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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  1. I Declare War
    The film rarely takes us past its rather obvious conclusions about the potential bestial nature of kids and how that may translate to the larger battlefields.
  2. Terraferma
    Its self-seriousness never allows it to become the realist counterpoint to Aki Kaurismäki's tragicomic approach in Le Havre that one initially hopes it will be.
  3. The Artist and the Model
    This safe, solemn tale of an aged artist whose vitality is briefly revived by a pretty young thing is unconvincing as an articulation of the potentially spiritual nature of the artist/model relationship.
  4. Romeo & Juliet
    Not even when the doomed Juliet reaches for Romeo's dagger do you feel a single vicarious pain in your gut.
  5. When Comedy Went to School
    It confuses nostalgia for earth-shaking cultural upheaval, never really expounding on the actual effect of the Borscht Belt circuit's influence.
  6. Belle
    The film is concerned largely with intellectual horrors and portrays the fight against slavery rather neatly as a growing feeling of internal guilt that slowly turns society toward the light.
  7. Linsanity
    The interpolations of "heavenly" sequences of Jeremy Lin playing basketball against CGI backdrops offer a hokey visual analogue for the intersection of faith and sports in his life.
  8. Parkland
    The Peter Landesman film's overt politics are minimal, aside from defaulting to the myth of John F. Kennedy as a martyr for...something.
  9. Paradise
    The film smartly avoids the sort of cynical hijinks that characterize the majority of Vegas-set flicks, though it can't come up with anything more compelling to place in its stead.
  10. A Teacher
    We're only allowed an insufficient glimpse of the anxiousness and curiosity that drive these creatures, a tactic which feels suspiciously like hesitance masquerading as enigma.
  11. Haunter
    Vincenzo Natali emphasizes technically impressive shots in the service of predictable, boring expository beats, at the expense of elaborating on his main character's growing feelings of isolation and torment.
  12. Off Label
    Sincerely angry about the crisis in polypharmacy, this narrative suffers from a documentarian form of A.D.D.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    Amy Nicholson's documentary feels warm and fuzzy about its subject, but at the same time depersonalized.
  14. Neighbors
    The promo materials implore viewers to vote either #TeamFrat or #TeamFamily on Twitter, though the audience is way more likely to be split between #TeamPecEfron and #TeamByrneBoobsplosion.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Student
    If Santiago Mitre doesn't transcend the issues of the writer's film with quite the grace of A Separation, he nonetheless manages to make good use of a fine cast.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    C.O.G.
    As an adaptation of Davis Sedaris's short essay from his acclaimed 1997 compilation, Naked, it's a letdown, as it doesn't exude the pop of the author's trademark humor.
  17. Wadjda
    It doesn't play like reality, but like boilerplate filmic fantasy, and its novel setting and inception struggles seem positioned as a beard--or veil, if you will--to mask its mediocrity.
  18. Devil's Pass
    As Renny Harlin's career progresses, it seems more and more that his early gems were merely happy accidents.
  19. Il Futuro
    A counterproductively "literary" film with no satisfying payoffs, Rutger Hauer's blind recluse notwithstanding.
  20. Get On Up
    As if taking a cue from its own title, the movie emphatically sets its sights on the upward trajectory of Brown's career.
  21. All Is Bright
    All Is Bright remains engaging, for the most part, but most of the big narrative turns feel both predictable and forced, and at odds with the natural charms of the cast.
  22. Out in the Dark
    Instead of looking for depth or verisimilar romance, director Michael Mayer turns his characters into mere cogs in a pseudo-suspenseful thriller.
  23. The Invisible Woman
    Ralph Fiennes's film feels not so much rooted in the past as it is mired in conventions about how to portray that past.
  24. Palo Alto
    It presents little that wasn't already done better in "Myth of the American Sleepover," an equally evocative tale of longing that was far more successful at matching teen tropes with atmospheric naturalism.
  25. Life of Crime
    Down to its too-crisp rubber Nixon masks, Daniel Schechter's film revels in obnoxiously self-aware period detail.
  26. Philomena
    A human-interest story that claims spite for human-interest stories, the film has some pretty divisive issues at its core that leave it torn between contrasting approaches.
  27. The Green Inferno
    The savagery here is rooted in retrograde myths that might have been easier to stomach had the cannibalism been positioned as a fantastical unleashing of retribution.
  28. Child of God
    James Franco's general aesthetic is ugly and ambling, not so much because of its brownish-gray monochrome, but because it registers like the jerky result of a college kid wielding a DV cam.
  29. How I Live Now
    There are a few effectively disquieting sequences early on, but the film never recovers from director Kevin Macdonald's indifferent staging of a pivotal moment.
  30. The Unknown Known
    Viewers' tolerance for Errol Morris's apparent sheepishness will hinge on their prior appreciation of the filmmaker's investigative acumen.
