Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,769 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: 4,345 out of 7769
  2. Mixed: 1,491 out of 7769
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7769
7769 movie reviews
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  1. Advantageous
    The dialogue is so disaffected it's as if humans were replicants even before going through the aforementioned twin-making procedure.
  2. Ted 2
    The film is a redundant showcase for Seth MacFarlane's racy, dick-centric sense of humor.
  3. Felt
    A hollow bit of violence exposes the film's sense of empowerment as nothing more than a harmless sheep masquerading in wolf's clothing.
  4. Batkid Begins
    Any hope of meaningful reflection or insight is doused by a steady drip of often redundant and banal observations.
  5. Runoff
    This emotionally affecting film never loses sight of the ethical complexity of forsaking a community in the name of an individual.
  6. Into the Grizzly Maze
    David Hackl often shoots his bear in fashions that accent its lumbering, powerful grace, even during its death rattle.
  7. The Princess of France
    The distinctiveness of Matías Piñeiro's alluring brand of formalism lies in this deference to chance and alchemy.
  8. Bound to Vengeance
    It trivializes victim trauma by treating its main character's best-laid plans as punchline fodder.
  9. A Murder in the Park
    Its wholly complex and provocative social pleas slip too frequently into the seedy realm of journalistic exploitation.
  10. The Little Death
    It's perched uneasily on a fence separating a rote comic sketch film from something weirder, stranger, and less engaged with offering reassuring domestic homilies.
  11. L.A. Slasher
    It inflates the meta conceit (already borderline overblown) of a pop-obsessed, sex-negative serial killer to excessive but trite proportions.
  12. Glass Chin
    The story wisely focuses on the cast's worn-in and jazzy repartee and expresses a perfectly modulated sense of self-awareness.
  13. A Borrowed Identity
    It lacks a formal rigor to match its thematic heft, preferring a digestible naturalism that serves its plot points in plain, uncomplicated sight.
  14. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    It utilizes Maya Angelou's claim as tantalizing bait rather than the starting point for a feature-length thesis statement.
  15. Big Game
    The rambling conversations and endless wandering through nature could let the film pass for a filler episode of Lost.
  16. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    A barbed inquiry into this particular notion of "self-defense," enabled by the quotidian racism state and perpetuated de jure by the state.
  17. Phantom Halo
    A genre mishmash cobbled together from the refuse of disparate visual and narrative modes.
  18. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Maya Forbes reveals herself as a sunny optimist, insistent on remembering the ecstatic highs and never dwelling on the despairing lows.
  19. The Wanted 18
    The eccentric artistry calls so much attention to itself as to make the subject of the film feel like an afterthought.
  20. Balls Out
    The film reveals itself as a sports movie actually attuned to the knowledge that victory in an inconsequential game bears no meaning.
  21. Rubble Kings
    It fails to go deep enough, suggesting an appetizer offered as an opening to an ultimately unserved meal.
  22. Manglehorn
    David Gordon Green stages even fleeting tonal palate cleansers with a self-consciousness that parallels Al Pacino's acting.
  23. Burying the Ex
    It alternates awkwardly between shrill, borderline misogynistic sex farce and desperately gory, pun-rife creature feature.
  24. The Overnight
    The film's Buñuelian potential for harpooning the bourgeoisie is quickly dashed in favor of mumblecore antics.
  25. Gabriel
    The film wants to reveal the anguish of mental illness and infiltrate the mind of its protagonist through constant affirmation of his pain.
  26. The Face of an Angel
    Michael Winterbottom's film is a mess of tones, but not of ideas, which could well sum up the director's prodigious but uneven oeuvre.
  27. Eden
    Every substrata of music geekdom deserves a period piece as intimate as Eden, Mia Hansen-Løve's swan song for the golden era of French house music.
  28. Dope
    Dope is a mess of styles and mixed signals, a pulp fiction that mostly tend to its loyalties to other cine-odysseys through the streets of Los Angeles.
  29. Inside Out
    Both wonderfully complex and weirdly reductive at the same time—a formula, though, that seems as sound an embodiment of the human brain as any other.
  30. Jurassic World
    Jurassic World can't tell whether it wants to be junk food or not, lovingly poking fun at some Hollywood tropes while shamelessly indulging others.
  31. The 11th Hour
    Writer-director Anders Morgenthaler's film is practically an exercise in over-explication.
  32. Chagall-Malevich
    When the appeal of the film's whimsy wears off, the fogginess of its historical perspectives comes to the fore.
  33. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    It unites a mélange of teen-film tropes into a narrative overburdened with cultural references and framing devices, and undermined by a lack of attention to character.
  34. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    The Yes Men show that while reality might get lost in this struggle, the truth does occasionally emerge from the chaos.
  35. The Wolfpack
    Crystal Moselle aims her cinematic arrow at the hearts of the same choir that Andrew Jarecki's stunted aesthetics preach to.
  36. Set Fire to the Stars
    At least it doesn't make the biopic mistake of attempting to check off every moment of a man's life over the course of a few hours' worth of running time.
  37. Madame Bovary
    Sophie Barthes neglects to thoroughly conceive of Emma's plight, instead making only sporadic gestures to it.
  38. Live From New York!
    Formally, it relies on a bevy of spectacularly funny clips and a plethora of talking heads, most of which fall back on plaudits rather than sage insights.
  39. Insidious: Chapter 3
    In lieu of advancing a view of the dead's dominion that doesn't abide by the law of "just becauses," Chapter 3 is often content to wink at the ways the first two films spooked audiences.
  40. Entourage
    If ever there was a movie equivalent of dad bod, Entourage is it.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Testament of Youth
    The film's inferno of horrors are undoubtedly visceral, but psychologically implosive rather than entrails-exploding.
  42. Wild Horses
    Robert Duvall's evident admiration for his wife are typical of this film, in which so much seems touchingly sincere but clumsily expressed.
  43. Police Story: Lockdown
    The film's subtitle is apropos, as this is a decidedly locked-down and lead-footed talk-o-rama.
  44. Survivor
    This is the kind of filmmaking that gets touted as "workmanlike" when it's really straight-laced to the point of tepidness.
  45. Spy
    It's the sustained, full-bodied mania of Melissa McCarthy's performance that anchors the film's many winning blind-alley gags.
  46. Hungry Hearts
    Throughout, Saverio Costanzo hypocritically drapes his scenes in a cloak of faux-empathy.
  47. Charlie's Country
    It finally offers little more than a moderately engaging slice of contemporary aboriginal life that mostly fails to dig beneath the surface of this underrepresented world.
  48. Love & Mercy
    Bill Pohlad seems never to have met a metaphor he couldn't bludgeon into its most rudimentary and literal interpretation.
  49. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence
    It confirms the Roy Andersson universe as one of near-fossilized similitude, in which any effort or movement is disruptive, revealing new cracks in the set illusion of order.
  50. Dawn Patrol
    The opposite of enlightenment, the film hides its anxieties behind a mélange of third-rate grit and playful xenophobia.
  51. The Nightmare
    As in Rodney Ascher's previous film, Room 237, the subject of obsession is complemented by a despairing attempt to process it, corral it, and somehow conquer it.
  52. Uncertain Terms
    Appropriately, the images in the film, the most fluidly beautiful and resonant of Nathan Silver's career thus far, suggest flashes of memory relived from the vantage point of the future.
  53. Aloha
    After a while, the film's sing-a-song-for-the-world vibe, so buoyantly optimistic at first, becomes grating and smug.
  54. San Andreas
    In Brad Peyton's San Andreas, the biggest earthquake in recorded history is less natural disaster than divorce negotiation process.
  55. Sunset Edge
    Writer-director Daniel Peddle's anthropological concerns never really wed themselves to a sturdy narrative bedrock.
  56. Gemma Bovery
    The film dabbles in the French romantic-comedy tradition and simultaneously spoofs it, committing to neither.
  57. Unfreedom
    The film's troubled aesthetics are exacerbated by a screenplay that contains the trappings of amateur toil, including dialogue that harps on innocuous moments and trifling exposition.
  58. Results
    Andrew Bujalski seizes upon physical training as a resonant metaphor for the work and risk that are inherent in cultivating significant interpersonal connections.
  59. Welcome to this House
    If the documentary isn't quite dynamic in its revelations, it's considerably more so in its challengingly essayistic presentation.
  60. Guidelines
    It effectively implies that the subjects' troublemaking is the stuff of transience, a phase before they're ushered into the realm of adult responsibility.
  61. Barely Lethal
    The film settles into a time-honored groove of so many forgettable juvenile comedies before it.
  62. Poltergeist
    It's the cinematic equivalent of a pat on the back accompanied by a slap in the face.
  63. Tomorrowland
    In Brad Bird's film, the way forward is backward, on a path that stumbles into misplaced nostalgia and dicey humanism.
  64. The Human Centipede III (Final Sequence)
    Tom Six has achieved the seemingly impossible: He's made a film even less watchable than "The Human Centipede II."
  65. (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    Yael Melamede doesn't dwell on each of her subjects' stories beyond the condensed version that's related on screen.
  66. The Farewell Party
    A neatly balanced tragicomedy about the easily blurred line between assisted living and assisted death.
  67. Love at First Fight
    Transparently wearing metaphors on its singed sleeves, the film shuttles around courses of meaning and significance without committing to any.
