Slant Magazine's Scores

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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
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    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New Jerusalem
    Unlike the soul-searching characters from Old Joy, which also stars Will Oldham, Ike and Sean always feel as if they've fallen out of the sky just for the film's setup.
  2. Much Ado About Nothing
    The film is nothing without the physicality of the performers, as Joss Whedon's script handles the transition of Shakespeare's language to modern day indifferently.
  3. Heleno
    The film hints at a kicky, impressionistic style that director José Henrique Fonseca never effectively employs to actually communicate Heleno de Freitas's demons.
  4. Yelling to the Sky
    The film avoids most of its genre's pratfalls, though it also shows little interest in transcending them.
  5. Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet
    Jesse Vile's film, despite its best intentions, is merely a serviceable extension of his own fandom.
  6. Let Fury Have the Hour
    On a political level, the film is far from a Godardian dialectic, so the view of history that emerges is, to say the least, blinkered.
  7. The Monuments Men
    George Clooney's film boils a big, messy maelstrom of theft and uncertainty down to a digestible, faintly appetizing mush.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (Une bouteille à la mer)
    The film obviously can't resolve the conflict between Palestine and Israel, but the resolution to the story's arc feels nonetheless forced and misplaced.
  9. Clandestine Childhood
    Benjamín Ávila structures the film as a series of precious moments, remembrances of a difficult year when the politics of patria and family got in the way of his puppy love.
  10. My Best Enemy
    This twist-heavy World War II drama would play as an absurdist comedy if the director wasn't so dead set on excluding just about any trace of humor from his self-serious project.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    High Tech, Low Life
    As far as its subject matter goes, the documentary only scratches the surfaces, only reaffirming the simple idea that Internet censorship in China is prevalent and unfair.
  12. $ellebrity
    Comes off as little more than a feature-length trashing of colleagues who director and celebrity photographer Kevin Mazur feels are giving his profession a bad name.
  13. Fairhaven
    The film plays coy with its quintessential indie-dramedy setup, eschewing narrative and tension in favor of convivial character interplay and master shots of wintry landscapes.
  14. Let My People Go!
    Without a consistent stylistic playfulness to match the histrionic scenarios, the action often feels just plain silly.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wrong
    It doesn't seem to have any pretensions beyond the regimented unveiling of a parade of odd occurrences, plodding along under the banner of absurdity.
  16. Machete Kills
    The films that Robert Rodriguez emulates here are known for similar unexpected narrative turns, but the crucial value that he misses is their actual cheapness.
  17. The Brass Teapot
    Imbued with a buoyant mysticism, the film is more gag-friendly than idea-based, primarily relying on the considerable charm of its leads to ground its supernatural conceit.
  18. Jurassic World
    Jurassic World can't tell whether it wants to be junk food or not, lovingly poking fun at some Hollywood tropes while shamelessly indulging others.
  19. At Any Price
    Alternates between business-world morality play, family drama, and portrait of a local community without ever comfortably integrating these disparate elements into his messy stew.
  20. The Taste of Money
    For all the revelations about the way the rich operate, there's little juicy pleasure to be had in the proceedings.
  21. Grudge Match
    It will come as a surprise to none that Grudge Match is so wantonly clichéd that to watch it is to explore the outer perimeters of one's own tolerance for a specific type of feel-good sports film.
  22. The Sorcerer and the White Snake
    The film looks so glossy, plasticized, and unreal that all you end up thinking about is special effects.
  23. A Rubberband Is an Unlikely Instrument
    It's as though the director, like his subjects, was too comfortable in the safe familiarity of the surface to find the place where it betrays us.
  24. Bless Me, Ultima
    The film's interest in social themes remains background fodder within a far more generic good-versus-evil narrative.
  25. The Berlin File
    The film is a sporadically entertaining, modestly ambitious shoot 'em up that frequently succumbs to spelling out its subtext.
  26. Red Flag
    It surprisingly abandons its obvious meta elements and unfolds as a straightforward road-trip flick, opting for an exhibition of self-loathing rather than self-reflexivity.
  27. War Witch
    Though ostensibly a character study, it's nevertheless characterized by the vaguely moralizing tone of an issue film, one whose candor in the face of brutality seems calculated for maximum liberal appeal.
  28. The Boxtrolls
    The flippancy toward the story's thematic concerns and character construction suggests that the film, like the boxtrolls' myriad gadgets and inventions, was largely built from used parts.
  29. Blancanieves
    Pablo Berger digs for emotional intensity in his gothic retelling of Snow White and only uncovers layers of gloss.
  30. Kiss of the Damned
    Xan Cassavetes cops to nothing more significant than being more keen on Vampyros Lesbos than anyone else from her clan of famous cinephiles.
  31. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    The laziest sort of political cinema, full of straw men and finger-pointing, wrapped up in an awards-friendly bow by its beautiful cinematography and a manipulative world music-y score.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    No Place on Earth
    A remarkable story made almost unremarkable in the hands of lazy filmmaking.
  33. Hunky Dory
    Director Marc Evans's monotonous style keeps the film earthbound.
  34. Molly's Theory of Relativity
    The characters never sound like they're actually talking to one another, but rather delivering Jeff Lipsky's echo-chamber monologues.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    From Up on Poppy Hill
    The story arc is somewhat facile, and its lesson about preserving history instead of demolishing it to make way for new, shiny things is too obvious.
  36. Kon-Tiki
    It lacks the fire and eccentricity that we want from our stories of adventurers driven by obsessions that could be seen as egotistical or just plain bonkers.
  37. 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.
  38. The Bling Ring
    Sofia Coppola seems curiously unmotivated to bring full analysis or provocation to her themes, leaving the film feeling like a disappointingly toothless satire.
  39. The Wolf of Wall Street
    Martin Scorsese's keyed-up, irreverent tone frequently fails to distinguish itself from the grunting arias sung by the oily paragons of commerce his film evidently intended to deflate.
  40. Erased
    The film seldom pushes beyond the bare-minimum dictates of the thriller, only rarely offering up a memorable action sequence.
  41. The Angels' Share
    Ken Loach's breezy scribble about lowlife redemption and drunken buffoonery isn't so much heavy-handed as it is charmingly weightless.
  42. Populaire
    Candy-colored to a potentially cavity-causing degree, the film is a bubbly regurgitation of retrograde romantic comedy tropes and reactionary sexual politics.
  43. Black Nativity
    For anyone who prefers their assertive homilies to crust over like a syrupy sweet, this loose adaptation of Langston Hughes's beloved holiday tradition will come on like a dream fulfilled.
  44. If I Were You
    A wannabe French-style infidelity farce that keeps indulging in unnecessary bathos and subplots.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everybody Has a Plan
    Ana Piterbarg's handsome, if uninvolving, film privileges mood over narrative and dumb brooding over character.
  46. You Don't Need Feet to Dance
    Despite its title, there's actually very little dancing, or rhythmic flair, in You Don't Need Feet to Dance.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Violeta Went to Heaven
    Suffers from an overtly conventional way of depicting the life events of an anything-but-conventional woman, a lazy flaw further highlighted by its brief moments of visual experimentation.
  48. 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.
  49. The English Teacher
    This is the second recent release—after The Great Gatsby, whose overwrought, on-screen text it even shares—that aims to channel great, time-honored storytelling without being able to tell a great story.
  50. Dorfman in Love
    The film's moral lesson is too contradictory to be taken seriously.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New World
    This is action-thriller feather preening, but all the wit in the world can't hide the narrative sprawl that rots from within.
  52. The Wall
    We may find out how Gedeck's character reacts to her isolation, but we're never privy to her actual feelings, largely because in a film about a sudden onset of solitude, Pölsler is far too afraid of silence.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Is All You Need
    At times it seems as if Susanne Bier set out to create some kind of absurdist comedy, but lost her nerve somewhere along the way.
  54. Stuck in Love
    The movie aims for an admirable balance, but fatally upsets that equilibrium in its hurried resolutions.
  55. Detour
    In comparison to its superior predecessors, the film's redemption plot feels banal and slight.
  56. Code of the West
    The filmmaker's failure of empathy for those who strive to outlaw medicinal marijuana turns the protestors into hissable puritanical bad guys.
  57. Free Angela & All Political Prisoners
    It foists its own retelling of Angela Davis's story over any contemplation of her politics, effectively neutering their power as it could apply to today in the hands of a proper film essayist.
  58. Tai Chi Hero
    Stephen Fung's pop-up graphics and jazzy fight scenes feel part of an unwieldy mix in which the director just throws whatever half-baked conceits up on the screen he feels like.
  59. Greetings from Tim Buckley
    Despite the counter-culture subjects at its core, Daniel Algrant's film possesses a put-upon hipness that cannot mask its disarming dorkiness.
  60. Venus and Serena
    Opting for inspiration over insight, Venus and Serena is a starry-eyed pop documentary that cannot transcend its scattershot, for-fans-only filmmaking.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal
    Because the film clearly aims for satire, Boris Rodriguez isn't entirely guilty of indulging gruesome spectacle for its own sake.
  62. Antiviral
    A one-joke movie--a good joke, yes, but Brandon Cronenberg's agenda clouds the clarity that's needed to fully deliver the punchline.
  63. Java Heat
    A middling genre movie, but it's oddly likable for its conflicted, unresolved tension.
  64. Fists of Legend
    The film is so generous in its characterizations that it's easy to overlook the fact that its hot-topic drama (bullying, economic marginalization, etc.) amounts to little more than padded lip service.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hot Flashes
    Seidelman's attempts to provide positive, alternative representations of marginalized people and problems is overly ambitious.
  66. Thérèse
    Claude Miller's swan song not only shares its main character's name but also her tempered disposition.
  67. 22 Jump Street
    As funny and batshit insane as the movie often is, the fact that 22 Jump Street knows it's a tiresome sequel doesn't save it from being a tiresome sequel, even as Lord and Miller struggle to conceal the bitter pill of convention in the sweet tapioca pudding of wall-to-wall jokes.
  68. Fury
    The film itself is a lumbering tank of a movie, chunky, loud, and clumsy, mulching down men into meat as proof of its dramatic seriousness and gloomy worldview.
  69. Europa Report
    After a while, it's hard to escape the fact that the audience is watching a potential monster movie in which most of the fun stuff — i.e. the monster—has been pared away.
  70. You Will Be My Son
    For all of the director's willingness to explore his characters' unexpected depths, he's still hamstrung by his perpetually tasteful cinema-of-quality aesthetic.
  71. He's Way More Famous Than You
    It would have been nice if the film had surrendered to its lunacy more blatantly, more carelessly.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Painting (Le Tableau)
    Its aesthetic employs expressionism, realism, and cubism, but the morality plays are layered on as thickly and haphazardly as a toddler's finger painting.
  73. I Give It a Year
    Much of the film's attempted laughs come from the comedy-of-discomfort school, with an endless array of situations that milk awkwardness to a degree that makes these scenes far more unpleasant than humorous to watch.
  74. 3 Geezers!
    The convoluted mockumentary setup indicates that this is all meant to be taken as a meta exercise in Hollywood-insider rib-nudging, although the proceedings rarely rise to the occasion.
  75. Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    Its looseness adequately portrays Plimpton as an inwardly conflicted figure, but it fails to make much of a case for his legacy outside of The Paris Review's still-noticeable brand.
  76. The Congress
    The film lacks the manic fly-by-night invention of, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or even the ripe erotic ambiguity of something like Avatar.
  77. Like Father, Like Son
    The film scores all of its thematic points early, commenting intriguingly, if ultimately rather obviously, on the demands of Japanese patriarchy.
  78. Blood Ties
    What Lumet or Cassavetes often showed with a look, an image, a movement, Canet chooses to tell, and often at length, with the most heavy-handed dialogue imaginable.
  79. The History of Future Folk
    Ridiculousness played with a straight face, the film is endearing even if it's never quite hilarious.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Student
    Kazakh cinema's stalwart auteur Darzhan Omirbaev adapts Crime and Punishment to modern-day Almaty, but with little to say beyond the obvious.
  81. 3 Days to Kill
    McG may strip down his approach and serve up a variety of slick, well-paced shoot-outs and car chases, but his technical skill can't quite overcome the story's lazy sense of humor and incomprehensible account of international espionage.
  82. One Mile Above
    We're never far away from a crude digression demoting an ethereal sense of artistry to hunkered-down artifice.
  83. Hello Herman
    The alignment with Herman's perspective, even as it never downplays the gravity of his crimes, leads the film into a set of obvious conclusions.
  84. Wish You Were Here
    From the opening montage alone, it's clear that Australian director Kieran Darcy-Smith plans to play his cards close to the vest in this maddeningly underwritten thriller/domestic-drama hybrid.
  85. Hey Bartender
    Sadly, Douglas Tirola's documentary doesn't follow its subjects' advice regarding the refinement of technique.
  86. Kill Your Darlings
    An overmatched star and a scarcity of eccentricity sink this hip-lit origin story from director John Krokidas.
  87. The Book of Life
    Jorge R. Gutierrez subsumes the film's darker themes in a relentlessly busy farrago of predictable kids'-movie tropes and annoying attempts at hipness.
  88. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    The expansion has the unintended and unfortunate effect of doing exactly the same thing to Alexander he accused his family of doing in the first place: marginalizing him.
  89. Alan Partridge
    Director Declan Lowney's film operates from a conceit that affords only minor opportunities for true hilarity.
  90. The Look of Love
    With its softened edges, bland aftertaste, and watered-down distillation of Raymond's life and career, Michael Winterbottom's film represents the house champagne of biographical cinema.
  91. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
    Though occasionally aesthetically alluring and evocative, feels like an introductory chapter to a more substantive, sprawling study of the actor.
  92. 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.
  93. Thanks for Sharing
    Is an exploration of sex addiction, in all its different manifestations, the new flavor of the week in contemporary American cinema?
  94. Beneath
    Its stance toward every dipshit slasher and creature-horror flick that's come before it never feels less than casually hostile.
  95. Mood Indigo
    Michel Gondry bungles his adaptation of the Boris Vian novel by indulging in homespun craftwork at the expense of plot and character detail.
  96. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Felix Van Groeningen's film owes more than a debt to the unwieldy narrative schematics of Susanne Bier's narratives.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wasteland
    At heart a heist movie, snappy and dry in its humor, clever in its elaborate robbery scheme, and somewhat bloated and unspooled in its storytelling.
  98. Good Ol' Freda
    The documentary will prove fascinating only to the die-hard fans that Freda Kelly spent years writing to, though in this case that's no small number of people.
  99. Man of Tai Chi
    The film ultimately doesn't live up to this early potential, as Keanu Reeves loses his way in the third act with too many false climaxes.
  100. La Playa D.C.
    The film only feels interesting when it focuses on looking at what the characters aren't doing and listening to what they aren't saying.
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