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 Kill Team
    This is a rare War on Terror military exposé, one almost exclusively interested in the hearts and minds of low-ranking soldiers.
  2. Cannibal
    It keeps us at a remove that becomes telling of the filmmaker's reticence to explore whatever feelings of isolation and yearning may inform his main character's grisly compulsion.
  3. Beneath
    The film is impersonal and populated with wisps of characters who spend most of the running time wandering around in the dark yelling at one another.
  4. Alive Inside
    The doc is heartwarming, but it doesn't delve deeply into the backstories that inform the ailing patients' connection to the music that stirs their memories.
  5. Planes: Fire & Rescue
    It's not even made clear whether the machines can feel pain. But after sitting through Fire & Rescue, interminable even at a lean 83 minutes, I sincerely hope they do.
  6. Sex Tape
    By the time a blackmailing plot is introduced, the film seems to be surviving solely on the fumes of curse words and frequent shots of Jason Segal and Cameron Diaz's backsides.
  7. The Purge: Anarchy
    DeMonaco may doubly, sometimes triply, underline the story's governing theme of social power and how it's exchanged, but the rage and lucidity of these ideas resonate.
  8. Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
    Between their wildly different bodies of work, a shared appeal emerges: to stop, look, listen, and consider not just what's in front of you, but also where it came from and where it might be going.
  9. Wish I Was Here
    It's hard to see the fiscal woes at the center of Zach Braff's second feature as anything more than a fashionable depiction of first-world problems.
  10. Persecuted
    There's no attempt to convince us that the world is being corrupted by people who haven't accepted the Gospel; it merely assumes we agree with that idea.
  11. Fanny
    The characters, the sets, and the scenes all exist to propagate the notion that pleasure derives from repetition and remediation.
  12. 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.
  13. A Five Star Life
    The director diligently keeps her heroine's ego in check, and that's awfully principled of her, but her audience may feel as if they've inadvertently booked a trip with no destination.
  14. Video Games: The Movie
    Jeremy Snead's doc comes off more as a commercial for a grand, overarching product that isn't finished being developed.
  15. 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.
  16. Affluenza
    The film is like an episode of Gossip Girl that's mistaken itself for one of the great satires by Evelyn Waugh.
  17. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
    This is a summer blockbuster contingent on grand bargains, tactical retreats, and a ferocious, inevitable shock-and-awe campaign.
  18. Made in America
    What could have been a spirited dissection of Jay-Z's optimistic enterprise is instead merely an advertisement for it.
  19. Rage
    Paco Cabezas's film is little more than a revenge relic pretending that the ethical treatise of David Cronenberg's A History of Violence never happened.
  20. Closed Curtain
    The next step in Jafar Panahi's personal cinema of captivity, a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse.
  21. The Empty Hours
    Aarón Fernández captures one of the most heartening elements of sex: that it doesn't always oblige our rules or expectations.
  22. Honour
    Paddy Considine's benumbed ambiguity at least works against writer-director Shan Khan's reduction of honor killings to grist for the cheapest of pulpy thrills.
  23. A Long Way Down
    An inept trifle, Pascal Chaumeil's film reduces Nick Hornby's novel of the same name to a series of smug self-help gestures.
  24. Tammy
    Ben Falcone's film is an almost plotless doodle, with low stakes made even lower thanks to the bratty passivity of its titular antiheroine.
  25. America: Imagine a World Without Her
    Beholden to the same plethora of taboos, half-truths, and outright lies traded en masse by mainstream conservatism for the last seven years.
  26. Earth to Echo
    The constant foregrounding of so much well-executed incident only works to shortchange the heroes' yearnings and anxieties.
  27. Wrinkles
    In its visionary dream and flashback sequences, the film becomes a comment on the rapidly diminished state of traditional animation.
  28. Me and You
    Not even Bernardo Bertolucci's choice of a lead actor with visible facial acne scars, in a welcome gesture toward authenticity, is enough to overcome the gaping hole of psychological nuance at the center of the film.
  29. Gabrielle
    Writer-director Louise Archambault's neatly affirmative denouement is at odds with the more uncertain reality occurring at the edges of the film's drama.
  30. Deliver Us From Evil
    A jump scare isn't just a jump scare in the films of Scott Derrickson, which isn't to say this wannabe master of horror has entirely perfected the art of sudden dread.
  31. Marius
    Daniel Auteuil's less exercising diligent homage than indulging troglodytic cinephilia.
  32. Life Itself
    There's a sense throughout of Steve James rushing and dutifully covering all his bases to evade accusations of creating a puff piece.
  33. Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger
    It seems too enamored with the seductive notion of an honorable criminal, too ready to take Bulger's justifications as actual indications of his relative innocence.
  34. Siddharth
    A well-intentioned story of an impoverished father searching for his missing child is muddled by an ambitious sociological agenda in Richie Mehta's film.
  35. They Came Together
    What results is chaotic but ultimately focused, bound by an intense devotion to disassembling genre and narrative standards.
  36. Begin Again
    It's a film that lives in the high and not in the comedown, even though its characters are often stalled and wallowing.
  37. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    The film is far from a technical matter, fiercely promoting Swartz's legacy and challenging us with the same questions its central subject was compelled to ask.
  38. Under the Electric Sky
    Just as queerness is conspicuous by its absence, so is any serious consideration of the drug use that often pairs with extended tastings of EDM.
  39. Nothing Bad Can Happen
    A film so comprehensively miscalculated in its desire to be a batshit think piece that it potentially creates a new category of offense.
  40. Jackpot
    Guy Ritchie may have creatively moved on from his Tarantino-inspired debut, but international crime cinema has not, as again evidenced by Magnus Martens's film.
  41. Snowpiercer
    The film preaches resolutely to the choir, and cinephiles in sync with the film's politics may still blanch at how snugly their interests are courted.
  42. Yves Saint Laurent
    For all of the supposed passion and anguish in Saint Laurent's clothing and relationships, Jalil Lespert consistently neglects to imbue the film with such a comparable level of ambition or desire.
  43. Dear White People
    Like the movie itself, every character is a beautiful swirl of contradictions.
  44. A Summer's Tale
    A Summer's Tale's linear structure and sense of observation is simple yet inspired.
  45. Think Like a Man Too
    That this retrograde "straight talk" somehow managed to emerge on screen as a reasonably genial ensemble comedy speaks to the strength of its performers.
  46. Jersey Boys
    However messy this overextended and oddly compelling work feels from moment to moment, the end result evokes the life of working artists without sentimentality or undue grandeur.
  47. Exhibition
    There's considerable talent on display in Exhibition, but it's the kind of thing people mean when they use the term "art film" as a pejorative.
  48. Third Person
    If the glue holding Crash's arcs together was Paul Haggis's belief in the power of racism, this time it's love.
  49. Northern Light
    The film has an atmosphere of endless experimentation, which compliments the constant revision the subjects apply to their lives in the wake of their economic insecurity.
  50. The Last Sentence
    Though ambitiously busy, the film is also self-sabotaging and stagnant, showcasing its main character's struggles without interpreting them into a cohesive thesis.
  51. Boyhood
    Richard Linklater's film is an experiment in time, and one that's attentive to the audience's sense of empathy.
  52. Miss Lovely
    The women of the film certainly deserve better, as they're often relegated to the role of victim, harmed or murdered simply to propel the plot along.
  53. Coherence
    The film's impression of personas is less traditionally sinister than representative of its inquiry into identity and what happens when social barriers begin to fall away.
  54. The Rover
    Robert Pattinson's stare is almost thousand-yard enough to make the film's sense of tragedy feel downright Greek.
  55. Jealousy
    Like an astutely aching ballad, the film—aptly scored with sweet, strumming beats by Jean-Louis Aubert—is pleased to ambiguously infer the interior logic of its irresolute characters without pigeonholing their motivations.
  56. Lullaby
    Garrett Hedlund's performance throbs with an anguish that's far more honest than the sentimental euthanasia subplot at the center of the film.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Burning Bush
    The decentralized narrative benefits from the film's original conception as a miniseries, with plenty of time to draw us into the morass that was the communist state.
  58. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    It has the core of a genuine crowd-pleaser, but unfortunately something bigger and more all-consuming keeps getting into its head.
  59. The Amazing Catfish
    The familiar premise is done with enough intelligence and heartfelt conviction that it rises above its potentially cliché trappings.
  60. Ivory Tower
    The documentary is more interested in covering all its bases than making sure it fully has its foot on each base.
  61. Violette
    By focusing on the tumultuous friendship between Violette LeDuc and Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Provost creates not so much a dichotomy of femininity as a funhouse mirror of it.
  62. Hellion
    Both film and protagonist are troubled works in progress that shuffle and meander and frequently falter, but occasionally sing.
  63. Return to Homs
    The film is a testament to the power of video to document resistance to corrupt and abusive regimes, but it's also a witness to the limits of that power.
  64. Witching and Bitching
    Álex de la Iglesia has a real flair for wild action sequences that remain exhilaratingly coherent and sensical.
  65. Heli
    The emotional and political point through all this isn't to be taken lightly, but because the entirety of the film has such a nihilistic temperament, its effect is muted.
  66. Test
    Adept as both timely character study and epochal drama, Test wonderfully manages fully formed humanism without sentimentality.
  67. A Coffee In Berlin
    Jan Ole Gerster seems infatuated with his main character, but to little avail beyond reveling in his aimless despair.
  68. 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.
  69. Policeman
    Israel's fractured psyche is plumbed via narrative splintering in Policeman, Nadav Lapid's compelling drama about his homeland's burgeoning social unrest.
  70. All Cheerleaders Die
    Frontloaded with a surprising amount of plot, the film takes forever to get going, but it's the filmmakers' hypocrisy that really grates.
  71. 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."
  72. Edge of Tomorrow
    Tom Cruise's participation transmutes, as it always does, everything around him, turning the movie's series of false starts, dead ends, and hard lessons into a working metaphor for his own career.
  73. Borgman
    An art-house con destined to make viewers who've ever used the term "mindfuck" as praise rack their brains trying to come up with alternate readings for a film that invites many but convincingly offers none.
  74. Trust Me
    Almost none of the film's characters or scenarios escape feeling contrived under writer-director-star Clark Gregg's bizarro tonal shifts and plot developments.
  75. Citizen Koch
    Like their earlier Trouble the Water, Carl Deal and Tia Lessin portray men and women yearning for a simple place in society as they become casualties to the self-involvement of larger forces.
  76. The Moment
    The film is a hybrid of a Lifetime movie focused on a "strong woman," a run-of-the-mill murder mystery, and a yogurt commercial from hell.
  77. Dormant Beauty
    The film puts too many elements into play, which means it ends up darting hopelessly between a series of underdeveloped storylines.
  78. Ping Pong Summer
    A heartfelt retro flashback littered with pop-culture iconography and much slang, it focuses on the importance of friendship and loyalty rather than social standing.
  79. Master of the Universe
    Marc Bauder's documentary quietly detonates the conservative notion that our largest corporations should be allowed to duke it out in metaphorical no-holds-barred cage matches.
  80. Willow Creek
    Bobcat Goldthwait exposes the characteristic male pursuit of power to which females are often made subservient.
  81. The Sacrament
    With The Sacrament, director Ti West has bitten off more of a premise than his classically modest barebones approach to horror movies can presently chew.
  82. Maleficent
    We may have all wanted to know the story behind those famed horns, but the mystery was far preferable to having Maleficent de-fanged and de-clawed in the process.
  83. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    All the whiny point-scoring is such an explicit appeal for audience sympathy that the dialogue feels derived from a malnourished stand-up routine.
  84. The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne
    Even at 74 minutes, the documentary comes to feel arduous in its recycling of the same points and imagery, the filmmaking as plodding as its subject is polished.
  85. The Signal
    The titular signal refers to the Nomad hacker's taunts, though it may as well point to the film's nature as a self-styled calling card.
  86. Elena
    This is a film about the invisible things passed down from generation to generation, that nasty inheritance that cages us into patterns and puzzles we try to solve in someone else's name.
  87. We Are the Best!
    Lukas Moodysson's film allows its trio of girls to express themselves through gender, certainly, but not undermine their desire to be heard as artists first.
  88. The Hornet's Nest
    It becomes clear pretty quickly that Mike and Carlos Boettcher's insider perspective allows for close to no context beyond what their cameras directly capture.
  89. Filth
    Ultimately, the film is too nihilistic to believe its protagonist can be saved, declaring him a lost soul and satisfied to let him suffer.
  90. Korengal
    The result is an alternately gripping and dully meandering patchwork of these soldiers' stay in the Korengal that pointedly shuns big-picture philosophizing.
  91. Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
    Greatly cognizant of the revenge genre's penchant for hypocritical demagoguery, director Arnaud des Pallières unsettles the audience's usual feelings of vicarious blood lust.
  92. The Grand Seduction
    Like many films that contrast the simplicity of a rural community against the confusion of city life, The Grand Seduction exhibits a patriarchal, xenophobic attitude.
  93. Gebo and the Shadow
    It defines Manoel de Oliveira's late period, during which his movies have continued to shrink in size and scope while remaining thematically expansive.
  94. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    It only conveys the awesome strangeness of its characters and their universe when director Brian Singer breaks away from the perpetual build-up of the film's unwieldy plot.
  95. The Angriest Man in Brooklyn
    Robin Williams once again proves he can insufferably crank the energy to 11 without batting an eye, only this time his frenzied comic demeanor is replaced with equally harried contempt.
  96. A World Not Ours
    Mahdi Fleifel's usage of a domestic archive of home-video images inherited from his father lends the doc a simultaneous sense of historical gravitas and intimacy.
  97. Blended
    The filmmakers only bother to lay out comedic set pieces that are simply family-friendly big-budget variations on Jackass stunts.
  98. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    The unbalanced appraisal of Vidal's life and work in Nicholas Wrathall's documentary diminishes the effect of the writer's engaging dissension of American political policy.
  99. 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.
  100. Wolf
    The film ultimately leaves you feeling as if you're stuck watching your cousin's boring slideshow of his trip to Palookaville.
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