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. Maggie
    Its only claim to uniqueness becomes running the standard zombie narrative through a Hallmark-card filter.
  2. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    The transcendence that the film offers isn't to be taken lightly considering the near impossibility of living professionally as an artist.
  3. Tu Dors Nicole
    Lafleur denies Nicole the angsty treatments given similar characters in films like The Graduate and Frances Ha by refusing to saturate the film with an undergirding sense of charm, where the issues being faced are merely points of spasmodic uncertainty that will erode over time.
  4. Avengers: Age of Ultron
    The film struggles against the rigid formula that typifies the Marvel universe, but only does so up to a point.
  5. Hyena
    The Gerard Johnson film's blanket cynicism is its most shopworn quality of all.
  6. Ride
    Throughout, Helen Hunt obsequiously tends to her character's evolution as a parent through a flagrant indulgence of sitcom-ish scenarios.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Welcome to Me
    The film rejects a fawning (or even particularly detailed) account of mental illness in favor of a plunge into the deep end of a bottomless ego.
  8. Marie's Story
    The film is unable to specify narrative urgency beyond a broad sense of "based on a true story" pathos that's by turns hollowly uplifting and tragic.
  9. Reality
    Quentin Dupieux has a talent for rendering otherworldly concepts banal in a manner that reflects the stymied desires of his characters.
  10. Iris
    Albert Maysles's portrait of Iris Apfel gradually emerges with cathartic clarity without compromising her inherent mystery.
  11. Gerontophilia
    It chooses the delicateness of a fable instead of the narrative recklessness we've come to expect from Bruce La Bruce.
  12. Far from the Madding Crowd
    The lack of real analysis or consideration leaves this perilously close to a Goldilocks-style depiction of privileged female indecision.
  13. Days of Grace
    Eventually, the film's impressive array of formal pyrotechnics overwhelms its morals.
  14. Cas & Dylan
    The film simply mucks up its earnest take on the buddy movie with undercooked characters and on-the-nose writing.
  15. Far From Men
    The film often suggests a less defiant cover of The Defiant Ones, yet it's a must-see for Viggo Mortensen's characteristically wonderful performance.
  16. Adult Beginners
    Given its played-out subject matter and hoary coming-to-terms narrative arc, one's ability to enjoy the film hangs on a tolerance for the ever-popular on-screen man-child.
  17. Heaven Knows What
    If nothing else, Heaven Knows What is one of the most harrowing cinematic depictions of drug addiction in recent memory, reliant less on formal gimmickry than on close observation of behavior.
  18. Blackbird
    The film is, like its main character, too naïve to understand or, at least, to deploy the reparative powers of camp.
  19. The Age of Adaline
    Less a sincerely kooky elegy to lost time than a slightly off-kilter acting out of familiar rom-com bona fides about commitment-phobes missing out on life.
  20. The Water Diviner
    In straining for the profound, the film ultimately loses its way in a veritable no-man's land of ill-conceived stylistic choices and narrative switchbacks.
  21. The Great Museum
    The ghostliness of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna derives from an identity crisis, where digitization threatens to eradicate the gallery space.
  22. The Forger
    A sluggish, obvious fusion of a disease-of-the-week tearjerker with a comedic family crime romp that abounds in stiflingly over-emphasized Boston-crime-movie details.
  23. Misery Loves Comedy
    Commingling industry shoptalk with introspective insights and wrangling testimonials, the film casts an incredibly wide net, but doesn't reveal much of anything.
  24. Little Boy
    It conveys life experience to such a sentimentalized degree that the world comes to resemble only the sham of a Norman Rockwell painting.
  25. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    Director Brett Morgen distinguishes the biographical documentary by viewing himself as more of a curator than a film director.
  26. Child 44
    The film is at once devoted to corroborating and casting an exaggerated light on Soviet paranoia and the state's rhetoric of unmasking its enemies.
  27. True Story
    If the film's copycat visual artistry illuminates nothing, at least its script is sincerely devoted to probing Finkel and Longo's odd partnership.
  28. Félix And Meira
    Maxime Giroux's sharp filmmaking instincts aren't always supported by similarly acute dramatic instincts.
  29. The Road Within
    The film's tired sentimentality aside, its general lack of empathy is most damning.
  30. Monkey Kingdom
    The cumulative effect is cheerily life-affirming, a bracing infusion of macaque-style joie de vivre.
  31. The Dead Lands
    A phony collection of storytelling clichés held under the banner of archetype and lent a modicum of weight by the splendor of the landscape.
  32. Tangerines
    For all of the potential, historically specific revelations regarding nation and religion, Tangerines elects to become bathetic hokum.
  33. Closer to the Moon
    Writer-director Nae Caranfil oddly forgoes the abundant elegiac aspects of his film's factual material for a tone approaching the ebullient.
  34. Beyond the Reach
    If all a movie needed was a boy with abs and a gun (or slingshot), then Beyond the Reach would be a masterpiece.
