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. A House of Dynamite
    Kathryn Bigelow’s nerve-shredding A House of Dynamite stares down impossible questions about an unthinkable scenario.
  2. No Sleep Till
    Uncertainty extends to the film’s mood, which fluctuates between dreamy ennui and slowly escalating dread.
  3. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants
    If the film’s breathless pacing and rapid-fire jokes run out of steam just a tad as SpongeBob’s stay in the underworld extends, Search for SquarePants is still charming, spirited, and ludicrous enough to prove that it’s not quite time to tell this series to walk the plank.
  4. Collective Monologue
    The film reveals—and urges on—a historical shift in how we relate to other living beings.
  5. Mortal Kombat II
    Mortal Kombat II is done waiting around. It’s ravenous to get down to bloody business.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Testament of Ann Lee
    Mona Fastvold’s protean fable is tremulous, tricky, and intrepid, much like its pious protagonist.
  7. Shoeshine
    Notwithstanding the veracity of the American-occupied urban locations he captures, De Sica doesn’t innovate or subvert expectations in the manner of the contemporaneous war trilogy of Roberto Rossellini, and his plotting with principal screenwriter Cesare Zavattini doesn’t rise above the level of a vivid potboiler with a mild bent for muckraking.
  8. Hedda
    Tessa Thompson's presence is captivating, as she relishes in exploring her character's gleeful and occasionally anxious villainy.
  9. Nuremberg
    Just as Stanley Kramer’s Judgement at Nuremberg explored the Nuremberg trials against the backdrop of the emerging Cold War, James Vanderbilt’s film holds the trials up as a mirror to our current era of authoritarianism.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Dead Man's Wire
    If Dead Man’s Wire adds up to less than the sum of its vicarious jolts and sardonic jabs, it’s perhaps a result of Gus Van Sant’s style fading into the background.
  11. Islands
    The film is most interesting when it's keyed to its main character's existential malaise across what plays out like a White Lotus B-plot.
  12. The Fence
    The late Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play isn’t opened up so much as clinically dissected by the film, with every character an enfeebled pawn in situations they’re at a loss to resolve.
  13. Hamlet
    Aneil Karia’s Hamlet, which is nearly defined by its handheld camerawork and the medium close-ups on Riz Ahmed’s face, is one of the more intimate adaptations of Shakespeare’s play to date.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Gavagai
    The film is a complex treatise on hierarchies of race, gender, and power in the contemporary art world.
  15. The Love That Remains
    Hlynur Pálmason, who has a background in visual art, explores the film’s family dynamics through a vignette-like structure that sometimes feels akin to walking through an art exhibition.
  16. The White House Effect
    The film meticulously yet concisely probes how, why, and when our understanding of the greenhouse effect went from a scientific certainty to it being up for debate.
  17. Scream 7
    This surprisingly refreshing take on familiar material is unconcerned with meta discussions about where the film stands in the canon.
  18. The Damned Don't Cry
    The Damned Don’t Cry is an efficient, fast moving exercise in melodrama, hardly memorable and at times putrefying in its reliance on hokum, cliché, and bullshit sentimentality.
  19. The Invite
    By the time The Invite burrows into the heart of its main characters and reveals the scope of their regrets and longings, it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t strike a chord of genuine emotion.
  20. undertone
    Throughout Undertone, Ian Tuason delights in deploying sound to eerily suggestive ends.
  21. Redux Redux
    Easy as it may be to imagine a more artful, restrained, and introspective version of Redux Redux, the one we got is satisfying enough that you may want to take it out for another spin.
  22. Nuisance Bear
    Nuisance Bear is at its most powerful when its message has been condensed down into a single image.
  23. 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.
  24. Ghost Elephants
    Ghost Elephants shows that Werner Herzog is fiercely determined to explore new frontiers while they still exist and capture the poetic phenomena of nature and the unshakeable dreams it continues to instill in mankind.
  25. Wolfram
    While Wolfram might struggle to convey a depth of feeling for its characters and the brutal, dehumanizing frontier they call home, it can be an intermittently satisfying good-versus-evil period piece.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Nightborn
    Even if the film has few surprises in store for us, there’s something pleasingly unpretentious about how it leaves little room for subtext throughout.
