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. Mr. Nice
    Writer-director Bernard Rose effectively conjoures an atompshere of poetic stoned-1960s British rebellion, a feeling of woozy, intoxicating possibility that will not-so-eventually be squashed.
  2. Rejoice and Shout
    One is left wondering what exactly the now moldy "anything is possible" sentiments of our 44th president have to do with a music whose history and cultural meaning we've just spent the last two hours not learning nearly enough about.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Woman in Black
    In the end, The Woman in Black displays a higher regard for the material makeup of gruesome-looking Victorian dolls than it does for the psychological turmoil of its characters, making one wish that some of the money it budgeted for cranes and fog machines had been offered to a script doctor.
  4. Amityville: The Awakening
    Franck Khalfoun's Amityville: The Awakening is an elegant entry in a lame series of horror films.
  5. The Guilt Trip
    Mothers and sons deserve an amiable comedy they can share, but this one proves to be faulty long before the requisite freeway breakdown.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    Instead of long takes, which are lovingly utilized in Step Up 3D, Jon M. Chu opts for increasing volatility in the editing room.
  7. Hello Lonesome
    Hello Lonesome isn't really that much of a movie, but it has something that a number of more polished pictures in the same vein don't: human decency. Sadly, that's noteworthy.
  8. Hotel Transylvania
    Yet another instance of a decent, potentially thorny premise bogged down in a mess of treacly sentiment and tedious moralizing.
  9. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    The film is content as it is to run clever one-liners and 19th-century pop-cultural references into the same comedic whirlpool.
  10. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    A once-precious franchise's weakest installment, which forgets these adventures' magic was never conjured by bells and whistles.
  11. Love Crime
    The film is less corporate parable than intricately crafted revenge drama whose intensively detailed plotting can't hide the fact that the whole thing seems like a lot of work for a glaringly modest payoff.
  12. Reversion
    While Reversion sets up a complex communication platform for a universe being slowly ripped apart, it doesn't know how to relate this idea in human terms.
  13. Battle for Brooklyn
    Battle for Brooklyn brings up larger quandaries about urban development which it doesn't begin to address.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Simply put, the documentary is full of cool talking heads pontificating rather than taking physical action.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bully
    Leaves us moved by poignant scenes of victims' shattered lives, but, for reasons unclear, keeps the bullies themselves largely out of our reach.
  16. Delhi Belly
    In spite of its conspicuously crude sense of humor, Delhi Belly is much more family-minded and innocent than it would like its young target audience to believe.
  17. Septien
    Like many films early in a director's career, it plays more as a sketchbook of intended future endeavors than as a cohesive and fully realized vision in its own right.
  18. The Chameleon
    If Barkin and Grondin create a swamp's worth of deceptive intricacies in their moments together, the rest of the cast is regulated to expository mop-up duty.
  19. Daylight
    Daylight reaches an apex of terror that it never quite tops.
  20. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    What's most disappointing about Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish is how it fails to deliver on the hybridizing NYC gimmickry of its title.
  21. The Tree
    This is one film that's overly reliant on a dubious central symbol, schematically employed.
  22. Machine Gun Preacher
    Marc Forster regards the real-life Childers's evolution from heroin-addicted, wife-beating (implied), gun-toting oblivion to born-again do-gooderism with motorized aloofness.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Where Soldiers Come From
    A four-year study of an Afghan war-bound group of friends (the mother of Cole, the goofy joker of the group, compares the boys to the characters in The Deer Hunter), Courtney's documentary is equal parts heartfelt and public-television predictable.
  24. Point Blank
    Fred Cavayé shoots his action with both vigorous propulsion and visual lucidity. Unfortunately, however, his story's revelations, all of which are related to a recent corporate bigwig's assassination, arrive at least two-to-three scenes after they've already become obvious.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Harvest/La Cosecha
    The Harvest/La Cosecha is another entry in the fast-growing agri-doc genre that seeks to upend naïve ideas of where your food comes from.
  26. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    It has the core of a genuine crowd-pleaser, but unfortunately something bigger and more all-consuming keeps getting into its head.
  27. Autoerotic
    Autoerotic's take on the me-me-me generation's inability for actual contact seems appropriate, but it lacks the nuance that makes "Denise Calls Up" so delicious to watch.
  28. House of Boys
    Call me crazy-stupid, but locker-room anal sex aside, didn't Christina Aguilera just enact this scenario last fall in "Burlesque"?
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Khodorkovsky
    The director glosses over rather than digs deep into such interesting aspects as the varied opinions of the men under Khodorkovsky who've had to flee the country because of him.
  30. Gun Hill Road
    Of the film's three principals, it's only teenage Michael--more than ably embodied by screen newcomer Harmony Santana--that writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green seems to have much of a feel for.
  31. Protektor
    Engendering an experience both visually slick and narratively sprawling, the apropos-of-nothing professionalism of Protektor often feels more like branding than filmmaking.
  32. Red Tails
    Where Spielberg has made WWII a venue for his sanctimonious side, a platform to convince viewers that war is indeed hell, Lucas is still in a state of pre-adolescent fascination with the conflict.
  33. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    The narrative doesn't want for ambition, but Marc Webb proves unwilling, or incapable, of making this unwieldy story feel like anything but a deluge of backstory.
  34. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    The extreme largesse of Anselm Kiefer's project, his radical certainties and devotion, all call for a more intrusive probing.
  35. Bad Posture
    Once it gets its nominal plot and character development out of the way, Bad Posture turns out to be pleasantly surprising.
  36. Toast
    Joan aside, the film goes down easy enough.
  37. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    A half-hearted morality tale about taking responsibility for your actions as a sign of impending maturity.
  38. Puncture
    Puncture's story only moves forward thanks to Evans's charm. But a good lead performance can't single-handedly save thin material.
  39. Trishna
    Class privilege and sexual politics are inextricably linked in Trishna, Michael Winterbottom's blunt, self-consciously brutal, and rather loose updating of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles."
  40. Tales from the Golden Age
    The first four of the film's 1980s-set episodes are shorter in length and more anecdotal in nature than the last two and deal primarily with the pageantry and inflexible customs behind the regime with a perspective at once amused and bemused.
  41. Little Girl (La Pivellina)
    The film lacks the immediacy of the Dardenne brothers' pictures, the electrifying sense that anything might happen, while also avoiding their penchant for redemptive resolutions.
  42. Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    The testimony we hear from suspects' neighbors and similarly curious media underlings feels muted, like a halfhearted repetition.
  43. That Girl in Yellow Boots
    The figure of the poor white girl whose sex work is justified by a really noble cause, set of circumstances or sheer charisma, is, of course, not a new cinematic premise.
  44. The Lucky One
    At this point, Sparksian romances unfold via their own preordained formula, and measures of their merits largely hinge on how well each can bend the cookie-cutter.
  45. Shaolin
    Only Jackie Chan, in a comedic supporting role as a Zen-trained cook who applies his culinary techniques on the battlefield (he "stir-fries" one enemy in a giant pot and "kneads" another like dough), provides any measure of relief.
  46. Jane's Journey
    Despite the fact that Goodall narrates the bulk of the material, there are scant details about her concrete contributions to animal and life science save for her observing of chimp-made tools.
  47. Limelight
    Limelight focuses far too much on the club's downfall and not nearly enough on what attracted its denizens there in the first place, managing only to preach to the choir, forgetting to also take it to church.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Woman on the 6th Floor
    It plays everything safe, keeping all its edges rounded and its lips sealed in territory ripe for sociopolitical commentary, making even The Help's glib depiction of African American servitude seem nearly honest.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bobby Fischer Against the World
    Note the noticeable uptick in the cleverness of the on-screen graphics or fitfully remember the movie poster's tagline, "His Greatest Match Was in His Mind," and you'll belatedly come around to the jarring downshift into Fischer's latter-day paranoia and anti-Semitism.
