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. Fun Size
    It pairs modern attitude with John Hughesian tropes, and it's odd enough, in spurts, to boast originality.
  2. Chasing Mavericks
    The filmmakers' kinship to Moriarity is obvious, and it makes for a tone of unflinching hope and optimism, though it leaves little room for grit or nuance.
  3. The Revisionaries
    Scott Thurman captures not only the fear and anti-intellectual resentment and insecurity that govern the dictations of the far right, but also the rampant unchecked egotism.
  4. Pusher (2012)
    Do we really need another cautionary tale about an ambitious drug dealer dramatically falling from grace?
  5. Sleep Tight
    The states get higher with every breadcrumb Luis Tosar's creep lays down, and the film derives sometimes remarkable corkscrew tension from watching him being backed into a corner.
  6. Orchestra of Exiles
    Its episodic nature poses a narrative challenge that director Josh Aronson's just barely feature-length documentary can't quite surmount.
  7. Dinotasia
    This decision to avoid treating the dinosaurs as surrogate people for easy identification is both the film's boldest move and the source of much of its problems.
  8. 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.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Brooklyn Castle
    It pays to consider even the small details of society's greatest investment in the future: our future generations.
  10. Tai Chi Zero
    Essentially a live-action anime, it sweats rivulets of Tarantino-era digital anxiety from all pores--every kick, punch, pan, and zoom exaggerated for maximum impact.
  11. Sassy Pants
    Sassy Pants has a slightly ludic atmosphere akin to another tale of teen alienation, Dear Lemon Lima, but it unfolds like a fable in which only Bethany doesn't feel like a canned caricature.
  12. My Worst Nightmare
    The hilarity of the film creeps up slowly and from every angle, not through the facile immediacy of short-lived laughter.
  13. The Sessions
    It's the rare film to sell sex as something truly tender and life-affirming, and Helen Hunt, in particular, is lovely and poignant.
  14. Yogawoman
    It's less a film than an unimaginatively assembled series of talking heads.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Just 45 Minutes from Broadway
    Henry Jaglom applies what must by now qualify as a tradition of pointless agitation to the disruption of theater. Unsurprisingly, the results are disastrous.
  16. Cloud Atlas
    Its ideas are paralleled, its themes twinned, sometimes breathlessly, sometimes fatuously, into what may be described as a 164-minute pop song of seemingly infinite verses, choruses, and bridges. Perhaps expectedly, it soars as often as it thuds.
  17. Flight
    A unique, audacious studio movie, kicking off as a star-driven spectacle before whittling itself down to a raw and riveting character study.
  18. Alex Cross
    Expositional and often self-serious to the point of genuine awkwardness, the dialogue is never as haltingly unconvincing as when it's attempting to give some approximation of Alex Cross's essential looseness and good humor.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Bestiaire
    Bestiaire argues persuasively without words, making a case without explicating one at all.
  20. Sexy Baby
    What the documentary lacks in the way of sophisticated filmmaking it compensates for with an earnest insistence on open dialogue.
  21. We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
    The doc's straightforward and chronological structure is its own worst enemy.
  22. 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.
  23. All Together
    The film is somewhat flimsy, tinged with the impulse to make the elderly characters just the right amount of ridiculous for the benefit of younger viewers.
  24. Holy Motors
    Léos Carax's maddening, self-satisfied, though never smug, game of spot-the-reference seems intended only for a particular type of cinephile.
  25. That's What She Said
    An embarrassing girls-behaving-badly indie romp you'd expect a group of friends to write after an all-you-can-drink brunch.
  26. Nobody Walks
    The whole thing comes out feeling kind of featureless, beaten flat by its own sense of fairness.
  27. The Flat
    Accusation is the rhetoric of outrage, and Arnon Goldfinger can't bring himself to experience even conservative anger, regardless of its appropriateness.
  28. The Loneliest Planet
    Much of the film's final act is given to alienated walking, which too often plays as an abstract study of triangular arrangements in which non-speaking figures move across a barren terrain.
  29. The Thieves
    A dazzling heist film that can't help but come off as duly influenced by Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's trilogy, South Korea's number one box-office champ of all time is never less than clever.
  30. Smashed
    Smashed touches on the awkward perversity that often comes from seemingly pure emotions and intentions, and turns a noticeable, if slightly analytical, eye toward the selfish hurt and narcissistic projections inflicted by the perceived moral hierarchy against recovering addicts.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Split: A Deeper Divide
    As an election-season reminder that our democratic system isn't functioning, it serves as a welcome wake-up call
  32. The Iran Job
    Though there's something refreshing, and disturbingly familiar, about Kevin Sheppard's spontaneity, he's certainly not the most interesting thing about the film.