  35. Antarctic Edge: 70° South
    It appears afraid of alienating viewers by overloading on scientific jargon, and in the process becomes too attracted to ultimately superfluous anecdotes from her subjects.
  36. Alex of Venice
    Chris Messina is eventually a little too indifferent to the machinations of the plot, but the film, however inescapably sentimental, is a romantic daydream that casts a lovely spell.
  37. The Longest Ride
    There's little doubt where Cormac McCarthy-bashing Sparks's allegiances lie. The Longest Ride is truly no country for old ambiguity.
  38. Lost River
    The story, more a tangle of violent, symbolic gestures, regards economic exploitation with fetishistic, impossibly overdetermined abandon.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Unfriended
    When the genre-film spectacle arrives, it's in full force, and the strictures of the framing device manage to amplify, rather than suppress, the impact of the shocks and scares.
  40. Kill Me Three Times
    The affectionate humanism that typically laces Simon Pegg's postmodern self-awareness is missing from Kriv Stenders's film.
  41. The Harvest
    Director John McNaughton, once an agile orchestrator of seemingly incompatible tones, has retained his talent for teasing insinuation.
  42. The Sisterhood of Night
    The film is so unusually moving and penetrating because it refuses to cloud its emotions in distancing irony, anger, or nihilism.
  43. About Elly (2009)
    Asghar Farhadi's sensibility embodies a combination of empathy and paranoia that's striking considering that the latter is normally driven by self-absorption.
  44. Rebels of the Neon God
    Tsai Ming-liang's debut makes one yearn for an alternative reality where it, not Pulp Fiction, became the beacon of '90s independent filmmaking.
  45. Desert Dancer
    The film's relentless turning of its characters' experience into platitudes and homilies is served for our too-easy consumption.
  46. Woman in Gold
    The film evades all but the most careful commonplaces about the relationship between the viewer and the work of art at its center.
  47. Cheatin'
    The plot is pure pulp, inspired in equal parts by the tropes and imagery of film noir, grand opera, and silent melodrama.
  48. Furious 7
    The film lays bare that the franchise's most radical asset is also its most conservative: an overriding emphasis on, above all else, the on-screen family.
  49. Electric Slide
    Like the characters, the film's exterior flash can't conceal a glaring emptiness.
  50. Dior and I
    Bolstered by deft editing that keeps the proceedings moving at a light, graceful clip, this behind-the-runway look at one of fashion's legendary brands has a sleek, efficient stylishness in keeping with its subject.
  51. Cut Bank
    If the film is meant only as a pulpy genre exercise, Matt Shakman's competence in various modes actually works to strip it of any sense of coherent vision.
  52. Manos Sucias
    Josef Kubota Wladyka is ultimately unable to reconcile complex dynamics any further than with a glimpse toward their fundamentally destructive effects.
  53. 5 to 7
    Ironically, the Victor Levin film's mildness turns out to be its most engaging quality.
  54. Last Knights
    Another macho celebration of fighting for "freedom" because someone else told you to, devoid of any acknowledgement of the inherent irony of that ideology.
  55. Effie Gray
    It spins the narrative of one of the Victorian art world's most mysterious marriages into a study of life lived and life merely examined, a fecund fairy tale in reverse.
  56. That Guy Dick Miller
    A fawning tribute to the cult legend, enriched by a subtle current of sadness that prevents the documentary from turning into a glorified DVD supplement.
  57. Get Hard
    The filmmakers largely stand out of Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart's way, but they also refuse to modulate the story's racial humor with any sense of subversion.
  58. The Salt of the Earth
    It evolves into an intimate reverie on family and aesthetics, while remaining sporadically attuned to the reflexive and ethical dimensions of ethnographic discovery.
  59. 52 Tuesdays
    Sophie Hyde barely elaborates on the toll James's transition takes on him and only superficially as it affects Billie's psyche.
  60. Home
    Home's exposition is a mess of forced zaniness, which leaves the rest of the film with a Swiss-cheese foundation.
  61. While We're Young
    Noah Baumbach lobs jokes with hectic editing and a Sturgesian velocity, but much of this cross-generational comedy is frantic and wearisomely superficial.
  62. Marfa Girl
    The film finds the actors' performance deficiencies functioning less as signs of authentic teenage behavior than as an incompetent carrier of plot.
  63. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
    Even though the film takes on a more overtly fictive aesthetic after he's kidnapped, Michel Houellebecq's understated presence lends the proceedings a factual quality throughout.
  64. A Wolf at the Door
    It finds its strength in painting a portrait of Brazilian heterosexual gender relations as an always-volatile symbiosis between feminine hysteria and ruthless machismo.
  65. Welcome to New York
    The film's peculiarly exhilarating effect can be attributed to a sense of social outrage that's transcended for the sake of metaphoric social clarity.
  66. The Riot Club
    The thinly sketched characters of the film are numerous and inconsequential, with director Lone Scherfig giving sparse attention to humanizing or deepening them.