  50. Echotone
    Director Nathan Christ dithers between fashioning the film as a glossing study of metropolitan personality and a virtual advertisement for the groups included.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beware the Gonzo
    As Beware the Gonzo happily dreams up its nerdy hero's victories over bullies, school censorship, and feeling like a nobody, it seems to do so from another time.
  52. Happy, Happy
    The filmmaker looks to American modes of visual and aural expression to give Happy, Happy its soul, but all her fetish accomplishes is depersonalizing her story, making a sitcom of her character's lives.
  53. The Catechism Cataclysm
    The film is an 80-minute shaggy-dog story about the seductive power of storytelling and the weird places it can transport us; too bad writer- director Todd Rohal doesn't take us any place worth going.
  54. Sidewalls
    Animation, motion graphics, and slow motion all pop up at some point, further splintering Sidewalls into a pandering pastiche of better films.
  55. American Teacher
    The movie is a curious blend of teacher-appreciation mandate and recruitment video, though it's not always clear at whom the narration's gravely spoken factoids are directed.
  56. Surrogate Valentine
    The relationship between the two leads neither deteriorates nor seriously improves and last-minute romantic developments don't so much as give shape to the narrative as play as perfunctory gestures of closure.
  57. Argo
    Undeniably rousing, but deeply irresponsible, Argo fans the flames surrounding historical events likely to still remain raw in the memory of many viewers.
  58. Elevate
    Long on hopefulness but short on sobering realities, Elevate proves a compelling if superficial look at the arduous path traveled by Senegalese teens hoping to make it to America for a higher education and an NBA career.
  59. The Dead
    The Dead ultimately doesn't have much of a pulse, as it fails to transcend the banality of its inevitable theme.
    • 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.
  61. Boy
    Less concerned with rendering the specifics of its setting (a small Maori town on the New Zealand coast) than in calling on bouts of whimsy and superficial cultural signifiers to approximate the headspace of its central characters.
  62. 12 Years a Slave
    Steve McQueen's film practically treats Solomon Norhtup as passive observer to a litany of horrors that exist primarily for our own education.
  63. Pina
    Go after Pina and you're going to have to go through a mob of modern-dance zealots first.
  64. Cargo
    Cargo can feel like a "film about human trafficking" from beginning to end.
  65. Now You See Me
    There's nothing behind all this sturm und drang but a lineup of insubstantial ciphers, all false fronts and empty words in a pretend world not quite conducive to emotional investment.
  66. Broken City
    Allen Hughes may suggest an air of pretty menace, but he does little to make the sequence work as a legible genre scene.
  67. The Greening of Whitney Brown
    The first strike against the movie is that the awkward and diminutive Sammi Hanratty is never even slightly convincing as an enviable teenage diva, and surely not as the most popular girl in school.
  68. God's Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz
    If the film were in fact a pastry, it might look like the first effort of a blind baker, wildly uneven and inconsistent in ingredient distribution.
  69. Eames: The Architect & The Painter
    Structurally lopsided, the narrative jumps directly into the success of their first molded-plywood chair, and meanders from there into the numerous short films the Eames Studio made for government agencies and IT companies.
  70. Knuckle
    A documentary of bareknuckle fights among feuding Irish Traveller clans can't give the participants' self-perpetuating, dead-end rivalry the scope of tragedy.
  71. The Forgiveness of Blood
    The film wisely avoids giving its material a large-scale epic quality it can't sustain, but it also results in a project that lacks the complexity to register as more than a handsome little sketch.
  72. The Greater Good
    The intersection between drug-company profiteering and lobbying, and governmental and private-sector desires to protect people from deadly diseases, is navigated too cursorily by the documentary.
  73. Romantics Anonymous
    A typically anodyne rom-com given a certain poignant piquancy by the paralyzing shyness of its romantic leads.
  74. Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
    Part of the issue here may be the nature of the talking heads themselves, most of whom are culled from Trungpa's inner circle and lack the objectivity needed to properly judge his philosophy or make it accessible.
  75. The First Rasta
    While The First Rasta never goes beyond the surfaces of conventional documentary making of the most average kind, its reticence becomes whimsical every time the elderly interviewees break into song soon after reminiscing.
