Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,775 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 6.3 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: 4,349 out of 7775
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7775
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7775
7775 movie reviews
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  1. We Need to Talk About Kevin
    The purpose of Lynne Ramsay's hodgepodge approach is to distract us from the flimsiness of a story that suggests a snide art-house take on "The Omen."
  2. The Watch
    What's perhaps most off-putting about the movie isn't its increasingly stale humor, but the way it ultimately validates its characters' worst impulses.
    • 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."
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A Horrible Way to Die
    The adventitious use of loud and strange blasts of music may theoretically make sense to heighten the film's creepiness, but here, like everything else, they don't exactly make a perfect fit and serve more as the final nail in the coffin for the film's lack of tonal cohesion.
  5. Tanner Hall
    Francesca Gregorini and Tatiana von Furstenberg's film is episodic, but the episodes don't achieve any kind of cumulative effect.
  6. Father of Invention
    There's no spark or humor to the film's situations, just the sense of capable actors trying to make the best of a hopeless situation.
    • 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.
  8. The Hedgehog
    The Hedgehog ultimately illuminates only the continued lameness of employing out-of-leftfield tragedy for cheap bathos.
  9. The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
    Like most of the film's performances, Sisley's comes off as flat and impenetrable, the result both of a certain stoical conception of character and the dissipation of focus that arises from the movie's perceived need to encompass so much.
  10. Blackthorn
    Blackthorn's last-man-standing circumstances, far from a cautionary tale about the cost of the gunslinger life, are glorified as the height of macho nobility.
  11. Iron Crows
    A maddeningly blunt and syrupy rendering of a piquant socio-economic configuration, Park Bong-Nam's Iron Crows is ultimately third-world documentary filmmaking at its most exploitatively surface-groping.
  12. Chasing Madoff
    The fawning personal-life segments are overdone, and undermine the film's compelling reportage about Madoff's ruse and downfall.
  13. Grave Encounters
    Twelve long years after "The Blair Witch Project" pushed the first-person-POV subgenre to horror's forefront, and four years after [Rec] expertly refined the formula, Grave Encounters can't even pretend to be anything other than hopelessly derivative.
  14. Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    In the documentary, the game is a make-believe war of pent-up frustrations linking race, nation, and manhood, one which teenage boys named Mohamed can actually win.
  15. Shame
    Shame articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction-in a vibrant city rendered dull and anonymous.
  16. 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.
  17. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Shut Up Little Man! fails to legitimize its topic as one of any significance.
  18. Prince of Swine
    Played as broadly and as crudely as you please (in terms of acting, direction, "edgy" dialogue), Prince of Swine paints a grimly ugly portrait of male sexual violence and female submission.
  19. A Bird of the Air
    Naturally, given the film's somewhat precious air of spiritualism, the parroted phrase that speaks most clearly to Lyman is a quotation from the book of Ecclesiastes that gives the film its title and gives Fiona a chance to offer a blithely optimistic interpretation of that most dour of Biblical books.
  20. 1911
    Adhering to what is apparently a formula for national superproductions, 1911 throws dates and names on the screen with unceasing speed and frequent irrelevance -- gratuitously identifying a walk-on as "German diplomat."
  21. Norman
    Alternately maudlin and snarky, Norman just doesn't risk enough, and can be consigned to the status of what the school drama geek would call "some contemporary, obscure, teen-angst thing."
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Taken 2
    Some of the basic pleasures of the original remain intact (nobody shoots up a small room of bearded Eastern European men like Neeson), but ultimately the film feels compromised.
  23. The Divide
    In Xavier Gens's The Divide, the revolution will not be televised, only the degradation of human civility--and in a mire of clichés more toxic to the mind than the radioactive dust that causes everyone's hair to fall out in the wake of a nuclear explosion.
  24. Oranges and Sunshine
    The film is so careful to avoid the luridness that would seem inevitably to accompany an excavation of child kidnapping, forced labor, and rape, that the result is a plodding, overly tasteful procedural that holds up its hero as an incorruptible embodiment of goodness.
  25. Young Goethe in Love
    What unfolds is a predictably anguished story of true love thwarted by material circumstances, or in the terms dictated by the film, rationality triumphing over romance.
  26. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The film is overtly suspicious and critical of the new and only serviceably romantic about the old.
  27. The Other F Word
    Covered in tattoos and clinging to wisps of their outsider status, the men profiled here seem assured of the novelty of their dilemma, as if they were the first generation to settle into a middle-class existence after a youth spent on the fringes.
  28. Killing Bono
    Rather than organically develop its characters, it charts their evolution via silly outfit changes, treating the early '80s as a costume bin for flavor-of-the-week aping gags, with the band going from Gary Numan style shirts and skinny ties to lavish glam-rock costumes.
  29. Ender's Game
    Gavin Hood relays a vague sense of what it's like to live in duty, and yet at a distance from one's home, but this vision of the future never rouses, never asks to be remembered.
  30. Watching TV with the Red Chinese
    The first half of the film is a virtual compendium of high-culture references, topical concerns addressed almost in passing, and narrative fracturing devices.
  31. Roadie
    A slice of slight character-driven conventionality in which directorial sensitivity and drama rooted in tense conversations and intermittent blow-ups prove incapable of imparting depth to a tale that plays like a series of simplistic stock gestures.
  32. The Big Fix
    The Tickells' style is a predictable grab bag of interviews with outraged experts and journalists, TV news footage, and scenes in which the filmmakers (and, during one trip, fellow activists Peter Fonda and Amy Smart) make faux-daring journeys into the fray to bring back supposed realities that corporate America seeks to hide.
  33. The Viral Factor
    The apparent byproduct of watching too much Bad Boys II, The Viral Factor is a cops-and-criminals saga slathered in glossy Michael Bay-isms.
  34. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    Nuri Bilge Ceylan has to be the least kinetic of working filmmakers - and not simply in the sense of static camerawork or lack of narrative momentum.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Lula, the Son of Brazil
    This insipidly inspirational biopic of the two-term Brazilian president is a safe, bourgeois vision of proletarian struggle.
  36. Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
    A predictable, drawn-out romantic comedy that happens to be set in the shadow of impending apocalypse.
  37. 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.
  38. Paranormal Activity 4
    Paranormal Activity 4 sadly continues the series' downslide, most drearily with a mid-film twist that enables the filmmakers to go about essentially remaking the second entry.
  39. Frankenweenie
    Tim Burton's sense of playfulness feels forced throughout, and as the film progresses, any humor or inventiveness takes a backseat to tumultuous set pieces that reference Frankenstein.
  40. Thin Ice
    The icy fatalism of film noir is turned to slush by Thin Ice, a crime saga that reduces its chosen genre to a series of atonal, old-hat clichés.
  41. ATM
    If both good and evil characters don't behave in ways that make sense vis-à-vis their circumstances, any sense of terror quickly dissipates.
  42. Kill List
    It's a road movie of sorts, like the Steve Coogan/Bob Brydon comedy The Trip, only with fewer expert impressions and more inept executions, but lovely scenery just the same.
  43. Five Time Champion
    A coming-of-age tale that, with every landscape cutaway and twinkling note from its xylophone-heavy score, begs to be taken as a dreamy slice of countryside profundity.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bad Fever
    In Bad Fever, Dustin Guy Defa's sad-sack indie drama about loneliness and urban ennui, a stand-up routine becomes an outlet for personal pain, the stage a place to unload baggage.
  45. Reuniting the Rubins
    Yoav Factor can't decide whether he wants to play his broad scenario as an exaggerated farce or as a heartwarming testament to blood ties.
  46. Mammuth
    The movie's deathblow is the casting of poet-artist Miss Ming as Mammuth's affectless niece, whose twee verse and sculpture make Miranda July seem like a bearer of gravitas.
  47. Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    Oh, the things that money can buy.
  48. Peeples
    Tina Gordon Chism's film collapses into a series of clumsy improvisatory sketches, tied up in cheap, risibly sentimental catharsis.
  49. The Dish & the Spoon
    Doesn't waste a moment on recognizable reality, consumed as it is with checking off various items from its list of clichés.
  50. Private Romeo
    Private Romeo feels more like a side project from the producers of Glee than some kind of novel queering of Shakespeare's text.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bullhead
    What Bullhead ultimately lacks isn't balls but insight and empathy.
  52. Michael
    A (relatively) tasteful and restrained approach to potentially lurid subject matter isn't necessarily any better than one that gives in freely to what might be seen as a filmmaker's baser impulses.
    • 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.
  54. The Salt of Life
    A dry dream of postmenopausal-male sexual lethargy, this comedy's least musty ideas are among its worst.
  55. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    Morgan Spurlock has little to say about Comic-Con other than that its attendees value it on a par with Christmas.
  56. The FP
    The FP has a one-note joke of a conceit, and when that runs out, it has few actual jokes to fill the humorless void.
  57. 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.
  58. For a Good Time, Call...
    While the heart of the movie is the at-times strained relationship between the two leads, it all unfolds rather by the numbers, dictated more by the expected arc of such things than the demands of the characters.
  59. Hit So Hard
    P. David Ebersole so busy flitters from one point of interest to another that Hit So Hard never coheres into anything other than a collection of rock-star clichés.
  60. God Bless America
    By wholeheartedly taking its main character's side instead of complicating or censuring his homicidal vigilante crusade, it proves inanely one-note and preachy.
  61. The Intouchables
    A cheeky dream-drama about the friendship between a rich, white quadriplegic and a penurious black job-seeker, the premise of The Intouchables alone nearly renders analysis redundant.
  62. 360
    Directed by Fernando Meirelles from a dusty script by Peter Morgan, 360 is all superficial stimulation, hollow and stiff as it beats the dead horse of we're-all-connected narratives.
  63. End of Watch
    End of Watch is pure frat-boy fantasy, the video game to Southland's great American novel.
  64. Delicacy
    Now that Zooey Deschanel has taken a detour into TV land, is Audrey Tautou the most insufferable pixy presence in cinema today?
  65. RoboCop
    Ultimately the film is, like the Faux News programming it caricatures at face value, a deck-stacking simulation of a dialogue it isn't even remotely interested in opening.
  66. Battle of the Year
    Remarkably, the highlight of Benson Lee's film, essentially a fiction reboot of his Planet B-Boy, isn't the scene where Chris Brown gets punched in the face.
  67. The Face of Love
    An almost offensively "tasteful" dud that remains irritatingly on the surface, more alive to the set design than the characters' motivations.
  68. Maleficent
    We may have all wanted to know the story behind those famed horns, but the mystery was far preferable to having Maleficent de-fanged and de-clawed in the process.
  69. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    Despite one or two moments of Venture Brothers-worthy fancy, the film is as by-the-numbers as any this series has ever offered.
  70. Sin City: A Dame To Kill For
    Whereas a single, stinging one-liner would have sufficed Jacques Tourneur or Fritz Lang, Frank Miller's overcompensating flood of pulpy dialogue only renders his characters flat and sans empathy.
  71. ReGeneration
    Phillip Montgomery's film is ironically as undeveloped and busy as the sensational media it criticizes.
  72. Virginia
    Unfortunately, there's little sympathy granted to these people, and the revelation of their hidden vices comes across like an increasingly mean series of punchlines.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    Silent Hill: Revelation fundamentally misunderstands the appeal its source material.
  74. Small, Beautifully Moving Parts
    Gentler and less aesthetically assaultive than offerings like 0s & 1s and Catfish, but it's not necessarily any subtler or more enlightening.
  75. Lovely Molly
    The film's inconsistent, largely bankrupt style is second to how hard and tackily it leans on the horror of child abuse to goose audiences.
  76. The Good Doctor
    The Good Doctor isn't a ponderous bore because Blake isn't a strictly good or bad character: It sucks because he isn't even a compelling character.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Mansome
    The sociological commentary and historical perspectives are superficial at best and the targets often too easy.
  78. Battle Royale
    Maybe Battle Royale's ultimate punchline is its inexplicable ability to fool some people into taking it seriously.
  79. Mighty Fine
    Debbie Goodstein-Rosenfeld's film seems oddly anemic when it deals with anyone but Chazz Palminteri's Joe.
  80. Paranoia
    Robert Luketic's supposedly down-and-dirty corporate espionage thriller undercuts itself at nearly every turn by shunning any potential relevancy.
  81. Red Lights
    That all the good things--and there are several--Red Lights has going for it are ultimately in service of an ending that might even make M. Night Shyamalan cringe represents one of the year's biggest missed opportunities.
  82. Hide Away
    A banal "poetic" drama of a grieving stranger licking his wounds in a bayside Michigan town.
  83. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Ben Stiller's aesthetics blend overly manicured imagery with soaring rock songs that underline every emotion, lest the film's corporate logo-driven message-making didn't get the point across clearly enough.
  84. Dark Horse
    Yesterday, Solondz blocking the screen meant something, even if it was just his own petulance. Today, a blurred sign only signifies his capitulation to peer pressure.
  85. The Oregonian
    It's the kind of movie you'd find in someone's VHS collection, decide to watch based on the box art and title, and end up switching out for "The House of the Devil" instead.
  86. Kite
    Far more concerned with indulging a slightly less glossy Slumdog Millionaire-like aesthetic than dealing with the frayed relationships of its characters.
  87. 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.
  88. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Oh, the hilarious awkwardness of placing privileged white kids in a place where they don't belong.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    If this sounds like the premise of one of those tiresome Discovery Channel docu-tainments, it's because it essentially is, only heavily abbreviated to fit the feature-film format.
  90. Collaborator
    The banter is playful and brazenly self-aware, but the ideas are a bit stale and don't lead anywhere emotionally substantial or narratively spontaneous.
  91. Starbuck
    Yet another example of modern-family predicaments getting stuffed into the traditional-family-values message of conventional comedies.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Solomon Kane
    The fight choreography has a gracefulness bordering on elegance, and so it's a shame that these standalone thrills aren't better integrated into the film as a fully formed narrative whole.
  93. Klown
    An ostensible Danish "Hangover" that more closely resembles "Two and a Half Men" with nudity and unexpurgated dick jokes.
  94. Sushi: The Global Catch
    The documentary is ultimately a dry endeavor that feels closer in spirit to an Afterschool Special than a full-blooded movie.
  95. The Equalizer
    All this should build up to a moderately engaging battle of wits, but Richard Wenk's script has little interest in wit and no capacity for psychology.
  96. Why Stop Now
    Shifting between wacky situation comedy and somber familial drama, Why Stop Now? isn't invested enough in either mode to convincingly pull off its genre-hopping ambitions.
  97. Death by China
    Further confirmation that agitprop documentaries have become wedded to a template that undermines their very arguments.
  98. Rush
    Ron Howard's by-the-seat-of-your-pants aesthetic makes the slower, darker sequences feel hurried and bland, especially when stacked up next to the racing sequences.
  99. The First Time
    Sex and love are both novel experiences for two high schoolers in this talky affair that suggests a hybrid of Before Sunset and Some Kind of Wonderful.
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