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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    • 95 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Zero Dark Thirty
    Doubtless, Kathryn Bigelow's greatest strengths emerge when she can more freely flex her muscles as an action filmmaker.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Django Unchained
    While the rush toward a conventional climax is confusing, and more than a little disappointing, there's an undeniable pleasure that emerges in seeing Tarantino juggle the dynamite of his ideas, even when they prematurely pop off in his face.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Consuming Spirits
    Not only a monstrous visual achievement, but one of the most uniquely humanistic animated features of all time.
  4. Let Fury Have the Hour
    On a political level, the film is far from a Godardian dialectic, so the view of history that emerges is, to say the least, blinkered.
  5. Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet
    Jesse Vile's film, despite its best intentions, is merely a serviceable extension of his own fandom.
  6. The Girl
    Uses the perils of immigrating to this country without papers as a backdrop for a poor white American woman's bumpy path to enlightenment.
  7. Yelling to the Sky
    The film avoids most of its genre's pratfalls, though it also shows little interest in transcending them.
  8. The Loving Story
    Perhaps the strongest aspect of the documentary is that it allows the Lovings to tell their story in their own words.
  9. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    The film, still only clearing its throat, hints at a wellspring of emotional riches to come.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Les Miserables
    One would be hard-pressed to describe this, despite the wealth of beauty on display, as anything but an ugly film, shot and cut ineptly.
  11. In Our Nature
    In Our Nature's visual style seems plastered on or allocated, not developed with any sort of authorial singularity.
  12. The Rabbi's Cat
    Despite its flaws, the film is at least a consistent vision, attesting through both its story and animation to the rabbi's right to be different while also striving for human solidarity.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    The Donald Rice film suffers most from an excessively blunt approach.
  14. Lay the Favorite
    Hollywood celebrities romping around in a candy-colored Alexa-shot criminal underworld, pretty much as a means of passing time.
  15. Playing for Keeps
    Gabriele Muccino's film is knee-deep in "don't hate the player, hate the game" territory.
  16. Promised Land
    Gus Van Sant's new film offends for how it views the struggles of the landowners at the heart of its story as subservient to their oppressor's triumph of the spirit.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Bad Kids Go to Hell
    The film's unlikely combination of didacticism and sexy teen slaughter signals a booming trend: the Occupy horror flick.
  18. Wagner & Me
    Even when Wagner & Me seems uneven as an art historical study, it's fairly successful as a travelogue.
  19. The Sheik and I
    The film is ultimately more concerned with Caveh Zahedi's attempts to pursue a variety of dull passing fancies than with any larger agenda.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Off-White Lies
    Elya Inbar is a surprisingly commanding screen presence, but she's contending with a screenplay plagued by contrivance--a battle few could win.
  21. Heleno
    The film hints at a kicky, impressionistic style that director José Henrique Fonseca never effectively employs to actually communicate Heleno de Freitas's demons.
  22. Not Fade Away
    Triumphs when David Chase's empowerment as a kind of autobiographical historian is balanced with the thrill of submersing the viewer in the tidal pool of his memories
  23. Tchoupitoulas
    The overall experience is entirely immersive, thanks not only to the filmmakers' handheld camera, but also to the illusory nature of the staging.
  24. Only the Young
    Jason Tippet and Elizabeth Mims refuse to use their subjects as test cases for any sort of larger thesis.
  25. The Art of Flight 3D
    An aesthetic showcase whose repetitive nature winds up diminishing the excitement of its breathtaking feats of mountainous flight.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Delhi Safari
    A much better way to strike home the same green message, while also having more fun, would be to just skip this movie and take your kids to a national park.
  27. Quartet
    For a movie that aims to make four artists' last spotlit hurrah a revel-worthy moment, Quartet shouldn't urge the viewer to welcome the closing of the curtain.
  28. Waiting for Lightning
    With Danny Way almost never weighing in directly, the film's attempts to portray his story as an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity scarcely registers.
  29. The Fitzgerald Family Christmas
    Edward Burns certainly doles out his fair share of family turmoil, but he admirably doesn't make lunatics out of his characters.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    New Jerusalem
    Unlike the soul-searching characters from Old Joy, which also stars Will Oldham, Ike and Sean always feel as if they've fallen out of the sky just for the film's setup.
  31. Deadfall
    None of Eric Bana's mildly rousing moments clearly rise above the laborious gobbledygook that Ruzowitzky builds up through the course of the film's 94-minute duration.
  32. Addicted to Fame
    The cinematic equivalent of staging a disaster and then bitching about the mess.
  33. King Kelly
    The film decides very early on, as part of its premise, to reduce Louisa Krause's King Kelly to a one-dimensional narcissist.
  34. The Collection
    Whereas the later "Saw" films were hampered by bloated backstory, various ostentatious agendas, and self-satisfied sadism, The Collection feels utterly unburdened by anything but its lean, fleet-footed plot.
  35. My Brothers
    An uncommon example of purely allegorical cinema, Paul Fraser's film foregoes plot almost entirely in favor of thematic resonance.
  36. Walk Away Renee
    It's Jonathan Caouette's insistence in going back to his nightmarish old footage, or the old footage that he purposefully renders nightmarish, that seems more interesting.
  37. Otelo Burning
    The film grows increasingly tiresome the more it flirts with melodrama, unraveling themes of jealousy, regret, and ambition in broad strokes.
  38. Ex-Girlfriends
    The romantic quest that's meant to drive the film is meaningless because Alexander Poe has extended empathy to no one besides himself.
  39. Elza (Le bonheur d'Elza)
    Capitalizes on a vibrant tropical location and a cast of capable, but the narrative makes disconcerting leaps from the poignant to the distractingly soap-operatic.
  40. Beware of Mr. Baker
    Jay Bulger's seemingly erratic documentary formally channels Ginger Baker's almost defiant refusal to lead a life that adheres to a linear narrative.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Gatekeepers
    Even when the so-called Gatekeepers offer up damning testimony against their organization, there's no real threat that they'll ever be held accountable for it.
  42. Parked
    The film takes dramatic material that sounds fairly standard-issue to begin with and proceeds to uncover precious little of genuinely fresh intrigue within it.
  43. Hyde Park on Hudson
    The filmmakers bite off far more than they're able to chew, resulting in an odd blend of touched-upon topics.
  44. California Solo
    Robert Carlyle's performance compensates for the film's less successful elements and even makes you wonder if they might be strengths.
  45. The Impossible
    A sham realist's disaster movie, tackily insulting the deaths of 300,000 people by reducing the horrors of the Indian Ocean tsunami to a series of genre titillations.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Back to 1942
    In painting a large-scale tableaux of the Henan disaster, Feng Xiaogang has inevitably been forced to sacrifice the specificity and focus on individual characterization that are generally so important for allowing the viewer a point of entry into such an important piece of history.
  47. Dragon
    Peter Ho-Sun Chan and Deonnie Yen Chan are too resourceful to let things remain dull for long.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
    Like a stiff Schwarzeneggerian conqueror making good on an "I'll be back," John Hyams returns to one-up the franchise again.
  49. Rise of the Guardians
    This spirited enough yarn is sincere and heartening in its belief that our devotion to these youthful myths is healthy for our sense of wonderment.
  50. Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child
    Much of the documentary plays like a moderately well produced but tediously uncritical making-of feature that could easily have been included on the opera's DVD release.
  51. The Central Park Five
    Though relentlessly and admirably logical, the movie constantly glosses over the buried human element.
  52. Rust and Bone
    It runs a complicated bait and switch on its audience, passing ostensible exploitation fodder through a high-toned prestige filter.
  53. Red Dawn
    It feeds the warrior fantasies of adolescent boys with a testosterone-heavy tale of a war free of moral complications.
  54. Hitchcock
    If you've ever seen Psycho, or even if you know anything at all about the film, Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock would like to congratulate you on your savvy.
  55. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Characters are better employed; emotions are, for once, palpable; and the selfishness of Bella, author Stephenie Meyer's avatar, is finally somewhat squelched.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Man Vanishes (1967)
    The earthiest of Japanese New Wave directors, Shohei Imamura goes fascinatingly meta in this 1967 hybrid of investigative tract and ruminative experiment.
  57. The Law in These Parts
    A film for those who, whether here or in Israel, believe the law is the beginning, and not the end, of rights discourse.
  58. First Winter
    The film's interests are mainly relegated to wallowing in the frigid-starvation-suffering of its protagonists.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Buffalo Girls
    Todd Kellstein doesn't allow you to entirely indulge convenient (though understandable and perhaps irresistible) armchair outrage.
  60. Hitler's Children
    The film drains its subjects of the shame forced on them by Nazi ancestors and yet has difficulty arriving at an effective, constructive thesis.
  61. Price Check
    The script is teeming with informed jargon about the business of supermarket pricing, and with actors like Posey as its vessel, the dialogue rings with an unlikely blend of fascination and farce.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Amour
    This isn't the work of a newly moral or humanistic filmmaker, but another ruse by the same unscrupulous showman whose funny games have been beguiling us for years.
  63. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God
    Alex Gibney's latest lacks a certain cinematic depth, but that doesn't take away from its admirable reporting.
  64. Barrymore
    Director Erik Canuel fails to deliver us from the inevitable hermeticism of the material.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    La Rafle (The Round Up)
    Sentimentality may make the movie's agony more digestible, but its darkness resists any glossing over of what isn't only France's, but Europe's painful legacy.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Killing Them Softly
    The film's cynicism, like everything else, is nothing more than empty posturing, a fashionable pose adopted to ingratiate itself with a disenfranchised public.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Silver Linings Playbook
    When one stops to consider how irksomely on the nose so much of this is, the qualities which intend to most readily ingratiate the film with us begin to appear perceptibly disingenuous and false.
  68. Miami Connection (1987)
    Love it or hate it, it's doubtful you'll ever forget it, and it may just force you to redefine your definition of what constitutes "good" cinema.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Nothing But a Man (1964)
    It can't be overstated just how Nothing But a Man is militantly tone-deaf to the Hollywood muzak of race relations.
  70. Generation P
    The film is incredibly cynical, but the experience of watching it is occasionally joyful in its sense of freedom.
  71. Anna Karenina
    The film contains far more passion and a tad more complexity than the dominant and typically more staid model of middlebrow costume drama.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Dangerous Liaisons (2012)
    Despite the abundant surface pleasures the vision of its milieu provides, its lack of insight or engagement makes this adaptation feel, ultimately, like a missed opportunity.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Nature Calls
    Writer-director Todd Rohal fills muddled scenes with manic amounts of jokes that all manage to land with a thud.
  74. Starlet
    The film works as a charming aesthetic exercise with its jerky camera and inadvertent cuts, as a contemplation on intergenerational female bonding.
  75. Festival of Lights
    Fifteen minutes into Festival of Lights you come to the discouraging realization that you know every infuriating plot beat that will follow.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Citadel
    Citadel is stripped down and no-nonsense, fixating on Tommy's emotional and psychological struggles with an intensity that's harrowing.
  77. Burn
    The endless scenes of burning buildings and macho posturing merely provide an action-driven context for the filmmakers to deal with more personal topics like loneliness and resiliency.
  78. 28 Hotel Rooms
    We're supposed to take their self-pity at face value, an impression that's emphasized by a grinding monotonous humorlessness.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    In Another Country
    Hong Sang-soo hits the beach once again in his latest project, another austerely amusing study of hopeless neurotics making a mockery of leisure.
  80. A Royal Affair
    The film is too tepid in its treatment of its central character and her situation to generate any real emotive charge.
  81. In Their Skin
    Winds up turning itself into just a rote thriller about psychos learning that, appearance notwithstanding, every family has dysfunctional problems.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Chasing Ice
    If you need it, the documentary offers a devastating, and often beautifully shot, reality check.
  83. The Comedy
    Tim Heidecker's Swanson does not amuse us in spite of the pity he inspires but because of it.
  84. Lincoln
    Steven Spielberg's film may further the heroism so associated with its subject, and favor a liberal viewpoint that leers down at the Confederates, but it's no bleeding-heart glamorization.
  85. The Man with the Iron Fists
    The chop-socky wire-fu scenes are beautifully choreographed, but pretty crudely edited; despite its gourmet neo-grindhouse trappings, the film won't bring the heat like you've never seen before.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    North Sea Texas
    While the film succeeds in creating a beautiful setting and portends of things to come from Defurne, it ultimately fails to give life to its main character - and no tale of pent-up teenage frustration should be as subdued and pretty as this.
  87. A Man's Story
    A Man's Story does a major disservice to an artiste of fashion with a pretty amazing and prolific oeuvre by reducing him to a Bravo-like personality - a personality whose pettiness Boateng's work, though perhaps not his ego, clearly exceeds.
  88. Jack and Diane
    Scenes of the pair staring longingly into each other's eyes go on for so long that they become devoid of meaning, not unlike the film's alchemical fusion of genres.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Gregory Crewdson: Brief Encounters
    Brief Encounters is great entertainment.
  90. A Late Quartet
    A muted soap opera masquerading as erudite ensemble piece, Yaron Zilberman's A Late Quartet jettisons character plausibility in favor of pop psychology and leaden instrument analogies.
  91. Café de Flore
    It's a pretty tired proposition to complain about movies being manipulative, but Café de Flore sets the bar especially low.
  92. Girl Walk: All Day
    "You should always be happy." That's a succinct encapsulation of the proudly optimistic spirit animating this joyous film, a worldview which the rest of Girl Walk // All Day illustrates with a combination of thrilling street ballet, exultant music, and unflagging verve.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    Graham Chapman's story, frankly, is better served by his Wikipedia page.
  94. The Bay
    The Bay is Barry Levinson's most engaged and entertaining movie since "Wag the Dog," which isn't to say that he's given up his irksome predilection for a certain bullish type of liberalism.
  95. Vamps
    A sense of anachronism is what provides the film with its melancholy heart.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wreck-It Ralph
    Nothing but broad, pandering indexes tailored to appeal to the arcade wistfulness the film never even bothers to convincingly evoke.
  97. This Must Be the Place
    The film believes in maturity, but only as a freely continual process of acceptance.
  98. The Details
    The Details is as smug and self-satisfied as its privileged lead character.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Skyfall
    Bond's latest is a remarkable high watermark for the series: at once solemn and deeply funny, sexy and sad, self-conscious without all the rib-bruising elbowing.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    Silent Hill: Revelation fundamentally misunderstands the appeal its source material.
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