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. In the Name Of
    This Polish "gay priest tempted" drama is almost as confused about the moral quandaries of its characters as they are.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Aftermath
    The film isn't so much about the moral atrophy of people who refuse to come to terms with their past as it is about cosmic karma passed from fathers to sons like an ancient curse.
  3. Mr. Nobody
    The only truly graspable notion the film can be said to put forth is one of increasingly tedious sci-fi-romantic genre busy-ness.
  4. Last Vegas
    The film is depressing, sub-sitcom fodder that will dull whatever affection you may still harbor for these legendary actors.
  5. Big Sur
    The viewer is informed of a world of chaos, obsession, and irresolution, but has no cinematic means of accessing or understanding it.
  6. Running from Crazy
    The modern-day sections with Mariel Hemingway, while detailing the redemptive promise of the title, too often come across as either indulgent time-filler or overflow with PSA-level superficiality.
  7. Man of Tai Chi
    The film ultimately doesn't live up to this early potential, as Keanu Reeves loses his way in the third act with too many false climaxes.
  8. Dallas Buyers Club
    Conventional but never sanctimonious, it balances out its familiar recovery angle with a healthy measure of sardonic wit.
  9. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    A choppy, feature-length progression of crude, predictable gags, the film plays like a variety show, and yet its main attraction is barely funny enough to warrant his own brief sketch.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Spinning Plates
    Spinning Plates may inadvertently be one of the year's best films about class differences in America.
  11. The Counselor
    The film doesn't temper enough of Cormac McCarthy's excesses, but Ridley Scott and his ensemble find enough meat in his scenario to make for diverting, bloody pleasure.
  12. Capital
    Costa-Gavras's new film is more a funhouse-mirror panegyric (albeit on an exhausted topic) than the staid thriller promised by its press materials.
  13. Jimmy P.
    Too often Jimmy P. seems to struggle in making its interesting ideas apparent, leaving them stranded beneath the dry surface of an otherwise ordinary procedural.
  14. I Am Divine
    Though it may boil down to your average procession-of-talking-heads template, it's still enlivened by the raucous words from the band of outsiders who supported and launched Divine into the limelight.
  15. Toad Road
    Writer-director Jason Banker finds the ironic beauty that arises from his characters' self-contemptuous and misplaced acts of destruction.
  16. Escape Plan
    A dim anti-privatization parable that preaches a familiar strain of cynical, unchallenged self-righteousness in the face of widespread abuse of civil liberties.
  17. Carrie
    In focusing on predominately kid-gloves portrayals of her teen players, Kimberly Peirce never properly addresses the machinery behind their doom, which is why the film is relentlessly lifeless when it's not literally ripping off De Palma shot-for-shot.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Human Scale
    While there's no doubt that a city's walkability is important, the film would have benefitted from either stats or testimonials in favor of its central premise.
  19. Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    Even if the film never transcends its subject matter, Jonathan Demme's light touch adds up to a charming portrait, only rarely fumbling into hagiography.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    2 Jacks
    The embarrassingly low production value of Bernard Rose's 2 Jacks works symbiotically with the film's botched performances.
  21. The Fifth Estate
    The film is guilty of some of the same quick judgment it clearly doesn't endorse, exploiting Julian Assange's unmistakable appearance to help give itself a boogeyman.
  22. Camille Claudel 1915
    Juliette Binoche's face, as we know, can tell a million stories in a simple and brief rearrangement of her facial muscles.
  23. The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers
    The documentary is dressed to the nines in pomp and patriotism, which seems meant to hide the fact that the film offers very little in the way of valuable reporting or insider information.
  24. Blood Brother
    Rocky's journey of self-realization undoubtedly has a universal resonance to it that intermittently yields poignant and inspiring moments. But where are the poor Indian kids in all of this?
  25. Haunter
    Vincenzo Natali emphasizes technically impressive shots in the service of predictable, boring expository beats, at the expense of elaborating on his main character's growing feelings of isolation and torment.
  26. Paradise
    The film smartly avoids the sort of cynical hijinks that characterize the majority of Vegas-set flicks, though it can't come up with anything more compelling to place in its stead.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Only Lovers Left Alive
    As is so often the case in Jim Jarmusch's films, simply spending time in the company of his creations proves engrossing.
  28. Her
    A screwball surrealist comedy that asks us to laugh at an unconventional romance while also disarming us with the realization that its fantasy scenario isn't too far from our present reality.
  29. Romeo & Juliet
    Not even when the doomed Juliet reaches for Romeo's dagger do you feel a single vicarious pain in your gut.
  30. The Invisible Woman
    Ralph Fiennes's film feels not so much rooted in the past as it is mired in conventions about how to portray that past.
  31. Nebraska
    In the film, Alexander Payne's overview of America is extraordinarily, multifariously profound.
  32. Réquiem NN
    Filmmaker Juan Manuel Echavarría's hands-off approach hinders us from mocking the believers' naïveté.
  33. All Is Lost
    J.C. Chandor creates an austere snapshot of human struggle, ingenuity, and perseverance, one that's predicated on Robert Redford's fantastic performance.
  34. Bastards
    Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.
  35. Escape from Tomorrow
    The film is just a stunt or, more specifically, a calling card, but that might be enough for anyone who's ever wanted to kick Mickey Mouse square in his padded, pious balls.
  36. CBGB
    As the film moves from one musical performance to another, the result increasingly feels like a series of celebrity impersonations set to a best-of-punk compilation album.
  37. I Will Follow You Into the Dark
    A moralistic ending is telegraphed from the beginning and routinely fulfilled by the end, rendering the rest of this trite, visually unappealing mess virtually worthless.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Gloria
    With its compelling and original approach to its romance narrative, coupled with Paulina García's nuanced and intuitive performance, the film delicately balances an entire octave of emotions.
  39. As I Lay Dying
    James Franco's readiness in approaching famously abstract source material certainly doesn't translate well into his directorial formalism, or, more appropriately, lack of formalism.
  40. Zero Charisma
    It's a pity that it hews to sitcom-like formula rather than using this bank of knowledge and sympathy to create something more original.
  41. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Ben Stiller's aesthetics blend overly manicured imagery with soaring rock songs that underline every emotion, lest the film's corporate logo-driven message-making didn't get the point across clearly enough.
  42. The Immigrant
    In its stripped-down realism and blistering fixation on its main character's grappling with life and mortality, the film is kin to Roberto Rossellini's collaborations with Ingrid Bergman.
  43. Machete Kills
    The films that Robert Rodriguez emulates here are known for similar unexpected narrative turns, but the crucial value that he misses is their actual cheapness.
  44. Runner Runner
    The ultimately forgettable Runner Runner is, for a gambling film, markedly risk-averse.
  45. Five Dances
    It's the moments when director Alan Brown stops worrying about clarifying plot and character motivation and lets the performances bring those into being that makes this an authentic project.
  46. The Missing Picture
    Paramount to molding a narrative of war and totalitarianism, however, is the inventive aesthetic in which Panh frames his memoir: a hypnotic hybrid of bleak archival footage, thoughtful voiceover, tone-dictating music, and—most significantly—homemade clay-figurine dioramas.
  47. A River Changes Course
    A delicate documentary about a way of life that's slowly disappearing, yet gives way to nothing new.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Institute
    A lazily constructed documentary that doesn't hide first-time director Spencer McCall's admitted lack of understanding for his subject.
  49. Vikingdom
    Intentionally or otherwise, Yusry Abd Halim allows the film, in all its candy-colored visuals and slow-mo-laden action scenes, to revel in its inherent campiness.
  50. Concussion
    The near-imperceptible finesse of Abby's characterization reflects writer-director Stacie Passon's effortless, interesting mix of richness and economy.
  51. Inuk
    The film can boast of an exotic locale and rare potential, but in Mike Magidson's hands the filmmaking is disappointingly shopworn.
  52. Argento's Dracula 3D
    The film is dispiriting because there's virtually no sign of Dario Argento in it, nor of any novel motivation to mount yet another version of an oft-told tale.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Dead Man and Being Happy
    At once familiar and enigmatic, Javier Rebollo's The Dead Man and Being Happy feels like a connect-the-dots film with a few lines artfully blurred.
  54. At Berkeley
    Frederick Wiseman's At Berkeley isn't only a study of the contemporary American university, but, like all of the filmmaker's best documentaries, a wide-ranging inquiry into the larger institutions and contradictions that define life in the United States.
  55. Let the Fire Burn
    An unnerving, all-archival account of Philadelphia citizens suddenly terrorized by the unchecked violence of rogue "law and order."
  56. I Used to Be Darker
    The songs performed here function as the creative end point of emotional trauma, revealing pain gradually transfigured into art.
  57. Linsanity
    The interpolations of "heavenly" sequences of Jeremy Lin playing basketball against CGI backdrops offer a hokey visual analogue for the intersection of faith and sports in his life.
  58. Gravity
    Alfonso Cuarón's triumph is an invigoratingly clean, elegant display of action choreography, a La Région Centrale you can still take grandma to see.
  59. Captain Phillips
    It works too hard to keep matters on an even, we're-all-more-alike-than-different keel, which is just one part of its chief problem of forcefully conveying information and intent.
  60. Bad Milo!
    It's fair to say that a filmmaker is thinking outside of the box when he or she stages a scene in which an ambulatory hemorrhoid tears a guy's cock off with its teeth and swallows it.
  61. Parkland
    The Peter Landesman film's overt politics are minimal, aside from defaulting to the myth of John F. Kennedy as a martyr for...something.
  62. Inside Llewyn Davis
    As played by an eloquently beleaguered Oscar Isaac, Llewyn Davis is arguably the most vivid and complex character the Coens have dreamed up since Marge Gunderson.
  63. Alan Partridge
    Director Declan Lowney's film operates from a conceit that affords only minor opportunities for true hilarity.
  64. A Touch of Sin
    As depicted by Jia Zhang-ke, the balance between the spoils and moral rot of murder are far preferable to the debasing rigors of tradition and hollow nationalism.
  65. Sunlight Jr.
    An admirable refusal to adhere to any overexposed poverty-porn templates, however, is taken a little too far in the opposite direction, to the point that the film feels self-consciously shapeless.
  66. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2
    This sequel strenuously works to form a total inversion of the first movie's relationship with food.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Inequality for All
    Robert Reich's message to America, much like director Jacob Kornbluth's uncomplicated film, is so simple and straightforward (you might even say obvious) that, without nitpicking, it can appear flawless.
  68. About Time
    A surprisingly thoughtful romantic comedy that shirks a great deal of reason and consequence in the name of love.
  69. Out in the Dark
    Instead of looking for depth or verisimilar romance, director Michael Mayer turns his characters into mere cogs in a pseudo-suspenseful thriller.
  70. Baggage Claim
    Writer-director David E. Talbert adapts his own 2003 novel into something as useless as it is implosive.
  71. The Square
    A blistering portrait of rebellion against social discord, marginalization and oppression, and a call to arms for true democratic ideals of dignity, justice, and fairness.
  72. Le Week-End
    Both keenly calculated and flowing with offbeat, naturalistic detail, Hanif Kureishi's jewel of a script reflects his sensibilities as a playwright.
  73. Metallica: Through the Never
    The songs still sound great here, but the instruments aren't amplified nearly as much as the nostalgia and vanity of the men who wield them.
  74. Hôtel Normandy
    Another well-upholstered but cheap exercise in luxe pandering that fails as romantic farce.
  75. On the Job
    A nose-to-the-ground crime thriller that also doubles as a wide-ranging portrait of official corruption in the Philippines, On the Job has little trouble delivering the genre goods.
  76. Rush
    Ron Howard's by-the-seat-of-your-pants aesthetic makes the slower, darker sequences feel hurried and bland, especially when stacked up next to the racing sequences.
  77. Shepard & Dark
    Treva Wurmfeld's documentary addresses, and acutely analyzes, the way friendship can bend, and occasionally snap, over time.
  78. Dark Touch
    The film is beholden to a strange internal logic that gives primacy not to its protagonist's suffering, but to its maker's thirst for fun.
  79. The Wind Rises
    Even if Hayao Miyazaki's career is complete, a work like this serves to remind us of the shining beacons he's left behind him, the testaments to pursuing beauty in the face of so much ugliness, themselves lasting reminders of the quiet rewards of determination.
  80. We Are What We Are
    Jim Mickle plays the scenario deadly straight and unintentionally exposes all of its attendant absurdities, leaving the cast stranded.
  81. Blue Is the Warmest Color
    Abdellatif Kechiche reveals through his sense of composition, and collaboration with his remarkable actresses, a sensitivity to emotional nuance that's striking.
  82. The Short Game
    This window into the world of youthful competition almost entirely disposes of social awareness in favor of routine drama.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    C.O.G.
    As an adaptation of Davis Sedaris's short essay from his acclaimed 1997 compilation, Naked, it's a letdown, as it doesn't exude the pop of the author's trademark humor.
  84. Enough Said
    Enough can't be said about how the late James Gandolfini comes so close to saving writer-director Nicole Holofcener's latest articulation of white suburban anxieties.
  85. Battle of the Year
    Remarkably, the highlight of Benson Lee's film, essentially a fiction reboot of his Planet B-Boy, isn't the scene where Chris Brown gets punched in the face.
  86. Like Father, Like Son
    The film scores all of its thematic points early, commenting intriguingly, if ultimately rather obviously, on the demands of Japanese patriarchy.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Newlyweeds
    Going neither in the direction of Reefer Madness nor a Cheech and Chong movie, it's both funny and serious, and its depictions of pot-smoking could be read as either promotional or cautionary.
  88. The Colony
    Greedily tries to cram every dystopian curse into one misbegotten plot, resulting in something wildly disjointed, even if its pieces arguably connect.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Muslims Are Coming!
    Despite their supposedly good intentions, the comedian-filmmakers broach the doc's central subject with crass and offensive standup routines that wouldn't be out of place on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    My Lucky Star
    Yet another limp spy spoof that fails to make any interesting critiques about the genre, let alone construct a humorous gag.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    American Promise
    The documentary's lack of a cohesive thesis may frustrate at times, but its power lies in its exposition of the mundane.
  92. Stranger by the Lake
    Alain Guiraudie's film portrays cruising as a danger-seeking and astoundingly repetitive affair, intimately linked to death itself.
  93. 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.
  94. Zaytoun
    It misfires in tone, depth, and political tact, dumbing down rather than providing new insights into the Israel-Palestine conflict.
  95. Prisoners
    Possibly year's most immaculate-looking drivel, a prismatically shot whodunit abundant in red herrings, but lacking in moral contemplation.
  96. Price of Gold
    While the real-time aesthetic approach sporadically enthralls, it also reveals the narrow worldview that burdens the film.
  97. Thanks for Sharing
    Is an exploration of sex addiction, in all its different manifestations, the new flavor of the week in contemporary American cinema?
  98. After Tiller
    It gives a true sense of how the forces of a hypocritically religious country has burdened countless young women with a lifetime of misplaced guilt.
  99. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    Dorothy Vogel is less the soft-spoken housewife from the first film than a businesswoman both shrewd and mousy, and her trajectory affords the film its closest semblance to a story.
  100. 12 Years a Slave
    Steve McQueen's film practically treats Solomon Norhtup as passive observer to a litany of horrors that exist primarily for our own education.
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