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. R.I.P.D.
    R.I.P.D. devotes far more energy to concept than execution, leaving most of the promising aspects high and dry.
  2. Our Nixon
    Our Nixon never completely overcomes the disappointment of its recovered video, but it nevertheless offers a compelling portrait of Nixon and those close to him, one that captures how willfully blind they often were to their excesses, and how paranoid they were about apparent threats to them and America as a whole.
  3. Nicky's Family
    This is a powerful chapter in our human history, but it's made melodramatic and dull through Matej Minac's indulgence of hokey reenactments and sound-augmented archival footage.
  4. Drug War
    The film is a singularly huge, relentless, all-encompassing set piece that mutates and spasms with terrifying lack of foresight. It's all business, business, business.
  5. Breaking the Girls
    At the center of the film, festering like an open sore, is the stereotype of the psycho lesbian bitch.
  6. RED 2
    An awfully expensive and grossly extended Cialis commercial.
  7. Dealin' with Idiots
    The film is reduced to a series of unfunny mockery laid out so Garlin can display his trademark deadpan reaction.
  8. La Playa D.C.
    The film only feels interesting when it focuses on looking at what the characters aren't doing and listening to what they aren't saying.
    • 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.
  10. Grabbers
    Good, clean genre entertainment, the sort of harmless yet endearing brand of moviemaking seemingly unattainable in today's Hollywood system.
  11. Turbo
    As a film about social issues, and simply being yourself, it's commendably progressive, going so far as serving as a kind of coming-out story.
  12. Only God Forgives
    It takes the basic form of the revenge flick and dips it in tar, making for a movie that comes out sticky, nasty, and black.
  13. Under the Bed
    The film's sense of conviction and psychological nuance never rises above that of the "I Learned It from Watching You" anti-drug PSA.
  14. Broken
    It's the rare coming-of-age narrative that manages to respect the tricky ambiguities of shifting perceptions.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Girl Most Likely
    Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini's dismal, D-grade sitcom isn't fit to lick the boots of Whit Stillman's four films.
  16. Blackfish
    The Frankensteinian rebellion of orcas against their corporate captors turns this doc into a sort of showbiz horror film.
  17. Evidence
    One wishes it had spared us the remedial theorizing on media culture and artistic representation and license and less apologetically acted the part of a straight-up horror film.
  18. The Conjuring
    Though The Conjuring claims to be based on a true story, in truth it's based on every horror film that's come before it.
  19. Killing Season
    Mark Steven Johnson's Killing Season is a hard movie to take seriously, which is particularly unfortunate since it deals with such weighty issues as genocide, the ethical compromises that everyone makes in combat, and the lingering effects of wartime decisions on participants years down the line.
  20. Grown Ups 2
    The obvious amount of hard work that went into this out-of-touch sequel is partly what makes it so irritating.
  21. Computer Chess
    A movie which sits at the nexus between spoken and written language, the latter mostly of the programming variety.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hot Flashes
    Seidelman's attempts to provide positive, alternative representations of marginalized people and problems is overly ambitious.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Terms and Conditions May Apply
    If The Social Network didn't make you want to quit Facebook in 2010, the brave new world outlined here should, despite the fact that your data won't actually be erased.
  24. Les Coquillettes
    It's hard to ignore the fact that a substantial percentage of Letourneur's would-be character study is dedicated to concentrated Schadenfreude that's unbalanced and without any real narrative weight.
  25. Sweetgrass
    Sweetgrass achieves a borderline abstract splendor that's furthered by the directors' avoidance of delving deeply into its human subjects, whose backstories and general circumstances are only alluded to through fly-on-wall scraps.
  26. Still Mine
    As far as films about couples dealing with the female partner losing her mind go, Still Mine is pretty pedestrian.
  27. Pacific Rim
    Guillermo del Toro doesn't rise above the obligations of staging a film of this sort as a multi-level video game, a stylish but programmatic ride toward an inevitable final boss battle.
  28. Pawn Shop Chronicles
    Wayne Kramer thankfully refuses to cloak his excessiveness in hedge-betting self-consciousness and the result is a gratifyingly disreputable B-movie blow out.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Exit Elena
    Nathan Silver's film is a quiet and affecting micro-budgeted drama, its condensed frame evoking the claustrophobic feeling of the household it examines.
  30. The Hunt
    The film is in part an exceedingly black comedy that parodies proper society's eager, self-righteous naïveté on the subject of its children.
  31. The Shine of Day
    As in Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's 2009 film, La Pivellina, modesty is the key to The Shine of Day, and sometimes to the detriment of audience involvement and focus.
  32. Beneath
    Its stance toward every dipshit slasher and creature-horror flick that's come before it never feels less than casually hostile.
  33. Israel: A Home Movie
    A prismatic meditation on an entire nation, Eliav Lilti's documentary is history as abstraction.
  34. Fruitvale Station
    Sensitively performed and laced with some forceful quotidian grit, the film evades the larger questions behind a scandalous shooting death.
  35. The Look of Love
    With its softened edges, bland aftertaste, and watered-down distillation of Raymond's life and career, Michael Winterbottom's film represents the house champagne of biographical cinema.
  36. The Lone Ranger
    The movie, of course, barrels toward climax upon climax, and while possibly better photographed, the crashes, bangs, and booms are no less numbing than anything else you've seen in this summer of garbage blockbusters.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A Girl and a Gun
    Had director Catheryne Czubek focused on just one or two of the several interesting or lesser-explored topics under the umbrella of her debut film's subject matter, A Girl and a Gun might have amounted to a sharper, more interesting documentary.
  38. Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me
    A rock-doc that mythologizes the tragicomic flame out of power pop's seminal band, and the fan-made afterlife that brought them long-delayed success.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Hammer of the Gods
    An unbearably stupid exercise in gore that deserves to die the same cruel, soulless death that nearly every character does at some point in the film.
  40. Absence
    The tension almost immediately leaks out of the narrative once we realize we're watching a found-footage horror movie.
  41. The Way, Way Back
    Praises the electric carelessness of teenage angst while depicting it as if it were ultimately no more exciting, though no less pleasant, than an hour in the wave pool.
  42. Despicable Me 2
    The script's jumble of plot asides and family-friendly pandering is enough to make you want to root for a hero.
  43. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    There's so much baggage involved in the kind of dilettantish games Jamie and Crystal are playing that it's a shame that the film never fully engages with these enticing issues.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Un Flic (re-release)
    As far as swan songs go, Jean-Pierre Melville's Un Flic is a fascinatingly garbled tune that teems with formal inconsistencies and yet still manages to carry a pained melody.
  45. The Heat
    With the film, Melissa McCarthy definitively cements her status as a legitimate comic talent, leaving her co-star stumbling behind in her wake.
  46. White House Down
    Roland Emmerich makes love of country into a thing of unabashed hokum, which bleeds through every nook of this overstuffed jumble and leaves no character untouched.
  47. Some Girl(s)
    Like most of Neil LaBute's work in the field of "emotional terrorism," the film protests that bad behavior isn't only good, but also essential to art.
  48. A Band Called Death
    The film is made impetuously watchable and disarmingly emotional by the filmmakers' strong command of docudrama and nonfiction narrative style.
  49. 100 Bloody Acres
    One sees a film called 100 Bloody Acres expecting the requisite allusions to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but an homage to the best scene in Melvin and Howard comes as something of a shock.
  50. Copperhead
    Ron Maxwell's film, from beginning to end, exudes all the excitement of a textbook history lesson.
  51. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    The film employs a flashy text-and-graphics aesthetic that immediately brings to mind the satirical undercurrent of a Grand Theft Auto video game.
  52. I'm So Excited
    Pedro Almodóvar's diverting pop-art bauble firmly placing the "relief" in comic relief and the "cock" in cockpit.
  53. Museum Hours
    Jem Cohen's film finds its most salient tension in the fraught relationship between known and unknown objects.
    • 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.
  55. Laurence Anyways
    It takes cojones for a filmmaker to chase Fassbinder's ghost, but it takes heart and talent to damn near catch up with it.
  56. Stuck in Love
    The movie aims for an admirable balance, but fatally upsets that equilibrium in its hurried resolutions.
  57. World War Z
    The zombies twitch, leap, gnash, and destroy, but the film has all the thrill and surprise of a model U.N. summit.
  58. Unfinished Song
    Part end-of-life romance, part grossly manipulative mush, the film tries to stare grief and mortality in the face while practically shitting rainbows.
  59. Monsters University
    Unfortunate proof that the animation studio previously known for its brains is now resting a little too heavily on its nominal brawn.
  60. Kuichisan
    These myriad impressions never quite add up to anything coherent by the end, but perhaps the incoherence is precisely the point.
  61. Three Worlds
    A little too deliberately balanced in its depiction of its three leads, but it largely makes up the difference with its informed grounding in the economic and social terrain of contemporary France.
  62. The Haunting of Helena
    Yet another ghost story that insists there's nothing more chilling than a professional woman charged with raising a child on her own.
  63. Maniac
    Its audio-visual overload testifies to a group of filmmakers' belief that some films are made to be remade.
  64. The Attack
    The film is most interesting as an articulation of how its main character's initial status as an emblem of inter-religious understanding quickly dissolves following a suicide bombing.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    In the Fog
    Sergei Loznitsa occasionally writes his ideas too explicitly in the film's dialogue, though he makes up for this by deftly employing some ironic symbolism elsewhere.
  66. The Guillotines
    Despite the multitude of cinematic tricks the prolific Andrew Lau has up his sleeve, the film is a disappointingly rote entry in the wuxia pantheon.
  67. 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.
  68. Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story
    Brad Bernstein's documentary proves that Ungerer's legacy is as historically significant as it is artistically.
  69. More Than Honey
    Markus Imhoof's film reveals itself as a curious, audacious mix of personal essay film and nature documentary.
  70. Vehicle 19
    As one incoherent action scene follows another, one's left staring at a film with nothing to respond to, waiting for it all to be over.
  71. Hatchet III
    BJ McDonnell, too hesitant to stray from the beaten path set by Green's previous films, lacks the looser, more whimsical hand that would have allowed Hatchet III to transcend its thoughtlessly imitative state.
  72. This Is the End
    It's disheartening that, despite some half-hearted overtures toward shifting the comedy paradigm, the filmmakers make little attempt to expand their comedic palette.
  73. 20 Feet from Stardom
    This joyous documentary leaves us wanting to immediately seek out the incredible, sometimes unfamiliar music we've just heard.
  74. Call Me Kuchu
    The film provides welcome context for the semi-hysteria that recently took over the U.S. media in regard to Uganda's "Kill the Gays" bill.
  75. The Bling Ring
    Sofia Coppola seems curiously unmotivated to bring full analysis or provocation to her themes, leaving the film feeling like a disappointingly toothless satire.
  76. The Stroller Strategy
    What most rankles about the film is the way that its insistence on paternal instincts as the principal signifier of male adulthood leads it to sanction the most childlike behavior of all.
  77. Berberian Sound Studio
    On the surface, Peter Strickland's film is an amusing black comedy that parodies the horror movie's continual status as the cultural black sheep of the cinematic landscape, but the filmmaker is most prominently concerned with painting a sonic portrait of alienation.
  78. Free Samples
    An angry indie that favors hollow ridicule over credibility.
  79. Rapture-Palooza
    Its views on organized religion are so halfhearted and perfunctory as to make Kevin Smith's Dogma seem like a veritable master's class in theistic studies.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    As Cool as I Am
    The film is the cinematic equivalent of a teenager, making everything more melodramatic than it needs to be, and impatient with the subtle details of life.
  81. The Internship
    Shawn Levy's occasionally uproarious, warm-hearted comedy is about different generations educating each other, but it never seems rote.
  82. The Purge
    A rote home-invasion thriller afraid to be seen as just another rote home-invasion thriller, the film turgidly grasps for profundity by framing bloodlust as patriotic duty.
  83. Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
    Inflammatory talk-show host Morton Downey Jr. sparked, delighted, and quickly faded like a firecracker--not unlike the erratic, quick-fire presentation of his persona in this documentary.
  84. Violet & Daisy
    A twisted, spirited exercise in stark juxtaposition, a grindhouse fairy tale of sorts that pairs the sugary sweet with the nastily violent.
  85. The Rambler
    Sinister, comical, aggravating, and audacious, Calvin Lee Reeder's film is nothing short of an affront.
  86. Much Ado About Nothing
    The film is nothing without the physicality of the performers, as Joss Whedon's script handles the transition of Shakespeare's language to modern day indifferently.
  87. Hey Bartender
    Sadly, Douglas Tirola's documentary doesn't follow its subjects' advice regarding the refinement of technique.
  88. Wish You Were Here
    From the opening montage alone, it's clear that Australian director Kieran Darcy-Smith plans to play his cards close to the vest in this maddeningly underwritten thriller/domestic-drama hybrid.
  89. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    The film works best when it focuses viewer attention most acutely on the story, deflecting it away from the director's manipulations.
  90. The Prey
    The Prey doesn't have the obsessive pull of a great thriller, as it's undeniably an impersonal toy, but it's a hell of a toy.
  91. Hello Herman
    The alignment with Herman's perspective, even as it never downplays the gravity of his crimes, leads the film into a set of obvious conclusions.
  92. Dirty Wars
    Ably leads us through its extensive investigation, faltering only when the camera lingers on Jeremy Scahill for a touch too long at the expense of his interview subjects.
  93. One Mile Above
    We're never far away from a crude digression demoting an ethereal sense of artistry to hunkered-down artifice.
  94. American Mary
    The filmmakers certainly exaggerate (i.e. exploit) their subject, but for a community that prides itself on shock value, there seems no sufficient alternative.
  95. Now You See Me
    There's nothing behind all this sturm und drang but a lineup of insubstantial ciphers, all false fronts and empty words in a pretend world not quite conducive to emotional investment.
  96. La Camioneta: The Journey of One American School Bus
    The documentary is committed not to some pseudo-factual documentary tradition, but to a more engaging realist poesis.
  97. After Earth
    The art of storytelling is both of distinct narrative interest and personal issue in the latest payload of calcified nonsense from one of modern cinema's oddest would-be auteurs.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Student
    Kazakh cinema's stalwart auteur Darzhan Omirbaev adapts Crime and Punishment to modern-day Almaty, but with little to say beyond the obvious.
  99. The Kings of Summer
    The film's aesthetic is marked by off-tempo editing and a tone that vacillates between grim and coy, and though it's occasionally visually evocative, it's also unmistakably over-calculated.
  100. Byzantium
    Forlorn depictions of love and death may dignify Neil Jordan's film, but narrative withholding ultimately drives a stake into its unmistakable heart.
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