  67. Serena
    The film can't reconcile Ron Rash's apocalyptic tenderness with its own eagerness to revel in romantic star allure.
  68. Ex Machina
    In the end, more than just the machine remains an enigma.
  69. Goodnight Mommy
    In the third act, the film devolves into an extremely unsettling series of sadistic tortures, the kind of stuff that would appeal largely to fans of Funny Games.
  70. The Tribe
    The film is more interested in performance and symbolism than in the meaning of its characters' words or their substitutive gestures.
  71. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    A Little Golden Book version of drastically simplified socialism accompanied with a healthy dose of warmongering bravado.
  72. Lily & Kat
    It passive-aggressively seems to suggest that anyone who isn't exactly interested in monogamy may be some kind of selfish, intolerable sociopath.
  73. Backcountry
    After a surprising development, the film grows slack and sentimental, reverting to the survival-movie platitude about hardship making you a better human.
  74. Cupcakes
    Eytan Fox opts for a thoroughly hollow rumination on pop-culture mechanics as they pertain to young, aspiring professionals.
  75. Entertainment
    It conjures a menacing perspective on how the titular occupation hulls out empathy and cultivates a particularly unsettling strain of cynicism.
  76. The Gunman
    The lack of any visual ingenuity, reflexivity, or awareness of genre tropes diminishes the intermittent pleasures of the action's slightly involving kineticism.
  77. Danny Collins
    The chemistry between Pacino and his cast mates gives this lightly amusing contrivance surprising emotional resonance.
  78. Amour Fou
    Jessica Hausner is less interested in historical revisionism than mining this real-life tragedy for its existential thrust.
  79. Court
    Chaitanya Tamhane's grand canvas is Indian society as represented by its legal system, and what it reveals is none too flattering.
  80. The Diary of a Teenage Girl
    True to its title, Marielle Heller's adaptation of Phoebe Gloeckner's semi-autobiographical novel has the loosely structured, unfiltered feel of a young person's diary.
  81. White God
    It affects a general air of artistically inclined realism, but it's mostly concerned with building tension via a steady accumulation of flatly conceived misery.
  82. Christmas, Again
    Charles Poekel displays an assured directorial hand and maintains a modest, appealing, even droll sensibility throughout.
  83. The Walking Deceased
    This juvenile horror-comedy spoof is primarily, if unintentionally, a cautionary tale about the perils of allowing brahs to make movies.
  84. Spring
    It bridges the cautionary elements of a horror film with the wish-fulfilling platitudes of a touristy romance.
  85. She's Lost Control
    Anja Marquardt feels the need to puff up her film with relatively artificial conflict that generally comes off as sops to screenwriting conventions.
  86. La Sapienza
    The mannered direction is at its most effective when it inspires an enhanced sensitivity to the import of every gesture, visual or verbal.
  87. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    It settles firmly into the perspective of a lost soul who finds solace in the swaddling security of fantasy.
  88. 3 Hearts
    Throughout, Benoît Jacquot never loses sight of the primordial compulsions that drive feelings and expressions of great love and beauty.
  89. Run All Night
    This time around, in spotlighting Liam Neeson's fatigued charisma, Jaume Collet-Serra's formidable filmmaking chops have plateaued.
  90. Cinderella
    The filmmakers cut the film to emphasize the story's familiar plot points, rather than highlight any instances of personal visual artistry.
  91. The Wrecking Crew
    Overall, the documentary comes off as a solipsistic, uncritical look at an incredible moment in the history of American music.
  92. Like Sunday, Like Rain
    Frank Whaley never gives these characters a humanizing moment outside of their default personalities, which turns them into cartoon impressions of the worst of each class.
  93. Seymour: An Introduction
    Ethan Hawke's concentration on Seymour Bernstein isn't a betrayal of his own ego massaging, but rather an attempt to have a genuine soul-bearing conversation.
  94. It Follows
    Though visionary, David Robert Mitchell's film abounds in undigested ideas and dubious sexual politics.
  95. Of Horses and Men
    On one hand, the film is surely a celebration of a land's distinct creatures and the people who live among them, but on the other, it's a culture's biting auto-critique.
  96. The Lovers
    A shamelessly derivative and preposterous would-be blockbuster that goofily fashions itself as a sweeping romance, time-travel sci-fi tale, and gallant period piece all at once.
  97. The Cobbler
    Thomas McCarthy evinces no interest in the people who come into Max's store and wind up as fodder for his increasingly violent and self-absorbed escapades. Not a shred.
  98. Cymbeline
    The source material, which is convoluted even by Shakespeare's narratively dexterous standards, is admittedly a tough nut for a filmmaker to crack.
  99. Unfinished Business
    The whole point of Vince Vaughn's cinematic existence is that he's a paragon for reformed chauvinism. He's an irrepressible but highly tamable id. Not so here.
  100. The Mafia Only Kills in Summer
    Individual politicians, detectives, and mafiosi come and go so quickly that the audience doesn't have enough time to become emotionally invested in their lives and deaths.
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