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. Giant Little Ones
    Keith Behrman’s film comprehends the malleable, often inscrutable nature of desire.
  2. Blink Twice
    Blink Twice clearly has thoughts about the danger that men can pose and the way women are forced to perform happiness while in the company of such predators, but it never provides more than a surface-level understanding of such dynamics.
  3. Kung Fu Panda 3
    It finds a benefit in its genre affiliation, evenly distributing its action in quick bursts of fluidly animated fight choreography.
  4. Himizu
    Sion Sono's film is a vision of coming of age as trial by fire, a thunderous encapsulation of that period of transition in which adolescents try to discover themselves: their passions, their purpose, their sense of morality.
  5. The Apostate
    The Apostate finds humor in unusual images or situations, few resounding with lasting impact.
  6. Dealt
    Richard Turner is a charismatic subject who demands more than a conventionally entertaining documentary.
  7. Speak No Evil
    This hollow attempt to turn a provocative showpiece into a crowd-pleaser makes you wonder if the filmmakers are actively disdainful of the original.
  8. Wonder
    The film has an almost pathological need to ensure that everything turns out well for every single character, while at the same time eliding any truly difficult issues.
  9. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Opting for scenes that tend to be fragmented, flawed snippets from a much bigger story, the film exudes a bizarre confidence in not trying to encapsulate the singer's whole life in 120 minutes.
  10. To Be Takei
    Jennifer M. Kroot plays things a bit too straight and safe by giving into basic emotional and thematic possibilities of each period in Takei's prolific early life and subsequent Hollywood career.
  11. The Breakfast Club
    The quintessential Brat Pack vehicle, hampered by Hughes’s willingness to pigeonhole his protagonists in exactly the same manner as they accuse Vernon of doing, The Breakfast Club is hopelessly tethered to its era in ways that the same year’s other major high school-themed blockbuster, Back to the Future, isn’t.
  12. The Trip to Spain
    The premise of Michael Winterbottom's series has devolved from moderately diverting to actively stifling.
  13. Borgman
    An art-house con destined to make viewers who've ever used the term "mindfuck" as praise rack their brains trying to come up with alternate readings for a film that invites many but convincingly offers none.
  14. What Keeps You Alive
    If Hannah Emily Anderson's performance was as fully imagined as Brittany Allen's, then What Keeps You Alive might have attained the emotional dimensions of a robust psychodrama.
  15. The Tenth Man
    As films about dopey dudes finding love go, The Tenth Man is too modest for its own good.
  16. Mister Universo
    The film eventually replaces the captivating smallness of everyday life with an inconsequential drama.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Ipcress File
    In the end, The Ipcress File abandons its more low-key, nuts-and-bolts depiction of spycraft, and as such morphs from the pure antithesis of a 007 romp into something far closer to a self-serious send-up.
  18. The Phenom
    Noah Buschel shows that formula can be repurposed to serve empathetic ends without losing its self-actualizing appeal.
  19. Cop Car
    The narrative derives much of its tension from the unsentimental ambivalence Jon Watts displays toward the story's two pre-teen boys.
  20. Werewolves Within
    The film becomes unexpectedly, effectively violent just when you’ve written it off as a glorified SNL sketch.
  21. The Lost Arcade
    The film's images have a loose, rough, textured liveliness that honors the spirit of Chinatown Fair.
  22. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    The film struggles against the rigid formula that typifies the Marvel universe, but only does so up to a point.
  23. 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.
  24. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    It occasionally succumbs to the pitfalls of the mock-thriller kitsch it slyly dismantles, but it's made up for in a wry and experimental visual style that satirically paints a vibrant crime fantasia.
  25. Brian and Charles
    The original Brian and Charles short focused entirely on its titular characters, and it’s clear that was for the best.
  26. Missing
    Humor for the sake of humor is a worthwhile pursuit, but Missing’s final act is more unintentionally funny than intentionally funny.
  27. Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
    It reduces its historical moment to a series of vignettes and voiceovers, each evincing a curiously tone-deaf sentimentality.
  28. Sausage Party
    Though the filmmakers may not believe in a higher power, they still maintain a faith in raunchiness as an id-blasting form of liberation from rigid norms, spiritual, sexual, or otherwise.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Genius on Hold
    Though overstuffed, his film eschews pop-doc conventions by opting for in-depth analysis over superficiality.
  30. The Life Ahead
    With its tough-minded characters from divergent cultures finding a common bond despite their differences, the film doesn’t deliver much in the way of surprises, but it turns out to be a starker and more honest piece of work than it might initially seem.
  31. When Boys Leave Home
    Its bizarre melding of moral-panic melodrama with the filmmaker’s signature wrong-man theme is fascinating.
  32. Last Hurrah for Chivalry
    Not yet a master, Woo here nonetheless demonstrates far more than mere potential as he starts to lay the foundations for his breakout successes.
  33. Peterloo
    Peterloo so simply recounts the details of its subject matter that its culminating horror unsettlingly feels like little more than a cathartic inevitability.
  34. White Hunter Black Heart
    White Hunter, Black Heart finds Eastwood reaching a peak in the fields of both film direction and acting.
  35. Yossi
    The film is at its finest as a catalogue of Yossi's unspoken ache, less so when it begins to flirt with the clichés of the love story.
  36. Alan Partridge
    Director Declan Lowney's film operates from a conceit that affords only minor opportunities for true hilarity.
  37. Clara's Ghost
    Bridey Elliott avoids the smug pitfalls of narratives concerned with privileged people drinking themselves into a stupor.
  38. Desert of Namibia
    The film is so welded to its main character’s perspective that it, too, shies away from understanding, tragic and frustrating in equal measure.
  39. Devotion
    This unfocused, awkwardly paced film never quite gets off the ground and, as a result, will do little to change perceptions of the Korean War as the “forgotten war.”
  40. Dark Horse
    Yesterday, Solondz blocking the screen meant something, even if it was just his own petulance. Today, a blurred sign only signifies his capitulation to peer pressure.
  41. Pink Ribbons, Inc.
    A righteously outraged documentary targeting the "warm and fuzzy" iconography of the breast cancer fundraising bureaucracy and its camouflage of corporate priorities.
  42. The Rule of Jenny Pen
    The film single-mindedly sees its elderly characters as objects of disgust or receptacles for harm.
  43. Creed II
    Creed II is absent of both the topically political atmosphere of Rocky IV and the bravura action of Ryan Coogler's Creed.
  44. Ben Is Back
    As the film hurtles toward its tense climax, you may find yourself both deeply resenting its narrative contrivances and passionately rooting for its protagonists.
  45. Wiener-Dog
    The film's back half nearly goes completely astray with two segments featuring unimaginative characterizations and tepid, mean-spirited scenarios.
  46. The Founder
    Michael Keaton's powerful performance in The Founder is marooned in a wishy-washy story.
  47. Rabin, the Last Day
    Its vantage point too loosely assembles an argument by focusing, almost obsessively, on reassembling a tangible timeline of events.
  48. The Tainted Veil
    The filmmakers refuse to promote a political agenda of their own in order to let the varied convictions of others foster a necessary dialogue.
  49. Argentina
    The film stagnates by restricting camera mobility and focusing more on capturing dimensions of the performances in close-up.
  50. Charlatan
    Throughout the film, Agnieszka Holland makes clear that she isn’t interested in easily digestible pop-psychology nuggets.
  51. The Civil Dead
    Clay Tatum’s film is wholly and refreshingly uninterested in tugging at the heartstrings.
  52. Mulan
    Walt Disney’s Mulan remake perfunctorily recycles the worst aspects of the 1998 animated version and roundly fails to convincingly execute the few deviations that it does attempt.
  53. The Angels' Share
    Ken Loach's breezy scribble about lowlife redemption and drunken buffoonery isn't so much heavy-handed as it is charmingly weightless.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wander Darkly
    What could have been a profound study of grief and psychological trauma is diluted with needless structural and stylistic obfuscation.
  55. The Last Showgirl
    The film is less a character study than a numbly tragic workaday fantasia held aloft by Pamela Anderson in a performance that seems to grasp beyond the bleary-eyed edges of Gia Coppola’s screen for larger truths about the choices women make to feel seen.
  56. By Sidney Lumet
    Its strength lies in taking a thematic approach to Lumet's work, which prevents a chronological rattling off of one title after another.
  57. The Aristocats
    If there isn’t a single element in the entire film that’s not derivative of the studio’s then-recent past, you can’t blame them for sticking with what worked best—business models-cum-creative habits conditioned by horsewhip die hard, if at all.
  58. Fast Five
    From unique to generic, it's a gear-shift that may prolong the franchise's life (a mid-credits coda confirms that a sixth installment is on its way), but, in the process, also renders it redundant.
  59. The Sound of Silence
    A wonderful high concept is compromised for another story of lonely people learning to connect.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    OC87: The Obsessive Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger's Movie
    A tender, painful, and frustrating work of vulnerability, and because of this in some ways deflects critical commentary.
  61. Sasquatch Sunset
    What we’re confronted with in the film may be less the quaint idiocy of four dull simians and more our own inability to loosen up and just live.
    • 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.
  63. Small Town Murder Songs
    So intent on being "art" that it's seemingly indifferent to providing simple niceties such as compelling performance, plot, and an atmosphere that isn't predictably oppressive.
  64. Bumblebee
    Bumblebee exudes some of the tediousness of a reformed sinner who decries hedonism, trying hard to convince us that it now believes in something.
  65. Holy Spider
    Holy Spider trickily manages to bridge the gap between social realism and exploitation cinema in a way that hints at how both are rooted in a similar place of gritty authenticity.