  27. Marc by Sofia
    It proves entertaining and enlightening when exploring Jacobs’ contributions to the world of fashion. But more often, it’s just like listening in on an engaging chat between two artist friends who share a fan-like admiration of each other’s craft.
  28. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
    BenDavid Grabinski’s film is less of a crime drama than a punch-drunk comedy of errors.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Mermaid
    Ultimately, Mermaid shows how loneliness can un-anchor a person, and it makes you understand how any lost sailor might fall for the first thing, no matter what it is, that breaks it.
  30. Pretty Lethal
    The film is lean, mean, and feisty, even if it doesn’t quite stick the landing.
  31. ChaO
    The narrative is nonsense, but it’s at least an arch and sweet kind of nonsense as it jumps through its fairy-tale hoops on the way to the next splash of artful color and manically doodled creativity.
  32. The Seduction of Mimi
    The Seduction of Mimi is socio-political discourse, Italian style: Sex speaks louder than words on any given subject.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Python Hunt
    The at times overbearing aesthetic touch isn’t enough to diminish the film’s saliency.
  34. The Samurai and the Prisoner
    The Samurai and the Prisoner offers a master class in framing and blocking, with Kurosawa Kiyoshi continually finding new ways to render the story’s self-contained setting as a source of rich visual pleasure.
  35. Funny Games
    Haneke's admonishments are disturbing only in the sense that they're never self-critical, and while watching one of his films, there's always a sense that he thinks he's above his characters, his audience, and scrutiny.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    Format owes much to Short Cuts, but Haneke’s wintry vision lacks Altman’s sense of life overflowing beyond the frame.
  37. Rocky Balboa
    Stallone yearns to investigate the loneliness of a man who can’t get over the past, an endeavor which entails unwieldy speeches (delivered by the actor in his patented “yews guys” patois) and reflective shots of the city’s skyline.
  38. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
    Like far too many modern horror films, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane flaunts its knowledge of classic genre fundamentals but fails to do anything very clever or surprising with them.
  39. My Blueberry Nights
    Every shot is painstakingly thought out, but less emphasis is placed on the human face than on the surfaces that reflect it and the objects that obscure it, and the overall effect is close to that of fetish art.
  40. Quantum of Solace
    Updating this anachronistic cash cow with the scrappy and sexy Craig still looks like a wise move, but it requires a greater quantum of style than Solace provides.
  41. Ali
    Ali‘s narrative laxness comes at the fault of boxing time (a good one-third of the film’s three-hour time span is spent inside the ring). You say: But Mann knows how to direct a fight. But I say: So what?
  42. King Arthur
    Revisionist mythmaking of the most bland variety, the Jerry Bruckheimer produced King Arthur purports to tell the true tale of the ancient British hero and his valiant Knights of the Round Table by stripping away the magic, mystery, and majesty of the fable and replacing it with grim n' grimy realism.
  43. Dawn of the Dead
    This new Dawn of the Dead doesn't stop to take a breath, and remains frequently scary and engaging in the moment without leaving much to chew on afterward.
  44. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    Oshii’s attention to detail is ravishing and his distractions of time and space evoke what it must be like to be trapped within the confines of M.C. Escher’s “Sky and Water.” Pity then that Innocence is so impenetrable, both aesthetically and philosophically.
  45. Halloween II (2009)
    Treading well-worn ground to diminishingly creepy returns is a bone-deep problem for Zombie’s latest, especially with regard to his characters.
  46. The Happy Poet
    Like its sad-sack main character, whose closed-off personality makes him hard to fully understand or sympathize with, The Happy Poet is too reservedly rough around the edges.
  47. The Magician
    The Magician might have worked better if it could have sustained for its first several sequences a sense of genre confusion.
  48. Every Day
    Throughout, the film raises metaphysical issues of physical and psychological autonomy only to gloss over them.
  49. Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou)
    While Nobody Else But You aspires to a kind of French Fargo, it forgets the primary qualities that made that film work.
  50. Haywire
    If anything, Haywire is most closely linked to last year's "Contagion," a kindred effort in style, theme, and value-marring detachment.
  51. Kung Fu Panda 2
    Exquisite looking but substantially hollow.
  52. Super 8
    J.J. Abrams's latest puts a modern spin on classical material, though here reinvention isn't the goal so much as slavish duplication embellished with muscular CG effects.
  53. Green Lantern
    Martin Campbell, though a capable director of action (Hal's training session with the Michael Clarke Duncan-voiced Kilowog is proof of that), doesn't have a poet's instincts.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    The Mission: Impossible franchise seems almost crudely mercenary in its formula for success.
  55. The Amazing Spider-Man
    No mutation is necessary to clearly see that Marvel's "reboot" of their signature franchise is an unimaginative remake of Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man.
  56. 6 Souls
    The film belongs to a long tradition of horror films that offensively suggest that all atheists might as well hang a Welcome sign up for the devil.
  57. Monte Carlo
    Mistaken-identity shenanigans and gooey romance are Monte Carlo's prime commodities.
  58. Crazy, Stupid, Love
    This schizophrenic conception of Gosling's character is indicative of the film's largely dichotomous view of romantic relationships.
  59. The Change-Up
    Yet as is so often the case with the frat-boy genre to which this film panders, so many gags feel like desperate, self-conscious attempts to be outrageous that the effect of its abundant cursing and boob shots is more depressing than delirious.
  60. Moneyball
    True to Hollywood's tireless efforts to fit square-peg material into roundish genre niches, this wavering, intermittently smart story of daring to think differently flattens its narrative into formula.
  61. Puss in Boots
    For all the fuss, it dissolves almost immediately upon contact.
  62. The Rum Diary
    The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson's amorphous hodgepodge of a film, wants to be many things: period recreation, social commentary, morality play, romance, an insider look at the newspaper game.
  63. War Horse
    What ultimately hobbles War Horse is a two-pronged attack, with Spielberg's soft-sell producing an unfortunately dramatic flatness in almost every scene, while an 11th-hour scramble for picture-book catharsis doesn't seem to work either.
  64. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    Like the film that constrains him, a prequel to Planet of the Apes, perhaps James Franco understands his performance as something that will one day evolve into something far greater.
  65. The Thing
    You can tell a lot about the film from its rough handling of the materials supplied by its predecessor, using these commonalities both to identify the bond between the two and signal how much further it's willing to push things.
  66. Melancholia
    The poetic, referential succession of near-still images that opens the film so immaculately distills Melancholia's moody narrative and themes that it makes the two-hours-plus that follow seem impossibly redundant.
  67. On the Road
    The lack of a strong expository voice further simplifies the wealth of explicit sex Walter Salles dramatizes, much of it drawn from juicy swathes of Jack Kerouac's only recently published original scroll.
  68. In Time
    Justin Timberlake can't elevate what amounts to relatively simplistic, formulaic material, but his headlining turn exhibits sufficient charisma and wit to make In Time a passably diverting action-packed waste of time.
  69. Abduction
    Odds are John Singleton doesn't know he's made one of the funniest films of the year.
  70. Texas Killing Fields
    Texas Killing Fields's mood is one of drowning in quicksand, though said atmosphere is the byproduct of both Ami Canaan Mann's often dreamy direction and an editorial structure that intermittently devolves into elliptical incongruity.
  71. London Boulevard
    A movie like this lives and dies by its finer details, and London Boulevard screws up by applying the same broad brush to its entire cast, meaning every character gets the same amount of shading.
  72. Butter
    It's the film's unwillingness to deal with the sometimes hilarious and often problematic things its characters say and do that stands as one of its ultimate failings.
  73. Jeff Who Lives at Home
    For the most part, this is a boys-will-be-boys movie that excuses everything its pair of protags do in the name of some sort of cosmic order.
  74. This Means War
    This Means War seems so concerned with being the best product, it doesn't even know how to be good trash.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Amigo
    Amigo finds John Sayles rather closer to his worst, alternating gracelessly between fleshing out the characters caught in the middle of international conflict and turning them into dots and arrows in a flowchart of historical relevance.
  76. Snow White and the Huntsman
    As feminist fantasy, the film is non-committal, and as a reimagining of the fairy tale, it's at best expensive-looking without seeming wantonly so.
  77. Old Cats
    Walks a fine line between empathetic treatment of its characters and voyeuristic freakshow gazing.
  78. Shark Night 3D
    It's refreshing to see Shark Night 3D director David R. Ellis try to pull off a semi-sincere second-generation "Jaws" rip-off, even if he doesn't quite succeed.
