Slant Magazine's Scores

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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
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  1. Grandma
    Writer-director Paul Weitz's proudly boisterous star vehicle for Lily Tomlin has about as many ambitions as it does delusions.
  2. The Mend
    The film is defined by its staunch refusal to clarify its characters' emotional issues, marooning them instead in the messes those emotions have wrought.
  3. Hitman: Agent 47
    If first-timer Aleksander Bach's choices as a director are any indication, he's a filmmaker who cares less about characters and actors than about dubious surface dazzle.
  4. American Ultra
    A Bourne movie turned just askew enough to be funny, American Ultra trains a bemused eye on a trope ripe for a ribbing.
  5. Learning to Drive
    Instead of using the titular metaphor as a means to seek deeper, darker ends, Isabel Coixet proceeds to restate it over and over again.
  6. The Boy
    Craig William Macneill's film is a sporadically frightening slow burn with a fatally overlong fuse.
  7. Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery
    Rarely do the interviewees express their own thoughts on Beltracchi, as Birkenstock lets him speak for himself, for better and for worse.
  8. Guidance
    The unapologetic lack of political correctness never goes beyond a one-dimensional and tentative provocation.
  9. Digging for Fire
    Reminiscent of Woody Allen's great, under-sung Manhattan Murder Mystery, it utilizes a pulp conceit as a shorthand for the regrets that bubble up in a marriage.
  10. Youth
    Tom Shoval, who eschews stylistic flourishes in order to focus on character, leaves the film's heavy lifting to the actors and his own screenplay.
  11. The Iron Ministry
    Though J.P. Sniadecki doesn't elucidate any broad structural motive, his film gradually adopts an engrossing rhythm among its clatter of steel and ambient chatter.
  12. Some Kind Of Beautiful
    A hodgepodge of horny-old-man clichés writ large, staged as a gleeful affirmation of its male lead's ego and entitlement.
  13. She's Funny That Way
    Familiar as its art/life paralleling may be, it's all fueled by a filmmaker with an intimate relationship to his subject matter.
  14. Straight Outta Compton
    It's most towering accomplishment are its set pieces, which manage to be brash, exhilarating, and even occasionally moving.
  15. Meru
    Its expositional crutch proves most inadequate when the team ascends the final pitch to the top after years of preparation in no more than a minute of screen time.
  16. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    Temperamentally, Guy Ritchie aligns more with the lithe, James Bond-like Solo: detached, above-it-all, eternally cool under pressure.
  17. Mistress America
    Mistress America is both the most concentrated and antic film in Noah Baumbach's unofficial New York trilogy.
  18. Big Sky
    Jorge Michel Grau's ambitions are stalled by a screenplay that seems to have never made it past a first draft.
  19. Rosenwald
    Director Aviva Kempner profile of Julius Rosenwald suggests a 60 Minutes segment stretched to feature length.
  20. Ten Thousand Saints
    Even when tragedy strikes early on, the revelation is just another "growing up is hard" dot on the grid.
  21. Amnesiac
    Its concern for the reclamation of identity is less important than the dull approximation of The Others' stark haunted-house atmospherics.
  22. Final Girl
    The filmmakers never really answer inevitable questions: What's the point of these fussy allusions?
  23. We Come as Friends
    It grows increasingly hopeless as it contrasts the alien paradise of the opening with the wastelands that resemble corporate dump sites.
  24. Tom at the Farm
    Its allegory for internalized homophobia, a gay man's perilous attraction to straightness itself, seems in this case deeply persona.
  25. Return to Sender
    The kind of wholly misconceived thriller that begs asking precisely what its filmmakers were seeking to accomplish.
  26. Prince
    It revives hope for a pop-art cinema that's capable of treating characters like actual human beings rather than pawns on a chess board.
  27. People Places Things
    The film introduces a promising romantic pentagon, only to let it float away unfulfilled into studiously benign coming-of-age clouds.
  28. Fort Tilden
    It elegantly evolves from an absurdist comedy into a remarkably wounded and uprooted story of friends who're beginning to tire of their shared social cocoons.
  29. How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy
    A definitive reflection on the work of two great directors and the specific slices of cinema they so fruitfully cultivated.
  30. The Great Man
    It exploits the military aesthetics that lend themselves so well to breathtaking sounds and visuals without fetishizing them.
  31. 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.
  32. Fantastic Four
    It adds more grist for the mill to the notion that studios don't hit the big red "reboot" button in any other state than a panic.
  33. The Gift
    Joel Edgerton's boilerplate direction is a blessing for a genre increasingly saddled with literal visualizations of madness.
  34. Dark Places
    The payoff is a huge and telling visual howler, summarizing the entire plot with a blithe indifference that will inevitably mirror the audience's.
  35. Homme Less
    Thomas Wirthensohn frequently sinks into dully positing Mark Reay as something close to the pinnacle of human integrity.
  36. Shaun the Sheep Movie
    It has generous lashings of Aardman Animations' trademark warmth, visual inventiveness, and satisfying Claymation tactility.
  37. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    A consummate sampler platter of the bounty of state-of-the-art animation currently available as alternatives established major-studio house styles.
  38. Cop Car
    The narrative derives much of its tension from the unsentimental ambivalence Jon Watts displays toward the story's two pre-teen boys.
  39. Call Me Lucky
    Bobcat Goldthwait's hand too nervously tempers Crimmins's outré tactics as kooky showmanship bred from unimaginable trauma.
  40. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    It can't resist winking at how this franchise manages to defy the limits of both human endurance and its superstar's rickety public status.
  41. Vacation
    Father doesn't just know best, he's the only one whose knowledge or lack thereof means anything at all.
  42. Staten Island Summer
    Breaking the laws of human nature is an ancient comic convention, but it only works when it leads to a laugh.
  43. Two Step
    A zig-zagging, free-associational genre item that's mostly concerned with stretching the generally narrow tonal rules of what a thriller can be.
  44. Paulo Coelho's Best Story
    Daniel Augusto relies on familiar tropes pertaining to the sexy, rebellious rock-star artist who does things his own way.
  45. Jenny's Wedding
    Tolerance in the film doesn't so much suggest a recognizably real epiphany as it does a moving Hallmark card.
  46. Counting
    The poetic pretenses are compounded by a sledgehammer insistence on elusive and irreducible moments as inherently beautiful.
  47. A LEGO Brickumentary
    Here's a documentary so insidious, so comprehensively scrubbed clean, that it argues for the therapeutic powers of consumerism.
  48. That Sugar Film
    One senses that all of these kinds of documentaires are finally aggrandizing shrines made by artists trying to erect something out of nothing.
  49. The Kindergarten Teacher
    The film's denouement is at once shocking and organic because it echoes a well-paced but nasty children's fable.
  50. The End of the Tour
    It does well in using dialogue to shape its escalating tête-à-tête, but the filmmaking is too fuzzy to expand on those ideas.
  51. Best of Enemies
    Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville reinforce the very circumstances they outwardly condemn.
  52. Listen to Me Marlon
    Among the film's many revelations is the level of self-aware humility Brando exudes while talking about his life and creative process.
  53. Paper Towns
    To hose down the white elephant in the room right off the bat, yes, it falls into place as a coming-of-age spin on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype.
  54. The Vatican Tapes
    Like technological innovation itself, the film seems overwhelmed by the reach of all its techo-cultural parts.
  55. Pixels
    This is a Happy Madison production, and as such it's exhaustively lazy, outside of its righteous dedication to the valorization of the man-child.
  56. Southpaw
    Each battle scar in the film is a testament to a vaguely but nonetheless forcefully defined notion of masculinity.
  57. Lucky Stiff
    Its irritatingly saccharine tone is such that it shuns grappling with certain characters' dubious and perverse behaviors.
  58. Big Significant Things
    Its anodyne tastefulness effectively lumps it into a big vat of likeminded Sundance-or-SXSW-endorsed offerings.
  59. Dark Was the Night
    The film may take the notion of implication over illustration a bit too far.
  60. Samba
    Even as Samba struggles to hold onto his identity, the film becomes entangled in an identity crisis of its own.
  61. 10 Cent Pistol
    One wishes the director had as burning of an interest in significance as he does trickery and quippery.
  62. Phoenix
    Christian Petzold never luxuriates in all this film history, but rather channels the artifice and affect it embodies into new insights.
  63. Unexpected
    It suggests that Kris Swanberg has taken notes on what a film concerned with pregnancy should include without actually making it.
  64. American Heist
    The film offers a veritable smorgasbord of dated, only-in-the-movies clichés about the debt-ridden working class.
  65. The Young Kieslowski
    Another effort to explain how difficult it is to be a young, white, smart, non-disfigured, upper-middle-class male.
  66. Trainwreck
    The script doesn't revel in Amy's quite harmless flaws, or at least examine them in the spirit of benevolence.
  67. Ant-Man
    Half-assed mentions of the Avengers, as well as a few cameo appearances sprinkled both within the feature and in its credits stingers, exude less shame than a crowd-pandering politico.
  68. Jellyfish Eyes
    Takashi Murakami has invested the film with the same sort of primal pop-art aesthetic that distinguishes much of his art.
  69. Irrational Man
    Woody Allen and Joaquin Phoenix's collaboration on Irrational Man's antihero is the closest the film gets to a saving grace.
  70. Mr. Holmes
    Bill Condon ignores the delights and hardships of becoming an artist in lieu of simply presenting the long-touted liberating effects of art.
  71. Lila & Eve
    Charles Stone III's film ultimately succeeds as a convincing social plea, but fails as compelling cinema.
  72. Ardor
    It broods along as if it's expressing something monumentally important with each slow-as-molasses camera move.
  73. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    The formalism fashions effective textural shortcuts to behavioral understanding that the remarkable cast fills in with chilling, convincing finesse.
  74. Catch Me Daddy
    The film plods from one gruesome moment to the next, as if its mere aversion to optimism constitutes a philosophy.
  75. Alléluia
    Both Lola Dueñas and Laurent Lucas are impressively committed to their roles, but the film's script is elusive to a fault.
  76. The Look of Silence
    If The Look of Silence still remains a gripping, vital, consequential documentary, it's in spite of its approach rather than because of it.
  77. Boulevard
    Not merely rote, Boulevard is contemptible for a belief in its own stature as a daring attempt to parse through the minutia of its core relationship, where Nolan's uncertain sexuality would be terms enough to laud the film's provocative insights.
  78. Minions
    It's a buzzkill to enter the world of Minions primed for a tidal wave of gibberish-talking lemmings to tear the roof off, only to see them once again led astray by the ordinariness of human affairs.
  79. The Gallows
    The film is sstrictly a high-tech spin on one of those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
  80. Stations of the Cross
    Stations of the Cross acknowledges that putting theoretical behaviors and mindsets into practice can have unwieldy consequences if context and intent are wholly ignored.
  81. Self/less
    The film's corporate blandness is almost as dispiriting as its disinterest in exploiting the inherent saliency of the material.
  82. Magic Mike XXL
    Magic Mike XXL isn't so much a lesser movie than Magic Mike as it is a looser one.
  83. Terminator Genisys
    Terminator Genisys feels like being trapped in a conversation with a child breathlessly recounting the highlights of the preceding movies.
  84. A Poem Is a Naked Person
    Even Les Blank's most conventional work remains an elusive vision, punctuated by cultural insights that elude many filmmakers for their entire careers.
  85. Mala Mala
    The filmmakers aren't really interested in the space between what these women say and what they mean.
  86. Stray Dog
    Ron "Stray Dog" Hall proves to be a welcome antidote to stereotypes about burly, bearded red-state RV dwellers.
  87. Closer to God
    The end result suggests Re-Animator as told through an airless CNN report.
  88. In Stereo
    The film is just another fantasy of living only the good portions of the life of an artist.
  89. Jackie & Ryan
    The film comes undone in its clumsy attempts to transform its story into a parable of economic distress.
  90. Stung
    The filmmakers maintain a tone that's mostly ideal for the contemporary equivalent of a drive-in movie: of reverent, parodic irreverence.
  91. What We Did on Our Holiday
    The underlying, redundant, and underwhelming theme of the film is the pursuit of family unity at all costs.
  92. Tangerine
    Its triumph is primarily a matter of style, a visionary revelation every bit as expressionistic as its main character's electric sense of shade.
  93. Do I Sound Gay?
    Another link in an increasingly tiresome chain of naval-gazing think pieces posing as personal documentary.
  94. 10,000 km
    It ends up feeling like an unsatisfying cautionary tale on how much detachment is too much detachment.
  95. Cartel Land
    A stunning work of war reportage nestled within a creaky study of ideological purity.
  96. Amy
    For the most part, the documentary succeeds in conveying a galvanizing sense of what made Winehouse so immediately engaging.
  97. Jimmy's Hall
    Ken Loach's staging is so calm and sober that it turns his story into an expertly photographed yet weirdly remote rebellion tale.
  98. 7 Minutes
    Whether because of race, shame, shelter, or fright, 7 Minutes remains white in the face throughout.
  99. A Little Chaos
    Alan Rickman's film is consistently, and often dispiritingly, mired in the quaint tradition of the classy costume drama.
  100. Max
    It hits its Red State beats so hard that its target audience likely won't notice they're being not only condescended to, but insulted outright.
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