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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    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    U.N. Me
    U.N. Me isn't all sneering, and it certainly makes its points.
  2. Found Memories
    Julia Murat shows a fine grasp of form, letting her technique reflect the elements and moods of her story.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Cellmates
    The film offers Tom Sizemore the perfect opportunity to prove himself worthy of a comeback. Alas, he fails spectacularly.
  4. 6 Month Rule
    The film is far too indulgent with its lead character to do more than hint at the ways that one form of male egotism can morph into another.
  5. 5 Broken Cameras
    The documentary provides a birdsong of perseverance in the face of irrational violence, immense historic anger, and grim, seemingly insurmountable realities.
  6. For Greater Glory
    The film is awash in blandly brown-toned cinematography, action scenes more violent than rousing, and a whole host of bathetic subplots.
  7. High School
    As sure as marijuana gets you high, you can count on weed-themed comedies cropping up every few years, each hoping to become a stoner-classic staple--a fate to which High School falls far short of achieving.
  8. Piranha 3DD
    John Gulager is neither artist nor genius, bringing only straight-to-video conviction to Piranha 3DD.
  9. Chernobyl Diaries
    With the faux-verité aesthetics of [Rec], the American-tourists-in-Eastern-European-hell setup of Hostel, and the brain of a mushy radioactive mutant zombie thingie, Chernobyl Diaries is little more than decomposed horror leftovers.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    OC87: The Obsessive Compulsive, Major Depression, Bipolar, Asperger's Movie
    A tender, painful, and frustrating work of vulnerability, and because of this in some ways deflects critical commentary.
  11. The Woman in the Septic Tank
    A lighthearted critique on the fetishized notion of the "non-actor," the ethics (or lack thereof) of the "docudrama," and the packaging of national despair for exportation.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Men in Black III
    More like an attempt to reenergize a franchise than rebottle the lightning that electrified the original.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Redlegs
    Redlegs may be "raw," but it's meaningless. That's something Cassavetes would have never abided.
  14. 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.
  15. Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
    The exquisite live-action Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog may be the family film of the year.
  16. Mighty Fine
    Debbie Goodstein-Rosenfeld's film seems oddly anemic when it deals with anyone but Chazz Palminteri's Joe.
  17. Battle Royale
    Maybe Battle Royale's ultimate punchline is its inexplicable ability to fool some people into taking it seriously.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Oslo, August 31st
    The evocation of things ending suffuses the film with melancholy, as Anders increasingly becomes an observant rather than a participant in his own life.
  19. The Samaritan
    The Samaritan treads a fine line between film-noir moodiness and crime-thriller triteness, mostly settling for the latter.
  20. Moonrise Kingdom
    Although the film remains continually fanciful, it always reminds us of the stakes in which precocious childhood rubs up against the possibility of a childhood denied altogether.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Mansome
    The sociological commentary and historical perspectives are superficial at best and the targets often too easy.
  22. Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story
    The documentary is briskly paced, often compelling, but a little soft, as it succumbs to hero worship.
  23. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    Mostly the movie's varied storylines cough up the same platitudes: being pregnant sucks, having young children is a misery, but it's all worth it when you're holding that newborn in your arms.
  24. Elena
    Elena is a film deeply concerned with class resentment, but the filmmakers' attitude toward their titular character is disconcerting and even shocking.
  25. Beyond the Black Rainbow
    Something like a trippy grindhouse homage whose familiar images are refracted through a prism of blacklight posters, Jodorowsky films, and even Rob Zombie's grungy psychotropic sensibility.
  26. Battleship
    Shamelessly mimics Michael Bay's larger-than-life dialogue, sweeping cinematography, cornball romance, and military fetishism.
  27. Indie Game: The Movie
    Makes a compelling case for games as not only clever hand-eye coordination exercises, but also as manifestations of their creators' emotional and philosophical viewpoints.
  28. 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.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    American Animal
    It may be baked with the same ingredients that come in your standard mumblecore starter kit, but because of Matt D'Elia's indebtedness to other movies, the film follows a different recipe altogether.
  30. The Color Wheel
    Much like the work of generational cohort Michael Robinson, Alex Ross Perry's films are steeped in a viscous cultural past.
  31. 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.
  32. Polisse
    Polisse has been compared to "The Wire," but beyond a shared interest in the Sisyphean nature of police work, the two are mostly comparable as inverses of each other.
  33. Hysteria
    Hysteria's happy ending isn't the type that calls for a cigarette, and it certainly isn't the one the film deserves.
  34. The Dictator
    Its dolly- and crane-operated polish points toward an acquiescence to Tinseltown mores, which until now Baron Cohen hovered cheekily above.
  35. You Are Here
    Some will find the film compelling, but underneath the riddles it's basically a self-important proclamation of "who the hell knows?"
  36. Dark Shadows
    A mixed bag of Nixon-era pop burlesque and vampire kitsch is ultimately undone by pedestrian gags and bloated genre boilerplate.
  37. Hick
    It doesn't take long to gather the influences trickling through Derick Martini's Hick, an aimless tumbleweed of a road movie if ever there was one.
  38. 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.
  39. Bonsái
    Cristián Jiménez's film knows how entangled the will to know is with the will to make love.
  40. Nobody Else But You (Poupoupidou)
    While Nobody Else But You aspires to a kind of French Fargo, it forgets the primary qualities that made that film work.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Nesting
    The way Nesting goes out of its way to tell us where its set is symptomatic of the film in general.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Cup
    One wonders who the audience is for a film this far removed from the dirt and grime of the reality it claims to be based on, and why they find anything so squeaky-clean appealing.
  43. The Observers
    Goss's film carries its unique forms of narrative suspense, but her 16mm images imbue both the forbidding landscape and her characters' scientific aerie, though the observatory only dates from 1932, with a poetry of the seemingly eternal.
  44. Where Do We Go Now?
    Nadine Labaki's film awkwardly hybridizes somber politizized drama with regional humor in the style of "Waking Ned Devine" and "Calendar Girls."
  45. Under African Skies
    It does lightly suggest scintillating questions about the responsibility artists have in reflecting current political moments in their music.
  46. Sleepless Night
    After a few turns in the modest narrative, an unlikely sense of structural resilience begins to emerge.
  47. Portrait of Wally
    The conclusion is a testament to the fact that authentic justice is probably only attainable by accident.
  48. Patience (After Sebald)
    A wide-ranging piece of literary criticism brought to vivid cinematic life, bursting with ideas and inspired visual translations of them.
  49. A Bag of Hammers
    Suffers from both an odd, ineffective structure and a low-key tone that jars uncomfortably with the subject matter and makes the film's stakes seem unnecessary low.
  50. Tonight You're Mine
    The film's narrative conceit is so rigidly formulaic and lethargically spun that even the looseness and spontaneity that the setting affords feels dull and constricting.
  51. I Wish
    I Wish has a tough time balancing the heartfelt with the saccharine and too often feels slight.
  52. 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.
  53. The Road
    For a spell, the film gets by on its unpretentious flair for atmosphere, even its disconcerting nonsensicality.
  54. Girl in Progress
    Girl in Progress operates like a training-wheels melodrama for genre-uneducated tweens.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    First Position
    The documentary twists out its six narrative threads with measured compassion and even-handedness.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Mother's Day
    A home-invasion film like Mother's Day is elongated coitus interruptus.
  57. The Perfect Family
    Having the far from goody-goody Kathleen Turner play a holier-than-thou mother bent on winning a devout church title is an inherently hilarious premise.
  58. A Little Bit of Heaven
    Unsurprisingly for a film detailing terminal disease, this is a largely solemn affair, often verging on morbidity in its elongated deathwatch.
  59. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
    Don't let the women's smirks and wordplay fool you: The fact that art is eternal often makes it more horrifying than life itself.
  60. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    The film is home to some unique redeeming factors, but it panders to viewers by diluting its lesson, which teaches that some comfort zones can only be truly abandoned on the other side of the world.
  61. The Avengers
    While The Avengers exhibits exemplary craftsmanship, Joss Whedon hasn't made a great film.
  62. Meeting Evil
    Chris Fisher so over-directs his material that the action takes on the sheen of a parody or, at least, of a film that doesn't realize its clichés are being exaggerated to the point of absurdity.
  63. ReGeneration
    Phillip Montgomery's film is ironically as undeveloped and busy as the sensational media it criticizes.
  64. You Hurt My Feelings
    For a film that often veers into potentially absurd territory, You Hurt My Feelings shows a great deal of sensitivity toward its sad-sack characters.
  65. Restless City
    The script simply isn't in the same league as the images that Andrew Dosunmu and the gifted cinematographer Bradford Young have fashioned.
  66. Last Call at the Oasis
    Both an informative bit of agitprop and an ultra slick and slightly self-satisfied bit of entertainment.
  67. Jesus Henry Christ
    The title alone invites you to cuss at this smug film, and you may do so the second you catch a whiff of the portentous first shot: a Wes Anderson put-on.
  68. Booker's Place: A Mississippi Story
    Documentarian and subject, past and present blur together like bleeding watercolors in Raymond De Felitta's gripping memoir.
  69. The Raven
    While full of welcome gore and blood spatter, it's bankrupt of any creative spark.
  70. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    The film is content as it is to run clever one-liners and 19th-century pop-cultural references into the same comedic whirlpool.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    While very informative, it doesn't work as an introduction to kibbutzim because it requires the viewer to have some prior knowledge of the history of Israel.
  72. Joffrey: Mavericks of American Dance
    While the documentary offers us a story that needs to be told, it does so in very non-Joffrey ways.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bernie
    A surprisingly shapeless true-crime farce which never creates a convincing context for the odd relationship between a pious East Texas mortician and his sugar mama.
  74. The Five-Year Engagement
    The film proves that neither gross-out gags nor pseudo-sophisticated Woody Allenisms are necessary to make a smart, funny comedy.
  75. Payback
    This documentary on the many forms of human debt, though often frustratingly broad, offers a path to balancing civilization's ledger with a hard-nosed brand of altruism.
  76. Citizen Gangster
    Its commentary on our fascination with law-breakers is virtually nonexistent, except to the extent that the film itself revels in the doomed romanticism of its own protagonist.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    96 Minutes
    Director Aimee Lagos seems to be at odds with her own film, like a well-meaning but controlling parent hell-bent on choosing a child's college, major, and fraternity for them.
  78. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    There's something to be said about a two-and-a-half-hour war epic that manages to make each of its countless decapitation scenes feel earned, even called for, in the moment.
  79. The Giant Mechanical Man
    It's a simple story of simple people intentionally told in simple terms, and the only issues with which it's concerned are those of pure personal connection.
  80. Safe
    Safe's primary contribution to the burgeoning Jason-Statham-kicks-everyone's-ass subgenre is setting three of its set pieces in crowded New York City venues (a subway car, a hotel dining room, and a Chinatown nightclub) where shootouts lead to believable mass-exodus pandemonium.
  81. Jean Gentil
    Filmmakers Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas have crafted a beautiful tale of alienation, solitude, and existential anxiety.
  82. Elles
    The film is ultimately draining because of the way it handles Anne, stranding a potentially dynamic character in two dueling scenarios, both of which are drab and unsurprising.
  83. The Day He Arrives
    The geometry of human relationships is the main theme of Hong Sang-soo's The Day He Arrives.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    My Way
    Many films are saved in the editing room, but how many are ruined there?
  85. Marley
    The bloat and heft of Marley's narrative scope leaves the viewer awash in a sea of historical "facts" with very little sense of the human experience behind the curtain of celebrity.
  86. Going Down in LA-LA Land
    Director Casper Andreas does a good job conserving a simultaneous sense of disgust and attraction for the way big-city dreams end up stripping off wannabes from everything but their bodies.
  87. Inside Hana's Suitcase
    A film relating a story of the Holocaust is destined to provoke a number of adjectives, but "cloying" shouldn't be one of them.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Snow on Tha Bluff
    Questions of authenticity aside, Damon Russell evinces a shrewd understanding of how to juxtapose the handheld camera's finite sightline with the bursts of chaos that suddenly invade it.
  89. The Lucky One
    At this point, Sparksian romances unfold via their own preordained formula, and measures of their merits largely hinge on how well each can bend the cookie-cutter.
  90. To the Arctic
    Though the film is light on anthropomorphization, its aesthetic is nothing if not infantile.
  91. Whores' Glory
    While Michael Glawogger does make overtures in the wrong directions, he usually seems to know where to steer his material.
  92. Fightville
    Fightville's most worthwhile material tends to lie in the space between what its subjects say and what we know to be true.
  93. Chimpanzee
    The astonishing footage of apes in their natural environment is made perfectly accessible and then nearly undone by a narration track that plays to the audience's basest desires for gag-inducing cuteness.
  94. Think Like a Man
    Unfortunately, like so many women have prophesized regarding the weaker gender's lack of commitment, there's just not enough follow through.
  95. The Moth Diaries
    This is one vampire film whose sexless, generic ending betrays a promise of revisionist complexity.
  96. Goodbye First Love
    A poignant sense of time's unyielding forward progress and a mood of deep adolescent sorrow aren't enough to overshadow the insufferable blankness of Goodbye First Love's navel-gazing protagonists.
  97. Downtown Express
    The movie's final act tries, somewhat admirably, to consolidate the plot's myriad interpersonal conflicts.
  98. Darling Companion
    A lost-dog drama so insufferable it makes one wish its human characters would also run off and never return.
  99. The Three Stooges
    After what seems like an eternity of inanity and incompetence in the realm of Cats & Dogs and Squeakquels, the Farrelly brothers' direction is downright classical.
  100. Oki's Movie
    Hong Sang-soo once again corroborates auteurist theory at the same time that he reveals the potential shortcomings of its practice.
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