Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
For 7,772 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 6.3 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
view
per page
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Shag
    As for Fonda, the camera certainly loves her (to quote a famous line by Howard Hawks), but an actor needs a part that will make her a star, and few films since Shag have seen fit to play to her strengths, specifically that perky blond American sass of hers that found perfect expression here.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pretty in Pink
    Whereas Mean Girls used a visual metaphor turning students into ravaging lions as a dull-headed joke, Hughes created a lion’s den that felt perilously real.
  3. The Pale Blue Eye
    The film often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart.
  4. Manglehorn
    David Gordon Green stages even fleeting tonal palate cleansers with a self-consciousness that parallels Al Pacino's acting.
  5. The Misandrists
    The sexual outbursts in the film are tempered with a tenderness that one hardly associates with Bruce LaBruce's career.
  6. 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.
  7. Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
    The film is at once enabled and hindered by its utter strangeness, an intrinsic quality surely exacerbated in its English-language release.
  8. Alex of Venice
    Chris Messina is eventually a little too indifferent to the machinations of the plot, but the film, however inescapably sentimental, is a romantic daydream that casts a lovely spell.
  9. The Running Man
    In flinching at the end, The Running Man ultimately becomes akin to the very thing it criticizes: a hollow, mollifying image of empowerment that distracts from the logical conclusions of its nihilistic premise.
  10. The Cable Guy
    The director, who intermittently shows up on Steven’s television as Stan and Sam Sweet, a hybrid of O.J. Simpson and the Menendez brothers, shoots all of this with verve and fluidity to spare, though he succeeds most commendably in framing and editing his star’s physical antics.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp
    It threatens to succumb to hero worship, but Jorge Hinojosa wisely subverts Slim's mythos by pulling the curtain back on it in the doc's second half by revealing the man beneath.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Monk
    Dominik Moll never addresses Matthew Gregory Lewis's original groundbreaking ideas in the film, nor does he rework the material for a contemporary audience.
  13. The Yellow Birds
    You may want for something to hold on to, but Tye Sheridan and Alden Ehrenreich slip through the fingers, both seeming uninterested and restless to move on to other projects.
  14. Joy
    David O. Russell proposes that there may be no real barrier between the caustic worldview he wears and the sense of childlike wonder he sells.
  15. The Three Stooges
    After what seems like an eternity of inanity and incompetence in the realm of Cats & Dogs and Squeakquels, the Farrelly brothers' direction is downright classical.
  16. Betty Blue
    Indeed, the film flies by and feels weightless, like a spectacular rainbow-colored hydrogen balloon that passes out of our memory the moment we lose sight of it.
  17. Summerland
    Throughout, the film’s characters exhibit little life outside of their moments of tragedy and symbolic connections.
  18. Steel Magnolias
    MacLaine grabbing Dukakis by the bangs, shoving her head back with a sneering “Have your roots done,” radiates more feminine fellowship than a dozen sisterhoods of the travelling pants. Not bad for a movie that alternates the tragedy of dying young and beautiful against the comedy of growing old and bitter.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Psychomagic, A Healing Art
    Whether or not the 91-year-old Alejandro Jodorowsky makes another film, Psychomagic could easily stand as a fitting encapsulation of the themes of suffering and transcendence that have run throughout his work.
  20. That Sugar Film
    One senses that all of these kinds of documentaires are finally aggrandizing shrines made by artists trying to erect something out of nothing.
  21. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
    Arvin Chen's Taiwan is dominated by eccentricity in tone and atmosphere, but in a very careful, pronounced way, as to never really run the danger of being truly strange.
  22. Deadly Blessing
    More often than not, the movie only glancingly burrows beneath America’s attitudes toward rural evangelism that surfaced concurrently with the advent of the Moral Majority.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Secret Disco Revolution
    Jamie Kastner bows fully to hedonism in lieu of all the scholarly theories on disco's lasting impact--a tidy but gutless way of tying together so many disparate arguments by such disparate people.
  24. Concussion
    The tacky and loose means by which the platitudinous screenplay dances around what ails the story's football players is just one cog in a whirligig of pat representations.
  25. The Beach Bum
    With the film, Harmony Korine solidifies his position as the premier cartographer of the Sunshine State as a place of unhurried pursuits.
  26. Touchy Feely
    Lynn Shelton crafts a film of astonishingly sustained mood, tying its beguiling atmosphere to the mental states of her characters.
  27. 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.
  28. Mommie Dearest
    Inscrutably powerful and brutally honest about diva worship as another form of male domination, Mommie Dearest is to camp what Medea was to Dr. Benjamin Spock.
  29. Spaceman
    Spaceman seems to want to be an allegory about men’s emotional unavailability and its impact on heterosexual relationships, but instead of coming across universal, the film’s human characters, along with much of the drama, are mostly empty space.
  30. The Foreigner
    Even overlooking its fictionalized account of an inexplicable political resurgence, the film falters in its needlessly convoluted plotting.
  31. I'm So Excited
    Pedro Almodóvar's diverting pop-art bauble firmly placing the "relief" in comic relief and the "cock" in cockpit.
  32. A Tale of Love and Darkness
    The film mostly succeeds in capturing the nuances of an event that continues to arouse passionate debate to this day.
  33. Antiviral
    A one-joke movie--a good joke, yes, but Brandon Cronenberg's agenda clouds the clarity that's needed to fully deliver the punchline.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Spark: A Burning Man Story
    The doc doesn't take the time to examine why Burning Man inspires such a level of fanaticism, overshadowing human interest with a gluttony of B roll.
  35. Stray Bullets
    What distinguishes Stray Bullets from so many other low-budget crime films is Jack Fessenden's sense of quietness.
  36. Friends with Kids
    With the foul-mouthed dramedy Friends with Kids, writer/producer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt is juggling so much, it's a wonder there aren't more jokes about balls.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Extraterrestrial
    In almost every respect, Extraterrestrial is an exceptional and traditional romantic comedy. It just happens to be set during an alien invasion.
  38. Detour
    In comparison to its superior predecessors, the film's redemption plot feels banal and slight.
  39. Man of Steel
    All its faux-patriotism isn't played for satire, but instead utilized to align the film with an idyllic, unquestioned vision of goodness.
  40. General Orders No. 9
    Under the modern mannerisms lies a rather clumsily Romantic -- one might say Wordsworthian -- rant that juxtaposes urbanity against a nebulous, fictitious past.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Harvest/La Cosecha
    The Harvest/La Cosecha is another entry in the fast-growing agri-doc genre that seeks to upend naïve ideas of where your food comes from.
  42. Payback
    This documentary on the many forms of human debt, though often frustratingly broad, offers a path to balancing civilization's ledger with a hard-nosed brand of altruism.
  43. 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.
  44. For a Good Time, Call...
    While the heart of the movie is the at-times strained relationship between the two leads, it all unfolds rather by the numbers, dictated more by the expected arc of such things than the demands of the characters.
  45. Offseason
    Keating’s film forgets the cardinal rule of good pastiche: that if you’re not building something new from familiar pieces then you’re just regurgitating old ideas.
  46. Inheritance
    Its bizarre mismatch of form and content mostly saps it of life, tamping down the tension and frequently suggesting an accidentally distributed proof of concept for a project that never managed to secure funding.
  47. Wuthering Heights
    Like a particularly impressive aspic, Wuthering Heights is tantalizing to behold but not so easy to swallow.
  48. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
    To Ritchie’s credit, he keeps his film moving along at a consistently brisk clip, but that breeziness is also the cause of its weightlessness, rendering its vision of historical events as outright cartoonish, down to the often clownish portrayals of Nazis and the flawless execution of nearly every element of March-Phillips’s plans.
  49. Almost Christmas
    The film is most affecting in its simpler moments, particularly those revolving around food.
  50. God Told Me To
    God Told Me To is one of the key American horror films from the 1970s to mine the internally sexual, racial quandaries of a nation beset by one great civil rights catastrophe after another.
  51. The Eye of the Storm
    This adaptation of a prize-winning Australian novel is a stodgy slog save for some sporadic moments of blunt force supplied by Judy Davis and Charlotte Rampling.
  52. Ultrasound
    Ultrasound never quite figures out how to keep going once its mysteries have been unraveled.
  53. The Devil All the Time
    Every moment in The Devil All the Time is meant to be a galvanic, preachifying high point, and so the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot. One can scarcely imagine a duller lot of sacrificial lambs.
  54. Cloud Atlas
    Its ideas are paralleled, its themes twinned, sometimes breathlessly, sometimes fatuously, into what may be described as a 164-minute pop song of seemingly infinite verses, choruses, and bridges. Perhaps expectedly, it soars as often as it thuds.
  55. Hitchcock
    If you've ever seen Psycho, or even if you know anything at all about the film, Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock would like to congratulate you on your savvy.
  56. Never Let Go
    As the film goes on, it stretches its own internal logic and, following a genuinely shocking third-act twist, renders the world that it’s created virtually incoherent merely in a ploy to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.
  57. J.T. Leroy
    It’s disappointing that so much of the film feels like mere tilling of the soil.
  58. The Canal
    Unlike David Lynch, Ivan Kavanagh isn't interested in catching ideas like fish, of linking the degradation of film to the degradation of consciousness.
  59. I Love You, Daddy
    It’s as exhilaratingly honest and unshackled a work as many have come to expect from this auteur of cringe comedy, one that foresees, absorbs, and responds to all possible bile that might be directed its way, knowing full well of the muck it dredges up.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    It's About You
    While there aren't many films shot on Super 8 anymore, It's About You, a documentary that isn't really about John Mellencamp's 2009 No Better Than This tour, doesn't make the case that moviegoing is missing anything because of that.
  61. Hyde Park on Hudson
    The filmmakers bite off far more than they're able to chew, resulting in an odd blend of touched-upon topics.
  62. Old
    In the moments when Old works, it’s because M. Night Shyamalan embraces the inherent weirdness of his material.
  63. Dark Shadows
    A mixed bag of Nixon-era pop burlesque and vampire kitsch is ultimately undone by pedestrian gags and bloated genre boilerplate.
  64. Purple Rain
    Magnoli’s professional, downright neorealistic approach to filming the concert clips almost disguises how audacious a structural conceit is the film’s climax: nearly a half-hour of musical numbers that render the solipsism of Prince’s vanity project entirely justifiable.
  65. The Fall of the American Empire
    Despite a few undeniably intense and lurid moments, the film lacks the pulsating fury of a significant genre work.
  66. Ip Man: The Final Fight
    Anthony Wong does a creditable job of conveying Ip Man's reflectiveness through his twilight years, occasionally cutting through the hagiographic nature of the enterprise.
  67. We Summon the Darkness
    The film’s cat-and-mouse antics play out with no sense of escalation or invention.
  68. Life's a Breeze
    A rigidly predetermined film that runs on the fumes of hackneyed plot points, squandering at nearly every turn a humanistic study of a family's struggle to maintain a tenable bond with one another.
  69. Union Square
    Nancy Savoca's film begins in caricature and ends in sentimentality, only briefly hitting the sweet spot in between.
  70. Money Monster
    Jodie Foster manages the interlocking tones of outrage and low humor with an unfailing rhythm and an engagingly casual cynicism.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    An American Werewolf in London
    The film’s indisputable centerpiece is the protracted werewolf transformation sequence.
  72. Ambulance
    Rarely have Michael Bay’s frenzied stylistic tics been so effectively intertwined with the substance of one of his films.
  73. The Purge: Election Year
    Its greater focus on disreputable genre thrills comes at the expense of making coherent points about class inequalities, political exploitation, or man's inhumanity.
  74. The Boogeyman
    Ultimately, The Boogeyman is like so many other modern horror films that prioritize mood above all else.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Assault
    The Assault raises many more questions than it answers, and its overall objective is puzzling and remains shrouded in political agenda.
  76. Wendy
    Wendy veers awkwardly and aimlessly between tragedy and jubilance, never accruing any lasting emotional impact.
  77. Hellion
    Both film and protagonist are troubled works in progress that shuffle and meander and frequently falter, but occasionally sing.
  78. Jackie & Ryan
    The film comes undone in its clumsy attempts to transform its story into a parable of economic distress.
  79. 2 Guns
    Viewer/character solidarity only holds up for so long, and the film falls hard into twisty, nonsense territory, skipping over its stronger themes in the process.
  80. Legend
    Given how Legend's script is so bereft of insight into its characters' psyches, perhaps there's only so much even an actor of Tom Hardy's stature can do.
  81. About Time
    A surprisingly thoughtful romantic comedy that shirks a great deal of reason and consequence in the name of love.
  82. Safe
    Safe's primary contribution to the burgeoning Jason-Statham-kicks-everyone's-ass subgenre is setting three of its set pieces in crowded New York City venues (a subway car, a hotel dining room, and a Chinatown nightclub) where shootouts lead to believable mass-exodus pandemonium.
  83. The Visit
    When the trademark Shyamalan twist finally arrives, it doesn't synthesize anything other than the director's devotion to his signature gimmick.
  84. Megalopolis
    If Megalopolis, as many speculate, marks the end of Coppola’s career as a filmmaker, it flourishes in that finality, having held back or compromised nothing.
  85. 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.
  86. Aquaman
    Often divertingly colorful and busy to a fault, the film seems to dare us to mock the world of comics' most risible superhero.
  87. Arkansas
    The film’s insistence on keeping the stakes low throughout is probably its key strength.
  88. Violent Night
    Ultimately, it’s the filmmakers’ insistence on both subverting the expectations of the family Christmas film and upholding them that leaves Violent Night feeling like it wants to have its Christmas cookies and eat them too.
  89. 3
    3 is a smidgeon film. Take a smidgeon of scientific/ethical discussion, throw in a pinch of dance/poetry/dream sequences, tie the whole thing up with split-screen montages and you no longer just have a film about a love triangle, but a Godardian objet d'art.
  90. Reality
    Quentin Dupieux has a talent for rendering otherworldly concepts banal in a manner that reflects the stymied desires of his characters.
  91. Viktoria
    The film is ultimately stultifying because the disconnection between the various characters is so immediately accepted as such a foregone conclusion that nothing ever seems to be at stake, and the heavily horizontal imagery, though accomplished and evocative, if fussy, only evokes two states of mind: loneliness and disconnection.
  92. The Gambler
    The filmmakers delve into a fantasyland of luxe coastal casinos and neon-lit bathhouses--as shrug-worthy a stab at picturing the contemporary black market as could be requested.
  93. Clown in a Cornfield
    Eli Craig’s film works precisely because it plays things straight.
  94. Clementine
    There’s a hint of Jane Campion’s own uncanny perversion of the banal throughout Lara Jean Gallagher’s film.
  95. The Flash
    Nothing Batman or Supergirl do in The Flash to save the world is more effective than what Barry Allen does to save it with a hug and a can of tomatoes.
  96. Summer of Blood
    Onur Tukel is able to offer a reasonably fresh spin on familiar vampire-movie tropes, giving pitiless misanthropy pedal-to-the-metal comic wit.
  97. Rainbow Time
    Linas Phillips's contrived sense of follow-through betrays the truthfulness of his initial characterizations.
  98. 52 Pick-Up
    52 Pick-Up loses its sense of social texture in the last third when everyone begins to die by decree of formulaic three-act screenwriting, and its indifference to the plight of Harry’s wife (Ann-Margret) is unseemly, but the film is an often nightmarish gem awaiting rediscovery.
  99. Spirited
    To say that the film grows tedious quickly would suggest that it wasn’t already trite from frame one.
  100. Beloved
    Ultimately crammed at a frustrating juncture between period-piece froth and seriously conceived drama, never tipping its hand toward either.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »