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. The Fairy
    Re-employing the tools of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, this pleasant fable reclaims artful slapstick with a bliss that's hard to deny.
  2. Jess and Moss
    A strange and intoxicating indie constructed as a series of vignettes that capture two children grappling with the overlap of trauma and nostalgia.
  3. Neon Flesh
    With no slick moves and no brains backing its skuzzy narrative, Neon Flesh is just a proudly tacky film about unconscionably tawdry people.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    To question where things went wrong feels somehow strange, as the project seems to have been ill-conceived from the very start.
  5. The Forgiveness of Blood
    The film wisely avoids giving its material a large-scale epic quality it can't sustain, but it also results in a project that lacks the complexity to register as more than a handsome little sketch.
  6. Cirkus Columbia
    Its lightheartedness and overtly traditional narrative structure become a smart strategy for crafting what is ultimately a very nuanced political critique of capital.
  7. On the Ice
    The moral dilemmas in On the Ice ultimately fail to resonate, Qalli's concluding plea for his flawed humanity coming off as strangely hollow.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bullhead
    What Bullhead ultimately lacks isn't balls but insight and empathy.
  9. The Lady
    The goings-on can rarely be called truly compelling, even if they're almost always generally pleasant.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Forgotten Space
    If you think of Wall Street as capitalism's symbolic headquarters, filmmakers Allan Sekula and Noël Burch more or less show us in The Forgotten Space how the sea is capitalism's global trading floor writ large.
  11. Putin's Kiss
    Fails to dig too deep into the politics or inner workings of the new right-wing youth movement it profiles, remaining content with simplistic conclusions about pro-Putin thuggery.
  12. 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.
  13. The Secret World of Arrietty
    Offers exactly what its title promises, unveiling this secret milieu through thoroughly meticulous animation.
  14. This Means War
    This Means War seems so concerned with being the best product, it doesn't even know how to be good trash.
  15. 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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Hell and Back Again
    Unlike most war documentaries, which tend to only skim the surface of its gun-toting subjects' lives, photojournalist Danfung Dennis's Hell and Back Again isn't content to merely capture warriors in combat.
  17. Bombay Beach
    Rather than bringing out the symbolic inner lives of the characters, these sequences seem like the intrusion of an aggressive authorial personality on a film whose subject-as well as the fact of Har'el's outsider status-demands that the filmmaker simply sit back and observe.
  18. 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.
  19. The Swell Season
    Ultimately, though, they never cohere into something more than a moderately engaging for-fans-only tour diary.
  20. Buried Prayers
    Steven Meyer's documentary treads a middle ground between illumination and cheap waterworks.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 11, 2012
  21. Laredoans Speak: Voices on Immigration
    Laredoans Speak is bad in a special kind of way that inspires the obviously piteous description of "well-intentioned."
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 11, 2012
  22. A Warrior's Heart
    A Warrior's Heart is so inept at developing itself as a film that it hands in all of its devices to the soundtrack itself and becomes a music video.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 11, 2012
  23. Grandma, a Thousand Times
    Director Mahmoud Kaabour is Fatima's grandson, and she instantly seizes on--lightly, in her way--the guilt and panic that's inspired him to make this film.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 11, 2012
  24. Chronicle
    Offers up little more than a tired morality play about the dangers of power, rehashing stale insights about the narcissism of the documentary impulse.
  25. Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    Oh, the things that money can buy.
  26. Bonsai People: The Vision of Muhammad Yunus
    In the end, it feels unavoidably dull, as there isn't much thematic ambiguity to be found in the assertion that humans deserve life that's defined by more than indentured servitude.
  27. Safe House
    It'd be unwise to dismiss Safe House as merely a clone of Tony Scott's manically inclined vision.
  28. The Vow
    Very fortunately, there's an alternate universe swirling in the eye of The Vow's synthetic storm, a place occupied only by Tatum and McAdams, where the link between them cuts down the filmmakers' bad instincts.
  29. 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.
  30. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    Prizes computer-generated wizardry above logical plotting or thoughtful character development, a misguided set of priorities exacerbated by the fact that said digital effects prove so chintzy.
  31. 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.
  32. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    The film ends on a note of courage, and a call-to-action that we "remember," naturally, but we can't completely buy it: What Freidrichs has accomplished is a portrait of unknowability.
  33. Windfall
    Whatever the legitimate arguments Windfall makes against the industry it targets, Meredith's feuding becomes just as inaccessible as the windmills that incite it.
  34. In Darkness
    It's the rare film that should not introduce new story elements or characters past its first act. In Darkness, a garbage movie applying for unlimited credit on the most meager collateral, is that film.
  35. Undefeated
    What sets Undefeated apart from the usual underdog sports story is how the filmmakers emphasize the importance of mentorship as something separate from on-the-field interactions between coach and player.
  36. Return
    As director Liza Johnson understands, simply being over there changes someone, no matter if anything unusually traumatic happened to the person.
  37. The Miners' Hymns
    A study of the this former mining region in both its de-industralized present and its past state as an active coalfield, The Miners' Hymns arranges its two parts as a set of binary oppositions.
  38. Chico & Rita
    A shallow romanticization of Batista-era Cuba -- when the nation was a tropical paradise for the delectation of American jetsetters -- and what the revolution left in its wake.
  39. The Turin Horse
    Béla Tarr is the cinema's greatest crafter of total environments and in The Turin Horse, working in his most restricted physical setting since 1984's Almanac of Fall, he (along with co-director Ágnes Hranitzky) dials up one of his most vividly immersive milieus.
  40. Perfect Sense
    Visually glassy and smooth, Perfect Sense values the dynamic mood of each scene without being overly stylized.
  41. Big Miracle
    Any goodwill it boasts is terminally suppressed, buried beneath a layer of bullshit as thick as blubber.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Woman in Black
    In the end, The Woman in Black displays a higher regard for the material makeup of gruesome-looking Victorian dolls than it does for the psychological turmoil of its characters, making one wish that some of the money it budgeted for cranes and fog machines had been offered to a script doctor.
  43. Splinters
    Adam Pesce never condescends to any of his subjects, but good intentions alone don't make for a captivating movie.
  44. Pretty Poison (1968)
    The movie's big joke is that Sue Ann turns out to be the potent, sociopathic one; for once, Perkins is out-psychoed by an honor-roll student who worries she'll be late for hygiene class.
    • 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.
  46. 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.
  47. The Innkeepers
    Winding up the tension to an almost stubborn degree, Ti West forestalls the inevitable disappointment of its release, a blow that's further softened by how immaculately the whole movie is shot.
  48. One for the Money
    One for the Money is like The Bounty Hunter by Andy Tennant, if you dipped it in self-tanner and strapped some Four Loko on it.
  49. Come Back, Africa (1959)
    A solid, affecting artifact of the cruelty of late 1950s South Africa, in which music often makes despair and long-suppressed anger bearable.
  50. Man on a Ledge
    The script is a hot mess of the highest order, taking some of the stalest chestnuts in the long, venerated legacy of the framed-cop-trying-to-clear-his-name genre and somehow f---ing it up, in scene after scene after scene.
  51. 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.
  52. After Fall, Winter
    Taking the pedestrian and decidedly unsexy American male to Paris so he can become a sexual human being attuned to life's small pleasures is a tired device that perhaps only Woody Allen could possibly resurrect from the stinky pile of cinematic clichés.
  53. How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
    Lionizing a world-class architect without tipping into hagiography, this documentary performs a graceful cinematic dance around his works.
  54. The Grey
    There's little in Joe Carnahan's previous films, marked by their frenetic, fanboy-friendly overindulgences, to predict the cold blast of The Grey, an old-fashioned, neatly arrayed survival story that almost reads like a reaction to the excesses of his past work.
  55. Declaration of War
    The surest sign that a filmmaker recognizes the insularity of his or her project is the presence of perfunctory attempts to hint at a wider political context.
  56. Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston
    The tension between the amateurish interviewer and the star interviewees gives the documentary a layer of authenticity that its otherwise formulaic structure and storytelling fail to find.
  57. Underworld: Awakening
    The only thing that manages to outpace Underworld: Awakening's ineptitude is its utter soullessness.
  58. Red Tails
    Where Spielberg has made WWII a venue for his sanctimonious side, a platform to convince viewers that war is indeed hell, Lucas is still in a state of pre-adolescent fascination with the conflict.
  59. Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    A bubbly 90-year-old mascot from the golden days of the American musical, this doc's subject is certainly larger than the conventional testimonial treatment she's given.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos
    Manages to be an entertaining and faithful expansion on the original material while being inconsequential to it.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Scalene
    More concerned with the novelty of its three-act, "three-perspective" structure than with how that structure actually functions (hint: poorly), Scalene epitomizes the pitfalls of the Memento-copping trend, its strained conceptual ingenuity an exercise in aid of nothing.
  62. 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.
  63. Grey Matter
    Director Kivu Ruhorahoza dares to demolish fiction's inherent distance from what might be considered "reality."
  64. The Front Line
    Both brutal and sentimental, this Oscar-submitted Korean war drama offers up rusty tropes as telling ironies.
  65. 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.
  66. Haywire
    If anything, Haywire is most closely linked to last year's "Contagion," a kindred effort in style, theme, and value-marring detachment.
  67. Don't Go in the Woods
    Coming across as a promotional showcase for a gaggle of young up-and-coming singer-actors, Don't Go in the Woods tethers together numerous indie-rock musical numbers with a backwoods-horror-film framework that's the definition of an afterthought.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sing Your Song
    It's likely, then, that the film was directed by Susanne Rostock the same way Belfonte's new memoir, My Song, was written with Vanity Fair's Michael Shnayerson: to articulate, polish, and edit what the vociferous and at times alarmingly honest Belfonte wants to tell us without injuring his credibility outside of the left any further.
  69. Toll Booth
    Both as a character study and modern-day parable, Toll Booth sneaks up on you with its subtle use of repeating motifs and audible cues.
  70. Joyful Noise
    Joyful Noise certainly has its demographics covered.
  71. Contraband
    Heist, swindle, and other like-minded genre films thrive or flounder on the mechanics of their story's dangerously elaborate scheme, a fact ably proven by Contraband, a tale of high-seas smuggling without a clever thought in its leaden, derivative head.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Domain
    The ultimate drama of Domain becomes how long he can be a witness to her self-destruction.
  74. Robinson in Ruins
    Robinson's very name ties him to explorers like Crusoe and Walden, but he is also something like JLG's whispering leftist prankster who butted into 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her to intermittently spout rhetoric over images of freeways and construction sites.
  75. Loosies
    Loosies never establishes a consistent tone; it feels made up as it went along, and not in the electrifyingly free-wheeling fashion of, say, a Godard or Altman film.
  76. 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.
  77. Albatross
    Albatross is simply a compendium of bad ideas.
  78. The Devil Inside
    The film's contradictory and nullifying dilemma of wanting to be both scripted and vérité at once, a plight that affects so much contemporary TV, is temporarily quelled in heated scenes of curse-laden levitation and Linda Blair contortion, which dutifully deliver the scares.
  79. 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.
  80. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same
    Madeleine Olnek has a limited repertoire of jokes, so it's fortunate that the film, at 76 minutes, is fairly amusing, even if it's never quite laugh-out-loud funny.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    It's About You
    While there aren't many films shot on Super 8 anymore, It's About You, a documentary that isn't really about John Mellencamp's 2009 No Better Than This tour, doesn't make the case that moviegoing is missing anything because of that.
  82. The Hunter
    In The Hunter, writer-director Rafi Pitts manages an atmosphere of choked, ambiguous dread, somehow naturalistic and hallucinatory at once, that recalls nothing less than Godard's Alphaville.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Norwegian Wood
    Even if this Haruki Murakami adaptation amounts to a gorgeous but lethargic emo ballad, there's no denying the stately lyricism of its melancholy.
  84. Beneath the Darkness
    Overly expository dialogue abounds throughout Martin Guigui's movie, as do questionable filmmaking choices and plenty of stupidly unconvincing actions taken on the part of the film's characters.
  85. 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.
  86. A Separation
    Barriers both transparent and persistently present encase the characters of A Separation, constricting them in ways social, cultural, religious, familial, and emotional.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    The Darkest Hour
    In a year-end season stacked deep with worthwhile films, what possible incentive could there be for submitting to The Darkest Hour's utter pointlessness?
  88. Angels Crest
    Angels Crest opens with the laughter of children at play, but that's the only hint of happiness you'll find in this unflinchingly manipulative and pointless morality play.
  89. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    This film buries its soul beneath its own pretentious rubble, and the youthful, labyrinthine mind in which it places viewers feels less like an offbeat vehicle for healing than it does a kaleidoscopic prison.
  90. El Sicario: Room 164
    A lot of evil is laid on the table in El Sicario, and the film makes a big, if exquisitely subtle show, of theorizing that there's no way to explain how it got there.
  91. War Horse
    What ultimately hobbles War Horse is a two-pronged attack, with Spielberg's soft-sell producing an unfortunately dramatic flatness in almost every scene, while an 11th-hour scramble for picture-book catharsis doesn't seem to work either.
  92. Miss Minoes
    After 30 long minutes, I stopped trying to make allowances for its varying ineptitudes, and Carice van Houten's work as the spunky human cat was the only reason I held out that long.
  93. Albert Nobbs
    Perhaps thrown by the challenge of having to direct women as men and not just as themselves, director Rodrigo Garcia turns in what may be his poorest effort to date, opting for a nearly airless tone, presenting a look that's sadly un-cinematic, and presiding over a collection of performers that seem to be operating on very different planes, and with accents of varying thicknesses.
  94. The Flowers of War
    This film has too many weak, unconnected strands (what's the subplot about the narrator's father doing here anyway?), too much overtly expositional dialogue, and too unfocused a narrative to really cohere. And then there's that whole matter of expendable whores.
  95. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    When does intensity and commitment supersede historical understanding?
  96. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked
    It's that rare thing, a movie that clocks in under 90 minutes, but feels like an endurance test in every moment, at every plot concern, and every musical number.
  97. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    Wither the rollicking verve and whip-crack humor in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows?
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    The Mission: Impossible franchise seems almost crudely mercenary in its formula for success.
  99. Sleepless Nights Stories
    A freeform, New York-based variation on the Arabian Nights tales by Jonas Mekas is both a pan-narrative and a disarming portrait of its sweetly curious maker.
  100. The Pill
    At the very least, The Pill could have been a pleasant exercise in screenwriting sharpness if Fred and Mindy's situation had been confined and (un-)resolved within the confines of its very promising first scene.
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