Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
For 7,772 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 6.4 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. Weiner
    Josh Kriegman and Elyse Sternberg's film never discovers a greater purpose beyond its undeniable sideshow appeal.
  2. Fireworks Wednesday (2006)
    Asghar Farhadi's 2006 film interrogates the tensions between tactility and vision in complex ways.
  3. Evolution
    The film interprets itself, offering an essay on rape and gender fluidity that locks us out of the cognitive process of digesting it.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Clan
    The Pablo Trapero film's parallels are drawn so bluntly that they lose all suggestive force, since there's little left to suggest.
  5. The Fits
    This singular mix of character study and mysterious mood piece might not have come off quite so successfully if not for Royalty Hightower's internal performance.
  6. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    The legacy of Syd Fields's screenwriting manual hangs over 10 Cloverfield Lane, as it does all of Abrams's productions, which never even accidentally casts a whiff of subtext or authorial personality.
  7. The Brothers Grimsby
    The film doesn't do much to satirize the spy genre, instead using its flimsy plot mostly as a scaffolding for a barrage of jokes.
  8. Remember
    Atom Egoyan is only interested in using the Holocaust as fodder for carrot-dangling plot contrivances.
  9. Marguerite
    Xavier Giannolli consistently glosses every sequence with a stagey kind of humor, and at the main character's expense.
  10. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Michael Showalter is content to trade They Came Together's mischievous genre deconstructionism for cheap-shot indie quirk.
  11. Eye in the Sky
    Director Gavin Hood treats the aesthetics of high-tech surveillance as the opaque membrane through which the prosecution of the War on Terror must pass.
  12. City of Gold
    The film affectively defends food critic Jonathan Gold's assertion that it's ultimately cooking that makes us human.
  13. Lolo
    A curiously unsentimental director of romantic comedies, Julie Delpy sees romance for the work that it primarily is.
  14. Backgammon
    The imagery fails to express either the characters' or the filmmakers' obsessions or synchronicities.
  15. Creative Control
    The film is overrun with characters, but it's less interested in their identity than their plasticity.
  16. Hyena Road
    Paul Gross situates the film's events somewhere between violent, militaristic fantasy and gentler, anti-war lament.
  17. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Its feminist perspective checkmates the frat-boy misogyny and machismo that too often mar films set in combat zones.
  18. Zootopia
    The film goes deeper in its allegorizing, tapping into the volatile nature of identity politics.
  19. London Has Fallen
    Like its predecessor, the film is content to dumbly relish in the inanity of Mike's rampage.
  20. Colliding Dreams
    The filmmakers' perspective is firmly aligned with the views of liberal Zionism, as the leftist peace activists are given the most screen time.
  21. Knight of Cups
    It has the uncanny quality of an out-of-body experience, not a torn-from-the-heart confessional.
  22. Songs My Brothers Taught Me
    The film is more taken by its own formal composition than enunciating the musical edification promised by its title.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Wave
    It sketches an imperiled family worth caring about, but any goodwill is soon weathered by wave after wave of contrivance following the initial town-leveling event.
  24. Ava's Possessions
    Jordan Galland confidently perches the film right on the razor’s edge separating absurdist comedy from horror.
  25. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    Sword of Destiny has an appealingly inventive, unruly genre party streak running down its figurative back.
  26. Gods of Egypt
    Its virtues as throwback don't elide the foolhardly decision to imprint an ancient mythology on a contemporary superhero framework.
  27. Triple 9
    It arrives prepackaged with suggested comparisons to Michael Mann's Heat that it never earns because of its dreary literal-mindedness.
  28. Marguerite & Julien
    It finds its filmmaker completely lost between impulses to pay homage, play it safe, or offer something—anything—new.
  29. Backtrack
    The film is the cinematic equivalent of watching a Rubik's Cube noisily solve itself for 90 minutes.
  30. Risen
    It's an episode of Without a Trace: Jerusalem presented with all the panache of a Trinity Broadcasting Network TV special.
  31. Race
    This is a complication-smoothing take on Jesse Owens's elegant riposte to Hitler's racism at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
  32. King Georges
    Erika Frankel’s documentary is finally revealed to be a story of prolonged adjustment to retirement, and a poignant illustration of sublimated redemption.
  33. Embrace of the Serpent
    Ciro Guerra's excesses in arthouse symmetry tend to arrive in the service of a just and angry correctivism.
  34. Eddie the Eagle
    It remains more committed to printing the uplifting legend of its title character than in actually examining the human beings underneath.
  35. The Witch
    The reworking of a tired horror trope into a transformed feminist symbol stands out as an impressive act of genre revisionism.
  36. Diamond Tongues
    Throughout, Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson purposely indulge Hollywood formula only to subvert it.
  37. Rolling Papers
    It neither glorifies nor castigates pot usage, letting consumers speak for themselves without the intrusion of an omnipresent voice.
  38. Forsaken
    The film adheres to the dictionary definition of a classical genre without ever attempting to subvert it.
  39. Cabin Fever
    Travis Zariwny detachedly regards the material as shtick to be waded through with quotation marks.
  40. Zoolander 2
    The film is frequently guilty of the same obsolescence it accuses the characters of embodying.
  41. Standoff
    Standoff isn’t quite inspired, but it coasts on unexpected modesty of professionalism.
  42. Touched With Fire
    The film is a thinly dramatized series of arguments against, then ultimately in favor of the medication of bipolar disorder.
  43. A War
    Tobias Lindholm stages his claims through clunky dramaturgical scenarios, with the seams exposed at every turn.
  44. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong
    The script labors to give the film a strong sense of place, but strange lapses confirm a sense that the city isn't a character here.
  45. Deadpool
    The whiplash contrasts between snideness and sincerity is deeply rooted in the main character's psychology.
  46. Regression
    It spends a lot of time considering the fear of knowing, which may explain why Alejandro Amenábar didn’t seem to know what kind of film he was making.
  47. The Choice
    Most Nicholas Sparks adaptations say, in cinematic terms, nothing so complicated as "roses are red." This one just points to a garden and shrugs.
  48. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    The juxtaposition of courtship and violence is the film's one true coup, but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies still mistakes weaponry for agency.
  49. Southbound
    Southbound is yet another contemporary horror film that belongs to seemingly every era but its own.
  50. Hail, Caesar!
    Joel and Ethan Coen's idiosyncrasies elevate the film above the level of a mere creative exercise.
  51. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    What comes through clearly by the end of the film is the act of one artist's eccentric generosity breathing new awareness into the life of another.
  52. Rams
    Every moment in writer-director Grímur Hákonarson's strange and wonderful film is imbued with mystery and revealing dignity.
  53. Fort Buchanan
    Benjamin Crotty's film is content to drift free-associatively through the intricacies of group mechanics via an expressive free-form structure.
  54. 4th Man Out
    It's a bizarre and retrograde spectacle, as clueless and incurious about friendship as it is about the rudiments of composition and screenwriting
  55. The Club
    Pablo Larraín's thematic interests shift toward constructing a didactic tongue-lashing against the Catholic Church disguised as speculative fiction.
  56. Jane Got a Gun
    It constantly blunders into stylistic choices and narrative clichés that sabotage the sturdy two-hander at its center.
  57. Fifty Shades of Black
    An aimless, if sporadically clever, parody that tirelessly conceives of human sexuality as punchlines for its shortsighted cultural ribbings.
  58. The Finest Hours
    A square journey through choppy waters, it boasts a Greatest Generation nostalgia so thoroughgoing it might as well be called Boys Becoming Men.
  59. Everybody's Fine
    It joins its American cousin in the scrapheap of family dramedies that no one watches, unless by default out of boredom on TBS or TNT.
  60. Kung Fu Panda 3
    It finds a benefit in its genre affiliation, evenly distributing its action in quick bursts of fluidly animated fight choreography.
  61. Lazer Team
    The premise thoughtlessly combines elements from Marvel comics, Men and Black, and a swath of '80s pop culture to curiously neutered effect.
  62. Rabin, the Last Day
    Its vantage point too loosely assembles an argument by focusing, almost obsessively, on reassembling a tangible timeline of events.
  63. The 5th Wave
    The sense that children’s attitudes toward rampant militarization are being gradually normalized is the film's objectionable given.
  64. Dirty Grandpa
    As in Judd Apatow's films, crassness is boasted as shamelessness, and calculated sentimentality is dressed up as empathy.
  65. Synchronicity
    Writer-director Jacob Gentry's film has the emotional fatuousness of uncertain softcore erotica.
  66. Rabid Dogs
    There's no reason for Rabid Dogs to exist, as even character identity and motivation receives little attention.
  67. Ip Man 3
    Donnie Yen's performance is so good that it's a shame Wilson Yip's films have never strived to be more than briskly entertaining hagiography.
  68. Bleak Street
    Bleakness, Arturo Ripstein's film implies, demands different kinds of labor from a man than from a woman.
  69. Martyrs
    It's hardly a desecration of Pascal Laugier's 2008 French horror film of the same name, but that assumes the original is a canonical text.
  70. Prescription Thugs
    It's symptomatic of the one-man-show form of polemical exposé that's come to dominate, and deteriorate, documentary practice.
  71. Mojave
    With the film, director William Monahan offers audiences a bundle of fetishes dressed up as an existentialist thriller about the class system.
  72. Aferim!
    The film's black humor is inextricably tied to serious questions about moral relativism and personal responsibility.
  73. Ride Along 2
    Like any serving of junk food, it seems engineered to give you that initial rush of satisfaction, but leaves you in a dead zone where the only thing you want is more of the same.
  74. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    Of course, when the action gets underway, Bay unleashes that flashy id of his, and all of his flaws as a titan of blockbuster filmmaking come to the fore.
  75. Intruders
    The film ultimately boils down to people bludgeoning one another in unimaginative close-ups.
  76. Band of Robbers
    It places more focus on the childish fabulousness of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer than the racial reckoning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
  77. Moonwalkers
    The whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, but the various detours coalesce into an amusing wannabe-cult curio.
  78. The Benefactor
    Writer-director Andrew Renzi treats unfettered wealth as a hyperbolic playground through which to explore masculine insecurity.
  79. A Perfect Day
    The film finally seems conspicuously at odds with itself, neither funny nor impassioned enough to pass as an accomplished vision of transnational welfare.
  80. The Forest
    The so-called suicide forest's cultural value is trivialized in the bum-rush to liberate the main characters from their agonies.
  81. Anesthesia
    Tim Blake Nelson's film immerses itself into as many pain-induced (and painful) subplots as it possibly can.
  82. Lamb
    Ross Partridge seems flatly fascinated by Lamb’s pathology without trying to understand its formation from environmental factors.
  83. No Home Movie
    By refusing to finitely define Natalia, or reduce her life to a series of biographical details, Akerman elides eulogizing of any sort, dignifying Natalia without personifying her as an idea made flesh.
  84. Sweaty Betty
    Sweaty Betty is a reminder that poetry comes in all shapes and sizes, and that art ultimately dictates its own terms.
  85. Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
    The absence of a central narrator for the most part prevents the film from devolving into gratuitous pedagogy.
  86. Diablo
    It inelegantly attempts to infuse a standard revenge western with the gravitas of a war veteran's coming-home odyssey.
  87. Only Yesterday (1991)
    It uses the trappings of the family melodrama to reveal the subtle social constraints that inhibit people, particularly women, from attaining full self-realization.
  88. Point Break
    In its philosophical and criminal investigations (largely imported from Kathryn Bigelow's original), the film moves in dozens of illogical directions, but not without achieving a patina of earnest credibility.
  89. Daddy's Home
    Though Will Ferrell has made a career out of his own debasement, the film quickly becomes too cruel to generate laughter for anyone who would empathize with him.
  90. Anomalisa
    The film's highpoint is one of the most remarkably moving sex scenes in all of American cinema, and the irony of it involving bland puppets is hardly lost on Kaufman and Johnson.
  91. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
    In the film, Alvin and the Chipmunks proudly align themselves not with Dr. Demento, but with Kidz Bop.
  92. Sisters
    A regurgitation of Apatowian formula, wherein ostensibly edgy humor hides a core of conservative moralizing.
  93. Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens
    It exists less as a meaningful extension of its world than as a fan-service deployment device.
  94. The Hateful Eight
    The premise of the film is simple, but it's a simplicity that can only attract complications, as simple plans are apt to do, in an atmosphere of foreboding and the macabre.
  95. Dreams Rewired
    The documentary isn't advancing an argument so much as simply restating a European socialistic breed of fact.
  96. Noma: My Perfect Storm
    Too much of Noma is composed of gorgeous pillow shots, which grow static and fussy, appearing to exist almost apart from the subject matter.
  97. The Emperor's New Clothes
    It's more about hyping Russell Brand as a constituent for the people than locating the means for sustained economic transformation.
  98. 45 Years
    It's the summative effect of the story's modest exchanges, unspooling one after another in long, tranquil shots, that lends the film its profound sense of loss.
  99. Son of Saul
    The film's meticulousness orchestration only calls attention to its dubious sense of purpose, which lies beyond human subjectivity.
  100. Body
    The filmmakers exhibit no interest in watching the story's central wolves wiggle out of the trap they've potentially set for themselves.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »