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 Family
    A film whose only distinguishing characteristic is how big a mess it makes of its already meager ambitions.
  2. Insidious: Chapter 2
    A full realization of the very worst fears one could imagine when its director, James Wan, unexpectedly emerged from the torture-porn murk with its original, spiritedly directed predecessor.
  3. Mother of George
    Beautiful, poetic, and hard-hitting without the use of excessive force and deeply layered with evolving and regional nuances of feminine experience
  4. +1
    It ambitiously parodies and mourns the implications of the one coherent message that mass media manages to convey to all of its consumers in all its endlessly proliferating, ever-shifting permutations.
  5. Kill Your Darlings
    An overmatched star and a scarcity of eccentricity sink this hip-lit origin story from director John Krokidas.
  6. Don Jon
    Joseph Gordon-Levitt's directorial debut does for porn-dependence what Shame did for sex addiction by offering a surface-level look at the effects of its specific pathology on its lead male character.
  7. Mademoiselle C
    It's to Carine Roitfeld's own credit and director Fabien Constant's funky and frenetic pacing that the doc feels neither like a corporate hagiography nor like mere fashionista masturbation material.
  8. The Last Time I Saw Macao
    The essayistic remembrances provide the filmmakers with a brilliant exit strategy when the noir business has nowhere to go but in circles.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Informant
    It creates a useful distance between Brandon Darby and his stories that allow for us to assess them individually, reinforcing the film's suggestion that the truth is elusive.
  10. Jayne Mansfield's Car
    Billy Bob Thornton's ensemble Southern family dramedy fails to subvert its cutesy formula often enough.
  11. Wadjda
    It doesn't play like reality, but like boilerplate filmic fantasy, and its novel setting and inception struggles seem positioned as a beard--or veil, if you will--to mask its mediocrity.
  12. Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
    Though occasionally aesthetically alluring and evocative, feels like an introductory chapter to a more substantive, sprawling study of the actor.
  13. And While We Were Here
    Suggests a version of Roberto Rossellini's Voyage to Italy reworked as a photo diary posted on Facebook.
  14. Winnie Mandela
    The film's tonal inconsistencies speak less to the struggles of its titular subject than to its own grasp-exceeding ambitions.
  15. All Is Bright
    All Is Bright remains engaging, for the most part, but most of the big narrative turns feel both predictable and forced, and at odds with the natural charms of the cast.
  16. Adore
    So deadly serious and yet so goofily unbound that, in some scenes, incest truly seems like it's on the scandalous menu.
  17. Out of the Clear Blue Sky
    By de-emphasizing politics in favor of humanitarianism, Danielle Gardner's work also suggests how Americans might yet unify even as the world around them threatens to tear itself apart.
  18. Salinger
    An outsized A&E Biography episode coursing with the strident urgency typical to anyone convinced they have something new to say on a long since played-out topic.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    La Maison de la Radio
    Whether or not you consider this a banal topic, it's plain to see that the puttering documentary doesn't achieve magnificence.
  20. Riddick
    For a film about a killing machine who can see at night, it's fittingly ironic that the film itself is, both narratively and visually, a dark, muddled mess.
  21. The Ultimate Life
    Its thinly veiled message of social conservatism and religious affirmations as the pathway to an ideal life is delivered with all the predigested sentimentality of a Hallmark card.
  22. Fire in the Blood
    It produces a collection of one-dimensional facts strung together with an utmost respect for chronology and documentary-making's most stale conventions.
  23. Il Futuro
    A counterproductively "literary" film with no satisfying payoffs, Rutger Hauer's blind recluse notwithstanding.
  24. A Teacher
    We're only allowed an insufficient glimpse of the anxiousness and curiosity that drive these creatures, a tactic which feels suspiciously like hesitance masquerading as enigma.
  25. 99%: The Occupy Wall Street Collaborative Film
    If you grant the documentary its slanted perspective at the outset, it works well as its own state-of-the-union address.
  26. Red Obsession
    Offers the ins and outs of the world of wine as an implicit metaphor for art appreciation, from both aesthetic and financial standpoints.
  27. Touchy Feely
    Lynn Shelton crafts a film of astonishingly sustained mood, tying its beguiling atmosphere to the mental states of her characters.
  28. Populaire
    Candy-colored to a potentially cavity-causing degree, the film is a bubbly regurgitation of retrograde romantic comedy tropes and reactionary sexual politics.
  29. Hell Baby
    Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon display a freewheelin' sense of invention that should be watched closely, because they have the raw stuff of major comic filmmakers.
  30. Good Ol' Freda
    The documentary will prove fascinating only to the die-hard fans that Freda Kelly spent years writing to, though in this case that's no small number of people.
  31. One Direction: This Is Us
    Some of the film's most memorable moments involve Niall and Liam looking down on oceans of screaming devotees in the street, and controlling their cheers like orchestra conductors.
  32. Abigail Harm
    Lee Isaac Chung's film exudes a wonderful sense of originality, a daring and organic playfulness rarely found in American indie cinema.
  33. Getaway
    Though always speeding forward in some gear of ridiculousness, the film is a lot more fun when it's completely nonsensical, before its baddie's motives and harebrained plot are funnel-fed to the viewer.
  34. The Last Christeros
    The film forsakes most of the underdog sentimentality found in traditional genre treatments of noble sacrifice.
  35. The Lifeguard
    The film heroically stretches out its governing water metaphor to a point that allows it to best Garden State's Guinness World Record for most incessant navel-gazing.
  36. American Made Movie
    The documentary's refusal to challenge the comfort zones of its target audience is apparent throughout.
  37. Afternoon Delight
    Jill Soloway's film is dishonest in the way it attempts to mask self-pity as enlightened self-criticism.
  38. Closed Circuit
    It fails as a critique of draconian security states and surveillance culture, moving too fast to properly consider any of the well-worn ideas it glosses over.
  39. Tokyo Waka: A City Poem
    Its discursiveness does have the intriguing effect of leaving behind a myriad of impressions about its subjects rather than settling on pat interpretations.
  40. I Declare War
    The film rarely takes us past its rather obvious conclusions about the potential bestial nature of kids and how that may translate to the larger battlefields.
  41. You're Next
    Adam Wingard's You're Next brazenly merges the home-invasion thriller with the dysfunctional family dramedy.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Trials of Muhammad Ali
    Bill Siegel has made more of a Ken Burns-esque history book--that is, a medium more dry and factual--than a film.
  43. Devil's Pass
    As Renny Harlin's career progresses, it seems more and more that his early gems were merely happy accidents.
  44. The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
    The movie blasts by for a while as an odd and busy slice of highly watchable garbage.
  45. Old Cats
    Walks a fine line between empathetic treatment of its characters and voyeuristic freakshow gazing.
  46. Paranoia
    Robert Luketic's supposedly down-and-dirty corporate espionage thriller undercuts itself at nearly every turn by shunning any potential relevancy.
  47. The Frozen Ground
    Taste and good intentions are only going to get one so far with a script this tone deaf and direction this ugly and monotonous.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Savannah
    The film is impossible to take seriously as a commemoration of Moultrie's life or Allen's prolific status because of its plethora of contrivances.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Student
    If Santiago Mitre doesn't transcend the issues of the writer's film with quite the grace of A Separation, he nonetheless manages to make good use of a fine cast.
  50. Paradise: Faith
    A shallow film that leaves us knowing exactly what we're seeing, and able to predict what the characters will say to each other in the mostly uninspired and overtly familiar dialogue.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sparrows Dance
    Writer-director Noah Buschel interestingly mirrors the monotony of his main character's routine in his claustrophobic aesthetic.
  52. Thérèse
    Claude Miller's swan song not only shares its main character's name but also her tempered disposition.
  53. Short Term 12
    There's tremendous dramatic value to the aching and sometimes devastating scenes that home in on these kids' private torments.
  54. Kick-Ass 2
    The film doubles down on the love-hate relationship with ultra-violence that typified its predecessor, but A History of Violence this is not.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    This Is Martin Bonner
    At its best, with its quiet, ominous pace in the early going and its economical distribution of information throughout, the film is reminiscent of Todd Haynes's Safe.
  56. The Grandmaster
    The film, more likely to invite comparisons to the writings of Marcel Proust than the previous Ip Man films, is a gorgeous folly that never entirely emerges from its creator's head.
  57. Jobs
    Steered by a lead actor and director, Joshua Michael Stern, who are both way out of their respective leagues, Jobs is excruciating, failing to entertain and all but pissing on its subject's grave.
  58. Ain't Them Bodies Saints
    The film's highly calculated beauty suffocates rather than elevates the story's emotional underpinnings.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The World's End
    An ordinary drama embellished and in some sense infringed on by genre elements rather than the other way around.
  60. The Happy Sad
    Ken Urban, adapting his own play, fumbles at injections of urban, and decidedly not urbane, levity, in addition to telegraphing entire subplots.
  61. You Will Be My Son
    For all of the director's willingness to explore his characters' unexpected depths, he's still hamstrung by his perpetually tasteful cinema-of-quality aesthetic.
    • 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.
  63. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    With the film, Lee Daniels quietly pushes his talent for hashing out visceral, violent emotions into unexpected dramatic terrain.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kid-Thing
    Its main character's moral predicament with a woman inside a pit becomes a muddle of confused symbolism and trite psychoanalysis.
  65. Jug Face
    Chad Crawford Kinkle impressively imbues this supernatural world of backwoods mysticism with a plausible milieu while still staying committed to the film's own brewing insanity.
  66. We're the Millers
    Though the cast partially eschews the family-friendly timidity that the film defers to in the end, this would-be wild thing remains little more than a rowdy endorsement of the status quo.
  67. Planes
    The film feels second-rate in every sense, from the quality of its animation to its C-list voice cast.
  68. Blood
    Themes of family ties, obsession, and morality, so dramatically realized in Conviction, are gracelessly and shapelessly strewn together here.
  69. Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
    I'll tell you what's insane: the probability that folks will go easy on this dreck because it's aimed at younger viewers, who are being distressingly trained to expect little from their art.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    Amy Nicholson's documentary feels warm and fuzzy about its subject, but at the same time depersonalized.
  71. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    It ever so subtly zeros in on the extreme particularities of a remote place to find something universal, or at the very least easily comprehensible about despair.
  72. Off Label
    Sincerely angry about the crisis in polypharmacy, this narrative suffers from a documentarian form of A.D.D.
  73. I Give It a Year
    Much of the film's attempted laughs come from the comedy-of-discomfort school, with an endless array of situations that milk awkwardness to a degree that makes these scenes far more unpleasant than humorous to watch.
  74. Drinking Buddies
    Less precise and cohesive than much of Joe Swanberg's recent work, as its small, improvisational skeleton struggles to meet the demands of the more ambitious story it's trying to tell.
  75. Elysium
    A cheekily gruesome and genuinely urgent entertainment, Blomkamp's latest nevertheless can't help but beg the question: Where's Snake Plissken when you need him?
  76. 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.
  77. The Artist and the Model
    This safe, solemn tale of an aged artist whose vitality is briefly revived by a pretty young thing is unconvincing as an articulation of the potentially spiritual nature of the artist/model relationship.
  78. The Canyons
    Paul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis don't have the sense of play this kind of narrative of one-upmanship requires, as we're never allowed to enjoy the characters' misdeeds.
  79. Una Noche
    Una Noche tugged at my heartstrings, but the film's almost phantasmagoric fixation on sex can feel crass and dehumanizing.
  80. The Smurfs 2
    Raja Gosnell's particular zeal to modernize the Smurfs only develops this would-be family comedy into a shamelessly manipulative smurftastrophe.
  81. Lovelace
    Lost in the music, mustaches, and furniture of the early '70s, this docudrama of a porn star's exploitation isn't nearly painful enough.
  82. In a World...
    Lake Bell holds the thing together through sheer charisma, and in fact the foibles of the movie only start to show when she absents herself for extended stretches of time.
  83. Our Children
    It's occasionally too icily removed, but it compensates through its perpetual concern with understanding its characters and their untenable situations.
  84. When Comedy Went to School
    It confuses nostalgia for earth-shaking cultural upheaval, never really expounding on the actual effect of the Borscht Belt circuit's influence.
  85. Smash & Grab: The Story of the Pink Panthers
    It occasionally succumbs to the pitfalls of the mock-thriller kitsch it slyly dismantles, but it's made up for in a wry and experimental visual style that satirically paints a vibrant crime fantasia.
  86. Europa Report
    After a while, it's hard to escape the fact that the audience is watching a potential monster movie in which most of the fun stuff — i.e. the monster—has been pared away.
  87. Drift
    The obstacles that the Kelly brothers encounter are as uninspired as the film's treacly lessons about brotherhood and staying true to one's principles.
  88. Cockneys vs Zombies
    Matthias Hoene allows the cockney swears to flow as deliriously as the truly convincing blood splatter, offering a few unexpected gut-busters along the way.
  89. The Spectacular Now
    Given the film's early promise, it's unfortunate how it turns into a largely reductive Freudian character piece in which the main character has to come to terms with his old man.
  90. Postales (Postcards)
    Throughout the film, writer-director Jash Hyde avoids Paul Haggis's patronizing white liberal attitude toward class warfare.
  91. A Single Shot
    Content to faithfully hew to convention, A Single Shot rarely surprises, but its portrait of foolishness and fallibility, and its atmosphere of inevitable doom, remain sturdy and captivating.
  92. The Wolverine
    This may be the year's best superhero movie because, for a sufficient amount of time, it doesn't feel like a superhero movie at all.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wasteland
    At heart a heist movie, snappy and dry in its humor, clever in its elaborate robbery scheme, and somewhat bloated and unspooled in its storytelling.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Stranded
    It may suggest an Alien incarnate, but once you get past its exterior, it's as empty as outer space.
  95. Terraferma
    Its self-seriousness never allows it to become the realist counterpoint to Aki Kaurismäki's tragicomic approach in Le Havre that one initially hopes it will be.
  96. The To Do List
    Essentially the film aims to trade in the awkwardness of teen sexuality, but too often settles for the gross-out gag instead.
  97. Frankenstein's Army
    The found-footage gimmick mostly comes off as window dressing for what turns out to be yet another mad-scientist-run-amok romp.
  98. First Comes Love
    Nina Davenport doesn't seem interested in taming her unwieldy vanity, and thus her documentary reads as a Match.com profile recontextualized as cinema narcissismo.
  99. Blue Jasmine
    One of Woody Allen's strongest and most pointed films in over a decade despite mildly falling victim to his recent propensity for clunky narrative development, cynicism, and stereotypical characterizations.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »