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. A Fierce Green Fire
    The director avoids all manner of stylistics, opting instead for the formulaic doc trifecta of first-person interviews, archival material, and news footage.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ginger & Rosa
    With Ginger & Rosa, Sally Potter manages to avoid nearly every pratfall of such period pieces, focusing on extreme alienation rather than enlightenment, and wringing a powerful and jaundiced coming-of-age story from the decade's less trod corners.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Genius on Hold
    Though overstuffed, his film eschews pop-doc conventions by opting for in-depth analysis over superficiality.
  4. Molly's Theory of Relativity
    The characters never sound like they're actually talking to one another, but rather delivering Jeff Lipsky's echo-chamber monologues.
  5. Phantom
    Todd Robinson's film is a third-rate submarine-set drama until, in its final moments, it sinks to fourth-rate.
  6. A Place at the Table
    More difficult to convey are the web of moral and political issues that surround the hunger crisis, and A Place at the Table proves its worth most by how it treats this wider set of problems.
  7. Stoker
    The film's weird mix of dollhouse dread and fashion-magazine chic can be fetching, but it's nothing if not vacuous, a series of disjointed, improvisatory riffs that recall the brazen aesthetic overload of Amer.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Leviathan
    Leviathan is a titanic achievement, a visceral overload whose impact registers immediately and with great force.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Dark Skies
    Scott Stewart's Dark Skies is the definitive horror film for the Tea Party era.
    • 93 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Tristana (re-release)
    There are more than a few striking images and intriguing ideas to be extracted from Tristana. [10 Oct. 2012]
  11. Red Flag
    It surprisingly abandons its obvious meta elements and unfolds as a straightforward road-trip flick, opting for an exhibition of self-loathing rather than self-reflexivity.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Snitch
    Snitch is the latest in a long line of films whose sole purpose is to flatten a major social problem into a pulp ideal for self-serious spectacle.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    One Life
    As much as Daniel Craig's narration can feel tacked-on, it's really secondary to the film's expert camerawork.
  14. Inescapable
    The film spins its wheels for almost an hour until collapsing under the weight of exposition that renders the mystery nearly besides the point.
  15. Bless Me, Ultima
    The film's interest in social themes remains background fodder within a far more generic good-versus-evil narrative.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    11 Flowers
    Because of its choice in subjectivity, and despite the film's historical context, 11 Flowers firmly elevates the experience of the personal over the political.
  17. Rubberneck
    The film takes on high-concept ideas that it can't sustain, and which only make its other problems more obvious.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Saving Lincoln
    Under even the best of circumstances, Saving Lincoln would have to inevitably face the scrutiny of potential redundancy.
  19. The Berlin File
    The film is a sporadically entertaining, modestly ambitious shoot 'em up that frequently succumbs to spelling out its subtext.
  20. Shanghai Calling
    If you prefer your social commentary in the form of a glorified sitcom with broad humor and even broader caricatures, look no further.
  21. Safe Haven
    It goes without saying that Safe Haven is the whitest thing offered up for public consumption in the three days since Mumford & Sons won the Grammy for Album of the Year.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    A Good Day to Die Hard
    The film feels like it was reverse-engineered from its "Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Russia" tagline, a wholly generic international actioner barely distinguished by the presence of Bruce Willis's banner hero.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Almost in Love
    The film spoils the charm of its concept in the way it confuses the wish to be a Woody Allen-Julie Delpy lovechild with a cramping formalism that borders the theatrical.
  24. The Jeffrey Dahmer Files
    Teasing out a subversive portrait of a complex and rather subdued monster, The Jeffrey Dahmer Files unfolds with the same meticulousness exemplified by the eponymous serial killer.
  25. Beautiful Creatures
    Beautiful Creatures basically spits in the face of a legacy of literature founded on feelings of exclusion and social alienation.
  26. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
    Christopher Felver is too reverent to properly convey the invigoratingly profane, angry messiness of the sense of community that Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his peers too briefly brought to life.
  27. Would You Rather
    A shrill Indiewood torture porn that, despite promised shocks and revulsions, doesn't even have the conviction to hold its camera on the story's most appalling twists.
  28. No
    A singular biopic and a snapshot of a society renewed, No unaffectedly celebrates faith in democracy, and, surprisingly, truth in advertising.
  29. Identity Thief
    Melissa McCarthy is riveting in simply-penned moments of remorse and confession, adding tearful depth to her ace timing and formidable physical comedy.
  30. A Rubberband Is an Unlikely Instrument
    It's as though the director, like his subjects, was too comfortable in the safe familiarity of the surface to find the place where it betrays us.
  31. Lore
    Copious amounts of landscape and wilderness shots cover up its schematic plot, as its indirect visual allusions take precedence over thematic development.
  32. The Sorcerer and the White Snake
    The film looks so glossy, plasticized, and unreal that all you end up thinking about is special effects.
  33. The Playroom
    Lacking much in the way of character depth, the film attempts to fill the gap with melodrama.
  34. Porfirio
    Alejandro Landes's Porfirio is an ugly movie to watch, but it's not without purpose.
  35. Night Across the Street
    It's a final film in the specific sense of Raúl Ruiz designing the larger part of it around a metaphorical contemplation of his own, imminent demise.
  36. Caesar Must Die
    Deceptively modest on nearly all accounts, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die employs seemingly minor directorial contrivances to ruminate on a unique quarrel.
  37. Warm Bodies
    It flouts convention in a number of ways in service of its genre-mash-up agenda while still contributing something original to the tradition of the zombie film.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sound City
    Given Dave Grohl's reputation for versatility and good taste, the film's sturdy sense of forward motion may come as no surprise.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Last Gladiators
    Makes room for tender moments of reflection from a guy who, against impossible odds, still managed some victories, the biggest of which may be that he's still standing.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Koch
    Neil Barsky is aware of how a great and terribly troubling person can reside in the same body, but his occasional eagerness to appoint himself as his subject's latest press agent is dubious.
  41. Little Fugitive (re-release)
    The film's beguiling visual poetry and smatterings of sociological subtext function less than coherently as transitional markers between cinematic epochs, or even as the nascent burblings of any imminent DIY revolution; instead, they're redolent of a modernist apotheosis.
  42. As Luck Would Have It
    Álex de la Iglesia's film hammers home the opinion that family is more important than celebrity or wealth.
  43. Bullet to the Head
    Walter Hill thoughtfully regards the pummeling power of weaponry at work.
  44. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
    Purports to tell the true story of the titular imprisoned, controversially outspoken death-penalty opponent, but eventually degenerates into an orgy of congratulation.
  45. Girls Against Boys
    Essentially a horror movie in which the source of the horror shifts from capital-M men to crazed lesbianism.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Movie 43
    This is barely a movie at all, mostly due to its structural similarities to "SNL", but also because it acknowledges the fact that its own premises are inherently unfilmable.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters
    Tommy Wirkola's film suggests A Knight's Tale as penned by Seth MacFarlane.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Side Effects
    Like Magic Mike, Side Effects is enlivened by Soderbergh's jazzy style and laidback moralism, bringing to mind the work of another connoisseur of genre, Robert Altman.
  49. Yossi
    The film is at its finest as a catalogue of Yossi's unspoken ache, less so when it begins to flirt with the clichés of the love story.
  50. Nana
    Its meta-cinematic "think piece"-ness is redeemed by the slinky symmetries drawn between Massadian's own auteur-ship and the protagonist's narrative role.
  51. The Taste of Money
    For all the revelations about the way the rich operate, there's little juicy pleasure to be had in the proceedings.
  52. San Diego Surf
    Here, the glamorous and the infantile cohabitate on a casual level, and frivolity remains the Factory's default mode.
  53. Knife Fight
    Bill Guttentag exaggerates the absurd lengths advisors go to win an election and yet ultimately aggrandizes their behavior.
  54. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    It would be inaccurate to call Happy People: A Year in the Taiga the newest Werner Herzog film.
  55. John Dies at the End
    The frantic, grotesque imagery ironically only highlights Don Coscarelli's inability to truly cut ties with the constraints of accepted storytelling.
  56. The Pirogue
    Moussa Touré's worldview, like Ousmane Sembene's, is characterized by the feeling that, at the end of the day, some degree of loss or defeat is inevitable.
  57. Supporting Characters
    Glides from a mildly off-putting opening across several scenes that waver between sitcom superficiality and sudden, unexpected gusts of feeling, ultimately ending on a note of perfectly judged emotional ambivalence.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Parker
    Tonally, Parker's not so much broad or inclusive as weirdly schizophrenic, vacillating between flat comedy and spiked savagery, the product of a painfully slapdash script that also includes such laughable incidental dialogue as "pizza-I love that sh.t" and "beers and jewels, baby."
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Like Someone in Love
    Plays out as a city-mouse rejoinder to the rustic, open-air daydream of Certified Copy, a snarl of thorny free jazz to that film's graceful aria.
  60. Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation
    Director Laura Archibald's approach is fatally safe, often turning poets into self-congratulatory windbags.
  61. Broken City
    Allen Hughes may suggest an air of pretty menace, but he does little to make the sequence work as a legible genre scene.
  62. Our School
    The filmmakers spend vastly more time chronicling bigoted remarks from Romanians about gypsy life than they do actual gypsy life, so a minor crisis of perspective hangs over Our School.
  63. Mama
    The premise isn't even worthy of executive producer Guillermo del Toro, who will apparently lend his name to any film as long as it fulfills its quota of moths and vulvic openings.
  64. The Last Stand
    One of its most refreshing aspects is its acceptance of both western and action-film conventions on their own terms, refusing to regard itself as operating outside of or superior to the genre.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hors Satan (Outside Satan)
    Bruno Dumont's employment of his bucolic French backdrop here attends to Hors Satan's muddying spiritual ambiguity.
  66. LUV
    As a film that largely works as a subdued twist on the familiar drama about crime and family, LUV needed more intimacy and focus.
  67. Southwest (Sudoeste)
    The inscrutability of the plot, intriguing at first, is ultimately impenetrable.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    A Haunted House
    If you're wondering why A Haunted House exists alongside the upcoming Scary Movie 5 rather than instead of it, you may already have given the subject more thought than Marlon Wayans had hoped.
  69. Welcome to the Machine
    The focus on Weider's fatherly duties and modest personal insights is what provides the film with its moral grounding.
  70. Fairhaven
    The film plays coy with its quintessential indie-dramedy setup, eschewing narrative and tension in favor of convivial character interplay and master shots of wintry landscapes.
  71. Let My People Go!
    Without a consistent stylistic playfulness to match the histrionic scenarios, the action often feels just plain silly.
  72. Struck by Lightning
    A class-five pity party so unbearably condescending and unconvincing that it might just make you run out and buy an "I'm With Mitt" t-shirt, it makes an inadvertent but hugely compelling pro-bullying argument.
  73. A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III
    The film speeds ahead with almost gleeful disinterest in dealing with the narrative challenges it sets up before resolving them in the most perfunctory ways imaginable.
  74. Gangster Squad
    Ruben Fleischer's film is a perfect example of Hollywood hypocrisy, something to be ignored diligently.
  75. The Baytown Outlaws
    This schlocky piece of ultra violence plays like a pop-culture pastiche without a stable thematic foundation.
  76. $ellebrity
    Comes off as little more than a feature-length trashing of colleagues who director and celebrity photographer Kevin Mazur feels are giving his profession a bad name.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    High Tech, Low Life
    As far as its subject matter goes, the documentary only scratches the surfaces, only reaffirming the simple idea that Internet censorship in China is prevalent and unfair.
  78. My Best Enemy
    This twist-heavy World War II drama would play as an absurdist comedy if the director wasn't so dead set on excluding just about any trace of humor from his self-serious project.
  79. Clandestine Childhood
    Benjamín Ávila structures the film as a series of precious moments, remembrances of a difficult year when the politics of patria and family got in the way of his puppy love.
  80. Texas Chainsaw 3D
    There's no deliberate Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2-style comedy to the film, just dim-witted gruesomeness retrofitted with gimmicky contemporary trappings.
  81. Storage 24
    More chilling than the horror of the alien's close-quarters assault is the rank misogyny that more than offensively underscores the Melrose Place-grade human drama.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (Une bouteille à la mer)
    The film obviously can't resolve the conflict between Palestine and Israel, but the resolution to the story's arc feels nonetheless forced and misplaced.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    My Brooklyn
    A thoughtful piece of documentary journalism that synecdochically uses the controversial redevelopment of the Fulton Street Mall to talk about the process of gentrification.
  84. 56 Up
    The series is both a testimonial to the vagaries of chance and an endlessly cyclical study into the implications of being studied.
  85. A Dark Truth
    A Dark Truth is one of those unfortunate projects whose component parts are immediately at odds with one another.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Allegiance
    Michael Connors does a fine job of not passing judgment on his characters, yet his depiction of his main character's dilemma is about the only thing he handles correctly.
  87. Parental Guidance
    Andy Fickman's comedy offers a confused and flat portrayal of generational differences.
  88. Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away
    The movie is something of a compositional nightmare, worlds away, one might say, from the artistry so associated with Cirque.
  89. Jack Reacher
    The film is as incompetent, manipulative, safe, and disposable as any number of nickel-and-dime actioners, but goes to great, unconvincing lengths to insist it's different.
  90. West of Memphis
    By taking a disturbing and sometimes conflicted look at the prejudices that led to the West Memphis Three's imprisonment, it asks murky questions about how people could get something so wrong for so long.
  91. The Guilt Trip
    Mothers and sons deserve an amiable comedy they can share, but this one proves to be faulty long before the requisite freeway breakdown.
  92. On the Road
    The lack of a strong expository voice further simplifies the wealth of explicit sex Walter Salles dramatizes, much of it drawn from juicy swathes of Jack Kerouac's only recently published original scroll.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Aquí y Allá (Here and There)
    It's a confident vision, but its aversion to sentiment has the intended but unfortunate effect of making the characters' disconnects our own.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Barbara
    Most compelling in Christian Petzold's latest is the way the filmmaker adeptly conducts his tides of Cold War paranoia.
  95. This Is 40
    It certainly suffers from the staleness of its off-the-cuff, improv-inspired mode of comedy, which prizes free-form riffing over organically constructed comedic scenarios.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Tabu
    The pangs of romance, eroticism, anguish, and longing (both for the stolen moments of private passion and for the sense-making schematics of Empire) transcend any period of cinema Tabu may evoke.
  97. Stand Up Guys
    Fails to plumb the dramatic depths of its setups, but every now and then the actors pick up the slack, filling in the blanks with three decades's worth of mythic resonance.
  98. Saving Grace B. Jones
    This cumbersome and graceless 1950s-set period drama possesses the reactionary life insights and amateurish production values of a Lifetime soap.
  99. Save the Date
    What's worst about the film is how it appropriates its main character's noncommittal selfishness to support its own quaint, anti-establishment themes.
  100. Any Day Now
    Its most redeeming quality is that it isn't so quick to neuter its queer characters into a package-friendly "gay couple" aesthetic a la Modern Family.
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