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 Last Christeros
    The film forsakes most of the underdog sentimentality found in traditional genre treatments of noble sacrifice.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Newlyweeds
    Going neither in the direction of Reefer Madness nor a Cheech and Chong movie, it's both funny and serious, and its depictions of pot-smoking could be read as either promotional or cautionary.
  3. Price of Gold
    While the real-time aesthetic approach sporadically enthralls, it also reveals the narrow worldview that burdens the film.
  4. Enemy
    Jake Gyllenhaal embodies the two roles with real presence, establishing Adam's sniveling wimp and Anthony's striding jerk as two believably discrete sides of the same coin.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    American Promise
    The documentary's lack of a cohesive thesis may frustrate at times, but its power lies in its exposition of the mundane.
  6. The Armstrong Lie
    The film can't entirely avoid the feeling of a less-productive score-settling hit piece, as if Alex Gibney was making this film merely to stick it to the subject that screwed him big time.
  7. Locke
    The literalizing of Ivan Locke's hidden self and his inability to master it ultimately exposes the film as the squarest kind of theater: drama therapy.
  8. On the Job
    A nose-to-the-ground crime thriller that also doubles as a wide-ranging portrait of official corruption in the Philippines, On the Job has little trouble delivering the genre goods.
  9. Sunlight Jr.
    An admirable refusal to adhere to any overexposed poverty-porn templates, however, is taken a little too far in the opposite direction, to the point that the film feels self-consciously shapeless.
  10. A Wolf at the Door
    It finds its strength in painting a portrait of Brazilian heterosexual gender relations as an always-volatile symbiosis between feminine hysteria and ruthless machismo.
  11. Capital
    Costa-Gavras's new film is more a funhouse-mirror panegyric (albeit on an exhausted topic) than the staid thriller promised by its press materials.
  12. Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    Even if the film never transcends its subject matter, Jonathan Demme's light touch adds up to a charming portrait, only rarely fumbling into hagiography.
  13. Toad Road
    Writer-director Jason Banker finds the ironic beauty that arises from his characters' self-contemptuous and misplaced acts of destruction.
  14. S#x Acts
    In its refusal to bring an easy understanding to its main character's behavior, it comes dangerously close to presenting her as a willing perpetrator in her own victimhood.
  15. Days of Grace
    Eventually, the film's impressive array of formal pyrotechnics overwhelms its morals.
  16. The Last Sentence
    Though ambitiously busy, the film is also self-sabotaging and stagnant, showcasing its main character's struggles without interpreting them into a cohesive thesis.
  17. I Am Divine
    Though it may boil down to your average procession-of-talking-heads template, it's still enlivened by the raucous words from the band of outsiders who supported and launched Divine into the limelight.
  18. One Chance
    David Frankel crams his story with predictable developments, yet he matches his subject in spirit, pushing something into the spotlight that, however unlikely, elicits irresistible glee.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Aftermath
    The film isn't so much about the moral atrophy of people who refuse to come to terms with their past as it is about cosmic karma passed from fathers to sons like an ancient curse.
  20. The Quiet Ones
    If the stock concessions made to genre cliché by The Woman in Black can be charitably viewed as deliberate tips of the hat to the heyday of Hammer Films, then John Pogue's period-set exorcism yarn The Quiet Ones more interestingly upends those tropes.
  21. The Ghosts in Our Machine
    Jo-Anne McArthur's cause draws sharp comparisons with the never-mentioned PETA, a seemingly insignificant omission that discloses a lingering problem of willful insularity.
  22. Faust
    Though its ballast of jokes and spectacle are formidable, it often lurches about at a remote, enigmatic distance
  23. Swerve
    A confident and exciting genre film, and that's certainly not nothing, but it has a slight impersonality that marks it as either a calling card or a work for hire.
  24. The Banshee Chapter
    Director Blair Erickson surely has style to burn, even if he oftentimes betrays his atmospheric shorthand and gets cold feet at the most inopportune moments.
  25. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    It exists less as a meaningful extension of its world than as a fan-service deployment device.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Detroit Unleaded
    It compellingly engages with the specific problems of a cultural group rarely represented in American film, but it too easily and abruptly resolves its main characters' problems.
  27. Weekend of a Champion
    The film is at its most fascinating when Jackie Stewart authoritatively and pedagogically discusses the nuances of his trade.
  28. Cuban Fury
    The film is thin on concept and limited in style, but the filmmakers have the good sense to let their characters remain playful and goofy throughout.
  29. The Unbelievers
    It ably captures the provocative open forums that Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss conduct, but its uneven nature occasionally dulls the effect of these intellectually stimulating conversations.
  30. The Purge: Anarchy
    DeMonaco may doubly, sometimes triply, underline the story's governing theme of social power and how it's exchanged, but the rage and lucidity of these ideas resonate.
  31. Return to Homs
    The film is a testament to the power of video to document resistance to corrupt and abusive regimes, but it's also a witness to the limits of that power.
  32. Cesar Chavez
    Not unlike Michael Peña's prior supporting roles, Chavez is marked by an explosive anger kept under a cherubic, sweet-natured mask, providing the surprise lacking in the story's text.
  33. St. Vincent
    The actors create emotionally coherent and sympathetic characters from a collection of often contradictory, monumentally irresponsible, or just plain improbable actions.
  34. Tracks
    The feminist bent of Robyn's quest nicely shadows the film without ever being stated aloud.
  35. Beyond the Lights
    By rooting Noni's self-image issues in a controlling mother, the script provides the film with a tame, melodramatic structure that dulls the thorny matters of identity and expression at its center.
  36. Tricked: The Documentary
    For all the heartbreaking depth with which the filmmakers explore the horrors of human trafficking, the film still leaves one with a sense of a larger story just beyond their grasp.
  37. The Sacrament
    With The Sacrament, director Ti West has bitten off more of a premise than his classically modest barebones approach to horror movies can presently chew.
  38. Big Bad Wolves
    From a purely suspenseful vantage point, Big Bad Wolves is an efficient and effective beast.
  39. Grand Piano
    Eugenio Mira thrills in watching his main character attempt to worm his way out of a most unusual hostage situation, synching his indulgences of style to the pianist's wily physical maneuvering.
  40. Blue Ruin
    By reducing its principals to stock figures in an extended chess game, it ends up providing steady, neatly staged thrills, but little else of substance.
  41. The Raid 2
    It's all showy viscera, no ballet, and wan attempts at the gravity of something like Drug War, with implicit statements made about the deadening nature of violence or the moral equivalency of state-sanctioned and criminal force, don't come close to cohering.
  42. Raze
    Raze leaves the background particulars about this competition oblique, partly because it adds a layer of ominous mystery, but primarily because it doesn't matter; witnessing women-on-women violence is the thing here, regardless of any narrative context.
  43. Interior. Leather Bar.
    With Travis Mathews's help, James Franco's persona forms a kind of symmetry: 1980's dubious homophobia against 2013's risible homophilia.
  44. The Great Flood
    Even in comparatively conventional mode, Bill Morrison's work still benefits from the poetic potential of nature's repossession of its own elements.
  45. Everest
    It feels less like an cautionary adventure movie or the classy Hollywood equivalent of a Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" and much more like a disaster epic.
  46. Nightcrawler
    Dan Gilroy's directorial debut only offers a familiar vision of today's newsman and producers as misery peddlers, and callow ratings slaves bordering on the monstrous.
  47. Bethlehem
    In the end, the film's misstep isn't some failure at being sufficiently morally gray. In being the thriller that it is, it smudges the palette beyond recognition.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Date and Switch
    The film's forced quirkiness and repeated displays of bro-ism in action hinder the potential for a more subtle approach to the potentially challenging issue the story depicts.
  49. The Trip to Italy
    Michael Winterbottom and his gifted actors still haven't quite solved the riddle of portraying social disconnection in a manner that's anything other than sporadically involving.
  50. Far from the Madding Crowd
    The lack of real analysis or consideration leaves this perilously close to a Goldilocks-style depiction of privileged female indecision.
  51. The Drop
    With its optimistic ending, the film muddies its previous statements regarding the danger of unthinkingly hanging on to totems of the past.
  52. The Homesman
    If there's any ambiguity to be found in the film's prolonged last gasps, which reach for tragedy, but only sow more epistemic confusion, it's of a mawkish and unpalatable variety.
  53. Midnight Special
    It starts off as a dynamic parable about faith before wilting into a glum and rather disingenuous paean to the family.
  54. Rosewater
    It shrugs off the bigger questions about Iranian politics its first half appears to raise, falling back instead on a gestalt of the eternal, Kafkaesque regime, wherever the viewer may find it.
  55. True Story
    If the film's copycat visual artistry illuminates nothing, at least its script is sincerely devoted to probing Finkel and Longo's odd partnership.
  56. Unbroken
    The film's chief misstep is taking its title too literally, and ultimately depicting Louie as an indestructible, and thus largely inhuman, superhero.
  57. The Two Faces of January
    Superbly acted and sporadically intriguing thriller, yet it has a difficult time locating more stringent meaning and significance beyond its outward narrative of duplicitous actions and veiled motivations.
  58. Life Itself
    There's a sense throughout of Steve James rushing and dutifully covering all his bases to evade accusations of creating a puff piece.
  59. Song One
    This snapshot of catharsis follows a familiar trajectory, but Kate Barker-Froyland refreshingly resists elevating her characters' relationship to the level of grandiose.
  60. Laggies
    To Keira Knightley's credit, she's all too willing to undercut her pretty-girl reputation by looking and acting a fool for Lynn Shelton's camera.
  61. Love Is Strange
    Ira Sachs's push for heartrending poetry makes it clear that the film is putting too fine a gloss on the acute pains of one small tragedy.
  62. The Sleepwalker
    The film soon settles into a confident, well-staged groove, primarily because of two unambiguously terrific performances.
  63. Cold in July
    While Jim Mickle's compositions lose much of their verve in the film's later half, his regard for the analog does not--and at the expense of perspective into his characters' emotional torque.
  64. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Maya Forbes reveals herself as a sunny optimist, insistent on remembering the ecstatic highs and never dwelling on the despairing lows.
  65. A Birder's Guide to Everything
    The film exhibits strong character interplay and resides in an unconventional milieu, in effect turning rote material into something that feels decidedly eccentric.
  66. Finding Vivian Maier
    This is less a portrait of an artist as a young woman than a psychological evaluation of a slippery subject.
  67. Oculus
    Through a mini-triumph of montage, what begins as run-of-the-mill backstory vomit is thrillingly repackaged as an almost-Lynchian duet between warring states of consciousness.
  68. Alive Inside
    The doc is heartwarming, but it doesn't delve deeply into the backstories that inform the ailing patients' connection to the music that stirs their memories.
  69. Breaking the Frame
    Director Marielle Nitoslawaska's experimental approach sometimes wanders down uncontextualized paths and obfuscates the subject with filmic affectations.
  70. The Overnighters
    If it ultimately can't reconcile all that's presented in its too-brief runtime, that's largely because its situation, much like the dissonance between those involved, is comprehensibly irresolvable.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    20,000 Days on Earth
    While the film is seemingly accessible as a portrait of an artist who seems particularly attuned to his own creative process, and particularly adept at describing this attunement, it's unlikely that many who aren't already whole-hog Bad Seeds fans would be able to stomach much of Cave's self-styled pomposity.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World
    For a three-hour, epoch-ending epic made by a comedy neophyte, it yields a treasure of showbiz lore.
  73. A World Not Ours
    Mahdi Fleifel's usage of a domestic archive of home-video images inherited from his father lends the doc a simultaneous sense of historical gravitas and intimacy.
  74. The Final Member
    A potential barroom joke blossoms into a surprisingly poignant portrait of three aging men wrestling with how to shed their mortal coil.
  75. Run All Night
    This time around, in spotlighting Liam Neeson's fatigued charisma, Jaume Collet-Serra's formidable filmmaking chops have plateaued.
  76. Goosebumps
    Some of the wittier one-liners and more affecting emotional moments feel undermined by the frenzy of chaotic excess.
  77. Particle Fever
    The film may not put itself above the uninitiated, but director Mark Levinson oftentimes appears almost too eager to present his material with affectation.
  78. The Den
    The film is dizzyingly creepy in its refracting of horrors through the cascading windows of computer programs we've come to understand more intimately than our own selves.
  79. Salvo
    The filmmakers' very particular sense of lighting and framing, though handsome, often exudes a formality that perpetually stifles the story's sense of spontaneity.
  80. Brothers Hypnotic
    There are grudges held amid all the good will, an intention of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble to do things on their terms, and those terms stem directly from their upbringing.
  81. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    Like its predecessor, the film is a charming example of what great actors can do with mediocre material.
  82. Go Down Death
    The end result is a bit like a beautiful diorama, in which the people share a common purpose with the furniture: to fill space and look nice.
  83. Hide Your Smiling Faces
    Daniel Patrick Carbone's pensive style, so dotted with ethnographic detail, is interested in revealing a world in flux, but his fixation on death is so incessant that it situates the film as a morose fetish object.
  84. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    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.
  85. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    The material and resources are certainly substantial, but the filmmakers clumsily weave separate stories together without detailing anything beyond a tangential relation.
  86. Wolf Creek 2
    There are cheap shocks in the film, but there are also terrifying moments that poetically command our empathy.
  87. Beneath the Harvest Sky
    It flourishes in the spaces between the plot's necessary setups and subsequent payoffs, which is nearly enough to redeem the film if not for the narrative going belly up in the third act.
  88. Captain America: Civil War
    The undeniable fun of Civil War's action scenes only exacerbates the failure of the narrative to adequately contend with its own themes.
  89. Half of a Yellow Sun
    It falls into the trappings of middlebrow literary adaptation by finding only sporadic means to convincingly adjudicate the trauma and anguish of its transitory epoch.
  90. Decoding Annie Parker
    This isn't a film of bedside conversions or radical emotional transformations, nor is it a story about laughing at one's own hardships as a coping mechanism.
  91. Kid Cannabis
    The film works best when it shows Jonathan Daniel Brown's drug kingpin at his most inept and incapable, rather than elevating him to a pothead martyr.
  92. Magic Mike XXL
    Magic Mike XXL isn't so much a lesser movie than Magic Mike as it is a looser one.
  93. The German Doctor
    In Lucía Puenzo's film, things always feel off balance even as the plot points click all too neatly into place.
  94. The One I Love
    The film gets too caught up in the semi-farcical comings and goings of the two Sophies and Ethans to explore any of the issues it raises about relationships very deeply.
  95. X-Men: Apocalypse
    The issue with X-Men: Apocalypse is that Bryan Singer suggests so many possible directions to go in and still chooses the least interesting one.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Paths of Glory
    Paths of Glory may be first-rate humanity, but it’s also second-rate art.
  97. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    It’s a film of familiar pleasures, but like Harold Faltermeyer’s still infectiously enjoyable synth-pop theme, they do remain highly pleasurable.
  98. Ricki and the Flash
    Director Jonathan Demme grasps the well of feeling of Diablo Cody's script and eventually harnesses it in his own image.
  99. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    The unbalanced appraisal of Vidal's life and work in Nicholas Wrathall's documentary diminishes the effect of the writer's engaging dissension of American political policy.
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