Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. Revenge of the Mekons
    What emerges is a portrait of a fully committed band that could never quite make it and of the rock n' roll project as something between a (very serious) hobby and a full-time career.
  2. The Great Invisible
    It effectively demonstrates how the systemic cause of the Deepwater Horizon explosion was tied as much to society's staggering dependence on fossil fuels as to the oil industry's greed.
  3. Horns
    For a story so unconventional, it's executed without director Alexandre Aja's typical commitment to anarchic awe.
  4. ABCs of Death 2
    Irony is a popular pose struck throughout these shorts, which are less revealing of the existentialist despair that death often rouses than they are of their makers' prejudices.
  5. Ouija
    The film consistently settles for the cheapest shock devices and the most shopworn totems of our current neo-gothic moment in the genre.
  6. John Wick
    The film is thematically thin, and it has a tendency to embrace the action genre's more obnoxious elements, but there's a proudly no-nonsense air to its nonsensicality.
  7. Laggies
    To Keira Knightley's credit, she's all too willing to undercut her pretty-girl reputation by looking and acting a fool for Lynn Shelton's camera.
  8. 1,000 Times Good Night
    It's difficult to swallow the premise of yet another tale of a heroic white Westerner with good intentions trying to give hope to Middle-Eastern misery.
  9. Low Down
    There's only so much that Fanning's vividly expressive face and Hawkes's charismatic sensitivity can mask before we realize how little we truly understand what goes on in anybody's head.
  10. Stonehearst Asylum
    In the wake of the ostentatious atmospherics summoned by the likes of Shutter Island and American Horror Story: Asylum, the film feels unnecessarily restrained.
  11. E-Team
    There's edifying information in the documentary, but it's tainted by forced dramatic tactics.
  12. The Heart Machine
    It showcases a genuine fascination with the mind/body split engendered by Skyping, online dating, and constant app usage through a plot that doesn't fuel itself on received wisdom.
  13. Force Majeure
    It comes down on the essential hollowness of traditional gender roles like the avalanche that proves to be its inciting event.
  14. White Bird in a Blizzard
    Gregg Araki's film suggests a hothouse melodrama that's been drained of the hothouse, the melodrama, and any other discernably dramatic stakes.
  15. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    Like Better Luck Tomorrow, it tries to cut cool-movie poses under the pretense of providing an alternative racial viewpoint to typical genre tropes.
  16. Exists
    In the wake of Bobcat Goldthwait's Wolf Creek, Exists's metaphorical ambitions are as under-realized as its story-circumscribing use of found footage.
  17. Camp X-Ray
    Peter Sattler's film feels quintessentially Sundance: an expensively mounted treatise on important issues that's terrified to dig in obsessively, yet so ramrod-stiff with indignation that it never comes anywhere near compelling entertainment.
  18. The Best of Me
    Even permitting that the movie's setup counts almost by default as one of Nicholas Sparks's more complicated scenarios, that makes his failure to draw up compelling, flawed, human characters all the more conspicuous.
  19. Diplomacy
    The film isn't really fooling anyone into feeling doom-laden suspense (Paris, after all, is still standing), but the principal performers sell the momentousness of the drama.
  20. 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.
  21. The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
    The soft colors, graceful movements, and clean lines together embody the ineffable beauty of life on Earth that is one of the film's main themes.
  22. Citizenfour
    Laura Poitras teaches by example, providing a privileged insight into Edward Snowden's personality and motivation while keeping the focus on government spying.
  23. Watchers of the Sky
    This is, to put it mildly, a lot of information for one documentary, which inevitably devolves to resemble not so much an anthology as a slideshow of genocide's greatest hits.
  24. Young Ones
    It avoids the typical trappings of the genre pastiche by utilizing its clear indebtedness to numerous other films as merely a starting point, rather than an end.
  25. Rudderless
    It unnecessarily hampers itself for over an hour for the sake of a gotcha moment before finally allowing its actors to explore something more than generic grief.
  26. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    It places regurgitated ideas into the mouths of gifted actors, then drops them amid a kooky story that plays like an elaborate distraction from what little the film actually has to say.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga
    The film becomes akin to variations on a theme, executed with visual finesse, and enhanced by its many rich textures.
  28. Summer of Blood
    Onur Tukel is able to offer a reasonably fresh spin on familiar vampire-movie tropes, giving pitiless misanthropy pedal-to-the-metal comic wit.
  29. Housebound
    You grow to feel as if you're arbitrarily changing the channel back and forth from a diverting horror film to a promising odd-couple comedy.
  30. Felony
    It reveals itself to be a profoundly cynical movie posing as a work of idealism, and it's all the more insidious because it's otherwise so bland and forgettable.
  31. One Chance
    David Frankel crams his story with predictable developments, yet he matches his subject in spirit, pushing something into the spotlight that, however unlikely, elicits irresistible glee.
  32. 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.
  33. Life Partners
    The romantic elements are secondary to what is essentially an astute and cleverly written dissection of a co-dependent friendship being gradually eroded by the incremental ravages of age, rivalry, and rapidly diverging personal arcs.
  34. Listen Up Philip
    By putting so much weight on his characters' speech, Alex Ross Perry's is an approach with honestly few contemporaries in American independent film.
  35. St. Vincent
    The actors create emotionally coherent and sympathetic characters from a collection of often contradictory, monumentally irresponsible, or just plain improbable actions.
  36. Dracula Untold
    It's a story arc that wouldn't be out of place on Game of Thrones, except it lacks for the HBO program's dense and surprising dramatic reflexes.
  37. The Judge
    One long trial of moral duty, and one that excuses repugnant behavior and psychological warfare in lieu of a repetitive, condescending sermon on honoring thy father.
  38. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    By formally acknowledging the material's inherent silliness ad nauseam, the filmmakers have distanced themselves from the spirit of the parody, robbing it of its gruesome pleasures.
  39. Autómata
    Much like a spate of recent summer blockbusters, there's a tiring sense that every single facet of the narrative has to be rendered with truculent solemnity.
  40. Kill the Messenger
    The film devolves quickly into a pedestrian character study that basks in Gary Webb's public shaming and victimization, losing sight of the bravery and probing talent that characterized his writing.
  41. 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.
  42. Catch Hell
    The story allows for Ryan Phillippe to indulge in a self-deprecating brand of satire, but he can't work up enough courage to ever make his character--and, by extension, himself--the brunt of any of the film's barbs.
  43. Waiting for August
    The distinct lack of domestic drama is precisely what makes the doc so gratifying as a portrait of a family averting turmoil in spite of challenging circumstances.
  44. The Overnighters
    If it ultimately can't reconcile all that's presented in its too-brief runtime, that's largely because its situation, much like the dissonance between those involved, is comprehensibly irresolvable.
  45. The Canal
    Unlike David Lynch, Ivan Kavanagh isn't interested in catching ideas like fish, of linking the degradation of film to the degradation of consciousness.
  46. The Pact 2
    Camilla Luddington refuses to predictably foreground her character's escalating fear, allowing us instead to see that fear as being at war with her inquisitive intelligence.
  47. Inherent Vice
    The dangers of filmmakers trying to replicate a golden era rather than embrace the present are part and parcel of Inherent Vice, but the ramifications are political as well.
  48. Left Behind
    Left Behind is one of those films so deeply, fundamentally terrible that it feels unwittingly high-concept.
  49. The Good Lie
    This is a Hollywood-delivered chronicle of the immigrant experience that earns its justification through good will and tact.
  50. Annabelle
    It's all a far cry from James Wan's The Conjuring, which embraced the thrill of the paranormal even as it respected its frazzled, earthbound characters.
  51. Timbuktu
    The film's criticism isn't primarily rooted in satire, but rather in fury and condemnation for those who seek to be gods while shamefully feigning to follow and praise one god.
  52. Saint Laurent
    No matter how much Bertrand Bonello varies his split screens, triptychs, and geometric screen divisions, he forgets that one of the most fashionable virtues is knowing when to leave.
  53. The Decent One
    The Decent One operates under a discursive premise so presumptuous and flimsy that its attempted function as an experiential documentary proffers little more than a book-on-tape-on-film.
  54. The Hero of Color City
    No cartoon has ever conveyed the struggle for self-actualization with such an inexpressive sense of imagination as this cheap and glorified babysitter.
  55. 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Keep On Keepin' On
    Slowly, the powerful message of heart and soul winning out over an impaired body and over-thinking mind develops into the core drama of this otherwise modest doc.
  57. Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    While the trivia value may feel tremendous, only One9's interviews with Nas, his father, Olu Dara, and his brother, Jungle, manage to make the doc legitimately moving--a history lesson in popular culture.
  58. Men, Women & Children
    Jason Reitman fails to take into account any of the positive endeavors enabled by social media, which will no doubt be used to promote and market his film.
  59. Stephen King’s A Good Marriage
    It could have used far more of King's mordant humor, which might have imbued the metaphorical autumnal proceedings with a much-needed jolt of pop anarchy, or even pathos.
  60. Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border
    The film, although it positions itself in dialogue with contemporary debates about the border, eschews a clearly delineated historical narrative.
  61. The Liberator
    It's sense of complexity is giving us masses of people moved by Simon Bolívar's words, and gorgeous sweeping vistas of the landscape backed by a stirring orchestra.
  62. Inner Demons
    There's a disingenuous offering of pathos to accompany the film's ridiculous and violent denouement.
  63. Fishing Without Nets
    Though this setup is perhaps infused with too much piety, cheating audience empathy toward the main character, it nonetheless generates a compelling air of social fatalism.
  64. Drive Hard
    Drive Hard is the action-film equivalent of one of those folks who relentlessly speak of having it tough all over as they plan their third yearly vacation.
  65. Gone Girl
    There's a comic streak to the film that suggests David Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it's the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, its insults.
  66. Days and Nights
    The drama over dinner comes in small analgesic portions, and the secrets feel canned and the dialogue is too pretty to be believable.
  67. The Equalizer
    All this should build up to a moderately engaging battle of wits, but Richard Wenk's script has little interest in wit and no capacity for psychology.
  68. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Opting for scenes that tend to be fragmented, flawed snippets from a much bigger story, the film exudes a bizarre confidence in not trying to encapsulate the singer's whole life in 120 minutes.
  69. 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.
  70. Björk: Biophilia Live
    You can't help but be impressed by how much it represents a natural, even defensive evolutionary step on its creator's part.
  71. Foxcatcher
    Of Bennett Miller's many directorial feats, his canniest is his depiction of the precariousness of bonds, and how those bonds can shift, drastically yet almost imperceptibly.
  72. Pride
    The film the tough true story has spawned is as formulaically cheery, didactically "uplifting," and fundamentally false as a Disney sports movie.
  73. Hellaware
    Michael M. Bilandic deftly captures the arrogance and despair of New York artists in their efforts to succeed in a decadent world that forces them to produce inherently epigonic work.
  74. Two Night Stand
    It's attempt at conveying a candid portrait of contemporary hookup culture and the dishonesty of online dating profiles, but the film's sentiments are all past their expiration date.
  75. Goodbye to Language 3D
    Cinema is a vernacular of domination, and quaking with revelations both formal and personal, the film attests that Godard has spent his career apologizing for it.
  76. Good People
    It only overcomes its deficiencies and gains a modicum of entertainment value precisely when it commits to its illogical storylines and exaggerated plot twists.
  77. Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
    The film is at once enabled and hindered by its utter strangeness, an intrinsic quality surely exacerbated in its English-language release.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Maps to the Stars
    If the research that Cronenberg and Wagner engaged in for Maps to the Stars oftentimes appears more entomological than sociological, there's nonetheless a plaintive chord of melancholy that plays throughout the film.
  79. Two Days, One Night
    The Dardennes believe in human value and social order being rooted in a sense of solidarity, a staggering consciousness of community that brims with a sensitivity to place, movement, and emotion.
  80. The Two Faces of January
    Superbly acted and sporadically intriguing thriller, yet it has a difficult time locating more stringent meaning and significance beyond its outward narrative of duplicitous actions and veiled motivations.
  81. Lilting
    Lilting doesn't have any momentum or any sense of ambiguity, once the setup has been established.
  82. Jauja
    Other films of this ilk use widescreen composition to highlight a terrifying existential void, but these cramped frames tend to produce the nutty energy of cabin fever.
  83. '71
    It distinguishes itself from Pual Greengrass's films by virtue of its close attention to political and moral ambiguities.
  84. Hector and the Search for Happiness
    It culminates in a weepy climax that verifies its status as a proud hunk of propaganda from America's massive self-help industry.
  85. The Maze Runner
    A curious blend of our newly acquired taste for dystopia alongside a healthy sprinkling of Lord of the Flies, the film offers familiar pleasures without prompting the sense of having already been here before.
  86. Fort Bliss
    The complicated psychological realities of army personnel require a tougher directorial treatment than the maudlin melodrama presented here.
  87. This Is Where I Leave You
    And the jury's still very much out over whether Shawn Levy is an inept comedy director masquerading as an opportunistically dramatic one, or vice versa.
  88. Pump
    The doc does a good job of avoiding partisan caterwauling, limiting its argument to a clear thesis and well-articulated supporting statements.
  89. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    All of Scott Frank's thematic concerns are little more than window dressing for a run-of-the-mill detective story in line with '90s thrillers like The Bone Collector.
  90. Whiplash
    The thrill of watching Fletcher and Neyman's fray unfold is intensified by Damien Chazelle's attention to the craft and challenge of musicianship.
  91. Reclaim
    Reclaim's highly mechanized plot ensures that the film is over before it even ends.
  92. Life's a Breeze
    A rigidly predetermined film that runs on the fumes of hackneyed plot points, squandering at nearly every turn a humanistic study of a family's struggle to maintain a tenable bond with one another.
  93. Tracks
    The feminist bent of Robyn's quest nicely shadows the film without ever being stated aloud.
  94. Swim Little Fish Swim
    It subtly counteracts the cliché that creative expression can save your life by making its protagonist a hipster Peter Pan whose creative expression is an excuse not to grow up.
  95. A Life in Dirty Movies
    Wiktor Ericsson emphasizes one of the strongest and most distinctive features of Joseph Sarno's aesthetic: his concentration on female pleasure.
  96. Art and Craft
    The filmmakers profile the prolific Mark Landis with a non-judgmental straightforwardness that allows the sheer brazenness of his scams to generate both shock and amusement.
  97. Stop the Pounding Heart
    Roberto Minervini has created a moving portrait of feminism born out of hard work and intuitiveness, but he never belittles or condescends to the faithful.
  98. Space Station 76
    As a space-opera lampoon, it's incoherent primarily because it's never clear what the filmmakers are attempting to spoof.
  99. Beloved Sisters
    It blossoms into a breezily utopian depiction of a ménage á trois whose entirely matter-of-fact presentation sets up an intriguing dissonance with the prim period setting.
  100. The Guest
    David's perversity as a character is mostly disarming for how it illuminates the sadness with which a foe can so readily be confused for a savior.
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