rocker Jay Reatard.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Where Are You Taking Me?
    The documentary revels in the simple joys of finding something that captures the eye and paying attention to it.
  86. Fun Size
    It pairs modern attitude with John Hughesian tropes, and it's odd enough, in spurts, to boast originality.
  87. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    The end results are mixed but nevertheless scintillating and provocative enough to be worth taking seriously.
  88. Blue Like Jazz
    Blue Like Jazz charts a typical existential coming-of-age tale, yet remains atypical by being hip while also treating religion fairly.
  89. Post Mortem
    Pablo Larraín employs ultra-widescreen cinematography for constricting close-ups and inhospitably alienating compositions that generate a nasty chill, the director keeping the army's brutality off screen to amplify a sense of oppressive malevolence.
  90. Payback
    This documentary on the many forms of human debt, though often frustratingly broad, offers a path to balancing civilization's ledger with a hard-nosed brand of altruism.
  91. Polisse
    Polisse has been compared to "The Wire," but beyond a shared interest in the Sisyphean nature of police work, the two are mostly comparable as inverses of each other.
  92. Restless City
    The script simply isn't in the same league as the images that Andrew Dosunmu and the gifted cinematographer Bradford Young have fashioned.
  93. Starlet
    The film works as a charming aesthetic exercise with its jerky camera and inadvertent cuts, as a contemplation on intergenerational female bonding.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Seven Psychopaths
    If Seven Psychopaths smacks a bit showoff-y in places, it's only because Martin McDonagh has so much worth showing off.
  95. Fake It So Real
    Fake It So Real has been made with considerable more polish than other do-it-yourself documentaries such as "Total Badass," but the sensibility is similar.
  96. Fear and Desire
    For all its heavy-handed gloom and stylistic unevenness, Fear and Desire has a certain fierceness that's hard to shake.
  97. Frozen
    The film's empowering themes of feminine strengths and bonds eventually flourish in novel fashion.
  98. Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story
    The documentary is briskly paced, often compelling, but a little soft, as it succumbs to hero worship.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    A Simple Life
    A Simple Life may have one of the most accurate titles in all of cinema, as the film has a bracingly casual sense of day-to-day working-class life that recalls the films of Jean Renoir or, more recently, Olivier Assayas.
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