  31. The Last Days on Mars
    The film's visual construction is spare, drawing power from its locations and quietly matted miniatures, though ultimately it succumbs to powering a series of cheap thrills.
  32. Dark Touch
    The film is beholden to a strange internal logic that gives primacy not to its protagonist's suffering, but to its maker's thirst for fun.
  33. Cinderella
    The filmmakers cut the film to emphasize the story's familiar plot points, rather than highlight any instances of personal visual artistry.
  34. Beauty and the Beast
    Christophe Gans’s telling of Beauty and the Beast abounds in impersonal and unsatisfying sumptuousness.
  35. Camille Claudel 1915
    Juliette Binoche's face, as we know, can tell a million stories in a simple and brief rearrangement of her facial muscles.
  36. Blood Brother
    Rocky's journey of self-realization undoubtedly has a universal resonance to it that intermittently yields poignant and inspiring moments. But where are the poor Indian kids in all of this?
  37. In the Name Of
    This Polish "gay priest tempted" drama is almost as confused about the moral quandaries of its characters as they are.
  38. Bettie Page Reveals All
    Mark Mori goes a bit overboard in hammering home his appreciation of Bettie Page's significance, allowing the film to occasionally lapse into repetitiveness.
  39. The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers
    The documentary is dressed to the nines in pomp and patriotism, which seems meant to hide the fact that the film offers very little in the way of valuable reporting or insider information.
  40. 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.
  41. Endless Love
    Shana Feste's film seems blissfully unaware that great fights require truly substantial conflicts.
  42. Running from Crazy
    The modern-day sections with Mariel Hemingway, while detailing the redemptive promise of the title, too often come across as either indulgent time-filler or overflow with PSA-level superficiality.
  43. Beyond Outrage
    If Takeshi Kitano does go forward with the rumored third volume, hopefully he'll conceive of some fresh angle on this increasingly dry material.
  44. Go for Sisters
    LisaGay Hamilton and Yolonda Ross play persuasively embody modern urban feminine strength, but they're eventually stranded in a recycled road movie.
  45. It's Me, It's Me
    Alternating between self-consciously offbeat comedy and existential J-horror, It's Me, It's Me never quite satisfies in either mode.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Name Is Nobody
    Part elegy for the Old West, part in-jokey celebration of the spaghetti western’s popular ascendance over classical Hollywood models, My Name Is Nobody plays like a deeply schizoid production, albeit an amiable enough one that manages several brilliant passages.
  47. The Adventurer: The Curse of the Midas Box
    The film gradually reveals a lot of unsavory motives, which ultimately deflate the buoyant virtues on which the film had blithely coasted.
  48. Caught in the Web
    The film opts for didactic resolution instead of fully committing to the contradictions in identity and agency its main character embodies.
  49. Free Ride
    Shana Betz's too-insistent refusal to commit to the melodramatic or to the suspenseful only makes the film seem like empty dramatization.
  50. The Punk Singer
    Sini Anderson's film may be another unimaginative fan letter, but at least Kathleen Hannah is worthy of such devotion.
  51. Insidious: Chapter 3
    In lieu of advancing a view of the dead's dominion that doesn't abide by the law of "just becauses," Chapter 3 is often content to wink at the ways the first two films spooked audiences.
  52. 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.
  53. Jane Got a Gun
    It constantly blunders into stylistic choices and narrative clichés that sabotage the sturdy two-hander at its center.
  54. The Mummy
    Too much is at stake throughout, leading to formulaic plot filler and exposition that snuff out the spark of the early scenes.
  55. Cymbeline
    The source material, which is convoluted even by Shakespeare's narratively dexterous standards, is admittedly a tough nut for a filmmaker to crack.
  56. All the Light in the Sky
    In Joe Swanberg's disaffected little film, the drama is never explicit, or even fully conscious.
  57. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    A Little Golden Book version of drastically simplified socialism accompanied with a healthy dose of warmongering bravado.
  58. Adult World
    The title of Scott Coffey's new film is a pretty obvious double entendre, but it does efficiently convey the good intentions behind this scattershot production.
  59. 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.
  60. 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.
  61. Masterminds
    Jared Hess's film turns out to be a succession of failed jokes punctuated by a few cathartic laughs.
  62. 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.
  63. Magic in the Moonlight
    A film of obvious characterizations and even more obvious plot machinations that render its moment-to-moment charms moot.
  64. For No Good Reason
    Charlie Paul isn't content to let his stock footage and interviewees lead for him, driven as he is to "make something out of a frame of mind," though to needlessly busy effect.
  65. God Help the Girl
    Stuart Murdoch clearly knows quite a bit about crafting pop tunes, but the film's consideration of the work of songwriting is totally flippant.
  66. Exposed
    Beyond the forthright identity politics and titillating theatrical misdemeanors, one still comes away wondering about the things that remain concealed.
  67. If You Build It
    It isn't until the rushed conclusion when director Patrick Creadon shows the possibilities of what the documentary could have been.
  68. The Cut
    Fatih Akin falls back on convenience and contrivance to streamline the thornier specificities of his grand-scale narrative.
  69. 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.
  70. The Theory of Everything
    Meticulous in its adherence to conventional narrative inducement, this biopic only offers a sanded-down and embossed vision of Stephen Hawking and Jane Wilde's 30-year marriage.
  71. Aloha
    After a while, the film's sing-a-song-for-the-world vibe, so buoyantly optimistic at first, becomes grating and smug.
  72. Generation War
    The perverse thrill of seeing less-than-popular considerations of Nazism on screen fades hurriedly to the old ache of seeing any kind of questions about Nazism answered noxiously.
  73. I Origins
    It treats its characters as placeholders for philosophical arguments and spends the majority of its running time trying to "solve" existential mysteries without adequately exploring them.
  74. 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.
  75. Calvary
    One may feel dissatisfied by the 11th-hour turn toward lyrical fatalism, and mildly insulted by the presumptuous attitude it seems to choose as it sends us on our way.
  76. 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.
  77. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    A sequel that functions as origin story, apologia, and harbinger of a second expanded universe of overpopulated action bonanzas.
  78. Hellion
    Both film and protagonist are troubled works in progress that shuffle and meander and frequently falter, but occasionally sing.
  79. The Bag Man
    The premise might make sense, if only hypocritically, but the film abandons this already flimsy parody of macho pride disastrously at the last minute.
  80. Special ID
    The audience becomes conditioned to expect the action a few moves before the film makes them, which quickly renders the story tedious.
  81. The Art of the Steal
    An energetic but paper-thin genre exercise, filled with pleasant riffs on the standard heist flick, but ultimately lacking in payoff.
  82. Cheap Thrills
    The film's clearest winner is Pat Healy, whose depiction of a man willing to corrode his entire life to provide for his wife and kid feels true despite the script's silliest moments.
  83. Rob the Mob
    For the most part, it's a gas, but the light touch Raymond De Felitta gives the material is at once its saving grace and its tremendous limiter.
  84. Teenage
    It botches itself out of its own epic ambitions, an aesthetic slickness that seems to contradict, if not betray, its subject matter, and a maddeningly subdued critical spirit.
  85. A Coffee In Berlin
    Jan Ole Gerster seems infatuated with his main character, but to little avail beyond reveling in his aimless despair.
  86. Goodbye World
    The tetchy band of thirtysomethings' interpersonal problems are infinitely less compelling than the mysterious and original global disaster the filmmakers have devised.
  87. Island of Lemurs: Madagascar
    What results is a lopsided, put-upon narrative of survival where humans, and not the animals themselves, are the ones to be celebrated.
  88. 13 Sins
    Daniel Stamm's film is solidly helmed, if expectedly over-reliant on unnecessarily grisly comeuppances that leave nothing to the imagination.
  89. Easy Money: Hard to Kill
    There's ultimately little in the way of authentically resonant drama underneath the film's self-conscious busy-ness.
  90. Better Living Through Chemistry
    A sexily chaotic parody of entitlement becomes just another tale of a white dude learning that there are worse things in life than essentially having no problems.
  91. Cooties
    It makes an occasionally spirited pretense of injecting the tensions of the United States's educational system into a familiar zombie-siege scenario.
  92. Blind
    Unfortunately, the film's occasionally thrilling visual sleight-of-hand comes at the ultimate service of a boilerplate early-mid-life-crisis drama.
  93. Jobriath A.D.
    The film never explores the depths and nuances that could actually place Jobriath in conversation with figures who came after him, however reductively.
  94. As Above, So Below
    The film predictably alternates in scaring its characters by tapping into their deepest fears and having them rub shoulders with the relics of a past that insists on being undisturbed.
  95. The Fault in Our Stars
    It takes few chances, frequently using sass as a smokescreen, hiding what's unoriginal and cheaply sentimental about this story behind a veil of witticisms about oblivion and "cancer perks."
  96. The Dance of Reality
    Alejandro Jodorowsky never manages to transcend the sense that he's indulging himself and participating in a hollow introspection unworthy of his prior cinema.
  97. Earth to Echo
    The constant foregrounding of so much well-executed incident only works to shortchange the heroes' yearnings and anxieties.
  98. Black Out
    The film's various references to other stylistic touchstones, while thematically apt, rarely carry any sort of critical inquiry.
  99. Two Lives
    The film's educational impetus is to announce to the world that even picture-perfect Norwegians continue to pay a heavy price for the horrors of WWII.
  100. Mistaken for Strangers
    Adds up little more than an anguished man using the hook of following his famous brother in order to gaze, however critically, at his reflection for 75 minutes.
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