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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    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal
    Because the film clearly aims for satire, Boris Rodriguez isn't entirely guilty of indulging gruesome spectacle for its own sake.
  2. Lotus Eaters
    The free spirit-ness of its characters is certainly mirrored in the film's aesthetic playfulness, but the initial glimmer of Fassbinder-esque expression quickly veers toward Xavier Dolan-grade affectation.
  3. Stranger Things
    Eleanor Burke and Ron Eyal's film is a tasteful, well-orchestrated drama that never reaches beyond its humble means.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    No Place on Earth
    A remarkable story made almost unremarkable in the hands of lazy filmmaking.
  5. To the Wonder
    Throughout To the Wonder, the new and old are incessantly twinned, blurred into a package that suggests an experimental dance piece.
  6. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
    A playfully self-reflective rumination on what writer-director Terence Nance has described as "self-awareness through experience with love."
  7. The Brass Teapot
    Imbued with a buoyant mysticism, the film is more gag-friendly than idea-based, primarily relying on the considerable charm of its leads to ground its supernatural conceit.
  8. 6 Souls
    The film belongs to a long tradition of horror films that offensively suggest that all atheists might as well hang a Welcome sign up for the devil.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bert Stern: Original Madman
    Rote, rushed, and utterly uninterested in the power of Stern as an innovator of image, making it effectively the opposite of the output of the artist it attempts to document.
  10. Down the Shore
    Down the Shore suggests what might happen if TBS and Bruce Springsteen were to collaborate on a sitcom set in hell.
  11. Tomorrow You're Gone
    Hardboiled noir play-acting doesn't get more sluggish than in this leaden tale that blurs the line between reality and delusion in a way that's less intriguing than simply confusing.
  12. Simon Killer
    The film has many elements of a thriller, but ultimately Antonio Campos's interest lies much more in profiling, yet never over-determining, his moody protagonist.
  13. The Company You Keep
    A would-be thriller masquerading a long, dry monument to the reliability and comfort of community, blindly cocooned by its own nostalgic self-regard.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Tyler Perry's Temptation
    When its third act erupts into full-blown theatrical maximalism, Tyler Perry's Temptation practically turns into Brian De Palma's Temptation.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Violeta Went to Heaven
    Suffers from an overtly conventional way of depicting the life events of an anything-but-conventional woman, a lazy flaw further highlighted by its brief moments of visual experimentation.
  16. Renoir
    A long string of picnics, portrait sessions, elaborate dinners, and countryside rituals, filtered through a svelte aesthetic pleasantness that ultimately corrodes its larger interests.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Mental
    Given the film's garrulous multitude of characters, one wishes they would all just shut up and sing.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Host
    Its title, very graciously, doesn't end with a "Part 1," but The Host sure has enough plot points and ideas to fill two installments.
  19. Blancanieves
    Pablo Berger digs for emotional intensity in his gothic retelling of Snow White and only uncovers layers of gloss.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Trance
    The film draws out Danny Boyle's less dazzling commercial side, not to mention his penchant for whirling excess.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    Instead of long takes, which are lovingly utilized in Step Up 3D, Jon M. Chu opts for increasing volatility in the editing room.
  22. Welcome to the Punch
    The sheer wastefulness of Eran Creevy's Welcome to the Punch is off-putting enough, but the film is also falsely painted-up as a crime epic.
  23. Code of the West
    The filmmaker's failure of empathy for those who strive to outlaw medicinal marijuana turns the protestors into hissable puritanical bad guys.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wrong
    It doesn't seem to have any pretensions beyond the regimented unveiling of a parade of odd occurrences, plodding along under the banner of absurdity.
  25. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    Bob Byington's perspective may be above it all, but that doesn't quite account for the shades of melancholy that pop up unexpectedly in lines of dialogue and in some of the performances.
  26. The Revolutionary Optimists
    The filmmakers display a genuine reverence for their subjects, evident even in the intimate but never intrusive photography.
  27. Dog Pound
    The plot willfully denies our satisfaction, often at the risk of compromising its own structural integrity.
  28. Detour
    In comparison to its superior predecessors, the film's redemption plot feels banal and slight.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Room 237
    The doc positions The Shining as a comparably coiled, thematically overflowing microcosm--standing in for cinema, for history, for obsession, for postmodern theory buckling under the film's heft.
  30. You Don't Need Feet to Dance
    Despite its title, there's actually very little dancing, or rhythmic flair, in You Don't Need Feet to Dance.
  31. Murph: The Protector
    One wonders if the filmmakers ever asked themselves who their film was intended for, or if it was at least a consciously self-serving effort from the outset.
  32. My Brother the Devil
    With My Brother the Devil, writer-director Sally El Hosaini tells a story both operatic in its implications and quotidian in its sensory, day-to-day details.
  33. Hunky Dory
    Director Marc Evans's monotonous style keeps the film earthbound.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New World
    This is action-thriller feather preening, but all the wit in the world can't hide the narrative sprawl that rots from within.
  35. Dorfman in Love
    The film's moral lesson is too contradictory to be taken seriously.
  36. The Croods
    The film takes more than a few pages from the James Cameron playbook.
  37. Love and Honor
    The deceptions and romances carry on as one might expect, all while the film makes some attempt at exploring the cultural shifts of the time period.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Sapphires
    Wayne Blair isn't interested in historical complexity or subtext, just the seamless flow of Hollywood-style storytelling that lazily connects one musical number to the next.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Olympus Has Fallen
    The film spends its first act establishing a flimsy emotional groundwork before gleefully taking a sledgehammer to it just seconds into act two.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Upstream Color
    Upstream Color is lush, rhythmic, and deeply sensual, a film of exceptional beauty.
  41. The Happy Poet
    Like its sad-sack main character, whose closed-off personality makes him hard to fully understand or sympathize with, The Happy Poet is too reservedly rough around the edges.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Viola
    In essentially offering up The Twelfth Night as a hazy Shakespearean mash-up, Viola isn't so much deeply disrespecting notions of ownership, authorship, etc., as charitably redefining them.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Hijacking
    Tobias Lindholm's hostage-negotiation drama that wields its verité style for maximum tension.
  44. The Act of Killing
    In Joshua Oppenheimer's extraordinary The Act of Killing, film becomes the medium for a bold historical reckoning--and in more ways than one.
  45. Blue Caprice
    The filmmakers are more interested in questioning what brings people to commit senseless and merciless acts than they are preoccupied with the historical record.
  46. Stories We Tell
    Sarah Polley is much more interested in the malleability of memory and the consequential refractions felt throughout her kin rather than telling a linear narrative.
  47. Eden
    The "male gaze" that often despicably and hypocritically surfaces in these kinds of films is pointedly absent throughout.
  48. Silver Circle
    Amateurish and hyperbolic, this animated feature directed by Pasha Roberts makes quite clear his political leanings.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Caroline and Jackie
    Because the whole thing feels so amateurishly improvised, Caroline and Jackie doesn't so much enter into Michael Haneke territory as slip backward, over a banana peel, into some bad-faith parody of the same.
  50. Stars in Shorts
    Generally, these shorts do little to advance their own arguments, but then again, they don't need to; if the short film is the arena of students, amateurs, and small-timers, then these are overdogs from frame one, coming off every bit as expensive and banal as their makers allow them to be.
  51. Come Out and Play
    Makinov's film expertly crafts a sense of dawning madness that hinges on its villains' unspoken fury at their elders.
  52. Starbuck
    Yet another example of modern-family predicaments getting stuffed into the traditional-family-values message of conventional comedies.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everybody Has a Plan
    Ana Piterbarg's handsome, if uninvolving, film privileges mood over narrative and dumb brooding over character.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    108 (Cuchillo de Palo)
    Renate Costa's doc gradually simplifies into an elaborate seesaw between general, journalistic scoopery and unabashedly personal confrontation.
  55. Clip
    A raw, sophisticated, and stomach-turning look at what it means to be a young woman in Serbia, what it means to be a woman tout court.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Place Beyond the Pines
    The film never reaches a climax because it's always in one, distilling the lives of its characters to their tensest moments.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Something in the Air
    Despite a fixation on fire as a cleansing agent (explosions, burning paintings, or a blazing house), the film, enveloping as it is, proves woefully short on burning dramatic or thematic intensity.
  58. Vanishing Waves
    A scintillating sci-fi throwback, Vanishing Waves draws inspiration from Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, among others, but without feeling plagiaristic.
  59. Reincarnated
    Essentially 90-minute promo video carefully orchestrated by the artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg and his handlers.
  60. Crazy and Thief
    It's eventually obvious that Cory McAbee mistakenly believes that his characters' resolutely dull adventures speak for themselves.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Call
    Brad Anderson's film is defined by an often frustrating combination of cleverness and stupidity.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    I Killed My Mother
    I Killed My Mother is a film best heard than seen, as the earnest, nimble scrubbiness of Dolan's screenplay is ill-served by his conceited visuals, an aesthetic mode that feels insecurely borrowed from perfume commercials and the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-Wai.
  63. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The film is overtly suspicious and critical of the new and only serviceably romantic about the old.
  64. Upside Down
    The highlight of the film is the moment Jim Sturgess's Adam inadvertently pisses on the ceiling.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Philip Roth: Unmasked
    In spite of the film's exhaustive chronology, those who deduce from its title that they're in for an unveiling, or an unraveling, of a major literary figure may come out empty-handed.
  66. K-11
    It careens from one tonal extreme to the next, uncertain about whether it wants to be a gritty drama, camp artifact, or violent prison-sploitation flick.
  67. My Amityville Horror
    The film is a tender character portrait rooted in deep curiosity and sympathy for its subject.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Spring Breakers
    One of the effects of Harmony Korine's feverish, hypnotic style is that the whole thing feels like a fantasy—or rather a nightmare perversion of the American dream.
  69. Reality
    Matteo Garrone has a sure eye for outlandish set pieces that exhibit the expansive outlines of his ideas, but these spectacles are sporadic, and the spaces between them tend to lag.
  70. If I Were You
    A wannabe French-style infidelity farce that keeps indulging in unnecessary bathos and subplots.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    From Up on Poppy Hill
    The story arc is somewhat facile, and its lesson about preserving history instead of demolishing it to make way for new, shiny things is too obvious.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Admission
    The estrogenic elements prove widely ineffectual, but they're just pieces of this overlong, overloaded misfire whose double-entendre title ultimately just goads the jaded viewer to admit defeat.
  73. Downeast
    An exposé of how the financial structures that make businesses possible in America seem to conspire against genuine good will and non-self-serving ambition.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Gimme the Loot
    A nose-to-the-ground portrait of two believably aspirational protagonists and their constant hustle to make good on the movie's eponymous demand.
    • 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.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Dead Man Down
    The action merely meanders when it should be hurtling forward, running in circles when one expects it to head toward a conclusion or some sense of resolution.
  77. Greedy Lying Bastards
    What Craig Scott Rosebraugh's film lacks in originality, it makes up for in comprehensiveness.
  78. Le Petit Soldat (re-release)
    Compared to "Breathless," Le Petit Soldat's images suggest a stronger sense of place, as characters seem inextricably linked to their environment. Overall, the film lacks the artifice of Hollywood cinema, which Godard admired but was looking to move past after catching flack from the French left wing.
  79. Oz the Great and Powerful
    An amorphous melange of ill-fitting reference points and misappropriated aesthetics, a lumbering family blockbuster both tiresome and wholly indistinct.
  80. Electrick Children
    Rebecca Thomas's debut feature is a sensible and humane exploration of youthful curiosity.
  81. Gut Renovation
    Due to the one-minded construction of the documentary, there's little to parse beyond impassioned harrumphs.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    Sadly, those looking for any insight into Journey from Ramona Diaz's documentary are going to have to look elsewhere.
  83. The We and the I
    A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.
  84. Language of a Broken Heart
    A feigned attempt at a stereotypically quirky indie film that has virtually nothing in the way of formal sophistication or narrative ambition.
  85. The Silence
    The slightly dour tone is the perfect backdrop for the director to skillfully weave together his varied narrative strands in a surprisingly entertaining medley.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Emperor
    Peter Webber's historical drama is blunt about its stylistic ambitions while at the same time failing to meet them, and the effect is one of sad ineffectuality.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The ABCs of Death
    Tellingly, this horror anthology's finest entries convey how real horror comes in more than shades of red, and how it lives inside us all.
  88. The Last Exorcism Part II
    Scenes of solemn importance drag on to the point of self-parody in an attempt at establishing mood, while dialogue reeks of connect-the-dots spoonfeeding.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Beyond the Hills
    It's Cristian Mungiu's staging and compositional skill that lends the material its true sense of dawning dread.
  90. The Condemned
    It adds up to a methodically bland, intellectually sluggish exercise in guilt-tripping that's nonetheless still more interested in its rich and sexy characters than the supposed unfortunates.
  91. Day of the Falcon
    There's an enormous amount of perverse pleasure to be had here for those who get off on the annihilation of nuance.
  92. War Witch
    Though ostensibly a character study, it's nevertheless characterized by the vaguely moralizing tone of an issue film, one whose candor in the face of brutality seems calculated for maximum liberal appeal.
  93. 21 and Over
    By the dictates of the boys-will-be-boys party genre, 21 and Over is so tame that it barely manages to even be offensive.
  94. Jack the Giant Slayer
    This epic waste of $190 million plunders the grab bag of overused plotlines, failing to put its own stamp on much of anything.
  95. Future Weather
    The film is ultimately enjoyable despite its faults, at least partially because it represents an earnest, honest attempt to empathize with struggling American working-class women.
  96. The Sweeney
    Clichés abound, even in the look of the film, which toggles between post-Ritchie crime-violence burlesque and sleek, Nolanesque faux-grandeur.
  97. Welcome to Pine Hill
    Keith Miller doesn't always trust the fluency of his visual language, occasionally forcing a point that's already being captured.
  98. Pavilion
    George Washington this isn't, but there's enough heft here that the comparison can be tastefully made.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Hava Nagila: The Movie
    The documentary can at times feel like you're wasting your time on a subject you might wish you had only accidentally crossed paths with briefly on Wikipedia.
  100. The Unspeakable Act
    Writer-director Dan Sallitt's fourth feature moves with confident boldness from the incestuous gauntlet its prologue impishly hurls down.
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