Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Big Boys Gone Bananas!*
    The issue remains that this variety of faux-populism seems better suited to the soapbox than the silver screen.
  2. Falling Overnight
    Falling Overnight recalls some of the more annoying entries in the mumblecore subgenre that erroneously believe that every indiscriminate moment in a person's life is worthy of a film regardless of subtext.
  3. Step Up Revolution
    The film busts a fierce move but never relishes the unique cultural essence that its gentrifying baddie threatens to snuff out.
  4. Klown
    An ostensible Danish "Hangover" that more closely resembles "Two and a Half Men" with nudity and unexpurgated dick jokes.
  5. Ruby Sparks
    Succeeds as a satirical fantasy about writerly self-involvement, but it's worth celebrating as a testament to self-made greatness, particularly in regard to the efforts of writer/star Zoe Kazan.
  6. Sacrifice
    A historical melodrama that retains an ancient, elemental pull even as it insufficiently charts motivation and the self-denying values of antiquity.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Rites of Spring
    Padraig Reynolds's film has no interest in self-awareness, and in fact wears stupidity as a sort of badge of honor.
  8. Planet of Snail
    Even with the heaviness of some of its subject matter, the documentary remains limpid and unsentimental until the very end, in keeping with its subject.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nuit #1
    It works--quite successfully, in places--as a warming tonic against this emotional nippiness of the cinema of Canadian coldness.
  10. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    The director's clear-minded approach allows her subject's more challenging aesthetic-political mix to shine through, even if it's at the inevitable expense of her own filmmaking proclivities.
  11. Abendland
    The documentary discipline can't escape its own inherent intermediateness, or its own penchant for deception.
  12. Shut Up and Play the Hits
    James Murphy never says that his music will sound different after LCD Soundsystem disbands, so why fearfully anticipate a change that we don't even know is coming?
  13. Killer Joe
    It thrills in seeing dumb people getting their due in hyper-stylized displays of violence, and yet it never feels contemptuous of them.
  14. 30 Beats
    While it lends itself to some interesting insight on the politics of non-exclusive, fuck-buddy dynamics, its characters are ultimately too one-dimensional and their dialogue too theatrical to sustain an involving cinematic experience.
  15. The Dark Knight Rises
    Christopher Nolan's capper of his Batman trilogy is a summer blockbuster of grand inclinations in both form and content.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Queen of Versailles
    Lauren Greenfield's film evolves from an ode to entitled obliviousness to a more evenhanded character study, tracing the fault lines that develop within the Siegel family.
  17. The Well Digger's Daughter
    Ultimately comes off as curiously anecdotal, lacking the dramatic dynamism that could give Marcel Pagnol's tale new life.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    Takashi Miike lets his familiar tastelessness get the better of him, relishing the grisly seppuku-by-bamboo in unnecessary detail.
  19. Wagner's Dream
    The title of Susan Froemke's documentary is both an expression of aspiration and a statement of achievement.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Lung Neaw Visits His Neighbours
    Just as Rirkrit Tiravanija had done in the '90s when he converted New York City galleries into live kitchens, he changes one's relation to a movie theater to a space for meditation.
  21. 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.
  22. Ice Age: Continental Drift
    Caters almost exclusively to the remedial, Duplo Blocks demographic, leaving parents and guardians bored to distraction.
  23. Ponies
    Never distinguishes itself as engaging cinema apart from the main character's vile charisma and a few dynamic dialogue sequences.
  24. Family Portrait in Black and White
    Julia Ivanova, a Canadian filmmaker, doesn't judge Olga; she refuses to see her through the eyes of a presumably better-off first-world citizen.
  25. Ballplayer: Pelotero
    The doc is a sly, interesting achievement: It opens as an entertaining sports story and closes as a metaphor for government corruption.
  26. It's the Earth Not the Moon
    After 30 minutes or so, Gonçalo Tocha's anthropological proposition slides into dubiousness.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Deconstructing Dad: The Music, Machines and Mystery of Raymond Scott
    The documentary is a work of careful consideration, moral weighing, and deliberateness of craft.
  28. Farewell, My Queen
    Control is the operative element in Benoît Jacquot's work, with the main caveat being that when someone has it, someone else does not.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Alps
    Both a companion piece to and in many ways a reversal of "Dogtooth," it builds on that film's surreally terse style and notions of communication and identity without diluting its singularity or concentration.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Easy Money
    The humanization of these antiheroic outlaws doesn't feel forced, but it does feel engineered, and there's never a viewer investment to match the story's wide expanse.
  31. Grassroots
    It isn't entirely clear what Stephen Gyllenhaal sees in the material apart from some lukewarm raging against the machine.
  32. The Imposter
    The film shrewdly opts not to proffer its own hypothesis about the true reasons behind the Gibson family buying Frédéric Bourdin's story.
  33. Union Square
    Nancy Savoca's film begins in caricature and ends in sentimentality, only briefly hitting the sweet spot in between.
