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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    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sound City
    Given Dave Grohl's reputation for versatility and good taste, the film's sturdy sense of forward motion may come as no surprise.
  2. The Counselor
    The film doesn't temper enough of Cormac McCarthy's excesses, but Ridley Scott and his ensemble find enough meat in his scenario to make for diverting, bloody pleasure.
  3. Lore
    Copious amounts of landscape and wilderness shots cover up its schematic plot, as its indirect visual allusions take precedence over thematic development.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Koch
    Neil Barsky is aware of how a great and terribly troubling person can reside in the same body, but his occasional eagerness to appoint himself as his subject's latest press agent is dubious.
  5. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    Bob Byington's perspective may be above it all, but that doesn't quite account for the shades of melancholy that pop up unexpectedly in lines of dialogue and in some of the performances.
  6. Blue Jasmine
    One of Woody Allen's strongest and most pointed films in over a decade despite mildly falling victim to his recent propensity for clunky narrative development, cynicism, and stereotypical characterizations.
  7. I'm So Excited
    Pedro Almodóvar's diverting pop-art bauble firmly placing the "relief" in comic relief and the "cock" in cockpit.
  8. The Maze Runner
    A curious blend of our newly acquired taste for dystopia alongside a healthy sprinkling of Lord of the Flies, the film offers familiar pleasures without prompting the sense of having already been here before.
  9. Xanadu
    While the soundtrack is evenly split between Newton-John ballads and power-pop from ELO, neither of which sounded particularly revolutionary at the turn of the decade, Xanadu's collage of musical styles and fads inadvertently suggests the utopia of post-disco no wave, hip-hop's emerging legacy of sampling and the DIY spirit of mash-ups. (I mean, if you want to be kind.)
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    One Life
    As much as Daniel Craig's narration can feel tacked-on, it's really secondary to the film's expert camerawork.
  11. About Last Night
    Kevin Hart turns an essentially crude wingman into the conscience of the film's torturous, nettled discourse on romance.
  12. Future Weather
    The film is ultimately enjoyable despite its faults, at least partially because it represents an earnest, honest attempt to empathize with struggling American working-class women.
  13. Welcome to Pine Hill
    Keith Miller doesn't always trust the fluency of his visual language, occasionally forcing a point that's already being captured.
  14. The Silence
    The slightly dour tone is the perfect backdrop for the director to skillfully weave together his varied narrative strands in a surprisingly entertaining medley.
  15. Reality
    Matteo Garrone has a sure eye for outlandish set pieces that exhibit the expansive outlines of his ideas, but these spectacles are sporadic, and the spaces between them tend to lag.
  16. In the House
    It's buoyant and titillates, striking that distinctly Ozonian balance between the beautiful and the sinister, but it doesn't resonate.
  17. Lotus Eaters
    The free spirit-ness of its characters is certainly mirrored in the film's aesthetic playfulness, but the initial glimmer of Fassbinder-esque expression quickly veers toward Xavier Dolan-grade affectation.
  18. The Spectacular Now
    Given the film's early promise, it's unfortunate how it turns into a largely reductive Freudian character piece in which the main character has to come to terms with his old man.
  19. My Amityville Horror
    The film is a tender character portrait rooted in deep curiosity and sympathy for its subject.
  20. Fruitvale Station
    Sensitively performed and laced with some forceful quotidian grit, the film evades the larger questions behind a scandalous shooting death.
  21. August: Osage County
    What works about the film can largely be attributed to the original text, which is full of cruel twists and savage blows that Tracy Letts wisely retains for the screen.
  22. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
    The Resident Evil films are so unconcerned with traditional character and narrative that they suggest either abstract art or the fevered brainstorming of a child at play.
  23. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    The film's highly calculated beauty suffocates rather than elevates the story's emotional underpinnings.
  24. Downeast
    An exposé of how the financial structures that make businesses possible in America seem to conspire against genuine good will and non-self-serving ambition.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Philip Roth: Unmasked
    In spite of the film's exhaustive chronology, those who deduce from its title that they're in for an unveiling, or an unraveling, of a major literary figure may come out empty-handed.
  26. Byzantium
    Forlorn depictions of love and death may dignify Neil Jordan's film, but narrative withholding ultimately drives a stake into its unmistakable heart.
  27. The Revolutionary Optimists
    The filmmakers display a genuine reverence for their subjects, evident even in the intimate but never intrusive photography.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    I Killed My Mother
    I Killed My Mother is a film best heard than seen, as the earnest, nimble scrubbiness of Dolan's screenplay is ill-served by his conceited visuals, an aesthetic mode that feels insecurely borrowed from perfume commercials and the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-Wai.
  29. Old Goats
    Taylor Guterson's film offers thoughtful, if familiar, comments on friendship, self-doubt, and romantic angst.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Something in the Air
    Despite a fixation on fire as a cleansing agent (explosions, burning paintings, or a blazing house), the film, enveloping as it is, proves woefully short on burning dramatic or thematic intensity.
  31. Eden
    The "male gaze" that often despicably and hypocritically surfaces in these kinds of films is pointedly absent throughout.
  32. My Brother the Devil
    With My Brother the Devil, writer-director Sally El Hosaini tells a story both operatic in its implications and quotidian in its sensory, day-to-day details.
  33. Dog Pound
    The plot willfully denies our satisfaction, often at the risk of compromising its own structural integrity.
  34. Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
    It never bothers to attempt the one thing we'd expect and hope from a documentary about Ricky Jay: It doesn't try to bamboozle us.
  35. Midnight's Children
    Preserves much of the novel's intricacy and human drama, perhaps due to Salman Rushdie's involvement as co-screenwriter, even if it remains singularly unremarkable from a cinematic perspective.
  36. The Attack
    The film is most interesting as an articulation of how its main character's initial status as an emblem of inter-religious understanding quickly dissolves following a suicide bombing.
  37. Free the Mind
    Phie Ambo deftly captures her subjects' sense of paranoia and helplessness without encroaching on their brave candor.
  38. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    There's so much baggage involved in the kind of dilettantish games Jamie and Crystal are playing that it's a shame that the film never fully engages with these enticing issues.
  39. Oconomowoc
    Writer-director Andy Gillies's film is extremely self-conscious, but in a fashion that generally serves the material.
  40. Short Term 12
    There's tremendous dramatic value to the aching and sometimes devastating scenes that home in on these kids' private torments.
  41. Violet & Daisy
    A twisted, spirited exercise in stark juxtaposition, a grindhouse fairy tale of sorts that pairs the sugary sweet with the nastily violent.
  42. Post Tenebras Lux
    Carlos Reygadas's latest, an almost impossibly intellectual film, keeps us at a remove that's as striking as that which separates its main character from the lower classes.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Herman's House
    An involving documentary that doesn't offer a convincing argument against solitary confinement for those who may not fully realize what's objectionable about it.
  44. Unmade in China
    Not even its problematically touristic gaze is enough to derail the fascination of this absurd tale's many nightmarish twists and turns.
  45. The Happy House
    D.W. Young navigates his varying moods with an ease that's particularly impressive for a director making his feature debut, but he never capitalizes on his ability to coax down our guard.
  46. Arthur Newman
    Throughout Dante Ariola's film, the expressions of the false-identity theme are multitudinous, and about as subtle as the Colin Firth character's choice for a new last name.
  47. Drinking Buddies
    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.
  48. Cockneys vs Zombies
    Matthias Hoene allows the cockney swears to flow as deliriously as the truly convincing blood splatter, offering a few unexpected gut-busters along the way.
  49. In a World...
    Lake Bell holds the thing together through sheer charisma, and in fact the foibles of the movie only start to show when she absents herself for extended stretches of time.
  50. State 194
    It too often feels like just one more aesthetically uninspired documentary that gives way in the end to a special round of pleading for its specific cause.
  51. Memories Look at Me
    Worry and sadness are palpable, but so is wry humor and irony as Song ponders age and mortality with a sensitive eye for emotions and a strong sense of composition.
  52. Big Hero 6
    The film quickly becomes a study of grief and retribution, and the question of how exactly technology can and should be utilized in the treatment of these emotions.
  53. Doin' It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC
    Perhaps the first important film about street hoops, even if the overall product struggles from a lack of focus.
  54. Hannah Arendt
    The film's most striking quality, and it's not insignificant, is director Margarethe von Trotta's refusal to fossilize the controversies she dramatizes.
  55. Frankenstein's Army
    The found-footage gimmick mostly comes off as window dressing for what turns out to be yet another mad-scientist-run-amok romp.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Becoming Traviata
    It works as a reminder of the important interactiveness of the performing arts, of actors evoking the drama, action, and emotion that computers and machines cannot.
  57. Elemental
    More than some run-of-the-mill social-awareness doc, the film pays as much attention to the personal and emotional strife of its subjects as it does to their activism.
  58. Alyce Kills
    The film is an ultra-violent parody of unearned self-entitlement, of people who feel tricked into a lifestyle they refuse to challenge for the comforts it still offers.
  59. Labor Day
    A better film would have had the gumption to maintain the poetic bleakness, rather than steer toward what ultimately feels like safe compromise.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    In the Fog
    Sergei Loznitsa occasionally writes his ideas too explicitly in the film's dialogue, though he makes up for this by deftly employing some ironic symbolism elsewhere.
  61. Heli
    The emotional and political point through all this isn't to be taken lightly, but because the entirety of the film has such a nihilistic temperament, its effect is muted.
  62. As I Lay Dying
    James Franco's readiness in approaching famously abstract source material certainly doesn't translate well into his directorial formalism, or, more appropriately, lack of formalism.
  63. Jimmy P.
    Too often Jimmy P. seems to struggle in making its interesting ideas apparent, leaving them stranded beneath the dry surface of an otherwise ordinary procedural.
  64. Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
    Greatly cognizant of the revenge genre's penchant for hypocritical demagoguery, director Arnaud des Pallières unsettles the audience's usual feelings of vicarious blood lust.
  65. The Great Beauty
    Paolo Sorrentino's film is really just a huge turn-on that has the bad manners to go sour, succumbing to its own self-delusions of moral/political grandeur.
  66. The Past
    Farhadi navigates his complicated narrative thicket with an apparent ease that confirms yet again that he's an amazing talent, but here he isn't able to blend the brushstrokes as he has in prior films.
  67. American Mary
    The filmmakers certainly exaggerate (i.e. exploit) their subject, but for a community that prides itself on shock value, there seems no sufficient alternative.
  68. Non-Stop
    The latest collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and star Liam Neeson is made with far more care and visual detail than you might expect.
  69. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    The film works best when it focuses viewer attention most acutely on the story, deflecting it away from the director's manipulations.
  70. Dallas Buyers Club
    Conventional but never sanctimonious, it balances out its familiar recovery angle with a healthy measure of sardonic wit.
  71. Grabbers
    Good, clean genre entertainment, the sort of harmless yet endearing brand of moviemaking seemingly unattainable in today's Hollywood system.
  72. 100 Bloody Acres
    One sees a film called 100 Bloody Acres expecting the requisite allusions to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but an homage to the best scene in Melvin and Howard comes as something of a shock.
  73. Into the Woods
    This PG-rated romp is, refreshingly, less notable for its happily-ever-afters than its oh-no-they-didn'ts.
  74. Three Worlds
    A little too deliberately balanced in its depiction of its three leads, but it largely makes up the difference with its informed grounding in the economic and social terrain of contemporary France.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Secret Disco Revolution
    Jamie Kastner bows fully to hedonism in lieu of all the scholarly theories on disco's lasting impact--a tidy but gutless way of tying together so many disparate arguments by such disparate people.
  76. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    By partially demonstrating what a newer, fresher superhero movie might look like, Homecoming ultimately underlines its own genre-defined limitations.
  77. Dolphin Tale 2
    Writer-director Charles Martin Smith's tin ear for dialogue and contrived symbolism is as unmistakable as his enormous heart.
  78. Hell Baby
    Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon display a freewheelin' sense of invention that should be watched closely, because they have the raw stuff of major comic filmmakers.
  79. The Shine of Day
    As in Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's 2009 film, La Pivellina, modesty is the key to The Shine of Day, and sometimes to the detriment of audience involvement and focus.
  80. Pawn Shop Chronicles
    Wayne Kramer thankfully refuses to cloak his excessiveness in hedge-betting self-consciousness and the result is a gratifyingly disreputable B-movie blow out.
  81. Still Mine
    As far as films about couples dealing with the female partner losing her mind go, Still Mine is pretty pedestrian.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Terms and Conditions May Apply
    If The Social Network didn't make you want to quit Facebook in 2010, the brave new world outlined here should, despite the fact that your data won't actually be erased.
  83. Child's Pose
    The film thrives on ambiguity, keeping all things blurry outside its main character's focused perspective, its myopia sustained by Luminița Gheorghiu's tough, quietly intense performance.
  84. Filth
    Ultimately, the film is too nihilistic to believe its protagonist can be saved, declaring him a lost soul and satisfied to let him suffer.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp
    It threatens to succumb to hero worship, but Jorge Hinojosa wisely subverts Slim's mythos by pulling the curtain back on it in the doc's second half by revealing the man beneath.
  86. SPECTRE
    All of its revisionism centrally incorporates the history of the franchise, and the film both excels and suffers for frequently recalling its forbears.
  87. Our Nixon
    Our Nixon never completely overcomes the disappointment of its recovered video, but it nevertheless offers a compelling portrait of Nixon and those close to him, one that captures how willfully blind they often were to their excesses, and how paranoid they were about apparent threats to them and America as a whole.
  88. Dear Mr. Watterson
    Though it begins by spending far too much time talking up the comic's quality, it gradually finds a groove as an incisive portrait of an insecure industry.
  89. Snowpiercer
    The film preaches resolutely to the choir, and cinephiles in sync with the film's politics may still blanch at how snugly their interests are courted.
  90. Our Children
    It's occasionally too icily removed, but it compensates through its perpetual concern with understanding its characters and their untenable situations.
  91. Una Noche
    Una Noche tugged at my heartstrings, but the film's almost phantasmagoric fixation on sex can feel crass and dehumanizing.
  92. 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
    If you grant the documentary its slanted perspective at the outset, it works well as its own state-of-the-union address.
  93. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    Dorothy Vogel is less the soft-spoken housewife from the first film than a businesswoman both shrewd and mousy, and her trajectory affords the film its closest semblance to a story.
  94. Birth of the Living Dead
    The film is unavoidably slight, but there's a certain pleasure in watching talented people wax passionate about a common source of inspiration.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Inequality for All
    Robert Reich's message to America, much like director Jacob Kornbluth's uncomplicated film, is so simple and straightforward (you might even say obvious) that, without nitpicking, it can appear flawless.
  96. Escape from Tomorrow
    The film is just a stunt or, more specifically, a calling card, but that might be enough for anyone who's ever wanted to kick Mickey Mouse square in his padded, pious balls.
  97. Ip Man: The Final Fight
    Anthony Wong does a creditable job of conveying Ip Man's reflectiveness through his twilight years, occasionally cutting through the hagiographic nature of the enterprise.
  98. Five Dances
    It's the moments when director Alan Brown stops worrying about clarifying plot and character motivation and lets the performances bring those into being that makes this an authentic project.
  99. Vikingdom
    Intentionally or otherwise, Yusry Abd Halim allows the film, in all its candy-colored visuals and slow-mo-laden action scenes, to revel in its inherent campiness.
  100. Willow Creek
    Bobcat Goldthwait exposes the characteristic male pursuit of power to which females are often made subservient.
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