  33. Here Comes the Boom
    As a comedy, the film aims low and manages to miss the mark entirely.
  34. Argo
    Undeniably rousing, but deeply irresponsible, Argo fans the flames surrounding historical events likely to still remain raw in the memory of many viewers.
  35. Middle of Nowhere
    In a cinema landscape where the representation of the black female experience is most visibly explored through the modes of outlandish comedy, unironic melodrama, or not at all, Ava DuVernay's take is a decidedly refreshing one.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Seven Psychopaths
    If Seven Psychopaths smacks a bit showoff-y in places, it's only because Martin McDonagh has so much worth showing off.
  37. Sinister
    Ellison's fascination with celluloid to solve a crime recalls Antonioni's "Blowup," but Scott Derrickson is unable to conjure an aura that isn't as transparent and weightless as a ghost.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    War of the Buttons
    By the time the drama is wrapped up with a bow and every child has learned a valuable life lesson, even the gap-toothed little tyke there solely for comic relief has begun to grate.
  39. Least Among Saints
    As a portrait of a self-pitying drunk's wet dream of inexplicable atonement, it's fairly effective, but as a story meant to take place on some rational version of planet Earth, it's utterly hopeless.
  40. Simon & the Oaks
    The film is at its best when it lingers on intimacy and the characters' incompetency to manage it.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Big Picture
    Like its protagonist, the film sells out for the security of convention and complacency.
  42. Gayby
    While Jonathan Lisecki is well in tune with his film's niche market, his knack for comedy, both visual and verbal, is universally hilarious.
  43. 3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    The film never really goes soft, as Jordan Roberts never loses sight of the fact that these toxic nincompoops are authentically bad for one another.
  44. In My Mother's Arms
    Throughout, it becomes clear that both the film and its subject are defined by the necessity of multitasking.
  45. Two Years at Sea
    The stillness and silence with which we look upon Jake Williams ranges from curious to unnerving to fascinating.
  46. Special Forces
    The film walks a questionable line between Important Issue seriousness and antsy video-game machismo.
  47. Photographic Memory
    Ross McElwee is less anxious of death itself than of finally comprehending the vast faultiness of the life he's lived.
  48. Smiley
    Michael J. Gallagher's half-cocked horror fiasco is filled with clichés, pitiful dialogue, and clumsy aesthetics.
  49. Butter
    It's the film's unwillingness to deal with the sometimes hilarious and often problematic things its characters say and do that stands as one of its ultimate failings.
  50. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    Roberto Faenza shoots his Manhattan-set action with a glossiness that's as bland as the soundtrack ballads.
    • 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.
  52. The Oranges
    As much as the dialogue in the film voices an attitude of self-liberation and champions the positives of severing accepted social constraints, it seems to be constantly taking one step forward and two steps back.
  53. The Paperboy
    The Paperboy deserves to be seen for its pulpy, well-executed excess, but as a filmmaker, Lee Daniels seems ignorant of how the shocks distract from the story.
  54. Sister
    Ursula Meier's film is sustained by a sturdy emotional engine and some intrepidly thoughtful characterization.
  55. The Double Steps
    One can't help but sense that underneath the complicated art-house game-playing of Isaki Lacuesta's The Double Steps resides a theme that's sentimental and old-hat.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Wake in Fright (1971)
    The film's vision of masculine self-sufficiency is built around--and on, via Australia's own bloody colonial history--an elemental violence.
    • 29 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Trade of Innocents
    Trade of Innocents is as much a piece of social-justice campaigning as it is a work unto itself, an important fact to remember when considering its many flaws.
  58. Janeane from Des Moines
    The film betrays its own fictions by overloading on cheap worst-case-scenario mythology.
  59. The House I Live In
    The mixture of different techniques and varied views results in a rich, multi-faceted look at one of America's most misguided policy initiatives.
  60. Fat Kid Rules the World
    People matter in Matthew Lillard's film; genre not so much.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Decoding Deepak
    Unlike his father, Gotham Chopra is more interested in his own latent daddy issues than with questions of cosmic import.
  62. Now, Forager
    Boasts an evocative sense of environment and the feel of working with one's hands, but otherwise rummages around in search of substance and subtlety.
  63. Avé
    The film exudes an elemental, intriguing mysteriousness, a reminder that things remain unseen and in a state of unrest.
  64. Bel Borba Aqui
    There's no pointing toward something other than the work itself, no poetic digression, no suggestion of a conceptual dimensionality to the work being produced.
  65. Wuthering Heights
    In whittling down Emily Brontë's romance to its most earthly aspects, Andrea Arnold stylizes herself into an unavoidable corner.
  66. Life of Pi
    The second act shifts the film from a lazy and comfy litany of introductions to a riveting fantasia of pure cinema, wherein Lee paints an oft-wordless picture of nature's harshness and grace, the perfect arena for Pi to have a Christ-like coming of age.
  67. 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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    V/H/S
    An anthology of found-footage horror shorts that exudes, sometimes extraordinarily, a neophyte's sense of courage and cluelessness.
  69. Dear Mandela
    A devout political documentary that insists that community, dignity, and solidarity are sustaining, but not the baseline by which one should settle.
  70. BearCity 2: The Proposal
    Doug Langway's film is often too cheesy to, well, bear.
    • 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.
  72. Won't Back Down
    One of its strengths is a knowledge of when to unfurl information, particularly for the strongest emotional effect.
  73. The Waiting Room
    Documents emotionally charged interactions between patients and hospital staff without any signs that the subjects are being made to feel self-conscious or that they're behavior is being affected.
  74. Looper
    As in the very best Anthony Mann and John Ford westerns, Looper at once understands the visual power of violence and is deeply critical of it.
  75. Vulgaria
    Pang Ho-cheung can't help but humanize Vulgaria's characters, which is a kiss of death for what's meant to be a farce of escalating obscenity.
  76. The Other Dream Team
    Made with considerable reverence, but it doesn't quite manage to tow a tricky tonal line that's required when working with such sensitive and complicated material.
  77. Pitch Perfect
    Jason Moore's film is more or less successful in inverse proportion to the degree that it plays its material by the book.
  78. Tales of the Night
    Michel Ocelot's recent cartoons cleverly advance Lotte Reiniger's prototypical stop-motion technique into the digital age.
  79. Headshot
    This "Buddhist film noir," as writer-director Pen-ek Ratanaruang calls it, is surprisingly slow-moving and soulful for a film full of double-crosses and cold-blooded killing.
  80. Bringing Up Bobby
    Just an extended dramatization of the 1980s anti-drug PSA that memorably cautioned "I learned it by watching you!"
  81. Hotel Transylvania
    Yet another instance of a decent, potentially thorny premise bogged down in a mess of treacly sentiment and tedious moralizing.
  82. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    The film captures Vreeland's perhaps unwitting philosophical integrity just as much as it drowns us in the exuberance of her work.
  83. House at the End of the Street
    The film is essentially toothless, but it never stoops to humorless torture-porn theatrics.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Uncle Rafael
    The Americans are clichéd and vapid, and seeing them get knocked around and told to wake up can be validating if you know people as obnoxious and spoiled as them.
  85. The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best
    The film has, at its source, a pool of affectations that so often constitute, or plague, American indie films--and, perhaps, American culture more generally.
  86. Trouble with the Curve
    Clint Eastwood makes his infamous chair speech look like chapter one of a season of self-parody.
  87. Dredd
    The story places a premium on delivering its disreputable sex-and-violence goods with a minimum of fuss or pretension.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Doctored
    Bobby Sheehan doesn't just squander his objectivity, he drowns it out with bleating strings.
  89. End of Watch
    End of Watch is pure frat-boy fantasy, the video game to Southland's great American novel.
  90. Three Stars
    As a sampler course of what it means to court the Michelin honor, Three Stars is enjoyable, but it's simply a collision of details that never entirely converge into a meaningful whole.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Switch
    Switch is possibly the driest and most balanced documentary on the current energy crisis.
  92. They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain
    The images and interviews Robert H. Lieberman and his crew have managed to capture are eye-opening enough to justify the dangerous effort.
  93. Knuckleball!
    This chronicle of two athletes throwing baseball's funkiest, least respected pitch is given depth by their stranger-than-fiction underdog status and camaraderie with mentors who've had the same struggles.
  94. 17 Girls
    At which point does a superficially "nonjudgmental" approach simply seem coy rather than sincerely evenhanded?
  95. Backwards
    Streamlines its busy set of plots and subplots into a 90-minute sprint, throughout which characters often confront and overcome their obstacles within the same scene.
  96. Hellbound?
    Fitfully engaging, but the documentary turns into a touchy-feely isn't-it-wonderful-we're-all-saved love fest as soon as the universalists begin to dominate the interview segments.
  97. Head Games
    While Steve James's documentary is persuasive on an informational level, it doesn't do enough to explore the human side of its subject matter.
  98. Tears of Gaza
    There's no coddling the audience in Vibeke Løkkeberg's verité heave of disgust as the full consequences on the Palestinian people of Operation Cast Lead are made sickeningly clear.
  99. Radio Unnameable
    While crediting free-form radio pioneer Bob Fass with changing the culture of broadcasting, this documentary remains clear-eyed about the decline of community radio and the New Left.
  100. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    A risible, somewhat revolting piece of pop martyrdom, made for and isolated to the damaged middle class.
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