Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Aniara
    The filmmakers are interested in world building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui.
  2. He Named Me Malala
    The effect of the film's animated sequences is to distance the viewer from real-life horrors--another misguided attempt at turning recent history into instant myth.
  3. Land
    The film’s overtly non-specific title is surely meant to suggest some kind of pared-down elementality, but, in the end, it mostly just reflects the story’s lack of definable character.
  4. La Cage aux Folles
    Though its politics are still quite progressive, La Cage aux Folles is ultimately a work of classicism, crafted with precision and efficiently paced.
  5. The Kentucky Fried Movie
    Uneven and amateurish, with a sense of vulgarity that’s now dated enough to seem downright Victorian, The Kentucky Fried Movie proves the maxim, “comedy is in the eye of the beholder.”
  6. The People vs. Fritz Bauer
    Lars Kraume's tinkering with the historical record would be more welcome were he also shifting away from the standard biopic template.
  7. Enemy
    Jake Gyllenhaal embodies the two roles with real presence, establishing Adam's sniveling wimp and Anthony's striding jerk as two believably discrete sides of the same coin.
  8. The Hero
    Sam Elliott’s calmly affecting performance is overwhelmed by a doggedly conventional screenplay that often plays like end-of-life wish-fulfillment fantasy.
  9. Sólo con tu pareja
    This sexy, often funny comedy about AIDS is missing one important thing: a crucial sense of danger.
  10. Funny Face
    Tim Sutton is a deft cartographer of how environments can shape its inhabitants.
  11. Unpregnant
    Its few nutty ideas demonstrate how little distance Unpregnant manages to put between itself and a standard high-school comedy.
  12. This One's for the Ladies
    There’s a surprising sense of communal exchange between the male strippers and their fans in Gene Graham’s documentary.
  13. Song Sung Blue
    Song Sung Blue is content to pendulum-swing from triumph to tragedy and back again with all the self-control of a drunk driver.
  14. Dreams
    The film exposes the incontestable American art of getting more with blunt obviousness.
  15. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    Robertson’s sense of having witnessed friends and collaborators get washed away by bitterness and addiction was more fulsomely evoked by The Last Waltz.
  16. PVT Chat
    Ben Hozie’s wry, observational film positions a young man’s repressed sexual paranoia as a reflection of a more general social malaise.
  17. 10 Years
    If nothing else, 10 Years is hip to the fleeting, fundamental joys of revisiting one's youth.
  18. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    The crystal clarity of Russell Carpenter’s cinematography is often unnerving, as is the uncanny nature of Pandora’s computer-generated flora and fauna, which never truly seem alive and vital.
  19. At War
    It’s always clear who’s right and who’s wrong, which material interests each is representing, and who’s lying and who’s telling the truth.
  20. The Informer
    Outside of the Easy Money series, Kinnaman has rarely been allowed to utilize his tightly wound intensity this explicitly.
  21. Triple Frontier
    J.C. Chandor turns an intensely physical narrative into another of his inadvertently generic studies of procedure.
  22. Somewhere in Queens
    Many of the character actors occasionally elevate the film above some of the more clichéd family humor.
  23. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
    Teasing out a subversive portrait of a complex and rather subdued monster, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files unfolds with the same meticulousness exemplified by the eponymous serial killer.
  24. The Big Country
    Although The Best Years of Our Lives remains Wyler’s most essential assessment of the American psyche, The Big Country is stunning for how it meshes the intimate strife of a particularly white American stripe of self-resentment with the epic vista of Technirama Technicolor.
  25. The Secret Life of Pets
    The film's messy pile-up of comic diversions can be exhilarating in the moment—the chaos of an id given free rein.
  26. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    The film's half-hearted plea for responsibility and ethics in the news, after joyfully rolling around in its corruption for the majority of its runtime, smacks of plain pandering.
  27. Heart Eyes
    Heart Eyes is a slasher movie first, and a gnarly one at that, with some imaginative, seat-shiftingly gruesome kills, and some particularly ominous set pieces.
  28. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    A unique restaurant like El Bulli probably deserves a more creative documentary than El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a static portrait that comes off as less than inspired by its unusual subject.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Bidder 70
    Without being didactic, the documentary demonstrates how an ordinary concerned citizen can take a stand when politicians neglect to make decisions for the good of the people and instead serve the interests of big business.
  30. 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.
  31. Sputnik
    Sputnik’s third act is a rush of formulaic action meant, perhaps, to compensate for the interminably repetitive and impersonal second act, which is mostly concerned with reinforcing a set of foregone conclusions.
  32. Babylon
    [Chazelle’s] torturously glib cynicism is quite the attitude around which to build an epic boondoggle of this sort. Equally as heinous is the 11th-hour optimism that he then attempts to tack onto Babylon via a jaw-droppingly wrongheaded climactic montage.
  33. Daniel Isn't Real
    Its performatively extreme imagery thinly masks a rather banal view of male subjectivity and inner conflict.
  34. Suncoast
    Suncoast spends much of its runtime trafficking in tiresome coming-of-age tropes, until the resulting crowd-pleaser has snuffed out much of what’s so singular about its central story.