  66. Phantom Boy
    The filmmakers are thankfully willing to render, with unremitting vigor, how grief can batter the human heart.
  67. Yellow Letters
    Yellow Letters ultimately proves to be much less than the sum of its parts, as a lack of focus prevents its political commentary and humanist drama from cohering in any meaningful way.
  68. Elstree 1976
    It too often fails to examine how the long shadow cast by Star Wars affected its its background actors' lives.
  69. Megan Leavey
    Everyone here, from fellow marines to Iraqis, is merely a supporting player in Megan Leavey's emotional journey.
  70. The Bling Ring
    Sofia Coppola seems curiously unmotivated to bring full analysis or provocation to her themes, leaving the film feeling like a disappointingly toothless satire.
  71. Dinosaur 13
    To some extent, the use of a wide aspect ratio and the doc's emphatic score takes its cues from paleontologist Pete Larson's passion.
  72. The Report
    In the end, it can’t help but sentimentalize the better angels that supposedly reside in the land of liberty’s flawed human fabric.
  73. Bronx Gothic
    By design, the film is intensely preachy. And this preachiness serves a therapeutic purpose, offering jolting possibilities for empathy.
  74. Causeway
    It’s to Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry’s credit that what lingers is their characters’ uncertainty.
  75. You Don't Nomi
    Has the time come to ask if the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction?
  76. After Love
    The film too often puts too much trust in dialogue, as Marie and Boris's predicament is sometimes perfectly conveyed by the actors' facial expressions and body language.
  77. Tales of the Night
    Michel Ocelot's recent cartoons cleverly advance Lotte Reiniger's prototypical stop-motion technique into the digital age.
  78. The Midwife
    If not for its performances, the film would belong in the category of Hallmark Channel tearjerkers.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Idiocracy
    Idiocracy is too scattershot and compromised to push the conceptual bleakness beyond the realm of lowbrow comedy, though Judge’s cultural ire remains bracing throughout: For all the characters’ slapsticky imbecility, Judge makes it clear that it’s their docile acceptance (read: political inactivity) that makes them true dumbasses.
  80. Crimson Peak
    Guillermo del Toro's fussiest, most compartmentalized construction, filled with the most powerful sense of repression and delusion.
  81. Cyrano
    As is typically the case with Joe Wright's films, one is left both exhilarated and exhausted, wishing that he had been more interested in the material at the center of his house of flourishes.
  82. 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.
  83. The Great Museum
    The ghostliness of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna derives from an identity crisis, where digitization threatens to eradicate the gallery space.
  84. A Woman, a Part
    The film’s depiction of friendship seldom pushes past insights predicated on a fundamental tension between characters.
  85. The BFG
    The film, full of such quietly inventive visual magic, is perfectly content to simply revel in the stuff dreams are made of.
  86. The Kid Who Would Be King
    Joe Cornish’s film is vigilant in its positivity and hope for the future at nearly every turn.
  87. Users
    The film’s triumph is keeping us on our toes by sending us into an ether where fear and wonder live hand in hand.
  88. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
    Alex Gibney’s documentary tells a dramatic, if somewhat workmanlike, story of Silicon Valley hubris meeting old-fashioned scamming.
  89. The Danish Girl
    In so clearly viewing Lili through the lens of 21st-century political correctness, the film only blunts the resolve of her struggle.
  90. Game Night
    The film establishes coherent characters and drops them into a twisty mystery plot that’s tightly crafted enough to generate some real narrative momentum while never getting too bogged down in its own plot that it forgets to be funny.
  91. The Woman with the 5 Elephants
    Watching Svetlana Geierat work, parsing the wild complexities of language as she converts Russian into German, the doc becomes a meditation on enforcing order in a world that refuses to accept it.
  92. Don Jon
    Joseph Gordon-Levitt's directorial debut does for porn-dependence what Shame did for sex addiction by offering a surface-level look at the effects of its specific pathology on its lead male character.
  93. Elián
    It has the decency to recognize that only Elián González has the right to define his sense of truth for himself.
  94. Barking Dogs Never Bite
    Bong's debut is not all it could be, but any film that has a line as hilariously warped as "Jesus, that thing's hairy" deserves some recognition.
  95. The Driller Killer
    What makes the film so remarkable is the extent to which Ferrara, even at the outset of his career, exploits sex and violence for their popular appeal even as he reflects on the effect of such subjects on both his own art and the culture at large.
  96. King Kelly
    The film decides very early on, as part of its premise, to reduce Louisa Krause's King Kelly to a one-dimensional narcissist.
  97. Judy
    Renée Zellweger can reach all the notes and hit all the marks, but Garland’s intense emoting eludes her.
  98. 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.
  99. Wonka
    Paul King again proves himself a masterful engineer of imaginary worlds, and it’s the meticulous attention to detail that makes Wonka so captivating.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    306 Hollywood
    Elan and Jonathan Bogarín's film blends various tones and visual styles with confidence and infectious exuberance.
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