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. The East
    It showcases the evolving interests and talents of Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, but expands them and channels them into a more traditional thriller framework.
  2. The History of Future Folk
    Ridiculousness played with a straight face, the film is endearing even if it's never quite hilarious.
  3. The Wall
    We may find out how Gedeck's character reacts to her isolation, but we're never privy to her actual feelings, largely because in a film about a sudden onset of solitude, Pölsler is far too afraid of silence.
  4. Shadow Dancer
    James Marsh carries forward the mood and menace of the opening into the balance of the work, perfectly matching his aesthetic strategies to the story's shifting moral terrain.
  5. Hannah Arendt
    The film's most striking quality, and it's not insignificant, is director Margarethe von Trotta's refusal to fossilize the controversies she dramatizes.
  6. Epic
    And that's the thing with Epic: It's something close to an animated masterpiece, provided it's watched on mute.
  7. Doin' It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC
    Perhaps the first important film about street hoops, even if the overall product struggles from a lack of focus.
  8. Plimpton! Starring George Plimpton as Himself
    Its looseness adequately portrays Plimpton as an inwardly conflicted figure, but it fails to make much of a case for his legacy outside of The Paris Review's still-noticeable brand.
  9. Fill the Void
    The film unfolds in unhurried dramatic terms that come to take on an almost fatalistic force.
  10. A Green Story
    Writer-director Nika Agiashvili buys into the concept of the American dream with the zeal of a true believer.
  11. Alyce Kills
    The film is an ultra-violent parody of unearned self-entitlement, of people who feel tricked into a lifestyle they refuse to challenge for the comforts it still offers.
  12. 3 Geezers!
    The convoluted mockumentary setup indicates that this is all meant to be taken as a meta exercise in Hollywood-insider rib-nudging, although the proceedings rarely rise to the occasion.
  13. The Source Family
    The research and elucidating synthesis on display effectively illuminate the pernicious aura of a lifestyle pursued by the yearning, lost souls of the time.
  14. Fast & Furious 6
    Justin Lin strives to approximate something like Ocean's Eleven for petrosexuals, but testosterone outweighs wit and cleverness at every turn in Chris Morgan's starched script.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Old Dog
    Minimalist in its aesthetics and soundtrack, quiet and deliberate in its plot, but nonetheless familiar--endearing and a vital addition to the small but growing Tibetan cinema.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Pieta
    Kim Ki-duk's film makes an exaggerated, undeserved show of its cruelty, indignity, and aspirations of importance.
  17. Star Trek Into Darkness
    The film is densely plotted, occasionally bordering on the convoluted, but the clarity and inventiveness of the direction keeps the drama and the action constantly percolating.
  18. Black Rock
    Layered conflicts mount as this lean film treks on, and they're not limited to gender politics.
  19. Elemental
    More than some run-of-the-mill social-awareness doc, the film pays as much attention to the personal and emotional strife of its subjects as it does to their activism.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Becoming Traviata
    It works as a reminder of the important interactiveness of the performing arts, of actors evoking the drama, action, and emotion that computers and machines cannot.
  21. 33 Postcards
    Pauline Chan's film is a jumbled mixture of redemptive uplift and genre hijinks.
  22. State 194
    It too often feels like just one more aesthetically uninspired documentary that gives way in the end to a special round of pleading for its specific cause.
  23. The English Teacher
    This is the second recent release—after The Great Gatsby, whose overwrought, on-screen text it even shares—that aims to channel great, time-honored storytelling without being able to tell a great story.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Bidder 70
    Without being didactic, the documentary demonstrates how an ordinary concerned citizen can take a stand when politicians neglect to make decisions for the good of the people and instead serve the interests of big business.
  25. Augustine
    Alice Winocour's take on this true story carries the superficial trappings of a period drama, but its perspective is entirely contemporary.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Frances Ha
    Noah Baumbach's film feels like too perfect a portrait of quarter-life malady, down to the rushed redemptive endnotes and Greta Gerwig's idealized heroine.
  27. No One Lives
    Ryuhei Kitamura's latest genre bloodbath is par for the course, in spite of the occasionally flourish of interesting subtext.
  28. He's Way More Famous Than You
    It would have been nice if the film had surrendered to its lunacy more blatantly, more carelessly.
  29. Three Sisters
    Wang Bing's no-frills style of documentation visually echoes the preadolescent trio's simple yet unforgiving world and its sense of labor as life.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Painting (Le Tableau)
    Its aesthetic employs expressionism, realism, and cubism, but the morality plays are layered on as thickly and haphazardly as a toddler's finger painting.
  31. Pilgrim Song
    It aims for a sense of soulful introspection that instead comes off as an unwitting parody of languid indie conventions.
  32. Assault on Wall Street
    Uwe Boll's insistence on plugging genre tropes into his imagined idea of populism returns us to the same cynical place as Postal, except with none of the sizzle.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Great Gatsby
    This is a film which takes classic source material and imbues it on screen with a sense of wonder commensurate to its prior form, perhaps offering an even more visceral impression of the possibilities inherent to this beautiful, tragic world.
  34. Venus and Serena
    Opting for inspiration over insight, Venus and Serena is a starry-eyed pop documentary that cannot transcend its scattershot, for-fans-only filmmaking.
  35. Aftershock
    There's plenty of gore, but none of it is particularly inventive, nor does it engender any visceral or emotional reactions beyond jaded disgust.
  36. One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das
    The overall product doesn't reveal anything about its subject that a Wikipedia page couldn't do just as well.
  37. Peeples
    Tina Gordon Chism's film collapses into a series of clumsy improvisatory sketches, tied up in cheap, risibly sentimental catharsis.
  38. Sightseers
    This sardonic depiction of Britain, as a land where a thin veneer of strained politesse and fussy specificity of tastes masks a throbbing heart of darkness, makes for Ben Wheatley's best film yet.
  39. And Now a Word from Our Sponsor
    It's a testament to Bruce Greenwood's acting that Adan never becomes entirely as insufferable as the words that come out of his mouth.
  40. Erased
    The film seldom pushes beyond the bare-minimum dictates of the thriller, only rarely offering up a memorable action sequence.
  41. Java Heat
    A middling genre movie, but it's oddly likable for its conflicted, unresolved tension.
  42. Free the Mind
    Phie Ambo deftly captures her subjects' sense of paranoia and helplessness without encroaching on their brave candor.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Is All You Need
    At times it seems as if Susanne Bier set out to create some kind of absurdist comedy, but lost her nerve somewhere along the way.
  44. Memories Look at Me
    Worry and sadness are palpable, but so is wry humor and irony as Song ponders age and mortality with a sensitive eye for emotions and a strong sense of composition.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dead Man's Burden
    It's always a pleasure to encounter genre ambition contained in such a sinewy-shot, emotionally resonant, and gorgeously photographed package.
  46. Desperate Acts of Magic
    Tammy Caplan and Joe Tyler Gold's film gives off the alienating feel of an inside joke that you miss in the off chance you're not part of the professional magic business.
    • 100 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Voyage to Italy (re-release)
    As befits a filmmaker who defined as well as challenged the definition of Italian neorealism, Voyage to Italy unfolds as a thorny narrative and a profoundly personal documentary.
  48. Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn
    As far as derivative crime sagas go, Paul Borghese's film might represent the new gold standard of shameless barrel-scraping.
  49. Iron Man 3
    A madly creative, darkly comical, and fiendishly self-aware actioner with muscle to spare.
  50. Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's
    Matthew Miele has made a department store of a documentary, stocked to the hilt with an obscene inventory of storylines, talking heads, and utterly tasteless choices.
  51. Unmade in China
    Not even its problematically touristic gaze is enough to derail the fascination of this absurd tale's many nightmarish twists and turns.
  52. Greetings from Tim Buckley
    Despite the counter-culture subjects at its core, Daniel Algrant's film possesses a put-upon hipness that cannot mask its disarming dorkiness.
  53. The Iceman
    Michael Shannon has no interior to play with, since the film seems intent on ridding Richie of any emotion other than love for his family, and also no catharsis to build toward.
  54. The Happy House
    D.W. Young navigates his varying moods with an ease that's particularly impressive for a director making his feature debut, but he never capitalizes on his ability to coax down our guard.
  55. 1st Night
    The political dynamic that underpins The Rules of the Game is nonexistent in 1st Night, which is fixated entirely on the zany sexcapades of its characters.
  56. What Maisie Knew
    David Siegel and Scott McGehee's film renders the rhapsodic Henry James novel of the same name into an abhorrent slice of tasteless familial drama.
  57. Kiss of the Damned
    Xan Cassavetes cops to nothing more significant than being more keen on Vampyros Lesbos than anyone else from her clan of famous cinephiles.
  58. Generation Um...
    The levels of insight provided into the characters are exactly commensurate with any conceivable viewer's interest in learning more about these nonentities.
  59. Post Tenebras Lux
    Carlos Reygadas's latest, an almost impossibly intellectual film, keeps us at a remove that's as striking as that which separates its main character from the lower classes.
  60. The Big Wedding
    For a movie ultimately about what freaks we all are behind the fronts we build for the sake of normalcy, the apathetically performed The Big Wedding couldn't possibly be more square.
  61. 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.
  62. Haute Cuisine
    Offers all the ingredients for a great feast of enticing visions and thematic concerns, only to have them be prepared, plated, and served with the grace of Elmer Fudd.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    What Richard Did
    The film's structure as a character study helps to subtly underscore the flawed justifications of a privileged kid's thought patterns and unchallenged value system.
  64. Arthur Newman
    Throughout Dante Ariola's film, the expressions of the false-identity theme are multitudinous, and about as subtle as the Colin Firth character's choice for a new last name.
  65. Pain & Gain
    An outrageous based-on-real-life tale that's perfectly suited to director Michael Bay's insanely overblown stylistic and thematic temperament.
  66. Before Midnight
    These films have always been about the power of words, their ability to bridge gulfs of time and space, the thrill of ideas and opinions taking definitive shape.
  67. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
    Like far too many modern horror films, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane flaunts its knowledge of classic genre fundamentals but fails to do anything very clever or surprising with them.
  68. Passion
    Passion is a serpentine, gorgeously orchestrated gathering of all of De Palma's pet themes and conceits, a symphony of giddy terror where people perpetually hide behind masks, both literal and figurative.
  69. Graceland
    The film's plot isn't unusual, but director Ron Morales strips it down to its primal essence.
  70. Mud
    The film ultimately succeeds thanks to small details, from its deep-fried lingo and the swampy texture of its location photography to its uniformly expert cast.
  71. Paradise: Love
    It often seems more intent on spelling out its awareness of the politics involved than in lingering on the aching human engaged in the libidinal transactions.
  72. Sun Don't Shine
    Amy Seimetz's intoxicating slice of genre revisionism earns its "neo" prefix, envisioning a brightly sinister world where desperation is the new normal.
  73. Cutie and the Boxer
    Funny, moving, honest, and occasionally inspiring, but as a portrait of a talent emerging from the shadow of a more public talent, the scale of the shadow is curiously omitted.
  74. Tai Chi Hero
    Stephen Fung's pop-up graphics and jazzy fight scenes feel part of an unwieldy mix in which the director just throws whatever half-baked conceits up on the screen he feels like.
  75. The Numbers Station
    Sits awkwardly between shoot 'em up and psychological thriller without offering the excitement of either.
  76. Midnight's Children
    Preserves much of the novel's intricacy and human drama, perhaps due to Salman Rushdie's involvement as co-screenwriter, even if it remains singularly unremarkable from a cinematic perspective.
  77. Kon-Tiki
    It lacks the fire and eccentricity that we want from our stories of adventurers driven by obsessions that could be seen as egotistical or just plain bonkers.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Oblivion
    Absent of any sense of self-awareness, Oblivion seems only self-serious, a ponderous mess both misguided and unaware.
  79. In the House
    It's buoyant and titillates, striking that distinctly Ozonian balance between the beautiful and the sinister, but it doesn't resonate.
  80. The Patience Stone
    While Atiq Rahimi's film may peel away the many layers of its female lead like an onion, the end result is still just an onion.
  81. Portrait of Jason (re-release)
    The film is a conversation between two disadvantaged artists with indelible personalities, both of whom are unabashedly manipulating their way into at least the esoteric side of the everlasting.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Herman's House
    An involving documentary that doesn't offer a convincing argument against solitary confinement for those who may not fully realize what's objectionable about it.
  83. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    The laziest sort of political cinema, full of straw men and finger-pointing, wrapped up in an awards-friendly bow by its beautiful cinematography and a manipulative world music-y score.
  84. Prince Avalanche
    The psychological path of these characters is finely marked with signposts, but as Prince Avalanche reaches its destination, you almost wish it would have gotten a little more lost in the woods.
  85. V/H/S/2
    A welcome contrast to the first film's snuff-y atmosphere and general mean-spiritedness, featuring more humor, fewer hateful characters, and occasional twinges of relatable human emotion.
  86. Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
    It never bothers to attempt the one thing we'd expect and hope from a documentary about Ricky Jay: It doesn't try to bamboozle us.
  87. The Lords of Salem
    Rob Zombie understands horror as an aural-visual experience that should gnaw at the nerves, seep into the subconscious, and beget unshakeable nightmares.
  88. Oconomowoc
    Writer-director Andy Gillies's film is extremely self-conscious, but in a fashion that generally serves the material.
  89. Fists of Legend
    The film is so generous in its characterizations that it's easy to overlook the fact that its hot-topic drama (bullying, economic marginalization, etc.) amounts to little more than padded lip service.
  90. American Meat
    Despite the intensity of its scope and research, American Meat is a decidedly soft-hitting display of an overweening good faith that, frankly, just can't jibe with the times.
  91. 42
    The film elevates the story of Jackie Robinson to that of cornball legend rather than just honoring his legitimately uplifting, heroic saga by telling it straight.
  92. This Ain't California
    While the film is deeply romantic and nostalgic, possessing a genuine reverence for youth and rebellion, it's also something of a tragedy.
  93. Disconnect
    Fails not so much because of its occasional self-seriousness or didacticism than it does from a scattered plot that makes the story's overriding theme or message difficult to grasp.
  94. 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.
  95. At Any Price
    Alternates between business-world morality play, family drama, and portrait of a local community without ever comfortably integrating these disparate elements into his messy stew.
  96. The Angels' Share
    Ken Loach's breezy scribble about lowlife redemption and drunken buffoonery isn't so much heavy-handed as it is charmingly weightless.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It's a Disaster
    The film flirts with big ideas about adult relationships, but fails to locate any gravitas about its characters' existential or psychological crises.
  98. Andre Gregory: Before and After Dinner
    Perhaps the most valuable insight that the film provides about its subject is that he acts even as he directs.
  99. Free Angela & All Political Prisoners
    It foists its own retelling of Angela Davis's story over any contemplation of her politics, effectively neutering their power as it could apply to today in the hands of a proper film essayist.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Evil Dead
    The setup and geography are consistent with the original, though the film never makes the mistake of trying to rebottle the lightning that electrified Sam Raimi's movie.
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