  34. Invisible
    One can see the difference between the two traumatized main female characters right in their faces.
  35. Trishna
    Class privilege and sexual politics are inextricably linked in Trishna, Michael Winterbottom's blunt, self-consciously brutal, and rather loose updating of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles."
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    China Heavyweight
    Although we never really get to know He or Miao, despite following them around vérité-style, director Yung Chang expertly captures the rays of Western culture bouncing off them.
  37. 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.
  38. Savages
    While his classic hyperbolic visual style is back in force, Stone can't bother to muster any of his usual righteous anger, instead mischanneling his discontent into a kind of zen acceptance of these perpetually tiresome main characters.
  39. Katy Perry: Part of Me
    This frothy 3D concert doc often plays like a Perry ad campaign, assuring viewers that their "Teenage Dream" diva is a good, fun-loving person, and that, by God, she's doing fine.
  40. The Magic of Belle Isle
    This gooey reteaming of Rob Reiner and Morgan Freeman is crammed tight with baldly manipulative elements, its tearjerker quota busting at the seams.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Pact
    When The Pact descends, finally, from suggestion to explication, the scares regrettably slink away.
  42. Starry Starry Night
    A modestly charming bit of whimsy that hopes to speak to anyone who experienced a sense of emotional injustice during their formative years.
  43. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    In Jay and Mark Duplass's film, the fragile middle-aged male ego is indulged, massaged, and, finally, critiqued.
  44. Crazy Eyes
    While the male characters are certainly not presented as models of enlightened behavior, their antics and crises are indulged in a manner not extended to their female counterparts.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Madea's Witness Protection
    The film remains buoyed by the same open heart that makes Tyler Perry's best work so endearing.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Neil Young Journeys
    As great and intimate as Live at Massey Hall 1971 may be, it's not as transportive as this filming of a Neil Young performance at the venue 30 years later.
  47. The Amazing Spider-Man
    No mutation is necessary to clearly see that Marvel's "reboot" of their signature franchise is an unimaginative remake of Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Magic Mike
    It's as if Soderbergh expects the film to mostly resolve itself, rounded out by the asses-in-the-seats appeal of the material, rote thematic underpinning, and ample charms of the cast.
  49. Ted
    Seth MacFarlane's comedic modus operandi is to shock with outrageousness and pander with TV and movie citations via one non sequitur after another, a strategy that leads to a few laughs but nothing approaching lasting humor.
  50. Unforgivable
    The layered, character-driven drama may subvert expectations of a sunny Venetian noir, but observes its five principal characters with a probing, egalitarian eye.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Burning Hot Summer
    The Louis Garrel character's mixture of self-containment and alleged possessiveness over his wife fails to convince, if not to irritate.
  52. Gypsy
    A Slovakian character study of a boy ambivalently caught between worlds that ultimately squanders its promise.
  53. Searching for Sugar Man
    Despite crafting a consistently engaging film, the director doesn't present the full scope of Sixto Rodriguez's life.
  54. People Like Us
    This dry-as-dust enterprise bogs down in an almost total lack of energy and imagination that no amount of faux earnestness can overcome.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Beasts of the Southern Wild
    Benh Zeitlin's lived-in, almost abstract sense of social realism is partly what makes the film so refreshing and uniquely affecting.
  56. Take This Waltz
    Take This Waltz is full of chance encounters, some less likely than a lobby with nine hundred windows or a bed where the moon has been sweating.
  57. Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League's New York
    Nina Rosenblum's love letter never attains that essence of ambiguity that makes the best nonfiction films live on after the credits fade.
  58. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    The script leaps forward with an absurdity almost as great as Lincoln's own strength.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Men on the Bridge
    If director Asli Özge has said something about modern-day Istanbul, she's done it in fairly broad strokes that may be too far apart for the sake of a discernible narrative.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nate & Margaret
    Nathan Adloff's Nate & Margaret is an endearing, hopeful, and quietly radical film.
  61. The Last Ride
    A typical wax-museum reproduction of the American South in which every detail is Southern in bold all caps, and not a single scene over the course of the film's 102 minutes rings true.
  62. 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.
  63. Kumaré
    Kumaré has a premise that could've been the launching point for one of Sascha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles's satirical outrages.
  64. To Rome with Love
    "With age comes exhaustion," according to a rueful line late in the film, and it serves as a fitting diagnosis for Woody Allen's latest fallen souffle set in a European cultural capital.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Invisible War
    Kirby Dick's spartan use of graphics and statistics conveys arguments with little grandstanding.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brave
    Pixar's latest ultimately offers nothing more than a caricature of a well-worn conceit.
  67. The Girl from the Naked Eye
    The Girl from the Naked Eye has heart, which is more than can be said of some other recent genre throwbacks, but it ultimately makes barely a splash.
  68. That's My Boy
    That's My Boy lazily exists in a fantasyland of Adam Sandler's perpetual adolescence, even as it generates some moderate comic friction from Sandler and Andy Samberg's testy back-and-forth.
  69. Rock of Ages
    If the Adam Shankman film's debasement of its subject into campy kitsch is the unavoidable fate of all culturally dangerous art, that doesn't make it any less palatable.
  70. The Woman in the Fifth
    Pawlikowski has crafted a film that throbs with substantial personal weight and bristles with a violent, haunting interior life.
  71. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
    As entertaining as the documentary is, it never really measures up to the fascination and sheer force of personality of its subject.
  72. The Tortured
    Robert Lieberman's Perverted Justice advert spins its wheels with scene after scene impatiently cut like a montage sequence.
  73. Kite
    Far more concerned with indulging a slightly less glossy Slumdog Millionaire-like aesthetic than dealing with the frayed relationships of its characters.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Extraterrestrial
    In almost every respect, Extraterrestrial is an exceptional and traditional romantic comedy. It just happens to be set during an alien invasion.
  75. El Velador
    El Velador doesn't pass judgment or manipulate emotionally, instead choosing simply to consider the arduousness of survival in a land wracked by slaughter.
  76. UFO in Her Eyes
    The serio-comic technique and ping-ponging aesthetics ultimately make for a winning approach.
  77. Tahrir: Liberation Square
    A direct-cinema document of the Cairo protests that toppled Mubarak, Stefano Savona's film doesn't pretend that Egypt's resolution has yet won a lasting victory.
  78. Your Sister's Sister
    For long stretches in its first two acts, Lynn Shelton's film is distinguished by a disarming sense of freedom and spontaneity.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Prometheus
    It aspires to Stanley Kubrick's "2001", but in its maddeningly unresolved plot threads and cornball cosmic mysticism, it lands closer to "Mission to Mars" -though Prometheus lacks any action set piece as gripping as the Brian De Palma film's sentient sandstorm.
  80. Patagonia Rising
    Director Brian Lilla alternates between talking heads and animated graphics to elucidate first how dams work and, obligatorily, to put a human face on those who would be affected.
  81. We Won't Grow Old Together (1969)
    A wild, furious, and genuinely unsettling ego is on display in Maurice Pialat's second proper feature.
  82. Paul Williams Still Alive
    The film too often undercuts its goals by indulging its director's need for self-affirmation at the expense of the movie's far more compelling central subject.
  83. 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.
  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.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Corpo Celeste
    Once Corpo Celeste began to recede a little in my rearview mirror, my initial impatience softened a little.
  86. Knockdown
    The film is a tedious narrative shambles that's almost hilariously unaware of its racism and sexism.
  87. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    In spite of its lazy, cookie-cutter screenplay, simple narrative mechanics are only dutifully observed to the extent that they step aside to make way for numerous flights of madness.
  88. Bel Ami
    A coherent characterization of Robert Pattinson's striving schemer is nowhere to be found in this pedestrian period piece.
  89. Lola Versus
    A year in the life of a young woman unhappy in love and uncertain in career, Lola Versus could easily be faulted for the narrowness of its worldview.
  90. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    What saves the film from being simply a schematic mother-daughter reconciliation drama is both the reluctance and prickliness that Catherine Keener brings to her character.
  91. Safety Not Guaranteed
    More focused on emotion than adventure, it teases out the possibilities and perils of time travel without embroiling itself in the confusion inherent to the subject.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Sexual Chronicles of a French Family
    Its scope is too limited for it to muster much of a response in us beyond basic titillation. And there are plenty of better places to go for that.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Loved Ones
    Sean Byrne endows his rote slasher material with the kind of blackly comic wit and levity that virtually guarantee its entry into the contemporary midnight-movie canon.
  94. Wish Me Away
    The film is ultimately too concerned with courting the singer's fans to deliver anything more than a theatrical release of a very special episode of VH1's Behind the Music.
  95. Hide Away
    A banal "poetic" drama of a grieving stranger licking his wounds in a bayside Michigan town.
  96. Snow White and the Huntsman
    As feminist fantasy, the film is non-committal, and as a reimagining of the fairy tale, it's at best expensive-looking without seeming wantonly so.
  97. Richard's Wedding
    In the director's preference for above-it-all contempt over tough-minded empathy, the film ends up seeming little more than an 89-minute hatefest.
  98. Pink Ribbons, Inc.
    A righteously outraged documentary targeting the "warm and fuzzy" iconography of the breast cancer fundraising bureaucracy and its camouflage of corporate priorities.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crooked Arrows
    Although it adheres to the tried-and-true sports-movie formula of an underdog team striving to overcome their limitations to become winners, Crooked Arrows lacks captivating emotional momentum.
  100. A Cat in Paris
    An animated film with the cozy charm of an advertisement for Starbucks French Roast, A Cat in Paris is all design and no danger.
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