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. Chappie
    The film's exasperating atonality washes out any legitimate idea about identity, education, nature versus nurture, or artificial intelligence that Neill Blomkamp hoped to evince.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Faults
    The film obliquely addresses its narrative mysteries through the conversational cracks of two people in enforced proximity.
  3. Tracers
    The lusterless camerawork keys itself almost empathetically to the drab reality of the film's spaces, settled and unsettled alike, but it can't enliven the hackneyed plot.
  4. Merchants of Doubt
    An issues documentary that scores its points through a seductive combination of clearly stated arguments and pithy humor.
  5. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    Like its predecessor, the film is a charming example of what great actors can do with mediocre material.
  6. Kidnapping Mr. Heineken
    For all the thematic emphasis the script ultimately places on the allegedly thick bonds among these men, it's surprising how often they communicate solely through exposition.
  7. A Year in Champagne
    The premise amounts to numerous raised glasses and classical music cues, but little of this schmoozing strikes a notable chord beyond the démodé back-patting engaged throughout.
  8. October Gale
    The film begins as a moodily introspective drama about grief before implausibly morphing into a stale thriller.
  9. The Lesson
    The film ultimately understands poverty as a profound and often irreversible desolation of terra firma.
  10. Focus
    The film turns out to instead be a strained trumpeting of the return of the proverbial king of the box office.
  11. The Lazarus Effect
    David Gelb doesn't evince so much as a single compositional sleight of hand, merely delighting in turning lights on and off and watching Zoe appear in random places.
  12. Farewell to Hollywood
    It suggests that a disease isn't a product of one single person's body, but the eruption of an entire family history of unarticulated desire.
  13. Bluebird
    Unable to reconcile plot with poetry, Bluebird is knitted-together by its sense of place and lived-in performances, yet unraveled by anemic false melodrama and overbearing music.
  14. Ejecta
    The cogent character study nestled inside all the bombast remains crafty for its rare commingling of artful storytelling and genre nonsensicality.
  15. Champs
    An unfocused mishmash that thrives only when it fixates on footage of actual bouts.
  16. Eastern Boys
    A ferocious plea for character salvation within a milieu where money and bodily affect are the raison d'être for human existence.
  17. Futuro Beach
    It masks depleted drama under a progression of long takes, various music cues, and a three-chapter structure that grows successively tedious.
  18. Young Bodies Heal Quickly
    Its lack of dramatic specificity places it in a precarious middle ground between exacting character study and ethereal parable.
  19. Wild Canaries
    Lawrence Michael Levine's film occupies a sweet spot between the self-aware and taut.
  20. Everly
    Yet another boring ode to heavy breathing that's offered under the hypocritical pretense of celebrating female empowerment.
  21. The Hunting Ground
    Kirby Dick's films don't go far enough in explaining how a culture of rape can pervade in vastly different institutions, but they're ruthless about holding them accountable.
  22. The Salvation
    The film achieves nothing more than hollow caricature, too caught up in dumb dress-up pageantry to accomplish anything else.
  23. The DUFF
    The film deposits its heroine and everyone in the audience looking toward her for image-maintaining guidance back at square one.
  24. Hot Tub Time Machine 2
    Josh Heald's script takes the easy way out, ending the film with a torrent of slapdash sentimentality.
  25. McFarland USA
    If there's a general air of emotional authenticity woven throughout all this garden-variety, faith-in-family hokum, it's in the racing scenes.
  26. Approaching the Elephant
    The film's 90 minutes are a disorienting cyclone of destructive incidents and propulsive energy.
  27. Digging Up the Marrow
    In the end, Adam Green reminds us that he's all to eager to go for the easy thrill.
  28. All the Wilderness
    The images gorgeously embody both the fear and the beauty of James's exploratory experiments with socialization.
  29. Queen and Country
    The film lacks an ability to construct significant instances of character drama as symbolic of larger concerns pertaining to nationalist dilemmas.
  30. Wild Tales
    Each of the six vignettes that make up this unusually energetic anthology pertains to the methods of calculated mass dehumanization that are (barely) hidden beneath the practices of social institutions.
  31. Accidental Love
    So flimsily constructed, visually and narratively, that it resembles a middle-school play that's been hastily filmed on an antique camcorder.
  32. Fifty Shades of Grey
    Jamie Dornan somehow manages to render his sculpted beauty moot, which throws a major wrench in the gears for a film dependent on eroticism.
  33. Coast of Death
    It convincingly insists that the human figure is no more vital to the image than the rapidly shifting landscape it inhabits.
  34. Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem
    The courtroom's cramped, near-featureless air of bureaucratic stagnation becomes oppressive even for the audience, making it easy to identify with Viviane's growing hunger for freedom.
  35. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Director Kiah Roache-Turner's film is an excitingly efficient and ultraviolent zomedy.
  36. Old Fashioned
    Any masochistic joy that can be derived from watching the film owes to seeing it take its bullheaded conceit to its logical, artless extreme.
  37. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    It's tructured in familiar, safe terms, plays for very low stakes, and appeals to no one so much as white, male teenagers with chips on their shoulders.
  38. What We Do in the Shadows
    The film sympathetically renders the small humiliations and inconveniences of life as an old-world vampire struggling with modernity.
  39. Da Sweet Blood of Jesus
    A dizzying hall-of-mirrors stunt, a horror remake as autobiographical X-ray, and a work of fantasy that serves as a decadently cleansing creative exorcism.
  40. 1971
    Johanna Hamilton's 1971 represents a mind-blowing scoop disguised as a fairly garden-variety issue doc.
  41. The Last Five Years
    The film mostly skirts any connection to musical theater as though it were faintly embarrassed.
  42. Jupiter Ascending
    The film is ntermittently inventive in its visual and physical effects, but its politics are unthinking and obvious, a cheap anti-authoritarian tantrum imbedded in an intergalactic action-melodrama.
  43. Seventh Son
    As is often the case in films like this, Seventh Son is at its weakest when it tries to leaven its brink-of-disaster gravity with a little nerdy humor.
  44. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    Its dedication to the transgressive power of frivolity remains the franchise's greatest weapon.
  45. Enter the Dangerous Mind
    The title of Youssef Delara and Victor Teran's new film pretty much sums up its shallow and exploitative take on mental illness.
  46. Losing Ground
    The film is a patient exploration of the enlaced connections between professional and emotional sectors.
  47. Mad As Hell
    The doc is too enamored with Cenk Uygur and his convictions that it hews more closely to being a conventional and one-sided biographical portrait.
  48. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    The material being offered has been edited, composed, and made sentimental with the rigor of a political ad campaign.
  49. The Voices
    For most of the film's running time, one mistakes the main character's callousness for the filmmakers'.
  50. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    The doc adopts the viewpoint specifically of those who knew him best, and seeks to separate the person from the emblem.
  51. Ballet 422
    Jody Lee Lipes shapes the footage into an intimate symphony of poetically shaped bodies that contrast poignantly with uncertain faces.
  52. Black or White
    Kevin Costner scowls and darts around the dubious thin line between "racism" and un-sugarcoated "truthfulness" that only anti-P.C. wingnuts actually believe exists.
  53. Project Almanac
    The film delivers the same misogynistic, faux-modernistic jolts of trashy humor and labored plotting that typify the work of co-producer Michael Bay.
  54. Above and Beyond
    It may channel the loose, adrenaline-fueled lives of pilots, but the film's inconsistent, often impassive study of this intriguing real-life adventure feels half-told.
  55. Supremacy
    The characters shout themselves hoarse, but they don't really say anything, and it isn't long before we feel like hostages ourselves, bound by the filmmakers' strained moral outrage.
  56. Hard to Be a God
    Aleksei German's final film is choreographed with a Felliniesque social grandeur, but tethered to a neorealist's eye for detail and quotidian matters of social justice.
  57. My Name Is Hmmm...
    The feeling here was perhaps intended to be impressionistic and elusive, but the result is instead rambling and unfocused.
  58. Wild Card
    The action-movie pyrotechnics succeed only at reinforcing Simon West's macho bona fides and condescendingly forcing Jason Statham back into his wheelhouse.
  59. Girlhood
    Girlhood is so keyed to the minutiae of its teenage protagonists' lives, it's as if the film can't stop itself from behaving like they do.
  60. Alien Outpost
    The film splits its time evenly between half-heartedly pretending it's an allegory for our current war on terror and pretending that it's not.
  61. The Boy Next Door
    The camera regards Guzman's buttocks and Lopez's breasts with an evasion of visual pleasure that could be blamed on the actors' nudity clauses if the entirety of the film didn't resemble a Lifetime movie embarrassed to have found its way to theaters.
  62. Mommy
    When Xavier Dolan's tremendous empathy for the abandoned, medicated, and economically stressed is given full visual flight, it's easy to get lost in the rush.
  63. The Humbling
    Philip Roth's original ending is cranked up to 11, flattening the more interesting contours of Al Pacino's performance into a martyr's desperate plea for an audience's love.
  64. Strange Magic
    As juvenile and frivolous a wish-fulfillment fantasy as one might expect from the visionary behind the lightsaber and Princess Leia hogtied to Jabba the Hut, Strange Magic depicts war as a series of scarcely muddied binary oppositions: between good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, and singing and death by karaoke.
  65. Cake
    The film is a study of grief that drowns in a cold bath of grim self-pity.
  66. Manny
    An informative, if largely deferent, biographical documentary that tritely explains the ascendancy of Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao.
  67. Salvation Army
    It's a quiet thud of a film, which embraces, with grace and precision, the nastiness of growing up with desire stuck in one's throat like a muffled scream.
  68. The Duke of Burgundy
    Peter Strickland charges full-tilt into the objectifying whims of his fantasies in order to somehow reach the other end of perception, which acknowledges the ultimate empathetic limitations of said fantasies.
  69. Song One
    This snapshot of catharsis follows a familiar trajectory, but Kate Barker-Froyland refreshingly resists elevating her characters' relationship to the level of grandiose.
  70. R100
    The set pieces follow their own insane, unstoppable logic, with each new twist yielding its own outré surprises.
  71. Son of a Gun
    The film has the requisite iconography of a crime thriller, but no investment in any of it.
  72. The Wedding Ringer
    This big, brash, occasionally clever, but mostly dumb comedy is so gallingly derivative that watching it feels like playing a game of basic-cable bingo.
  73. Appropriate Behavior
    Desiree Akhavan's tale of queer post-breakup funk shows more nuance, and racial dimension, than its cinematic cousins.
  74. Gangs of Wasseypur
    This insane masterpiece shows the self-destructive properties of myth making and how they overlap with the downfall of a community damned from the beginning of time.
  75. Blackhat
    Michael Mann's camera elegantly collapses the spaces between bodies and objects without sacrificing spatial coherence.
  76. Medeas
    Writer-director Andrea Pallaoro's feature-film debut isn't especially beholden to plot or dialogue, impressionistically shaping its story through pervasive silence.
  77. Joy of Man's Desiring
    A chronicle the act of labor as both a universal function of life and a spectacle in itself.
  78. Black Sea
    As much as the film is primarily a genre workout for director Kevin McDonald, the script makes room for a tough-minded, psychologically corrosive depiction of vengeance.
  79. Giuseppe Makes a Movie
    Adam Rifkin's documentary convincingly portrays the sense of community fostered by Giuseppe Andrews's crazed passion.
  80. Paddington
    The film recalls its stylistic forbears at their best: flowing with whimsy, but never at the expense of the beating heart of its human (and animal) characters.
  81. Still Life
    Its fixation on life's quotidian aspects gives way to a less imaginative focus on an inevitable and overly familiar romance.
  82. Vice
    Vice takes the basic premise from 1973's Westworld and morphs it into an incoherent slog.
  83. Loitering with Intent
    It's a comedy concerned with myopia that doesn't succumb to the self-obsessed pitfalls of that subject.
  84. Match
    Patrick Stewart's performance is practically an argument for Belber to jettison everything else and take the actor on the road as a one-man spoken-word act.
  85. Taken 3
    Empowerment porn for those who long for the Cold War's clarity of purpose and American dominance in this murky age of terror.
  86. Little Accidents
    A movingly authentic exploration of a working-class milieu and the psychological and economic trauma that ripples through a town in the wake of a tragic accident.
  87. La Última Película
    The film isn't so much about "the end of cinema" as it is about the people who abuse the medium and their subjects for their own political agenda.
  88. Something, Anything
    The film turns what at first seemingly appears as Kodak moments into a study of a soul in transition.
  89. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    At once a microcosmic expression of frustration and another of auto-critique, When Evening Falls devilishly recalls and riffs on seemingly shapeless conversations between its very small ensemble of characters without succumbing to soporific navel-gazing.
  90. Farewell, Herr Schwarz
    The sobering quality that informs both the documentary's aesthetic and content largely suppresses any spontaneity or much-needed moments of levity.
  91. It's All So Quiet
    There's literally no way to miss the memo that It's All So Quiet is about dealing with the encroachment of death, as it's there in every scene.
  92. The World Made Straight
    The moody lighting and the ubiquity of deciduous trees provide a canvas for bracing drama, but the film undoes itself by its desire to impart revelatory history lessons.
  93. Preservation
    Chockablock with instances of characters not shooting, running, attacking, or sneaking away when they can or should, this thriller comes off like the world's most rigged game.
  94. Dark Summer
    The cacophony of visions, broken mirrors, and mutilations only points to the ghost in the machine respecting The Craft as its spirit animal.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    Cheery and happily empty-headed, the present-day subplot adds little but sentiment to a film shot through with cliché characters, a predictable plot, and undisguised reverence.
  96. Let's Kill Ward's Wife
    Any pretense of satire collapses by the film's midpoint, leaving only the contempt.
  97. Predestination
    The film effectively underlines the one undertaking that time-travel fantasies can never truly allow: escape from ourselves.
  98. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    The film ends up cheapening its sense of empathy in its final mad rush to subject audiences to every incarnation of the jump scare imaginable.
  99. [REC] 4: Apocalypse
    Whatever scant insight the prior films offered into Spain's waning Catholic belief has now been entirely replaced by fascist, cartoonish shows of wish-fulfillment prevarication.
  100. Li'l Quinquin
    It resembles a satirical treatise of self-reflection, functioning simultaneously as a summation of Bruno Dumont's thematic interests over the previous two decades and as a bonkers remake of Humanité.
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