  68. Seeds of Time
    First-person accounts from individuals most affected by the drop in agricultural productivity are rarely the focus of the film's vision.
  69. It's Such a Beautiful Day
    Despite all this macabre torment, It's Such a Beautiful Day involves a lot of sweet, plucky humor that represents a discreet softening of the angry sarcasm for which Hertzfeldt has become known.
  70. The Japanese Dog
    It may be described as a Yasujirô Ozu drama done in the Romanian style; if only there was more to distinguish it beyond such extra-textual concerns.
  71. When Marnie Was There
    The film at first plays like a refresher and throwback to Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, before revealing itself to be less minimal than minor.
  72. Sunshine Superman
    It depicts counterculture where those stranded outside the barriers of conventional society seek to push past natural boundaries to intermingle with the metaphysical in midair.
  73. Aloft
    The film's images, so continually heartrending so as to never become redundant, effectively function as visual proselytizing.
  74. Güeros
    A good story, full of life and related with intelligence and a sense of humor.
  75. The Connection
    The film feels utterly infatuated by the cop/crook dividing line long-since drawn, if not flogged, by Michael Mann.
  76. Pitch Perfect 2
    Even stronger than its predecessor, which didn't quite go as far in terms of representing these young women in a wider context.
  77. Mad Max: Fury Road
    George Miller orchestrates the rubber-burning pandemonium with the illicit smirk of someone who knows he's giving us exactly what we want.
  78. I'll See You in My Dreams
    Highly polished yet never quite slick, it devolves now and then into cartoonish cutesiness with its broadly drawn minor characters.
  79. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    It weaves through past and present, memories and reality, analysis and history, like a mercurial mind reminiscing seemingly at random.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Know How
    Overall, the film's educational prerogatives tend to overwhelm its more interesting formal properties.
  81. Animals
    It sticks firmly to a Kerouac-lite immersion into young love rather than a more provocative portrait of the hazards inherent to modern urban life.
  82. One Cut, One Life
    The doc emerges not so much as a glimpse into the mind of a dying artist than as a factual drama on how loved ones are impacted by an individual's death.
  83. Every Secret Thing
    It has a problem that's familiar to competently made, sporadically involving crime procedurals: It's just good enough to inspire wishes that it were better.
  84. Our Man in Tehran
    Never is there an Iranian perspective on the proceedings, giving the documentary the jingoistic bent its title implies.
  85. Forbidden Films
    The documentary takes an equivocal stance, implying that just because a film should not be shown doesn't mean that it should be banned.
  86. Slow West
    A pageantry of pseudo-art poses, a self-consciously cool reorientation of the western as silly symphony.
  87. Good Kill
    Like other Niccol films, Good Kill is about an essential innocent who dreams of release from a highly structured, classist, and hypocritical environment.
  88. The Film Critic
    It perverts cinephilia by asserting that anyone who engages in criticism actually, deep down, wants to be a practicing artist.
  89. Two Shots Fired
    The lack of tangible dramatic follow-through leaves the film feeling incomplete, indistinguishable from so much other undercooked festival fare.
  90. Playing It Cool
    As characters endlessly digress on the differences between rom-coms and real life, the film evinces a schizophrenic relationship with its own inside-baseball cynicism.
  91. Hot Pursuit
    The only thing that could've made Sofia Vergara's misguided contribution grislier would have been to fellate a Chiquita banana.
  92. The D Train
    The film uses its male-on-male boundary-leaping to give the shopworn man-boy narrative a refresh.
  93. Bravetown
    The filmmakers attempt to acknowledge the pain of warfare within the framework of a redemptive story that lends it an unforgivably patronizing sense of closure.
  94. Preggoland
    Throughout, Sonja Bennett embodies slackness as an affectation, not a raw response to a culture of authenticity-killing productivity.
  95. 1001 Grams
    In the end, Bent Hamer's view of current international relations comes to down to a treacly rendition of "Kumbaya."
  96. 5 Flights Up
    Ira Sachs, for all the tenderness of feeling he brought to Love Is Strange, wouldn't have countenanced the stacked-deck sentimentality that lies at this film's heart.
  97. The Seven Five
    It relays a story of police corruption that's transparently designed as a pitch for a feature-film adaptation.
  98. Intrepido: A Lonely Hero
    Gianni Amelio bogs down into a family drama that's neither supplementary to the film's initial quest or a fulfilling substitute.
  99. Skin Trade
    There's no beauty to this film, little rhythm, none of the physical grace that action-film fans crave even if they don't know they do.
  100. In the Name of My Daughter
    This adaptation is to concerned with narrative fidelity and formal objectivity to pierce the veil of power dynamics that largely comprises the film's concerns.
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