  79. Courageous
    Even the logos for the companies involved in its making (Sherwood Films and Affirm Films) and distribution (TriStar Pictures) scream that this will be a message from on high.
  80. The Vow
    Very fortunately, there's an alternate universe swirling in the eye of The Vow's synthetic storm, a place occupied only by Tatum and McAdams, where the link between them cuts down the filmmakers' bad instincts.
  81. Tyrannosaur
    The brutality of Tyrannosaur isn't so over the top as to make director Paddy Considine's sympathy for his flawed characters look like a sham. But it does frequently bring his film's seesawing exploration of blue-collar existence to the brink of collapse.
  82. Monsters University
    Unfortunate proof that the animation studio previously known for its brains is now resting a little too heavily on its nominal brawn.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Men in Black III
    More like an attempt to reenergize a franchise than rebottle the lightning that electrified the original.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brave
    Pixar's latest ultimately offers nothing more than a caricature of a well-worn conceit.
  85. Mirror Mirror
    For all its pomp and fabulosity, Mirror Mirror is actually Tarsem Singh's most minimalistic effort, a dialed-down game board of elaborate pieces that's akin to the human chess set captained by Julia Robert's evil Queen Clementianna.
  86. My Afternoons with Margueritte
    Germain's bonhomie with the bistro regulars has the feel of a TV comedy pilot, which is more than can be said of the monologues he speaks to his cat, one on the inadequacies of the dictionary.
  87. Circumstance
    Since Mehran's embrace of hardline Islam is never dramatized or elaborated on in any insightful way.
  88. Project Nim
    To drive home the pathos of Nim's mistreatment, James Marsh frequently makes questionable use of the creature's apparent similarity to human beings, trading complex analysis for easy sentiment.
  89. Bride Flight
    It's all very tastefully handled by Ben Sombogaart, shot in plenty of staid compositions whose denuded color scheme suggests a historical remove, but it rarely generates any heat, even during a pair of graphic, but not particularly erotic sex scenes.
  90. The Devil's Double
    The film's first act is wholly concerned with the juxtaposition of physical similarities and ideological opposites, and Tamahori spends entire sequences upending the balance between the two.
  91. The Trip
    Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's shtick - a relentless verbal sparring comprised of dueling impressions, poetry recitations, absurdist riffing, and comic one-upmanship - works best in small doses.
  92. Kidnapped
    Its scenario and criminals devoid of any representational depth, and without any substantial ideas underlying its carnage, the film ultimately just assumes the sadistically pragmatic POV of its one-dimensional thugs, pitilessly doling out brutality as a practical means to an end.
  93. Like Crazy
    Outside of Felicity Jones's work, the film, directed and co-written by Drake Doremus, usually feels like it's soullessly connecting dots, a far cry from the Before Sunrise-style substance its Yank-meets-Euro chattiness might suggest.
  94. The Whistleblower
    It reaches a peak of dramatic anguish in star Rachel Weisz's single moment of naked fury, rather than through the tenacity and compassion that define her crusading title character.
  95. Janie Jones
    First thing to get out of the way: No, David M. Rosenthal's third feature, Janie Jones, has nothing to do with the famous song by the same name that opens the Clash's self-titled 1977 debut album. Perhaps that might have made this film far more interesting film it is.
  96. American Reunion
    Funnier than its prior two predecessors, if gratingly awash in demographic-pandering late-'90s alt-rock hits ("Closing Time," "Freshman"), American Reunion flounders with its earnest melodrama.
  97. 3
    3 is a smidgeon film. Take a smidgeon of scientific/ethical discussion, throw in a pinch of dance/poetry/dream sequences, tie the whole thing up with split-screen montages and you no longer just have a film about a love triangle, but a Godardian objet d'art.
  98. Dark Shadows
    A mixed bag of Nixon-era pop burlesque and vampire kitsch is ultimately undone by pedestrian gags and bloated genre boilerplate.
  99. The Campaign
    A lumpy spoof of electoral mudslinging that offers some bracing bipartisan contempt amid the lowbrow, labored slapstick.
  100. Think Like a Man
    Unfortunately, like so many women have prophesized regarding the weaker gender's lack of commitment, there's just not enough follow through.
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