Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. The Zero Theorem
    Terry Gilliam has imposed a mix tape of his greatest hits, whose greatness was debatable to begin with, on a whiff of a story that might've flourished under the maxim "less is more."
  2. Tusk
    It suggests the worst possible gene splice of a barbed Terrance and Phillip South Park appearance, Fargo's blithe condescension, and the smuggest of Quentin Tarantino pastiches.
  3. 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.
  4. The Drop
    With its optimistic ending, the film muddies its previous statements regarding the danger of unthinkingly hanging on to totems of the past.
  5. The Skeleton Twins
    Craig Johnson's film is ultimately most interested in what its jokes are implying or obscuring about the jokesters themselves.
  6. Archaeology of a Woman
    It purports to be an incisive character study dramatized through outré "dream logic," but Sharon Greytak's ineptitude at this very Lynchian aesthetic sucks all nuance and spirit out of the film.
  7. Mr. Turner
    An astute summation of Mike Leigh's glum view of humanity, but also a challenge to this disposition and his own pessimistic perspective.
  8. My Old Lady
    Israel Horovitz's film is basically a three-character play without a single character you can believe in.
  9. At the Devil's Door
    An accumulation of dread in search of a properly fleshed-out screenplay to sustain it, the film plays like a show reel for writer-director Nicholas McCarthy's considerable craft.
  10. Bird People
    Pascale Ferran's film isn't daring enough to fully embrace the narrative fragmentation that it sporadically assumes.
  11. The Man on Her Mind
    The film suggests an ineffectual mishmash of Ruby Sparks-ish high concept and modern Elizabethan comedy.
  12. Honeymoon
    It waffles between dramatizing youthful self-absorption and succumbing to it, and this tonal instability comes to effectively mirror the domestic discord that's revealed to be its real subject.
  13. The Green Prince
    The proceedings have such a rigidly determined structure, amplified by chapter titles, that the power and conviction in their recountings deteriorate into a placid series of back-and-forths.
  14. Dolphin Tale 2
    Writer-director Charles Martin Smith's tin ear for dialogue and contrived symbolism is as unmistakable as his enormous heart.
  15. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    The film abounds in excruciatingly obvious, often precious, articulations of grief, where armchair philosophizing volleys back and forth with punishing abandon.
  16. Rocks in My Pockets
    This inventive animated feature about depression and familial roots suggests NPR's "The Moth" storytelling series by way of Persepolis, mixing mesmerizing memoir monologue with whimsical animation.
  17. Wetlands
    For its general ludic obsession with all things generally thought of as disgusting, the German film Wetlands is stuck in the anal stage.
  18. The Blue Room
    The film abounds in guilt and grief, reveling in a general sense of hopelessly broken social connection.
  19. Last Days in Vietnam
    For American viewers who don't know, the doc will be a worthy footnote to a long bout of deliberate cultural amnesia, but it's too telling that the Vietnamese remain in the background.
  20. 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.
  21. Life of Riley
    Alain Resnais's overpoweringly beautiful final film dares to push through the ghosts that inhabit the present, standing between the pessimism of an ill-spent past and the optimism of an undefined future.
  22. Gringo Trails
    Pegi Vail beautifully edited film somehow addresses a lot, but ultimately says nothing at all.
  23. Kelly & Cal
    A romantic drama complicated by a stroller and a wheelchair, and its first mistake is in assuming some kind of equity between the two vehicles.
  24. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The pleasure in watching the film becomes a linguistic one as Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart masterfully sharpen their words and hurl them at each other like projectiles out of a blowpipe.
  25. Frontera
    By turns abrasive and stately, sermonic and impartial, plot-heavy and meandering, often within seconds of each other.
  26. Memphis
    The film's music is the city itself as well as a subtle suggestion that Tim Sutton's own digital cinema is just as elusive and intangible as Willis's unwavering sense of dissatisfaction.
  27. Naked Opera
    A film that outwardly wants its depiction of class privilege to be ridiculing and farcical, but lacks the ability to express these critiques in lieu of the means of the class on the chopping block.
  28. The Identical
    The film's so preoccupied with being "inspirational" that it disastrously fails to evoke the allure of rock n' roll, particularly in America in the 1950s, when it represented an erosion of racial and sexual barriers.
  29. 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.
  30. Life of Crime
    Down to its too-crisp rubber Nixon masks, Daniel Schechter's film revels in obnoxiously self-aware period detail.
  31. The November Man
    Roger Donaldson embellishes an already overly plotty scenario with hollowly attractive genre superfluities.
  32. Starred Up
    The cautious optimism with which it answers questions about rehabilitation and forgiveness is credible because the characters and setting feel so thoroughly authentic.
  33. The Naked Room
    By eschewing even basic B-roll footage, it ends up feeling even more stripped down than Frederick Wiseman's patient inquisitions, yet nearly as complex overall.
  34. The Damned
    From its first draw of blood onward, it bolts down a foreseeable slasher-movie trajectory, laying on thick the dramatic irony while constantly inventing new reasons to punish its characters for old iniquities.
  35. The Notebook
    János Szász's film is a thoroughly provocative WWII screed that almost deliberately goes out of its way to avoid sentimentality or bathos of any sort.
  36. Last Weekend
    The filmmakers are content to idealize everyone's unchecked narcissism and idle privilege--an inquiry-free recipe for disaster in an age when the American wealth gap is wider and more detrimental than ever.
  37. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    The film's attempt at political commentary amounts to a half-baked treatise on good governance in the face of tyranny and socioeconomic exploitation.
  38. The Calling
    The premise of faith-based assisted suicide as a motivating factor for a madman's killing spree is initially intriguing, but quickly revealed as solemn window dressing.
  39. Stray Dogs
    Tsai isn't making a social-problem film here, and his critique of patriarchal control is secondary to his portrait of unbearable psychic conditions.
  40. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    Thomas Allen Harris's documentary consistently takes agency away from the art itself with a litany of talking heads.
  41. 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.
  42. If I Stay
    The film, based on the novel by Gayle Forman, is an almost deliberate confirmation of Alison Bechdel's claim that women in film are so often shown only in relation to men.
  43. When the Game Stands Tall
    Jim Caviezel commits only to the level of God-like omniscience that Mel Gibson whipped into him a decade ago, and as such his character often seems less a teacher than an appropriately shadowy figurehead of authority.
  44. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    Whereas a single, stinging one-liner would have sufficed Jacques Tourneur or Fritz Lang, Frank Miller's overcompensating flood of pulpy dialogue only renders his characters flat and sans empathy.
  45. Winter in the Blood
    Its offbeat aesthetic largely flaunts for appeal, suffocating character and thematic ambition underneath its flashiness.
  46. Kink
    More than just a thorough examination of hardcore pornography, Christina Voros's doc is also a sort of chronicle of the filmmaking process.
  47. Metro Manila
    Sean Ellis doesn't so much understand Filipino society as merely sees it as grist for standard genre fare, perhaps hoping that the foreign setting will somehow automatically make the clichés feel fresh.
  48. I Am Happiness on Earth
    If the film defies conventional form, it does so without the gravitas that conceptual cohesion brings, quickly rendering its experimentation into gratuitous aesthetic masturbation.
  49. To Be Takei
    Jennifer M. Kroot plays things a bit too straight and safe by giving into basic emotional and thematic possibilities of each period in Takei's prolific early life and subsequent Hollywood career.
  50. Love Is Strange
    Ira Sachs's push for heartrending poetry makes it clear that the film is putting too fine a gloss on the acute pains of one small tragedy.
  51. 14 Blades
    An immensely gifted physical performer, Donnie Yen isn't strong enough an actor to suggest an authentic inner life to his character beyond a vague sense of stone-faced dissatisfaction.
  52. See You Next Tuesday
    The film is uproariously funny, but its laughs don't come with an aftertaste of cynicism so much as they are the aftertaste of cynicism.
  53. Expedition to the End of the World
    A visual pleasure, and refreshingly free of message or structure, but it leaves an aftertaste similar to that of an awkward party spent among intellectuals.
  54. May in the Summer
    Cherien Dabis is least successful at connecting her character May's marital crisis to the rumblings of her repressed heritage.
  55. Cam2Cam
    Lost in this barely coherent and clichéd hugger-mugger is the initial killer-website conceit and the attending erotic dread, which is retrospectively revealed to be an illusory siren call.
  56. Are You Here
    The female characters on Mad Men are probably the show's strongest asset, but here they're hollow to the point of insult.
  57. The Giver
    The internal crisis of its protagonist amounts to the flicking of an on/off switch rather than the ebb and flow of a consciousness being born.
  58. Level Five
    Level Five pictorializes the cruel moment when curiosity encounters tragedy, and the all-too-human abandonment of interest that can follows.
  59. Ragnarok
    In the end, any and all potential B-movie fun is extinguished by Ragnarok's depressingly listless anonymity.
  60. Mr. X
    For a life beyond mere DVD supplementary material, the film could use a dose of rigor to balance out its steady stream of congratulatory pit stops.
  61. We Are Mari Pepa
    The film finally works because of its multitudinous interests in adolescent shell-shock, where paralysis and uncertainty can only be momentarily assuaged through gendered outrage.
  62. Coldwater
    It comes as no surprise that writer-director Vincent Grashaw wrote the first draft of this movie soon after graduating high school.
  63. The Expendables 3
    For all the brawn on display, the film never slows down to take in the thrill and talent of hand-to-hand combat.
  64. Frank
    The film boldly raises the unanswerable question of whether it's better for an artist to safely isolate his work or tweak it a bit so as to share it with the world.
  65. Dinosaur 13
    To some extent, the use of a wide aspect ratio and the doc's emphatic score takes its cues from paleontologist Pete Larson's passion.
  66. Moebius
    A kind of silent opera in which the actors' precise facial emoting and a muscular editing rhythm create a melodrama by turns horrific and hilarious.
  67. Life After Beth
    Jeff Baena's film, at heart, is just another overly familiar story of a boy struggling to get over his first love and who's rewarded for his troubles with a less volatile replacement model.
  68. The Trip to Italy
    Michael Winterbottom and his gifted actors still haven't quite solved the riddle of portraying social disconnection in a manner that's anything other than sporadically involving.
  69. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    The film is rife with tired food metaphors and plot twists so predictable you see them coming like travelers on the poplar-lined street that leads to the dueling restaurants.
  70. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    A film so overworked to ensure mass-market appeal that it loses the charming oddness and loose goofiness that has allowed these characters to endure.
  71. Into the Storm
    There are many instances of questionable logic in Into the Storm, but the most persistent is the film's unexplained assumption that tornado-hunting is a growth industry.
  72. Web Junkie
    Without a frame of footage nor a single interview presented from outside the camp, the documentary shows a capitalist nightmare that accords its victims zero wiggle room.
  73. Deepsea Challenge 3D
    Less explored in all the ensuing back-patting is the question of whether Cameron is, in fact, sincerely interested in learning more about the world around him or whether this mission is merely intended to stroke his own ego.
  74. What Now? Remind Me
    The repetitive rhythms of Joaquim Pinto's daily routines provide the film with a feeling of serenity that stands in contrast to the man's underlying anxiety.
  75. About Alex
    However self-aware the film may be, its characters and moods and conflicts are too over-determined and familiar to linger in the memory very long after the credits roll.
  76. Fifi Howls from Happiness
    Mitra Farahani rescues the doc from becoming a talking-head fest by embracing her creative self as a character and exposing the travails of her own authorship process.
  77. After
    Throughout After, the filmmakers crank the trials of the film's Valentino family up to 11, sans irony or subversion.
  78. The Dog
    It's informed with a subtle but disquieting subtext that insists on the pitfalls of allowing ideology to steer you away from common sense.
  79. The Maid's Room
    Drina is less of an individual, and one whom we wish to see avenged, than a transparent martyr for the collective sins of the wealthy few.
  80. What If
    Right up to its simplistic ending, the film is pleased to regurgitate the contrived tropes of the genre without ever honestly addressing the ethics of romantic boundaries.
  81. The Almost Man
    The script is perspicacious in making Henrik's bad choices understandable enough emotionally, but also nudges the audience toward wishing the man would wise up.
  82. Guardians of the Galaxy
    For every scene that soars into the dizzying heights of the pop sublime, there's another that crashes back down into the mundane troughs of studio-mandated formula.
  83. 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.
  84. Rich Hill
    Rich Hill is poverty porn, examining lower-class spaces with pity as its operative mode and engendering little more than a means for viewers to leave the film acknowledging its sadness.
  85. 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.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Strange Little Cat
    As pleasant and effortless as Ramon Zürcher makes his formal persnicketiness and Akermanian aesthetic rigor seem, his film feels lightweight.
  87. War Story
    Mark Jackson's direction strips much of the agency from any character's grasp by insisting that their dilemmas can only be revealed with stone-faced austerity.
  88. Finding Fela!
    Alex Gibney uses archival and Broadway footage so seamlessly that telling the difference between reality and recreation becomes not only difficult, but one of the film's central metaphors.
  89. Louder Than Words
    Never once does it project an intuitive understanding of how humans would behave or react in the midst of such a shattering misfortune.
  90. The Killer Inside Me
    The result isn't drama so much as a waking nightmare of play-acting and predestined doom.
  91. Happy Christmas
    Joe Swanberg's films have grown into a reliable relief from the competitive, dehumanizing freneticism of much of American culture, marked by an affirming and understated sense of decency.
  92. 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.
  93. Cabin Fever: Patient Zero
    This is less a movie than a dutiful renewal of a recognizable title's licensing rights.
  94. Behaving Badly
    Falls back on the trappings of the film's innumerable teenage gross-out forefathers with tiresome vulgarity and rote misunderstandings in place of genuine insight.
  95. Hercules
    The film fluctuates haphazardly between semi-serious reverence and tongue-in-cheek camp, with no shortage of opportunities for the inevitable Rifftrax accompaniment.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Abuse of Weakness
    Breillat's scripting of Maud as fatally distant from her family, willfully independent, but more believably abandoned, is haunting.
  97. Lucy
    Vulgar auteurist Luc Besson finally commits wholeheartedly to his decades-long preoccupation with waifish young women discovering their inner Shiva, spinning the concept out to its most delirious possible extremes.
  98. Magic in the Moonlight
    A film of obvious characterizations and even more obvious plot machinations that render its moment-to-moment charms moot.
  99. And So It Goes
    Just as Michael Douglas doesn't have it in his guts to make Oren a real son of a bitch (a grandpa Gekko), Diane Keaton's jangled neurotic tics lack any dramatic import.
  100. A Master Builder
    Jonathan Demme makes loving sport of the trust his actors have clearly placed in him, erecting for them a monument to the joys and terrors of walking an emotional high wire.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »