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. Words and Pictures
    At least the irony with which this transparently written and dispassionately aestheticized film so demagogically argues for the value of words and pictures is brutally convincing.
  2. Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
    We're simply presented a person in trouble, and we're allowed to recognize his problems as extreme embodiments of universal issues of terror, confusion, and loneliness.
  3. Cold in July
    While Jim Mickle's compositions lose much of their verve in the film's later half, his regard for the analog does not--and at the expense of perspective into his characters' emotional torque.
  4. Cyber-Seniors
    The film is too standard-issue in its making to probe beyond the rough outlines of a success story.
  5. Godzilla
    In form, it's no wham-bam VFX sizzle reel replete with sputtering, ejaculatory climaxes. It's the magnificently sustained equivalent of Ravel's "Bolero," with nuclear warheads in place of timpani rolls.
  6. Horses of God
    Nabil Ayouch's film allows us see how young suicide bombers--"horses of God," as the man in charge of their mission calls them--might deserve our pity.
  7. A Night in Old Mexico
    Red is the kind of lazily written, thankless curmudgeon role that uses the trials of advanced age for cheap laughs rather than harnessing a veteran actor's talent to engage our empathy.
  8. Half of a Yellow Sun
    It falls into the trappings of middlebrow literary adaptation by finding only sporadic means to convincingly adjudicate the trauma and anguish of its transitory epoch.
  9. The Discoverers
    It pushes itself beyond shrill predictability in its willingness to indict the public and familial histories at its core.
  10. Chinese Puzzle
    Cédric Klapisch's film becomes an effervescent variation on the time-honored story of striking out for the American dream.
  11. Wolf Creek 2
    There are cheap shocks in the film, but there are also terrifying moments that poetically command our empathy.
  12. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    With dubious scruples, and much Broadway-style caterwauling, the film imagines what The Wizard of Oz would look like with a should-have-gone-straight-to-video chimney on her.
  13. 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.
  14. Sol LeWitt
    What first feels like a neurotic avoidance of Sol LeWitt the man instead becomes a kind of mirage of his life, as though he managed to evaporate into his body of work.
  15. Devil's Knot
    Atom Egoyan is a much better director when he drops the art-film fanciness and wrestles directly with his inner voyeuristic weirdo.
  16. God's Pocket
    Throughout, it becomes difficult to know whether we're meant to empathize with these characters or laugh at them.
  17. Stage Fright
    Jerome Sable's debut feature couldn't be further from De Palma's delirious cinematic essays on vision and genre.
  18. Ida
    Pawel Pawlikowski shows great empathy toward the idea of illusions as a way of attaining emotional stability in even the most brutal terrain.
  19. Whitewash
    The film benefits greatly from this bait-and-switch narrative design, as Hoss-Desmarais dials down or otherwise forgoes exposition, backstory, and character development in favor of an ambiguous, almost ethereal dramaturgical approach.
  20. Bad Johnson
    Huck Botko's film asks us to laugh at, even revel in, the misadventures of womanizing men, even as it condemns them for their behavior.
  21. The One I Love
    The film gets too caught up in the semi-farcical comings and goings of the two Sophies and Ethans to explore any of the issues it raises about relationships very deeply.
  22. Supermensch: The Legend of Shep Gordon
    A glorified act of hero worship that leaves one hard-pressed to form any conclusion other than an infinitely positive one about Shep Gordon.
  23. More Than the Rainbow
    The film's segments move seamlessly from one topic to the next with the unselfconscious ease of a good dinner party.
  24. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    The narrative doesn't want for ambition, but Marc Webb proves unwilling, or incapable, of making this unwieldy story feel like anything but a deluge of backstory.
  25. Mr. Jones
    That it half succeeds, in spite of its cloying self-seriousness, means that it's at best a convincing copycat of a definitive expression of ego and influence in art.
  26. The M Word
    Like a number of cult directors to emerge in the 1970s, Henry Jaglom values a party atmosphere at the expense of narrative cohesion.
  27. Beneath the Harvest Sky
    It flourishes in the spaces between the plot's necessary setups and subsequent payoffs, which is nearly enough to redeem the film if not for the narrative going belly up in the third act.
  28. Decoding Annie Parker
    This isn't a film of bedside conversions or radical emotional transformations, nor is it a story about laughing at one's own hardships as a coping mechanism.
  29. Blood Glacier
    The film straddles a very awkward line between creature feature, conspiracy thriller, and domestic drama, all without novelty or suspense.
  30. 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.
  31. Brick Mansions
    Only the very charitable would characterize this strain of providence as anything other than dumb, or at least incredibly forgetful.
  32. The Quiet Ones
    If the stock concessions made to genre cliché by The Woman in Black can be charitably viewed as deliberate tips of the hat to the heyday of Hammer Films, then John Pogue's period-set exorcism yarn The Quiet Ones more interestingly upends those tropes.
  33. 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.
  34. Chef
    Jon Favreau's film comes off as flippant in its view of independent labor as a universally liberating experience for an artist and businessman.
  35. The Other Woman
    The film is clearly wary of either being too saccharine or taking itself--or the notion of compulsive infidelity--too seriously, though its schadenfreude is unwavering.
  36. Land Ho!
    That the filmmakers consistently catch the nuances of character that bind the two men to each other, rather than simply tracing the pros and cons of their dispositions, is what gives the film its melancholic yet vibrant resonance.
  37. Venus in Fur
    After years of respectable filmmaking, it's refreshing to witness a reinvigorated Roman Polanski willing to once again delve deep into seedy psychodrama.
  38. The German Doctor
    In Lucía Puenzo's film, things always feel off balance even as the plot points click all too neatly into place.
  39. Night Moves
    Like Michael Cera's two recent films with Sebastian Silva, Night Moves reveals the dark core contained within an actor's nice-guy neuroticism.
  40. Bicycling With Molière
    Even though the subtext about the past and modernity constantly being at odds throughout the setting's changing times is intriguing, the director presents this in a clunky, almost didactic fashion.
  41. Lucky Them
    It labors under the illusion that an abundance of Sub Pop memorabilia is adequate substitute for the honest evocation of a creative subculture and the personalities of which it's composed.
  42. Who is Dayani Cristal?
    As informative, revealing, and occasionally poignant as some of the unearthed revelations are, the doc is ultimately hampered by a level of self-congratulation that nearly undoes its effectiveness as an activist polemic.
  43. Young & Beautiful
    The film's increasingly unnerving story mostly unfolds with minimal flair, intensely focused as it is on its steely and enigmatic protagonist.
  44. 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.
  45. Blue Ruin
    By reducing its principals to stock figures in an extended chess game, it ends up providing steady, neatly staged thrills, but little else of substance.
  46. Locke
    The literalizing of Ivan Locke's hidden self and his inability to master it ultimately exposes the film as the squarest kind of theater: drama therapy.
  47. Transcendence
    If you programmed an algorithm to figure out how The Lawnmower Man might be retold by Snake Plissken at the conclusion of Escape from L.A., you'd still wind up with a more recognizably human effort.
  48. That Demon Within
    It rarely feels like anything more than an effort to pander to the kind of audiences that enjoy Quentin Tarantino's films for all the wrong reasons.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Soft in the Head
    Nathan Silver captures the young-adult experience, particularly the agony of first sexual pangs, in films that deftly mix beguilement and repulsion.
  50. Heaven Is for Real
    Heaven Is for Real is by Christians, for Christians, and deliberately, if subtly, antagonistic toward everyone else.
  51. The Final Member
    A potential barroom joke blossoms into a surprisingly poignant portrait of three aging men wrestling with how to shed their mortal coil.
  52. Authors Anonymous
    It takes the easiest approach to every scene, haphazardly juggling different tones without integrating them into a cohesive and consistent thematic identity.
  53. Tasting Menu
    There's a sinister, even insidious quality to a film that insists upon using incessant food montages not as a source of passion, but fodder for class-based self-congratulation.
  54. Proxy
    It transforms itself from a meek lo-fi indie stalker thriller in the key of May to a hysterically sexist and homophobic revenge film.
  55. Kid Cannabis
    The film works best when it shows Jonathan Daniel Brown's drug kingpin at his most inept and incapable, rather than elevating him to a pothead martyr.
  56. A Promise
    Patrice Leconte struggles to find a coherent rhythm, a problem exacerbated by a hurried running time that compresses some of the novella's more interesting socio-political nuances.
  57. Manakamana
    Filmmakers Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez insist that altered spectatorship, particularly patience and duration, is the foundation of cinematic edification.
  58. Fading Gigolo
    The question of why one should actually work up any emotional investment in what happens to these people is never really answered, much less asked in the first place.
  59. 13 Sins
    Daniel Stamm's film is solidly helmed, if expectedly over-reliant on unnecessarily grisly comeuppances that leave nothing to the imagination.
  60. Draft Day
    The cruelly obvious third act congeals the film as a wet-eyed monument to the Kevin Costner character's particular brand of American manliness, one that values gut instinct, it's implied, over cold and ruthless calculations.
  61. The King of Escape
    Cruising for Alain Guiraudie seems to be the way of nature, a drive that doesn't discriminate.
  62. Rio 2
    The net effect is a shapeless would-be diversion in which things just happen independently, a string of effects missing any cause.
  63. Hank and Asha
    As the film is focused solely through the lens of the titular characters' cameras, this limits the exploration of the story's worldview outside of Hank and Asha's perspective.
  64. Cuban Fury
    The film is thin on concept and limited in style, but the filmmakers have the good sense to let their characters remain playful and goofy throughout.
  65. Joe
    Director David Gordon Green finds a balance between symbolism and realism in his storytelling that allows the film to be many things at once.
  66. Hateship Loveship
    It ultimately offers little more than another opportunity for famous actors to indulge their fetishistic, inadvertently condescending impressions of "everyday" people.
  67. Oculus
    Through a mini-triumph of montage, what begins as run-of-the-mill backstory vomit is thrillingly repackaged as an almost-Lynchian duet between warring states of consciousness.
  68. 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.
  69. 10 Rules for Sleeping Around
    For a film so bent on naturalizing the presumably hilarious incongruity of "the sexes," it sure features lots and lots of that site of horror: a naked male body. And for comedic purposes, of course.
  70. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    Despite one or two moments of Venture Brothers-worthy fancy, the film is as by-the-numbers as any this series has ever offered.
  71. In the Blood
    Aside from being another rote addition to the revenge-film canon, John Stockwell's In The Blood is also a supreme waste of Gina Carano's talent.
  72. Watermark
    By keeping explanatory talking-heads interviews to a minimum, the filmmakers put their trust in the audience to draw their own conclusions based on what they present to us.
  73. The Unknown Known
    Viewers' tolerance for Errol Morris's apparent sheepishness will hinge on their prior appreciation of the filmmaker's investigative acumen.
  74. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    The material and resources are certainly substantial, but the filmmakers clumsily weave separate stories together without detailing anything beyond a tangential relation.
  75. Goodbye World
    The tetchy band of thirtysomethings' interpersonal problems are infinitely less compelling than the mysterious and original global disaster the filmmakers have devised.
  76. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    The sex in Nymphomaniac is inhuman, mechanical, boring, and predictably viewed through the (male) scrim of someone who characterizes women solely as withholders.
  77. Flex Is Kings
    Putting aside the generic human interest, the film turns out to be shockingly deficient in its on-screen depiction of flexing.
  78. Under the Skin
    Throughout, what truly matters to director Jonathan Glazer is articulating through visual and aural enticement the unconscious power of our death drive.
  79. Alien Abduction
    A few jolting scares are deployed throughout, but more difficult to shake is how the story's overacting lambs walk a rather programmatic path toward slaughter--or at least anal probing.
  80. The Retrieval
    Less old-fashioned than demure and passé, evoking the visual style and rhythms of a 1990s made-for-TV movie rather than a daring, revisionist independent feature.
  81. Dom Hemingway
    That Dom is so clearly an up-to-11 caricature, embodied with reliable pizzazz by Jude Law, makes the sentimental moments feel especially false.
  82. Sabotage
    There's no sense of visual artifice to match the ludicrous pitch of the script, and subsequently, the film comes off as awkward and uncertain.
  83. Noah
    Once the money shots of Darren Aronofsky's version recede, it becomes ever more clear that his intention is to tackle the capriciousness of Old Testament logic. And, ultimately, to assent to it.
  84. Finding Vivian Maier
    This is less a portrait of an artist as a young woman than a psychological evaluation of a slippery subject.
  85. Hide Your Smiling Faces
    Daniel Patrick Carbone's pensive style, so dotted with ethnographic detail, is interested in revealing a world in flux, but his fixation on death is so incessant that it situates the film as a morose fetish object.
  86. Go Down Death
    The end result is a bit like a beautiful diorama, in which the people share a common purpose with the furniture: to fill space and look nice.
  87. Cesar Chavez
    Not unlike Michael Peña's prior supporting roles, Chavez is marked by an explosive anger kept under a cherubic, sweet-natured mask, providing the surprise lacking in the story's text.
  88. Refuge
    The problem with the film isn't the contrivance of its premise, it's that writer-director Jessica Goldberg doesn't know it's contrived.
  89. 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.
  90. Breathe In
    Seemingly high-brow because it's so low-key, but underneath that veneer is an inert, thinly plotted melodrama premised on trite characterizations that would be offensive if they weren't so absurd.
  91. The Raid 2
    It's all showy viscera, no ballet, and wan attempts at the gravity of something like Drug War, with implicit statements made about the deadening nature of violence or the moral equivalency of state-sanctioned and criminal force, don't come close to cohering.
  92. Brothers Hypnotic
    There are grudges held amid all the good will, an intention of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble to do things on their terms, and those terms stem directly from their upbringing.
  93. 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.
  94. Obvious Child
    Whatever your foreknowledge of low-budget Brooklyn dramedies, it's impossible that Gillian Robespierre's film won't lob you at least a few curveballs.
  95. The Babadook
    Its horrors go beyond any single raggedy phantom, reaching back to the primordial fear of death and loss: of a child, of a loved one, of one's own sense of self.
  96. A Birder's Guide to Everything
    The film exhibits strong character interplay and resides in an unconventional milieu, in effect turning rote material into something that feels decidedly eccentric.
  97. 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.
  98. 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.
  99. Muppets Most Wanted
    Freed from the burden of starting anew, the film restores the Muppets' rightful place as stars of their own show.
  100. Maladies
    It borders on parody as it tries to portray its hero as martyrdom-bound genius, which makes the film feel as if it was made by Franco's vain, art-fetishizing character from "This Is the End."
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