  35. Oculus
    Through a mini-triumph of montage, what begins as run-of-the-mill backstory vomit is thrillingly repackaged as an almost-Lynchian duet between warring states of consciousness.
  36. The Kings of Summer
    The film's aesthetic is marked by off-tempo editing and a tone that vacillates between grim and coy, and though it's occasionally visually evocative, it's also unmistakably over-calculated.
  37. Barrymore
    Director Erik Canuel fails to deliver us from the inevitable hermeticism of the material.
  38. 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.
  39. The To Do List
    Essentially the film aims to trade in the awkwardness of teen sexuality, but too often settles for the gross-out gag instead.
  40. Candyman
    Rose’s dizzy, Jungle Fever-ish romanticism is juxtaposed against his cold, Cronenbergian dystopia to create Candyman‘s uniquely baroque use of modern urban blight, subtle political undercurrents, and hints of fallen woman melodrama. It creates a startlingly effective shocker that gains power upon further, sleepless-night reflection.
  41. The Sense of an Ending
    Ritesh Batra's film is a tale of white nostalgia that should have found its footing on dramatic grounds.
  42. Cat People
    Unjustifiably compared to the original film upon its release, Schrader’s Cat People is more of an erotic reinvention of the Bodeen story. Though Schrader keeps the Fangoria crowd at bay with a series of grisly tableaus, he remains less concerned with the body-horrific than he does with the rituals of sex—mandatory and otherwise.
  43. Bicycling With Molière
    Even though the subtext about the past and modernity constantly being at odds throughout the setting's changing times is intriguing, the director presents this in a clunky, almost didactic fashion.
  44. The Karate Kid
    The Karate Kid might have been more endurable, maybe even endearing, if its runtime had been trimmed of a solid 30 minutes.
  45. Dog
    Dog cannily smuggles a nuanced inquiry of a social issue under the guise of popular entertainment.
  46. Country Gold
    For all its formal playfulness, the film never loses its grip on the interior lives to its characters.
  47. Magic Mike XXL
    Magic Mike XXL isn't so much a lesser movie than Magic Mike as it is a looser one.
  48. Disappearance at Clifton Hill
    What distinguishes the film from much of its ilk is Albert Shin’s ongoing taste for peculiar and unsettling details.
  49. Black Phone 2
    Throughout, Scott Derrickson collapses dreams, reality, past, and present sidelong into a singular cinematic haunted space.
  50. The Observers
    Goss's film carries its unique forms of narrative suspense, but her 16mm images imbue both the forbidding landscape and her characters' scientific aerie, though the observatory only dates from 1932, with a poetry of the seemingly eternal.
  51. The Hornet's Nest
    It becomes clear pretty quickly that Mike and Carlos Boettcher's insider perspective allows for close to no context beyond what their cameras directly capture.
  52. The Wretched
    The filmmakers don’t examine the psychological terror, the bitterness, and lust that gave rise to many of the works they cherish.
  53. The White Crow
    Ralph Fiennes’s film too conspicuously avoids an overt political perspective.
  54. Vice
    Vice is as noisy as the media landscape that writer-director Adam McKay holds in contempt.
  55. Paradise: Faith
    A shallow film that leaves us knowing exactly what we're seeing, and able to predict what the characters will say to each other in the mostly uninspired and overtly familiar dialogue.
  56. Last Hijack
    It intriguingly invites us to think about the mundane forces that can drive a seemingly ordinary guy like Mohamed to do something so desperate and cruel as piracy.
  57. Ocean's 8
    With Ocean's 8, Gary Ross serves up a mildly engaging riff on the heist film, but he rarely strays from the established formula of Steven Soderbergh's original Ocean's trilogy.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sleeping Beauty
    Julia Leigh's take on the fairy tale is a study in detachment and unspoken dissatisfaction, traits that imbue the proceedings with a barely-contained sexual energy lurking beneath a thin veneer of calm.
  59. Respect
    When Jennifer Hudson is singing her heart out, not so much approximating Aretha’s voice as channeling her soul, the effect is transportive.
  60. Blackthorn
    Blackthorn's last-man-standing circumstances, far from a cautionary tale about the cost of the gunslinger life, are glorified as the height of macho nobility.
  61. A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    Overflows with inspired craziness, doling out an all-night odyssey of sex-centric crises, death-defying conflicts, and Neal Patrick Harris-centered insanity with snowballing momentum, as bits pile on top of bits with intoxicating verve.
  62. Sunlight Jr.
    An admirable refusal to adhere to any overexposed poverty-porn templates, however, is taken a little too far in the opposite direction, to the point that the film feels self-consciously shapeless.
  63. Angel Heart
    It would all be laughable if the evil deeds and premature deaths and withered witch doctor hands led us to more than the protagonist’s unnecessarily messy self-discovery. As it is, it’s mostly just gratingly pointless.
  64. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    The sex in Nymphomaniac is inhuman, mechanical, boring, and predictably viewed through the (male) scrim of someone who characterizes women solely as withholders.
  65. El Angel
    El Angel‘s greatest accomplishment is in the way it charges the relationships between characters with so much eroticism but never grants us the right to watch desire — other than desire for violence — actually unfold.
  66. Fast & Furious 6
    Justin Lin strives to approximate something like Ocean's Eleven for petrosexuals, but testosterone outweighs wit and cleverness at every turn in Chris Morgan's starched script.
  67. Lilting
    Lilting doesn't have any momentum or any sense of ambiguity, once the setup has been established.
  68. This Must Be the Place
    The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.
  69. Muppets Most Wanted
    Freed from the burden of starting anew, the film restores the Muppets' rightful place as stars of their own show.
  70. Exposed
    Beyond the forthright identity politics and titillating theatrical misdemeanors, one still comes away wondering about the things that remain concealed.
  71. Onward
    While Onward begins as a story of bereavement, it soon turns to celebrating the payoffs of positive thinking.
  72. Under Capricorn
    Though Under Capricorn’s dark and twisty narrative eventually unearths everyone’s secrets, it’s the swooning camera that most fully taps into the class and sexual tensions that consume the characters.
  73. Abominable
    The second half’s series of hollow visual spectacles foreground the film as a corporate product.
  74. 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.
  75. Hunter Hunter
    Writer-director Shawn Linden skillfully draws us into the narrative before springing a series of startling traps—of both the narrative and literal variety.
  76. Haute Cuisine
    Offers all the ingredients for a great feast of enticing visions and thematic concerns, only to have them be prepared, plated, and served with the grace of Elmer Fudd.
  77. Buffaloed
    The filmmakers allow their characters to learn the usual humanist lessons, in the process eliding the ramifications of their scenario.
  78. 17 Girls
    At which point does a superficially "nonjudgmental" approach simply seem coy rather than sincerely evenhanded?
  79. Caniba
    Throughout Caniba, there’s a singularly disquieting relationship between the filmmakers’ formal experimentation and their subject.
  80. The Front Runner
    The film quickly reveals that the only angle it’s interested in is the one that most sympathizes with Gary Hart.
  81. For Ellen
    So Yong Kim's direction remains ruminative, even poetic, in its pacing, its sense of place, and its approach to intimacy, but this is her most unsuitable script.
  82. 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.
  83. Sea Fog
    The film fails to lift off from this sturdy aesthetic launching pad; it never allows the characters, however stock, to evolve in their respective dealings with one another, which is the primary source of tension and escalation for a thriller set in a confined place.
  84. Adult World
    The title of Scott Coffey's new film is a pretty obvious double entendre, but it does efficiently convey the good intentions behind this scattershot production.
  85. Stargirl
    It comes across like yet another casualty in the long line of stories about men having their eyes opened by their angelic girlfriends.
  86. Blue Beetle
    Blue Beetle plays out with all the revelry of a contractual obligation, hitting every note of the hero’s journey with no variation, murky action sequences, and little in the way of imagination, despite the titular object itself granting Jaime the ability to manifest anything that he imagines.
  87. The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    The documentary provides little sense of intimacy with its subject, but it gives an in-depth look at the master chef's uniquely obsessive work habits.
  88. Bells Are Ringing
    It has the unfortunate effect of being a movie that seems stuck on a Broadway stage.
  89. Metallica: Through the Never
    The songs still sound great here, but the instruments aren't amplified nearly as much as the nostalgia and vanity of the men who wield them.
  90. Carnage
    One doesn't have to look too closely at Carnage's final shot to marvel at the way Polanski refuses to haughtily indict his audience in the pettiness of his characters' behavior.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Trance
    The film draws out Danny Boyle's less dazzling commercial side, not to mention his penchant for whirling excess.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Oka!
    As a film stupefied by its exotic setting, Oka! almost drops its walking stick of a plot as it wanders through the Central African Republic's jungle, getting blissed out on the sensuous delights of the surrounding wildlife and local Bayaka music.
  93. Tricked: The Documentary
    For all the heartbreaking depth with which the filmmakers explore the horrors of human trafficking, the film still leaves one with a sense of a larger story just beyond their grasp.
  94. Zeros and Ones
    Zeros and Ones is the unwelcome spectacle of a bad boy attempting to apologize for his badness.
  95. Coup!
    The film has little to add on the subject of the interplay of politics and infectious disease, then or now.
  96. Tetris
    There’s a riveting story somewhere here about the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the stranglehold of capitalism on ’80s culture, but Tetris never quite locates it.
  97. All I Can Say
    The film refuses to shy away from the unvarnished honesty of Blind Melon frontman Shannon Hoon during his brief moment of fame.
  98. Rob Peace
    The things that elevate Chiwetel Ejiofor’s film are those that elevated Rob Peace’s life overall.
  99. Velvet Buzzsaw
    With its silvery sheen and sexy lure of celebrity actors being naughty, the film recalls the decadent, self-consciously chic art it parodies.
  100. Antarctica: Ice and Sky
    The documentary advances its cause through an intimately diaristic depiction of hard work done well.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »