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 Rocket
    The particulars of Laos's historical conflicts are sometimes only obliquely confronted, but the torrid past of covered-up wars palpably echoes through the scarred yet majestic landscapes.
  2. The Legend of Hercules
    Given its virtuous subject matter and the relative bloodlessness of its violence, perhaps Renny Harlin means for this film to be a means of atoning for his previous cinematic sins.
  3. 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.
  4. Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1
    Because it actively defies and outright ridicules all notions of aesthetic intent, proper form, and moral propriety, this lazy Z-film pastiche is essentially impervious to standard critical evaluation.
  5. The Truth About Emanuel
    What's missing, in the end, is any provocative or poignant insights into the "truth" about Emanuel; all we get are vague hints.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. The Banshee Chapter
    Director Blair Erickson surely has style to burn, even if he oftentimes betrays his atmospheric shorthand and gets cold feet at the most inopportune moments.
  9. The Great Flood
    Even in comparatively conventional mode, Bill Morrison's work still benefits from the poetic potential of nature's repossession of its own elements.
  10. In Bloom
    The foreclosure of possibilities provided by the use of the long take assists in the indictment of chauvinism and patriarchal brutality that underpin, directly and indirectly, many moments in the film.
  11. Cold Comes the Night
    Tze Chun's film exudes no flair in rehashing the violence and suspense of its predictable noir-thriller material.
  12. G.B.F.
    The film, lensed in appealing candy-striped colors, has so much fun exploding stereotypes and radiates with such infectious comic gusto and genuine good nature, that it would be almost churlish to resist its charms.
  13. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    Several reels' worth of ugly, unshaped footage that wouldn't have been deemed fit for a movie's end-credit outtakes not so long ago.
  14. Open Grave
    Individual moments linger, but Gonzalo López-Gallego's film is merely a rough draft of a thriller.
  15. The Best Offer
    It ascribes to the falsehood that a rarefied milieu inherently infuses a film with intelligence, as if inept execution can be covered up by pretty lensing.
  16. 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.
  17. Raze
    Raze leaves the background particulars about this competition oblique, partly because it adds a layer of ominous mystery, but primarily because it doesn't matter; witnessing women-on-women violence is the thing here, regardless of any narrative context.
  18. Labor Day
    A better film would have had the gumption to maintain the poetic bleakness, rather than steer toward what ultimately feels like safe compromise.
  19. Grudge Match
    It will come as a surprise to none that Grudge Match is so wantonly clichéd that to watch it is to explore the outer perimeters of one's own tolerance for a specific type of feel-good sports film.
  20. 47 Ronin
    This botched vision accepts the warrior's nobility at face value and sees the story merely as a springboard for high-flying action and CGI special effects.
  21. Tim's Vermeer
    It chronicles the quest of a self-described "geek," and there are pleasurable frissons of discovery in the detective work.
  22. All the Light in the Sky
    In Joe Swanberg's disaffected little film, the drama is never explicit, or even fully conscious.
  23. Walking with Dinosaurs
    The strain to make the film both an educational tool and a child-minded entertainment is noticeable throughout.
  24. The New Rijksmuseum
    It most potently strikes the tone of an elegy, pensively observing that beneath the bickering in museum boardrooms lies a massive treasure trove of art history that's being kept from the public's eye.
  25. August: Osage County
    What works about the film can largely be attributed to the original text, which is full of cruel twists and savage blows that Tracy Letts wisely retains for the screen.
  26. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    The film's half-hearted plea for responsibility and ethics in the news, after joyfully rolling around in its corruption for the majority of its runtime, smacks of plain pandering.
  27. The Wolf of Wall Street
    Martin Scorsese's keyed-up, irreverent tone frequently fails to distinguish itself from the grunting arias sung by the oily paragons of commerce his film evidently intended to deflate.
  28. Paradise: Hope
    The third and final film in Ulrich Seidl's "Paradise" trilogy navigates a narrow space between tenderness and cruelty.
  29. The Selfish Giant
    The ear for language is paired with an eye for the landscape, and the film finds beauty even in such a seemingly dreary, economically depressed community.
  30. The Past
    Farhadi navigates his complicated narrative thicket with an apparent ease that confirms yet again that he's an amazing talent, but here he isn't able to blend the brushstrokes as he has in prior films.
  31. Some Velvet Morning
    To watch the film is to wonder once again why Neil LaBute was ever taken seriously as a so-called dramatist of the gulf between the sexes.
  32. Liv & Ingmar
    The documentary not only humanizes Ingmar Bergman as the absent lover-cum-father of everyday life, but works as a priceless oral history of cinema.
  33. Lone Survivor
    Like his prior "The Kingdom," Peter Berg's film pretends to dabble in a frothy moral ambiguity, swiftly betraying its true aims with trigger-happy jingoism.
  34. The Unbelievers
    It ably captures the provocative open forums that Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss conduct, but its uneven nature occasionally dulls the effect of these intellectually stimulating conversations.
  35. Big Bad Wolves
    From a purely suspenseful vantage point, Big Bad Wolves is an efficient and effective beast.
  36. Here Comes the Devil
    The film is eventually revealed as less interested in subverting or playing off its influences than rigorously retracing them.
  37. Hours
    The film's fealty to history is both unnecessary and a hindrance, pulling us out of a story that could have easily been set in an anonymous city hit by a nondescript hurricane.
  38. Tricked: The Documentary
    For all the heartbreaking depth with which the filmmakers explore the horrors of human trafficking, the film still leaves one with a sense of a larger story just beyond their grasp.
  39. Trap for Cinderella
    Ian Softley is far too interested in the minutia of the plot to bother with the Chabrolian elements of bourgeois excess or the Hitchcockian themes of mistaken identity.
  40. The Crash Reel
    It compellingly captures a family wrestling mightily with the riddles and contradictions of a culture that promotes achievement at all costs with little thought as to what that actually means.
  41. 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.
  42. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    A once-precious franchise's weakest installment, which forgets these adventures' magic was never conjured by bells and whistles.
  43. Saving Mr. Banks
    A tale of memory and redemption that does little to linger in the mind and even less to decry P.L. Travers's claim that Disney turns everything it touches into schmaltz.
  44. Twice Born
    Sergio Castellitto's film quickly turns out to be more interested in reveling in the secrets of its storyline than in its sentiments.
  45. Night Train to Lisbon
    Bille August's film is a protracted, soporific trip into Portuguese history that would like to be a romantic thriller.
  46. American Hustle
    Formally ostentatious and unrepentantly messy, the film manages to implicitly convey the overdriven, coked-up confusion that many '70s period pieces make painfully overt.
  47. Out of the Furnace
    What this movie finally boils down to is a deceptively simple tale of two brothers, and of being one's brother's keeper, and of seeking justice on the crudest of fronts.
  48. Ernest & Célestine
    It's in the way the film refuses to characterize its central friendship solely on the grounds of common isolation that becomes its most endearing quality.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Merry Christmas
    The conceit has the potential to be amusing, but the role-playing is never as funny or immersive as it could be, and the characters' repartee often feels more stilted than witty.
  50. White Reindeer
    What's dark and weird about Zach Clark's film is also what's tangible, authentic, and wise about it.
  51. Crave
    The film's method of admitting its own hypocrisy so as to enable it to further indulge said hypocrisy grows more grating than if it were merely indifferently conceived junk like Falling Down.
  52. Swerve
    A confident and exciting genre film, and that's certainly not nothing, but it has a slight impersonality that marks it as either a calling card or a work for hire.
  53. S#x Acts
    In its refusal to bring an easy understanding to its main character's behavior, it comes dangerously close to presenting her as a willing perpetrator in her own victimhood.
  54. The Punk Singer
    Sini Anderson's film may be another unimaginative fan letter, but at least Kathleen Hannah is worthy of such devotion.
  55. Cousin Jules
    It's a bit reductive in terms of a personal portrait, but this is a film that's not concerned with telling the story of a man, instead making him a representative symbol of a mostly bygone way of life, a reminder of both the fleeting nature of individual experience and the steady patterns of a broader human existence.
  56. Oldboy
    Spike Lee's version loses the one thing that really worked in the original, the sense of moral complication emerging out of the intertwined action of two men hell-bent on retribution.
  57. 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.
  58. Black Nativity
    For anyone who prefers their assertive homilies to crust over like a syrupy sweet, this loose adaptation of Langston Hughes's beloved holiday tradition will come on like a dream fulfilled.
  59. Homefront
    The material plays out like a particularly busy episode of Sons of Anarchy, possessing a peculiar joylessness that's anathema to the success of films like this.
  60. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    A cursory history lesson with no interest in probing the deeper or more complex implications of Mandela's positions and their relationship to his country's shifting landscape.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Detroit Unleaded
    It compellingly engages with the specific problems of a cultural group rarely represented in American film, but it too easily and abruptly resolves its main characters' problems.
  62. Weekend of a Champion
    The film is at its most fascinating when Jackie Stewart authoritatively and pedagogically discusses the nuances of his trade.
  63. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    Nothing more than an absurdist soap-opera bauble.
  64. Lenny Cooke
    While it verges on exploitation of the gentle giant at its core, it's also an effective bit of human drama, competently, and sometimes movingly, telling a story that deserves to be told.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Cold Turkey
    While featuring much screaming, accusations, collision of agendas, and the exhuming of dirty secrets, the film remains emotionally tone deaf.
  66. 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.
  67. Delivery Man
    The breadth of Vince Vaughn's gregarious persona has never been given free reign by any director and this certainly isn't the game-changer.
  68. Narco Cultura
    Director Shaul Schwarz, sans judgment, presents us with two men who epitomize how accepted and engrained narco culture has become in Mexico.
  69. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    A magnificently quizzical diagram of two ceaselessly inquiring minds in perfect tandem, like a raw X-ray of atomized creativity.
  70. Everyday
    While the film charts its protagonist's gradual progression toward a renewed sense of agency and freedom, it rarely indulges in lengthy or even linear narrative arcs.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Francis Lawrence imbues the source material with visceral pleasure in well-wrought scenes vacillating between elaborate spectacle, breathtaking terror, and--occasionally--surprising beauty.
  72. 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.
  73. Frozen
    The film's empowering themes of feminine strengths and bonds eventually flourish in novel fashion.
  74. The Best Man Holiday
    The sexism isn't quite as noxious as one might find in Tyler Perry's films, but that's as far as the compliments go when it comes to this overextended and deeply crude sermon.
  75. Faust
    Though its ballast of jokes and spectacle are formidable, it often lurches about at a remote, enigmatic distance
  76. Charlie Countryman
    An egregious entry into the pantheon of films about white Americans traveling to exotic lands in search of identity and soul-searching adventure.
  77. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here
    The research that went into the film seems a largesse, but it's compromised at every turn by filmmaker Amei Wallach's sloppy, pedantic delivery.
  78. Dear Mr. Watterson
    Though it begins by spending far too much time talking up the comic's quality, it gradually finds a groove as an incisive portrait of an insecure industry.
  79. The Great Beauty
    Paolo Sorrentino's film is really just a huge turn-on that has the bad manners to go sour, succumbing to its own self-delusions of moral/political grandeur.
  80. Diana
    Are the micro-biopics that don't even bother to provide overviews of their famed subjects' entire lives, but instead lean on the spectacle of celebrity impersonation, the new camp?
  81. The Book Thief
    Books themselves become the story's key symbol, representing the past and future, loss and possibility, of a place that's ground zero for some of history's darkest days.
  82. Reaching for the Moon
    Bruno Barreto's insistence that this pass for a product that Hollywood might have spawned smoothens a journey built on sharp edges.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Medora
    It feels as if it set out to be an inspirational tale about underdogs beating the odds, but instead of giving color to the story, the filmmakers presented it with black-and-white ideas.
  84. Thor: The Dark World
    Superhero movies aren't going anywhere, nor is their standard, on-to-the-next-fight structure, so it's heartening to see a gem that grandly and amusingly fills in the blanks.
  85. Birth of the Living Dead
    The film is unavoidably slight, but there's a certain pleasure in watching talented people wax passionate about a common source of inspiration.
  86. The Ghosts in Our Machine
    Jo-Anne McArthur's cause draws sharp comparisons with the never-mentioned PETA, a seemingly insignificant omission that discloses a lingering problem of willful insularity.
  87. 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.
  88. 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.
  89. The Armstrong Lie
    The film can't entirely avoid the feeling of a less-productive score-settling hit piece, as if Alex Gibney was making this film merely to stick it to the subject that screwed him big time.
  90. Best Man Down
    While it tries to relate a story about the sloppiness of life, the way best-laid plans can go wrong in an instant, its script is neatly and tidily structured.
  91. 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.
  92. A Case of You
    Kat Coiro's film takes the comedy of discomfort to new levels of cringe-worthiness by presenting.
  93. Ender's Game
    Gavin Hood relays a vague sense of what it's like to live in duty, and yet at a distance from one's home, but this vision of the future never rouses, never asks to be remembered.
  94. Free Birds
    The film is absent of humor and thrills, and accented with designs and color schemes that are equally notable for their lack of risk.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Golden Slumbers
    It puts value back on people who've historically been undervalued, both by the Khmer Rouge and, by lack of mention, cinema history at large.
  96. A Perfect Man
    In its elliptical presentation of its characters' lives, brings to mind the latter-day films of Philippe Garrel, but Kees Van Oostrum's genre experimentation aligns him with Paul Verhoeven.
  97. Sal
    It functions under the delusion that subtext will magically appear if you linger on a character long enough, and the significance of most of its scenes is nothing if not inscrutable.
  98. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Felix Van Groeningen's film owes more than a debt to the unwieldy narrative schematics of Susanne Bier's narratives.
  99. The Pervert's Guide to Ideology
    Slavoj Žižek manages to explain some of Lacanian psychoanalysis's most inscrutable notions with disarming clarity and infectious urgency.
  100. These Birds Walk
    The filmmakers use a wide range of cinematic techniques to convey the tenuous environment in which their subjects find themselves.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »