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. Jodorowsky's Dune
    This is a fanboy movie, one more engaged with the excitement of possibility than that of reality, and whatever the noxious connotations of that form of film appreciation, this particular project does a pretty fantastic job of stirring up enthusiasm.
  2. Divergent
    The film transcends the déjà vu of its borrowed trappings but ironically sacrifices all momentum in favor of a long series of physical tests.
  3. The French Minister
    With its broad performances, rapid-fire pacing, and rampant visual and verbal gags, Bernard Tavernier's first out-and-out comedy doesn't try too hard to hide its graphic-novel origins.
  4. Just a Sigh
    When Jérôme Bonnell allows his two magnificent leads to work at the sparse dialogue, he invokes a powerful, elemental sense of frank, sexual discussion and high-end flirtation, imbuing the relationships with a maturity that's loathsomely rare in films today.
  5. It Felt Like Love
    Eliza Hittman's film captures the exclusive properties of sex with a degree of intimacy and empathy that, at times, feels authentically revelatory.
  6. Buzzard
    This is a study of a man who's hard to like, harder to dismiss, and impossible to pigeonhole.
  7. Salvo
    The filmmakers' very particular sense of lighting and framing, though handsome, often exudes a formality that perpetually stifles the story's sense of spontaneity.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nymphomaniac: Volume I
    But whereas female sexuality was borderline vampiric in Antichrist, this time we're in more ambiguous, contextually richer terrain, where desire is complicated not only by love, but also by a deep need for self-determination, and pride.
  9. 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.
  10. The Double
    Whatever the film's interest may be in the marginalized, writer-director Richard Ayoade never alludes to what would even be worth fighting for in this nightmarish industrial landscape.
  11. Veronica Mars
    For all its references to the show's history, the film never panders. It's an evolution of the core concept as opposed to a nostalgia-tinged reproduction, and is all the better for it.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    The Right Kind of Wrong
    The film is so in love with its unoriginal premise that it can't see the forest for the trees, treating reality like an occasionally relevant prop and stalking as a sweetly romantic gesture.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    20,000 Days on Earth
    While the film is seemingly accessible as a portrait of an artist who seems particularly attuned to his own creative process, and particularly adept at describing this attunement, it's unlikely that many who aren't already whole-hog Bad Seeds fans would be able to stomach much of Cave's self-styled pomposity.
  14. Dark House
    The film's dialogue is knowing and the action sequences are elaborate, but not only in ways that advance the shady story toward its hokey denouement.
  15. Need For Speed
    Even when compared to other films posing as Ford Mustang commercials, Need for Speed isn't particularly memorable for anything other than the startling incompetence and dull sheen of the end result.
  16. Himizu
    Sion Sono's film is a vision of coming of age as trial by fire, a thunderous encapsulation of that period of transition in which adolescents try to discover themselves: their passions, their purpose, their sense of morality.
  17. Exposed
    Beyond the forthright identity politics and titillating theatrical misdemeanors, one still comes away wondering about the things that remain concealed.
  18. 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.
  19. Enemy
    Jake Gyllenhaal embodies the two roles with real presence, establishing Adam's sniveling wimp and Anthony's striding jerk as two believably discrete sides of the same coin.
  20. Guilty of Romance
    Though it begins with the aesthetic and conceptual rigor of Blade Runner, it quickly veers toward the gratuitous outlandishness of a Bruce La Bruce film.
  21. 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.
  22. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    One can never fully shake the feeling that the sense of unease the filmmakers rouse, every act of seduction, infiltration, and vengeance they orchestrate, is borrowed.
  23. The Den
    The film is dizzyingly creepy in its refracting of horrors through the cascading windows of computer programs we've come to understand more intimately than our own selves.
  24. Bad Words
    The meager comeuppance and hasty notes of sweetness that end the film feel pre-approved rather than organically realized.
  25. Big Men
    No one corporation or person plans to trample over the wellbeing of the Ghanaian people, but as the story of the development progress, the breadth of Rachel Boynton's research shows how it will occur regardless.
  26. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    The film spent roughly a dozen years in development, and the moronic, corporate detritus from that long time warp is strewn about like so many improbable history lessons.
  27. Honey
    Driven by a no-nonsense ethos, the film avoids sentimentality the same way its main character avoids sentiment.
  28. 300: Rise of an Empire
    Noam Murro gives the film nothing so much as a hit-refresh on the same glistening, impossibly golden and gray flecks of pixel-barf that have invaded the frames of every tent-pole studio release since the Bush administration.
  29. Particle Fever
    The film may not put itself above the uninitiated, but director Mark Levinson oftentimes appears almost too eager to present his material with affectation.
  30. Special ID
    The audience becomes conditioned to expect the action a few moves before the film makes them, which quickly renders the story tedious.
  31. The Face of Love
    An almost offensively "tasteful" dud that remains irritatingly on the surface, more alive to the set design than the characters' motivations.
  32. Interior. Leather Bar.
    With Travis Mathews's help, James Franco's persona forms a kind of symmetry: 1980's dubious homophobia against 2013's risible homophilia.
  33. The Island of St. Matthews
    It gives us a series of images that, free from definitive context, form a new reality of their own, a small composite portrait of previously untold stories.
  34. Journey to the West
    Stephen Chow's distinctive vision is evident in the seemingly boundless imagination of his scenarios, and in the film's sincere spiritual concerns and generosity toward misfits and outsiders.
  35. Haunt
    Mac Carter repeatedly compromises his intuitive, and often elegantly framed, glances at his main characters' teenage blues by too busily going through amateur-night gesticulations of spooking his audience.
  36. Grand Piano
    Eugenio Mira thrills in watching his main character attempt to worm his way out of a most unusual hostage situation, synching his indulgences of style to the pianist's wily physical maneuvering.
  37. The Grand Budapest Hotel
    As always, Wes Anderson places his trademark precision in direct confrontation with the chaos and confusion menacing his beloved characters.
  38. Ong Bak 3
    Most of Ong Bak 3's spectacular shortcomings are forgivable because, to a large extent, the film is everything you came to see and then some.
  39. Son of God
    The film plays for much of its length like a terrible sketch comedy with one-dimensional caricatures shuffling listlessly through a succession of stilted tableaux.
  40. 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.
  41. The Lunchbox
    The patience in mercurially presenting the characters' backstories and desires is matched by the film's genuine curiosity about the healing power of sharing stories.
  42. Non-Stop
    The latest collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and star Liam Neeson is made with far more care and visual detail than you might expect.
  43. 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.
  44. Stalingrad
    Its blind reverence toward the Russian mythos is so grandiose that it becomes impossible to rescue it from self-importance, and as such President Putin would likely give it two big thumbs up.
  45. Pompeii
    Shockingly, the violent release of smoke, fire, and meteoric debris is positioned more as a climactic afterthought than as the main attraction.
  46. 3 Days to Kill
    McG may strip down his approach and serve up a variety of slick, well-paced shoot-outs and car chases, but his technical skill can't quite overcome the story's lazy sense of humor and incomprehensible account of international espionage.
  47. Black Out
    The film's various references to other stylistic touchstones, while thematically apt, rarely carry any sort of critical inquiry.
  48. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    Chiemi Karasawa's documentary is remarkable for its candor, but it's a brutal honesty that Elaine Stritch herself gladly offers.
  49. In Secret
    A broad, crude mutilation of Emile Zola's noirish romance Thérèse Raquin that prioritizes heavy petting over plot.
  50. Bethlehem
    In the end, the film's misstep isn't some failure at being sufficiently morally gray. In being the thriller that it is, it smudges the palette beyond recognition.
  51. Child's Pose
    The film thrives on ambiguity, keeping all things blurry outside its main character's focused perspective, its myopia sustained by Luminița Gheorghiu's tough, quietly intense performance.
  52. About Last Night
    Kevin Hart turns an essentially crude wingman into the conscience of the film's torturous, nettled discourse on romance.
  53. Winter's Tale
    Fantasy is heavily dependent on vision, which Mark Helprin had in spades, but the look of Akiva Goldsman's fantasy is limp, timid, and occasionally outright awkward.
  54. Endless Love
    Shana Feste's film seems blissfully unaware that great fights require truly substantial conflicts.
  55. Lucky Bastard
    In the end, considering the numerous ways the film goes limp, it seems credibility still eludes the found-footage genre.
  56. RoboCop
    Ultimately the film is, like the Faux News programming it caricatures at face value, a deck-stacking simulation of a dialogue it isn't even remotely interested in opening.
  57. The New Black
    It does little to break free of the conventional talking-head documentary format, but thoughtful in how it prizes dialogue over acrimony and one-sided rhetoric.
  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.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Date and Switch
    The film's forced quirkiness and repeated displays of bro-ism in action hinder the potential for a more subtle approach to the potentially challenging issue the story depicts.
  60. Girl on a Bicycle
    The film turns the miscommunication between cultures into an utterly lifeless romantic comedy best appreciated as a travel guide for first-time tourists to Paris.
  61. Easy Money: Hard to Kill
    There's ultimately little in the way of authentically resonant drama underneath the film's self-conscious busy-ness.
  62. The Returned
    It proves that the zombie narrative is still capable of subversion, but does so with the laziest, Lifetime-grade intimations of social relevance.
  63. Love & Air Sex
    Whatever predictable plot the film tries to unfold never lives up to the excitement of its conceptual gimmick.
  64. Cavemen
    Cavemen is an apt title considering how the sensibility and maturity of the film's characters don't seem to have developed beyond primal, alpha-man impulses.
  65. The Monuments Men
    George Clooney's film boils a big, messy maelstrom of theft and uncertainty down to a digestible, faintly appetizing mush.
  66. A Fantastic Fear of Everything
    Strands of Simon Pegg's amiable persona are found in the film's more tolerable bits, but even this seasoned vet's unique voice is lost amid the glut of references to other work.
  67. The LEGO Movie
    All told, there's an ageless warmth to The LEGO Movie akin to that of the LEGO brand itself.
  68. A Field in England
    Ben Wheatley's film is a reckless combination of period piece, war drama, broad comedy, psychedelic fever dream, and occult horror-scape.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Vic + Flo Saw a Bear
    The film presents its tonal switch-ups and narrative swerves with a deadpan belligerence by turns stimulating, calculated, and poignant.
  70. 7 Boxes
    The film is ripe with powerful subtext, specifically how greed, celebrity, and technology help to form a misguided sense of opportunity that keeps the working class downtrodden.
  71. The Pretty One
    The film is a quiet, tender triumph that leaves you feeling as if you've been embraced without you feeling had.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Last of the Unjust
    Claude Lanzmann's film doesn't so much strive to elucidate the Shoah as to draw us into its infinite moral complexities.
  73. Nurse 3D
    Rather than capture truly pained souls tangled in exuberant horror tropes, the filmmakers settle for retrograde anguish and warmed-over artistry.
  74. That Awkward Moment
    Its obsession with male genitalia, or, more specifically, penis receptacles, is emblematic of its overall aura of male entitlement and its consideration of women as prizes to be lanced.
  75. 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.
  76. Love Is in the Air
    The film is knowingly sarcastic in its self-awareness without falling back on the gawky meta-squealing of its American rom-com counterparts.
  77. Breaking the Frame
    Director Marielle Nitoslawaska's experimental approach sometimes wanders down uncontextualized paths and obfuscates the subject with filmic affectations.
  78. Charlie Victor Romeo
    The film's tension doesn't come from the why or how, but more from the idea that one becomes so settled into habit that seemingly nothing is capable of interfering.
  79. 12 O'Clock Boys
    It constantly divides itself between fulfilling the conventions of the informational talking-heads documentary and aiming for a more poetically impressionistic quality.
  80. The Wait
    By the end, audiences will most likely feel as if they've been locked out of the drama that's presumably unfolding right in front of them.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Best Night Ever
    The filmmakers make sure their female protagonists constantly look immature and irresponsible, and are intent on punishing them for wanting to have a good time.
  82. Gimme Shelter
    Writer-director Ron Krauss's Gimme Shelter is wretched long before its odious ulterior motives come to light.
  83. Papirosen
    Gastón Solnicki's mapping out of his family's narrative from within never feels exploitative or self-absorbed.
  84. Old Goats
    Taylor Guterson's film offers thoughtful, if familiar, comments on friendship, self-doubt, and romantic angst.
  85. Enemies Closer
    JCVD may not say it best, but he does say it aptly, when his manically cartoonish baddie caps one murder with the assertion that "shit happens."
  86. Towheads
    There's but one sequence in the entire movie that offers even the slightest bit of filmmaking verve, and even this speaks to the project's essential myopia.
  87. Visitors
    Godfrey Reggio's symphony of pristine 4K images doesn't add up to one grand epiphany, but an intermittent cluster of small ones.
  88. 24 Exposures
    Throughout, Joe Swanberg connects Generation Y's fetish for past pop-cultural kitsch to its attending sexual insecurities.
  89. When I Saw You
    Like Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, Tarek has a way of using defiance and sarcasm to make himself seem smarter than any ostensible authority figure.
  90. Omar
    What Omar best portrays are the limitations that result from having an occupation, and the fight to overthrow it, dominate a person's entire life.
  91. 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.
  92. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    In keeping his actors on his sober-yet-buoyant plane, Kenneth Branagh presents a convincing romance that doesn't stall the film's brisk clip.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Life of a King
    Any potential flights of invention or creativity are subordinate to the plain and emphatic delivery of life lessons.
  94. Ride Along
    The film refuses to openly engage the isolationism and hardened cynicism that's often part and parcel of being a career police officer.
  95. Summer in February
    As sumptuous as it is immensely shallow, the film practically revels in its attention to lush English landscapes as a means to distract from its derivative storytelling.
  96. The Nut Job
    There's no personality in the design or the script, which only renders the cynical aftertaste of this convoluted one-squirrel-against the-world story all the more potent.
  97. Maidentrip
    A coming-of-age journey of self-realization, made immensely more involving by virtue of being seen through its subject's first-person perspective.
  98. Jamesy Boy
    The movie adds up to little more than an interminable bildungsroman, sunk early and often by the desperately miscast Spencer Lofranco.
  99. Reasonable Doubt
    You may feel as if you're watching two or three abbreviated episodes of Law & Order in quick succession rather than a fully realized movie.
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