  76. Footnote
    Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a sour, rather unpleasant affair that hinges on acts of Jews behaving badly.
  77. Sparkle
    Whitney Houston's death is just about the only thing that gives the film real, albeit mostly unintentional, life.
  78. Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    A bubbly 90-year-old mascot from the golden days of the American musical, this doc's subject is certainly larger than the conventional testimonial treatment she's given.
  79. The Flowers of War
    This film has too many weak, unconnected strands (what's the subplot about the narrator's father doing here anyway?), too much overtly expositional dialogue, and too unfocused a narrative to really cohere. And then there's that whole matter of expendable whores.
  80. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same
    Madeleine Olnek has a limited repertoire of jokes, so it's fortunate that the film, at 76 minutes, is fairly amusing, even if it's never quite laugh-out-loud funny.
  81. Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston
    The tension between the amateurish interviewer and the star interviewees gives the documentary a layer of authenticity that its otherwise formulaic structure and storytelling fail to find.
  82. 4:44 Last Day on Earth
    It's only natural that Abel Ferrara's vision of the end of the world should take corporeal form as a quasi-autobiographical hangout movie.
  83. Chico & Rita
    A shallow romanticization of Batista-era Cuba -- when the nation was a tropical paradise for the delectation of American jetsetters -- and what the revolution left in its wake.
  84. The Front Line
    Both brutal and sentimental, this Oscar-submitted Korean war drama offers up rusty tropes as telling ironies.
  85. Goodbye First Love
    A poignant sense of time's unyielding forward progress and a mood of deep adolescent sorrow aren't enough to overshadow the insufferable blankness of Goodbye First Love's navel-gazing protagonists.
  86. Musical Chairs
    The schmaltzy and benign tale of a ballroom dancer who accepts and transcends her unexpected disability through the power of art and love.
  87. Chronicle
    Offers up little more than a tired morality play about the dangers of power, rehashing stale insights about the narcissism of the documentary impulse.
  88. Splinters
    Adam Pesce never condescends to any of his subjects, but good intentions alone don't make for a captivating movie.
  89. To the Arctic
    Though the film is light on anthropomorphization, its aesthetic is nothing if not infantile.
  90. The Hunter
    The film refuses to focus on its core story, hedging its bets with forays into family drama, environmental thriller, and corporate intrigue.
  91. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye tries so hard to keep up with the quirkiness and theatricality of its subjects that it ends up canceling them out.
  92. Bombay Beach
    Rather than bringing out the symbolic inner lives of the characters, these sequences seem like the intrusion of an aggressive authorial personality on a film whose subject-as well as the fact of Har'el's outsider status-demands that the filmmaker simply sit back and observe.
  93. Buried Prayers
    Steven Meyer's documentary treads a middle ground between illumination and cheap waterworks.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 11, 2012
  94. The Swell Season
    Ultimately, though, they never cohere into something more than a moderately engaging for-fans-only tour diary.
  95. Sinister
    Ellison's fascination with celluloid to solve a crime recalls Antonioni's "Blowup," but Scott Derrickson is unable to conjure an aura that isn't as transparent and weightless as a ghost.
  96. Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus
    In the end, it feels unavoidably dull, as there isn't much thematic ambiguity to be found in the assertion that humans deserve life that's defined by more than indentured servitude.
  97. The Magic of Belle Isle
    This gooey reteaming of Rob Reiner and Morgan Freeman is crammed tight with baldly manipulative elements, its tearjerker quota busting at the seams.
  98. Putin's Kiss
    Fails to dig too deep into the politics or inner workings of the new right-wing youth movement it profiles, remaining content with simplistic conclusions about pro-Putin thuggery.
  99. On the Ice
    The moral dilemmas in On the Ice ultimately fail to resonate, Qalli's concluding plea for his flawed humanity coming off as strangely hollow.
  100. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    What saves the film from being simply a schematic mother-daughter reconciliation drama is both the reluctance and prickliness that Catherine Keener brings to her character.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »