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. The Search for General Tso
    Director Ian Cheney doesn't delve too deeply into the possibly unsettling questions the documentary raises about society at large.
  2. The Gambler
    The filmmakers delve into a fantasyland of luxe coastal casinos and neon-lit bathhouses--as shrug-worthy a stab at picturing the contemporary black market as could be requested.
  3. Into the Woods
    This PG-rated romp is, refreshingly, less notable for its happily-ever-afters than its oh-no-they-didn'ts.
  4. Song of the Sea
    Even as it entertains increasingly far-fetched detours, the film's folkloric narrative offers an ideal vehicle for this pictorial play.
  5. Selma
    What will make the film essential for future generations isn't mere flashpoint topicality, but the way it aligns an old struggle with a current one.
  6. Unbroken
    The film's chief misstep is taking its title too literally, and ultimately depicting Louie as an indestructible, and thus largely inhuman, superhero.
  7. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    This third and supposedly final edition in the franchise is nothing more than an uncomfortably transparent contractual obligation.
  8. The Interview
    It essentially uses a major global issue to cheaply dress up what is two hours of hit-and-miss erection jokes.
  9. A Most Violent Year
    J.C. Chandor's fondness for situational irony is empowered by the spartan efficiency of his method, and that of most of his performers.
  10. Goodbye to All That
    If Junebug focused on quieter moments of extended family dynamics, with its city-meets-country clashes delving into resonant, region-specific sensibilities, Angus MacLachlan never goes beyond signpost sentiment.
  11. Annie
    2014: Annie's America makes director John Huston's elephantine, synthetically charismatic 1982 adaptation look like a Minnelliesque model of focus and concision.
  12. If You Don't, I Will
    The actors play off one another beautifully, but the film bottoms out just as it's getting warmed up.
  13. Winter Sleep
    Staring deep into the darkness of an apparently static character, Nuri Bilge Ceylan again exhibits his gift for making interesting stories out of predetermined plots, locating small eddies of change in the midst of eternally fixed dynamics.
  14. Tip Top
    Instead of finding one consistent tone and sticking to it, Serge Bozon allows the wildly hilarious and the grimly serious to uneasily coexist, exulting in the resultant clash.
  15. Leviathan
    Andrey Zvyagintsev never loses sight of the humans, who're allowed to display improvisatory behavior that deepens the majesty of the rigorously orchestrated tableaus.
  16. Maidan
    It puts the viewer inside Maidan, allowing them to draw their own conclusions about the ideas and agendas espoused by the movement's leaders and participants.
  17. Free the Nipple
    This is kind of didactic topical movie that distributes its rhetoric evenly between characters with clear distinction as to who's playing devil's advocate to the other one's points.
  18. Tales of the Grim Sleeper
    Broomfield isn't so much dedicated to journalistic truth or social ethnography as he is displaying bodies and mindsets of individuals that complicate any sense of Manichean polemics, where good and evil must be reckoned with at a purely secular and corporeal level, particularly along the lines of class and gender.
  19. Human Capital
    Paolo Virzì's Human Capital gives the tired trope of cutting between overlapping stories a welcome shot of adrenaline, using it not just to compare and contrast tangentially related stories, but to show how people caught up in their private dramas can overlook or misinterpret the people around them.
  20. Time Out of Mind
    The film isn't preachy, but its indie-movie artiness sometimes get in the way of its noble mission, making us think more about the techniques being used than the effects they're meant to create.
  21. Little Feet
    This is a micro-budgeted affair of the heart that's never precious or obnoxious, but tender and moving and occasionally explosive in its intrinsic emotion.
  22. Big Eyes
    In style as in content, it offers neither the granular detail of more subtle period pieces nor enough of Tim Burton's spirited eccentricity to register as anything other than what one character derides as "that representational jazz."
  23. We Are the Giant
    It ironically reveals its intent to suture shut any remote ambivalence regarding its own gung-ho ethos, in effect engaging the same sort of oppressively dogmatic tactics it so outwardly denigrates.
  24. The Wonders
    Like a rural Fellini, Rohrwacher mixes the mundane with the absurd to create a sometimes fabulous tale that always feels palpably real.
  25. The Color of Time
    If The Tree of Life was a contemplation of the universal mysteries and verities of life, The Color of Time is an hour spent scrolling through a stranger's family album.
  26. The Captive
    The film has the plot of an intensely lurid thriller, but Atom Egoyan can't bring himself to face that and actively tend to the story; instead, he trades in barely coherent, high-brow euphemisms.
  27. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Director Chuck Workman's simply compiles Welles's greatest moments, offering little in the way of an authorial point of view.
  28. American Sniper
    Clint Eastwood startlingly grips the audience with his sense of hypnotic silence, which carries suggestions of what might be termed politically apolitical pragmatism.
  29. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    It doesn't take long to realize that Ridley Scott's adaptation is only aiming for certain forms of credibility, and callously eschewing others.
  30. Still Alice
    Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart's artful consideration of familial friction acerbated by disease, and vice versa, nearly saves Still Alice from the banality of its Lifetime-movie execution.
  31. Miss Julie
    The film is no tearjerker, but it makes the stage play's hidebound, soul-baring pleasures mesmerizing on screen, and without copping to reductivism.
  32. Wild
    Director Jean-Marc Vallée has created a film out of Cheryl Strayed's beloved 2012 memoir that never quite matches the blunt audacity of its simple title.
  33. Concerning Violence
    Here is a film that isn't afraid to risk didacticism in order to put across its vision of the debilitating physical and psychological effects of colonialism.
  34. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    These films, and Tolkien's entire oeuvre, are most affecting in their depictions of friendship, and the performances here represent plutonic male intimacy in convincing, often moving ways.
  35. Comet
    Its time-jumping strategy cleverly illuminates the way in which we go over and fixate on isolated incidents in our minds of breakups past.
  36. Pioneer
    Its greatest asset, and another trait it shares with Mann and Fincher's work, is a careful attention toward the particulars of its milieu in a way that doesn't call attention to those period touches.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    It captures a kind of essential form of self-expression (and pleasure) that exceeds categorization, creating a shared experience between the musicians, the filmmakers, and the viewer that feels sublime.
  38. Dying of the Light
    Paul Schrader's personality reveals itself in the film's joylessness, which is meaningless without the director's accompanying and occasionally poignant existentialism.
  39. Horse Money
    Costa's storytelling is illusory at best, but Horse Money's self-contradictions are communicated not via plot half as much as in scenography, even in the costuming.
  40. Once Upon a Time Verônica
    The film is simply too conscious of its form and its global-market ambitions to ever feel honestly interested in the themes it purports to cherish.
  41. Remote Area Medical
    Despite the subdued anger and drawn-out suffering on display, the documentary is primarily a work of hope.
  42. The Immortalists
    Some voices of reason and skepticism do make an appearance to rebut and deflate Bill and Aubrey's monumental claims, but aren't allowed to fully elaborate on their arguments.
  43. Penguins of Madagascar
    It does well to put more focus on delivering a plethora of jokes, imitations, zippy repartee, and sight gags than its plot's familiar machinations.
  44. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    The documentary is hesitant to show the great work that resulted from Hayao Miyazaki's "grand hobby," never including clips from the classics referred to throughout.
  45. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    Anthony Powell's vision as a filmmaker is frustratingly limited to an information-style presentation that doubles as an enthusiastic advert for the transcendental qualities of the terrain.
  46. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Benicio Del Toro's performance is showy, a great actor's parade of indulgences that occasionally sets the deranged camp tone that should have been the narrative's starting point.
  47. Before I Disappear
    Even at its most compelling, it remains inconsistent and superfluous, a lesson that sometimes a movie can feel more fully formed in 19 minutes rather than 90.
  48. Horrible Bosses 2
    If your answer to the question "When are rape jokes funny?" is anything aside from "never," the good news is that you may still find a lot to hoot over throughout the film.
  49. Story of My Death
    True to its title, the film approaches death as both narrative endpoint and formal focus, its initial vivacious mischief giving way to a Manichean fable about the waning of the light.
  50. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    As a metaphor for the way we respond to the media, and the way our politics are funneled through the media lens, the film succeeds most when it revels in ambiguity.
  51. Extraterrestrial
    A knowing mélange of recognizable genre tropes bordering on shopworn cliché, with little else introduced to the equation to justify its existence.
  52. Flamenco, Flamenco
    It's as if Carlos Saura were calling the bluff of spectacle-oriented narrative cinema that necessitates excusing its excesses with characters and plotting.
  53. The King and the Mockingbird
    If the film were to propose a mandate for animation, it would be what the medium's etymology has longed suggested: to make the inanimate full of life.
  54. The Circle
    The film refuses to tease us with suspense, overwhelm us with sentimentality, or defy us with nuance.
  55. Late Phases
    Adrián García Bogliano ends up merely toying with the death-steeped concerns of his characters, and taking the furious and bitter perspective that powers the narrative's ponderous dramatic core for granted.
  56. V/H/S: Viral
    One need go no further than the film's first segment to grasp how little interest the latest entry in the anthology series has in generating chills from the lo-fi.
  57. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    Florian Habicht unwisely shifts his focus from Sheffield and its unique denizens to the band's personal history, effectively turning the film into an episode of Behind the Music.
  58. Bad Hair
    The narrative works through the many contradictions brewing inside its main character in the wake of his personal actualization without ever feeling like a dramatic checklist.
  59. Food Chains
    Perhaps Sanjay Rawal's most fascinating excursion into agriculture's dark side is the vineyards of Napa Valley, where the practically Eden-like scenery masks a dreary labor model.
  60. Reach Me
    Yell the word "independent" loud and long enough and people might forget that they're seeing the same old, patronizing Hollywood clichés, recycled, rebranded, and regurgitated for their gullible, eager consumption.
  61. Happy Valley
    Once the media caravan departs, the doc meanders, torn between its obligation to reportage and its interest in a town riven by America's thirst for justice.
  62. The Sleepwalker
    The film soon settles into a confident, well-staged groove, primarily because of two unambiguously terrific performances.
  63. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    To dismiss it as simply an act of hipster appropriation is to cop out, because appropriation is the film's thematic meat.
  64. Dumb and Dumber To
    There's much more plot floating around during the sequel, all leading up to a climax at the "KEN Conference" that suffers in comparison to Silicon Valley's mockery of the same milieu.
  65. Rosewater
    It shrugs off the bigger questions about Iranian politics its first half appears to raise, falling back instead on a gestalt of the eternal, Kafkaesque regime, wherever the viewer may find it.
  66. Beyond the Lights
    By rooting Noni's self-image issues in a controlling mother, the script provides the film with a tame, melodramatic structure that dulls the thorny matters of identity and expression at its center.
  67. Red Army
    Gabe Polsky's quiet yet welcome achievement is to allow us to see the individual amid the politics, clearly and sympathetically.
  68. Penance
    The film is ultimately, and disappointingly, revealed to be a contraption that's less concerned with mental portraiture than with getting all of its expository ducks in a row.
  69. Miss Meadows
    Perhaps Karen Leigh Hopkins's intent was to subtly suggest the surreal aspects of the story, but ultimately she underplays her hand.
  70. Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
    This is a confident work that smashingly updates the Southern gothic for contemporary generations.
  71. Always Woodstock
    The filmmakers play Catherine's disgustingly narcissistic sense of entitlement as endemic to the supposedly girl-next-door charms befitting the film's thoroughly normative gender politics.
  72. Wolves
    The cinematographic approach of the film suggests some unholy hybrid of the aesthetic and genre indulgences of Michael Bay and the hyper-literalist plot construction of Christopher Nolan.
  73. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    Whereas "Bad Santa" was nastier and riskier, as well as more mischievously winsome, A Merry Friggin' Christmas is as curiously timid as it is morally dubious.
  74. The Homesman
    If there's any ambiguity to be found in the film's prolonged last gasps, which reach for tragedy, but only sow more epistemic confusion, it's of a mawkish and unpalatable variety.
  75. Bad Turn Worse
    A reminder that crime movies pointedly inspired by other, better genre films can still be enjoyable, if they wear their influences lightly and cleverly connect them to something tangibly human.
  76. Pelican Dreams
    The film is spare, empathic, and deeply introspective, and its imagery, such as a pelican fascinated by its own reflection, is so sublime in its kookiness as to be worthy of Werner Herzog.
  77. Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain
    The film places its characters in a reflexive historical continuum that dooms them to be mere demonstrative types from start to finish.
  78. Jessabelle
    Rather than commit to exploring Jessabelle's existential crisis, the filmmakers opt to pile on the clichés straight until the rotten denouement.
  79. Big Hero 6
    The film quickly becomes a study of grief and retribution, and the question of how exactly technology can and should be utilized in the treatment of these emotions.
  80. Open Windows
    Timidity and perhaps fear, of visual confinement, of lingering emotional engagement, closes Nacho Vigalondo's most promising windows.
  81. Interstellar
    Much like his hero, Christopher Nolan's goal seems to be to take the humor and wildness out of imagination, to see invention in rigidly practical and scientific terms.
  82. West
    Christian Schwochow's film is a tense psychological slow burn, putting us in the muddled headspace of its protagonist as she gradually comes unglued.
  83. Virunga
    This is muckraking journalism that moves confidently with the brio of an action thriller.
  84. The Tower
    As the psychology of the characters hardly connects with their distinctive milieu, the film merely suggests a conventional family drama littered with empty pot-shots at governmental authority.
  85. Hangar 10
    It's easy to see how Daniel Simpson's desire to return the found-footage genre to its roots resulted in cheap imitation.
  86. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    Refusing to mourn anything, displaying a Futurist-style disdain for the past, Sion Sono imagines a world in which static adherence to old ideas leads directly to doom.
  87. The Way He Looks
    What progressively mounts tension is the film's understanding of a boy's gradually realized homosexuality as being inextricable from the central metaphor of compromised vision.
  88. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    Of greatest damage to the doc's coherence is its wholehearted belief that its subjects are offering firsthand reports worth hearing.
  89. National Gallery
    In the style of an ambling, yet entirely focused visitor, the film continually circles back to pictures, protagonists, and situations to furnish them with new meanings, alter their perception, or even directly challenge their previous presentation.
  90. Actress
    It convincingly reconciles private passion with public desire by suggesting that, for women in particular, the 21st-century limelight is always on, no matter the setting or venue.
  91. Before I Go to Sleep
    It's hard to tell if the film is hampered or helped by the performances of its three stars, because it's so amateurishly written and directed that their participation beggars belief.
  92. Zero Motivation
    Zero Motivation is refreshingly casual in the depiction of its female-centric environment, but the freshness of its performances is often compromised by a directorial impulse to reduce the female experience to spiteful girl fights, virginal malaise, and bunk-bed antagonism.
  93. Magical Universe
    To varying degrees of success, it attempts to prominently display Al Carbee's creations, yet keeps undermining his art in favor of investigating his skewed relationship to everyday realities.
  94. Private Peaceful
    By modestly embracing its inherent minimalism and finding the emotions underlying even the most schematic of scenarios, the film taps into something unmistakably human.
  95. Viva la Libertà
    It ultimately lacks the vision and conviction to honestly and meaningfully dissect a contemporary political movement's deep-seated structural malaise.
  96. The Better Angels
    Even taking into consideration the fact the A.J. Edwards edited To the Wonder, it's hard to recall a film so immensely and reductively in thrall to the work of another director.
  97. Braddock America
    It's mercifully free of the ruin-porn shots that turn so many contemporary films about struggling cities into self-consciously arty exercises in the romanticization of decay.
  98. Nightcrawler
    Dan Gilroy's directorial debut only offers a familiar vision of today's newsman and producers as misery peddlers, and callow ratings slaves bordering on the monstrous.
  99. The Imitation Game
    Given the liberties the film takes, it's surprising that it refuses to penetrate Alan Turing's carnality and allow Benedict Cumberbatch to truly wrestle with the torment of the man's sexuality.
  100. Point and Shoot
    In abandoning a more vigorous discussion of class and race-based senses of entitlement, Marshall Curry reveals his goals to be less critical or rigid than passively honorific.
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