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. Last Will and Embezzlement
    The doc is so obnoxiously simplistic that you find yourself strangely unsympathetic to its objectively inarguable aim to promote greater standards of elder care.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    A Simple Life
    A Simple Life may have one of the most accurate titles in all of cinema, as the film has a bracingly casual sense of day-to-day working-class life that recalls the films of Jean Renoir or, more recently, Olivier Assayas.
  3. Blue Like Jazz
    Blue Like Jazz charts a typical existential coming-of-age tale, yet remains atypical by being hip while also treating religion fairly.
  4. Deadline
    By the end of it, you'll be crying uncle--or wish you were watching The Help instead. At least that was a more artful lie.
  5. Here
    While everything here is mostly unspoken, and the film itself hints at a broader set of concerns than simply two lost souls meeting on foreign ground, Here too often feels like a jumble of ideas that don't quite cohere.
  6. How to Grow a Band
    The movie is unsurprisingly devoted to peddling up-and-comer Chris Thiele as something daring, something new.
  7. Lockout
    Luc Besson's producing career has been so geared toward lean, tough genre films that it's somewhat apt that he'd ape--or, if we're being kind, pay homage to--John Carpenter's preeminent sci-fi actioner Escape from New York with his latest, Lockout.
  8. Post Mortem
    Pablo Larraín employs ultra-widescreen cinematography for constricting close-ups and inhospitably alienating compositions that generate a nasty chill, the director keeping the army's brutality off screen to amplify a sense of oppressive malevolence.
  9. Monsieur Lazhar
    There's great potential for the kind of issues that are taken on, but nothing is resolved, and the biggest questions, of guilt and shame, the gulf of understanding between the first world and the third, remain unengaged.
  10. 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.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Detention
    High school students (the jocks, the brains, the princesses, the criminals, the basket cases), long the favored prey of serial killers, somehow manage to fight back from the brink yet again in Detention, a bright, witty new genre mash-up.
  12. The Cabin in the Woods
    The Cabin in the Woods, regardless of its many genealogical links to prior Whedon creations, is an ideal Hollywood film in the Age of Pixar: spectacle for spectacle's sake, but infiltrated by intelligent commentary and an atmosphere of generosity and inclusion.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    MIS Human Secret Weapon
    The documentary necessitates a degree of respect and sensitivity that makes it difficult to stress how bad it is.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Surviving Progress
    By turning the idea of progress on its head, the nimble Surviving Progress exquisitely presents to us the possibility that humankind's achievements may cause its downfall.
  15. American Reunion
    Funnier than its prior two predecessors, if gratingly awash in demographic-pandering late-'90s alt-rock hits ("Closing Time," "Freshman"), American Reunion flounders with its earnest melodrama.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Damsels in Distress
    The clash of styles in Damsels in Distress is bewildering and then disarming.
  17. Player Hating: A Love Story
    One of the more intimate and revealing looks at American projects ever made; it's assured and empathetic without indulging in fashionable white guilt.
  18. We Have a Pope
    Nanni Moretti's latest is a mixed bag that too often settles for easy, superficial laughs.
  19. Artificial Paradises
    The juxtaposition between the gorgeous natural beauty of a remote beach with the stubborn human need to escape somewhere, no matter what cost, is what really enthralls in the film.
  20. The Hunter
    The film refuses to focus on its core story, hedging its bets with forays into family drama, environmental thriller, and corporate intrigue.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. We the Party
    While We the Party can be insensitive, or blind, to the misogyny and homophobia of the general culture (the token gay teen is a finger-snapping, head-bobbing fashionista), it takes the issues of race and class quite seriously.
  24. Keyhole
    A night of reckoning by a hoodlum in his haunted former home is a more sober and remote Freudian farrago than one expects from Guy Maddin.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Love in the Buff
    The film has an exhilarating tossed-off quality that characterized many of the most entertaining works of the French New Wave.
  26. Mirror Mirror
    For all its pomp and fabulosity, Mirror Mirror is actually Tarsem Singh's most minimalistic effort, a dialed-down game board of elaborate pieces that's akin to the human chess set captained by Julia Robert's evil Queen Clementianna.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Womb
    Too abstract to suggest a coherent moral lesson, but too remote to foster a satisfying emotional connection, Womb feels barren, an attempt to do too much that ultimately does very little.
  28. Wrath of the Titans
    Made possible by the half a billion dollars Clash of the Titans garnered worldwide, Wrath of the Titans sputters and coughs on the fumes of its own inevitability.
  29. Scenes of a Crime
    A true-crime documentary of invigorating analytical clarity and evenhandedness.
  30. The Beat Hotel
    Following the faux-opiate flecked suit of docs like One Fast Move or I'm Gone, The Beat Hotel can't quite rise above its obvious desire to appeal to the former demographic in spite of their apparently limited patience for historical exegesis.
  31. Fear and Desire
    For all its heavy-handed gloom and stylistic unevenness, Fear and Desire has a certain fierceness that's hard to shake.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bully
    Leaves us moved by poignant scenes of victims' shattered lives, but, for reasons unclear, keeps the bullies themselves largely out of our reach.
  33. Four Lovers
    This handsome mate-swapping drama never moves beyond the erotic to become incisive about the barriers built into sexual experimentation for committed couples.
  34. Turn Me On, Dammit!
    Nothing here is wrong, but beyond pointing out that sexually charged teenage girls are likely to be misunderstood in an oppressive small town, there's nothing that's especially insightful here either.
  35. Goon
    A second-rate dude comedy in which an untalented knucklehead becomes a star through brute violence.
  36. The Island President
    The film successfully positions its point of view with the developing countries that suffer the most immediate consequences of global warming rather than the developed countries most responsible for climate change and from whose citizenry Jon Shenk's prospective audience is likely to be drawn.
  37. Come on Eileen
    Rarely leaves the realm of the obvious and the literal.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Trouble with Bliss
    Populated with unlikely occurrences and oddball characters, it plays out, to put it most complimentary, like a dull, slower moving "After Hours."
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    An Encounter with Simone Weil
    Ultimately, the film doesn't feel like it ever left Julia Haslett's head, leaving us a little cold.
  40. The Hunger Games
    The Hunger Games is more notable for the holes it doesn't fall into than the great heights it reaches.
  41. Fake It So Real
    Fake It So Real has been made with considerable more polish than other do-it-yourself documentaries such as "Total Badass," but the sensibility is similar.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Losing Control
    The film, in its defense, is far too vacuous to be accused of having any kind of agenda--it just happens to get its politics wrong along with everything else.
  43. All In: The Poker Movie
    The film has a shambling charm that actively disputes an unspoken notion that a documentary must be well-structured in order to effectively land its points.
  44. The Deep Blue Sea
    Its director's romantic sensibilities wed to Terrence Rattigan's 60-year-old play, this period drama is buoyed by Rachel Weisz's poignant embodiment of a bourgeois wife seeking erotic autonomy.
  45. Musical Chairs
    The schmaltzy and benign tale of a ballroom dancer who accepts and transcends her unexpected disability through the power of art and love.
  46. Brake
    Until its pair of ludicrous twist endings, which complicates its message and logistics in ways that make little sense, Gabe Torres's Brake plays like a more simplistic version of Buried tailored specifically to a hawkish right-wing crowd.
  47. 4:44 Last Day on Earth
    It's only natural that Abel Ferrara's vision of the end of the world should take corporeal form as a quasi-autobiographical hangout movie.
  48. The Raid: Redemption
    This mostly no-nonsense, floor-by-floor ass-kicking panorama is admirably humble.
  49. The Wise Kids
    Hovering over the narrative is the fear of the domino effect that change can enact, the dread that one person's "queerness" may perhaps expose everyone else's.
  50. Jeff Who Lives at Home
    For the most part, this is a boys-will-be-boys movie that excuses everything its pair of protags do in the name of some sort of cosmic order.
  51. Casa de mi Padre
    You know a film isn't going to be considered high art when the guy to your left at the press screening is a reporter from Extra and the guy to your right lets out a loud "That's awesome, man" after each scene.
  52. 21 Jump Street
    Like many almost-great comedies, 21 Jump Street is frontloaded with the best go-for-broke gags and lines.
  53. Saviors in the Night
    It's all fairly by the numbers, but in Boeken's presentation, the film isn't without its moments of narrative power.
  54. Delicacy
    Now that Zooey Deschanel has taken a detour into TV land, is Audrey Tautou the most insufferable pixy presence in cinema today?
  55. Natural Selection
    The film works because what it documents is less a transformation and more a return to a former, more natural state for its troubled protagonist.
  56. Seeking Justice
    The film's tossed-off look and clunky editorial construction are still secondary to the sheer silliness of its story.
  57. 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.
  58. Free Men
    For much of its runtime, the film is simply there, decent for the most part, but at no point immersive.
  59. 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.
  60. Detachment
    Endng in risible bathos, Tony Kaye's urban high school melodrama is all about the cute teacher's crises and the girls who love him.
  61. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    The end results are mixed but nevertheless scintillating and provocative enough to be worth taking seriously.
  62. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    The ill use made of the stars' charms in this initially strained, then egregiously dopey mushfest can likely be credited to market-tested notions of modern popular romance.
  63. Dissolution
    The camera is at its most effective when it seems dumbfounded at what it's indexing.
  64. Convento
    Convento is an unusual experimental film that conjures the free-floating aura of a dream, only without the stylized, hyper-symbolic imagery that we generally associate with films attempting to convey dream states.
  65. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye tries so hard to keep up with the quirkiness and theatricality of its subjects that it ends up canceling them out.
  66. John Carter
    As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.
  67. Good for Nothing
    The title is apropos, but it's also an understatement.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Decoy Bride
    The film recognizes how resolutely derivative it is, and it deigns to relish rather than efface that quality. The result is a trifle, but a fairly amusing one.
  69. Friends with Kids
    With the foul-mouthed dramedy Friends with Kids, writer/producer/director/star Jennifer Westfeldt is juggling so much, it's a wonder there aren't more jokes about balls.
  70. Attenberg
    A boldly conceived assemblage of diverse and seemingly random fictional materials, Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg is concerned with nothing less than those hardy perennials: sex, death, and modernity. And coming of age a little too late.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Shakespeare High
    These SoCal kids are passionate about their craft and it shows in their renditions of the famous bard's work.
  72. Playback
    Writer-director Michael A. Nickles may momentarily shout out to Peeping Tom via a shot of its DVD, but Playback is merely a voyeurism-tinged horror film of dismal direct-to-video quality.
  73. Sound of Noise
    The film is ultimately winning because of its devilish anarchic streak, aiming its arrows at the stuffiness of the traditional musical establishment.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Kid with a Bike
    If The Kid with a Bike is a fairy tale, it's the unsentimental kind that locates the dark enchantment in characters discovering themselves during their most despairing moments. Still, it's certainly the Dardennes' fleetest, warmest film to date.
  75. Footnote
    Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a sour, rather unpleasant affair that hinges on acts of Jews behaving badly.
  76. Jiro Dreams of Sushi
    Director David Gelb details, among other things, the painstaking process that goes into creating mouthwatering pieces of sushi.
  77. Silent House
    Silent House dies a sudden and egregious death when the amateur players in Olsen's company, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens, as her character Sarah's father and uncle, respectively, open their traps.
  78. Heist: Who Stole the American Dream?
    The film provides a crisp, succinct answer to a question that nags most Americans: What the hell happened?
    • tbd Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Patriocracy
    To presume that even an explicitly neutral political position lacks its own subjective ideological bias is nothing more than a delusion, and not a particularly useful one.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Where Are You Taking Me?
    The documentary revels in the simple joys of finding something that captures the eye and paying attention to it.
  81. Project X
    Awesomeness seems to be the chief quality prized by both the film and its characters; all other considerations--like safety, property damage, and especially good taste--are secondary.
  82. The Woods
    It's all very "found footage," Impolex by way of Discovery's The Colony, only with a lot more in the way of familiar consumer products.
  83. Last Days Here
    Gambling on the unlikely redemption of a doom metal fuck-up, this potential rock-doc tragedy reveals a bromance of idol and idolator.
  84. Boy
    Less concerned with rendering the specifics of its setting (a small Maori town on the New Zealand coast) than in calling on bouts of whimsy and superficial cultural signifiers to approximate the headspace of its central characters.
  85. Dr. Seuss' The Lorax
    The Lorax is a modest gem, failing to significantly enhance its source material's ideas but still delivering a zany, rollicking, multi-character version of Seuss's environmental cautionary tale.
  86. The Salt of Life
    A dry dream of postmenopausal-male sexual lethargy, this comedy's least musty ideas are among its worst.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Let the Bullets Fly
    Let the Bullets Fly is an intentionally overheated and very funny comedy about how the best-laid plans tend to fall apart in spectacular fashion.
  88. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    Intimacy doesn't completely give rise to insight in this loving, if largely for-fans-only, posthumous portrait of Memphis-bred punk rocker Jay Reatard.
    • 90 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    This Is Not a Film
    In its way, this effort is both a forceful assertion of the most stifling brand of auteurism and a radical reconfiguration of its political potential.
  90. Being Flynn
    If Robert De Niro knew what was good for him, he'd certainly distance himself from this director and find a new path.
  91. The Snowtown Murders
    Whatever one ends up thinking about The Snowtown Murders, it's difficult to deny that it's a deeply impressive work.
  92. Black Butterflies
    A reasonably sensitive and occasionally insightful look into the mind and psyche of an impassioned and deeply troubled artist.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Assault
    The Assault raises many more questions than it answers, and its overall objective is puzzling and remains shrouded in political agenda.
  94. Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie
    In the race to achieve unadulterated fourth-wall breakage, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie is the new pack leader.
  95. Good Deeds
    Simultaneously both archetypal Tyler Perry and another step in the direction of nuance and thoughtfulness for the filmmaker.
  96. Gone
    Nearly a year has passed since the release of Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood, and Amanda Seyfried is still crying wolf.
  97. Wanderlust
    Wagging a limp dick at a host of up-to-the-minute issues, Wanderlust, manages to feel current, and relatively funny, without ever becoming particularly pointed, resulting in a floppy but satisfactory middlebrow comedy.
  98. Act of Valor
    A movie whose cinematic ineptitude is matched only by its ideological rottenness, Act of Valor features a cast of real-life active-duty Navy SEALS in order to grant the project's us-versus-them geopolitical worldview a sham moral authority.
  99. How to Start a Revolution
    Much of this content, which involves complex social movements in Burma, Iran, and elsewhere, is necessarily abridged, but it's often done so to the point of incoherence, making Gene Sharp's connection to what we're seeing seem contrived.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Tomorrow, When the War Began
    It's one thing to defer to archetypes, but Tomorrow is so full of stock types and clichés it makes "The Breakfast Club" look like "Nashville."
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