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 6.5 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. Deep End (1970)
    Deep End is as soaked in pheromones and nervous electricity as Mike, but he's as much a product of the world of desire that surrounds him as one of its participants, and when the end finally comes, there's only a reprise of earlier dream imagery to suggest that there was anything other than a spasmodic, hormonal twitch involved in bringing about its conclusion.
  2. Cook County
    Unlike AMC's Breaking Bad, meth here doesn't reflect current, perilous economic realties; rather, it's just a low-rent drug used by degenerates whose lives say nothing about anything.
  3. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
    The difference between Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and David Fincher's own is not, as some might have hoped, the difference between night and day, but between curdled milk and a warmed-over holiday second.
  4. The Iron Lady
    The wonder and terror of Meryl Streep's performance in The Iron Lady is her formidable ability to nail the disheartening talents of not just Margaret Thatcher, but so many conservative politicians like her, who have a tremendous knack for changing minds and beckoning cheers while underlining their own rigid ignorance.
  5. Addiction Incorporated
    The most dramatic material, such as Victor DeNoble's much-applauded congressional testimony, more or less traffics common knowledge without bothering to provide fresh emotional context.
  6. W.E.
    W.E.'s is a kind of dynamic pleasure that allows for non-shameful identification with the feminine and a fantasy of becoming what we see.
  7. We Bought a Zoo
    Far more concerned with pratfalling animal shenanigans and unearned uplift than crafting a single complex or amusing moment, it's a film caged in by formulaic plotting and plentiful pap.
  8. Pariah
    It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story.
  9. Seducing Charlie Barker
    Charlie is a stereotype who doesn't know it--basically your typical broke dude in a near midlife crisis who thinks he's the first to have his dull problems.
  10. Young Adult
    Pairing again after the mad success of "Juno," Cody and Reitman prove a canny team when it comes to capturing frank yet polished modernity, getting at truths of the here and now even if a certain excess of gloss denies them the full Americana humanism of someone like Alexander Payne.
  11. Daguerreotypes (1976)
    Like many of Agnès Varda's similarly themed explorations, the results are more than they initially seem, casual anthropology with a strongly humanist bent, resulting in a film that's fueled more by compassion than curiosity.
  12. The Sitter
    An ugly rendering of an infantile script that constantly exploits stereotypes for cheap guffaws, and employs the hollow trend of hoping ultra-specific, zeitgeisty lingo will distract from inert, derivative storytelling.
  13. Knuckle
    A documentary of bareknuckle fights among feuding Irish Traveller clans can't give the participants' self-perpetuating, dead-end rivalry the scope of tragedy.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Red Hook Black
    That Red Hook Black, a strained film about two friends struggling with jobs and family in a bleak, thickly spread economic milieu, is adapted from a play is painfully obvious; that it's never able to transcend its staginess makes it unbearable.
    • 22 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    New Year's Eve
    The lesson to learn from watching Garry Marshall's New Year's Eve, a predictably insufferable, self-congratulatory cash cow designed to be ingested and then happily discharged without a second thought by gullible moviegoers who just don't know any better, is that we live in a time without economic dignity, a time in which we must be ready to do just about anything for a paycheck.
  16. My Piece of the Pie
    Cédric Klapisch settles for a mixture of bland obviousness and crudely manufactured drama.
  17. London River
    Rachid Bouchareb casts his account of the horrifying aftermath of tragedy on an intimate scale, allowing the halting words and frightened faces of his two leads to tell us as much as we need to know about the uncertainties of those faced with tracking down their lost loved ones.
  18. I Melt with You
    The only thing more narcissistically indulgent than the film's repugnant protagonists is Mark Pellington's iPod-scored, visually flashy, thoroughly hollow directorial celebration of them.
  19. The Adventures of Tintin
    Fast on its feet, using 3D and motion-capture animation to kick its comedy-adventure into a superhuman gear, Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin is a wittily kineticized adaptation of the internationally loved comic books.
  20. We Need to Talk About Kevin
    The purpose of Lynne Ramsay's hodgepodge approach is to distract us from the flimsiness of a story that suggests a snide art-house take on "The Omen."
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Lads & Jockeys
    Half-formed expressions of disappointment, hope, struggle, confusion, and boyish playfulness on faces otherwise marked by youth's inexperience, and a self-consciousness brought on by the curiosity of being filmed, constitute the most memorable moments of Lads & Jockeys, a documentary on 14-year-old aspiring jockeys in France.
  22. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
    Order may be restored to the Circus, the "bad" elements weeded out, but in the jaundiced world the film has spent the last two hours so effectively delineating, the barriers between good and evil have been shown to be essentially meaningless.
  23. Answers to Nothing
    Speculation is futile, as plausible, worthwhile answers are the last things Answers to Nothing is prepared to give. Not that you really cared anyway.
  24. Under Control
    Volker Sattel takes us on a blank-eyed tour of the country's biggest plants (plus a few from Austria), exposing both the tenuous balance of precision and innovation that has provided 20th-century Western society with its most controversial power source.
  25. The Big Fix
    The Tickells' style is a predictable grab bag of interviews with outraged experts and journalists, TV news footage, and scenes in which the filmmakers (and, during one trip, fellow activists Peter Fonda and Amy Smart) make faux-daring journeys into the fray to bring back supposed realities that corporate America seeks to hide.
  26. The First Rasta
    While The First Rasta never goes beyond the surfaces of conventional documentary making of the most average kind, its reticence becomes whimsical every time the elderly interviewees break into song soon after reminiscing.
  27. In the Family
    An acutely felt, altogether devastating family drama as intimate and affecting as it is sprawling and untamed.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Khodorkovsky
    The director glosses over rather than digs deep into such interesting aspects as the varied opinions of the men under Khodorkovsky who've had to flee the country because of him.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sleeping Beauty
    Julia Leigh's take on the fairy tale is a study in detachment and unspoken dissatisfaction, traits that imbue the proceedings with a barely-contained sexual energy lurking beneath a thin veneer of calm.
  30. Outrage
    It's a brilliant reversal that, while seemingly far less inspired than most of the director's efforts, leaves us with a film that's just as iconoclastic.
  31. Coriolanus
    Though his film's feel is pure Iraq and Afghanistan, Fiennes doesn't push those parallels unduly, and his central performances prove clear, nuanced, and incisive.
  32. Crazy Wisdom: The Life & Times of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche
    Part of the issue here may be the nature of the talking heads themselves, most of whom are culled from Trungpa's inner circle and lack the objectivity needed to properly judge his philosophy or make it accessible.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Brighter Summer Day (1991)
    It's in his generous, objective use of long shots and spare but startling close-ups that we see once again the influence of Robert Altman in Yang's aesthetic and the struggle of the Taiwanese people to accept their history. In essence, Yang uses his aesthetic to bring into the light that which is dark.
  34. Romantics Anonymous
    A typically anodyne rom-com given a certain poignant piquancy by the paralyzing shyness of its romantic leads.
  35. Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987)
    The film uses a country-mouse-and-city-mouse template to explore morality, aesthetic sense, urban and rural savvy, and a host of other concerns.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    House of Pleasures
    A brief history of time and space, according to Bertrand Bonello.
    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hugo
    Scorsese's affection for cinema is, of course, no surprise, and Hugo doesn't shy away from stumping for the cause of his Film Foundation; which isn't to say it's a vanity project, at least not any more than any film with a budget in the nine figures is.
  38. The Muppets
    The beloved gang's sweet reunion will melt nostalgic adults into laughter and tears, and maybe kids won't mind drippy new Muppet Walter so much.
  39. Rampart
    Not only does its incredibly loose aesthetic challenge the traditionally controlled and slick conventions of the cop genre, it adds a certain visceral haziness that compliments Brown's own professional and personal immorality.
  40. Arthur Christmas
    A yuletide fable that boasts Aardman Animation's peerless mix of whip-smart comedy and cheery heart.
  41. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    Intended as the cinematic equivalent of an orgasm, this tirelessly hyped insta-blockbuster is loaded with OMG developments (marriage! Sex! Baby!) and seemingly regarded by everyone to include the most epic and gratifying scenes of romantic release in modern movie history.
  42. The Greater Good
    The intersection between drug-company profiteering and lobbying, and governmental and private-sector desires to protect people from deadly diseases, is navigated too cursorily by the documentary.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Silver Tongues
    Silver Tongues is the creation of a filmmaker who's not an acute observer, but a trickster, one who values being clever for the sake of being clever.
  44. Dzi Croquettes
    What's easy to appreciate in the documentary, however, is the way it reassembles the Dzi Croquettes' trajectory without polishing off its jagged edges. It's through their brilliance and their flaws that they become muses.
  45. Happy Feet Two
    There's something about these films, something about the working-over these songs suffer--a wrongness that's intangible but inescapable, like the unseen menace of a bad dream.
  46. The Heir Apparent: Largo Winch
    Like most of the film's performances, Sisley's comes off as flat and impenetrable, the result both of a certain stoical conception of character and the dissipation of focus that arises from the movie's perceived need to encompass so much.
  47. Tomboy
    Tomboy is one of those little big films whose simplicity and concision suggest the excess of meaning that language (cinematic or otherwise) could never account for.
  48. Eames: The Architect & The Painter
    Structurally lopsided, the narrative jumps directly into the success of their first molded-plywood chair, and meanders from there into the numerous short films the Eames Studio made for government agencies and IT companies.
  49. Garbo: The Spy
    Using a whirlwind of archival footage, maps, and split screens, Edmon Roch conveys Juan Pujol Garcia's reign as Europe's premiere spy in a constantly fluid fashion, aesthetically mimicking his crafty and cagey nature.
  50. The Lie
    It's hard to say which is worse: the unfunny caricatures or the indulgent soul-searching.
  51. Tyrannosaur
    The brutality of Tyrannosaur isn't so over the top as to make director Paddy Considine's sympathy for his flawed characters look like a sham. But it does frequently bring his film's seesawing exploration of blue-collar existence to the brink of collapse.
  52. The Artist
    The Artist neatly sidesteps this unsolvable dilemma by ignoring everything that's fascinating and memorable about the era, focusing instead on a patchwork of general knowledge, so eroded of inconvenient facts that it doesn't even qualify as a roman à clef.
  53. Rid of Me
    At once hopelessly amateurish and given to desperate assertions of auterist "virtuosity."
  54. Another Happy Day
    Hell is family in Another Happy Day, a portrait of one clan's reunion for a wedding that overflows with characters even more repugnant than the irony of its groan-worthy title.
  55. God's Fiddler: Jascha Heifetz
    If the film were in fact a pastry, it might look like the first effort of a blind baker, wildly uneven and inconsistent in ingredient distribution.
  56. Immortals
    Dashing across the screen in all its bloody, gilded glory, the awesome and beautiful Immortals marks an all-win scenario.
  57. Jack and Jill
    If the result is a movie that seems like a much slicker, more condensed, and speedier version of the Sandler comedies that have guaranteed his grandkids' retirement, count it as a blessing that it's over quickly. Not without pain, but quickly.
  58. Shame
    Shame articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction-in a vibrant city rendered dull and anonymous.
  59. J. Edgar
    Black's script, in the wrong hands, could have come under fire for confusing Hoover's twisted mind with his homosexuality or his problems with Mother. Eastwood doesn't seem to give a fuck, and only opts for one overt visual match, depicting as mirror images Hoover's lifeless corpse and the remains of the Lindbergh baby.
  60. Dog Sweat
    With six protagonists serving as a cross-section of Tehran's youthful population, director Hossein Keshavarz's Dog Sweat is a somber, minor-keyed debut feature about the daily manifestations of oppression in contemporary Iran.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    A Novel Romance
    For a film about writing a novel, A Novel Romance is surprisingly shallow in regard to its characters and superficial in terms of its chapter-structured façade.
  62. The Greening of Whitney Brown
    The first strike against the movie is that the awkward and diminutive Sammi Hanratty is never even slightly convincing as an enviable teenage diva, and surely not as the most popular girl in school.
  63. London Boulevard
    A movie like this lives and dies by its finer details, and London Boulevard screws up by applying the same broad brush to its entire cast, meaning every character gets the same amount of shading.
  64. The Love We Make
    The Love We Make is mostly about placing viewers in an icon's shoes as he makes a rehabilitative gesture toward a city with which he's grown considerable roots.
  65. Inni
    As a document of a live show it looks like nothing else, but Vincent Morisset's greater aspirations, attempts to define or sum up the band through the inclusion of external material, come off as muddled and oblique.
  66. Dragonslayer
    Is Josh "Skreech" Sandoval the least deserving documentary subject ever?
  67. Into the Abyss
    Underlying the occasionally harrowing, consistently mournful tone is a philosophy that, more than being explicitly anti-capital punishment, puts both family ties and the social contract at the center of people's self-worth.
  68. The Conquest
    Even as it takes pleasure in imagining the wheeling and dealing that politicos make when no one is looking, it never offers as much insight into the process by which a president is made as its premise would seem to promise.
  69. Elite Squad: The Enemy Within
    Elite Squad: The Enemy Within is pure pedagogic bliss.
  70. A Very Harold & Kumar Christmas
    Overflows with inspired craziness, doling out an all-night odyssey of sex-centric crises, death-defying conflicts, and Neal Patrick Harris-centered insanity with snowballing momentum, as bits pile on top of bits with intoxicating verve.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Cherkess
    But that hardly matters, as Cherkess is so inept it inspires appreciation of the craft that goes into even grade-B romantic melodrama such as last year's "The Other Woman."
  72. The Look
    Rampling is very much aware of the camera's every intention and possibility. Perhaps too aware, like the kind of over-educated narcissist for whom real spontaneity is too costly a risk.
  73. Killing Bono
    Rather than organically develop its characters, it charts their evolution via silly outfit changes, treating the early '80s as a costume bin for flavor-of-the-week aping gags, with the band going from Gary Numan style shirts and skinny ties to lavish glam-rock costumes.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    5 Star Day
    Danny Buday's film is not so much skeptical of astrology as confused about it.
  75. Pianomania
    Stefan Knüpfer's subtle charisma feels more suited to a beefily human New Yorker article than a documentary film.
  76. Stuck Between Stations
    Brady Kiernan's Stuck Between Stations has sweetness to it, but it's a sweetness borrowed from innumerable other films and constantly corrupted by biased politics and crass emotional digressions.
  77. Tower Heist
    Defiantly graceless, Brett Ratner deals in loudness, haplessness, obviousness, and, certainly, crudeness, reminding you of his directorial presence with such inclusions as a scolded kid who tells his disciplinarian to "suck it."
  78. The Other F Word
    Covered in tattoos and clinging to wisps of their outsider status, the men profiled here seem assured of the novelty of their dilemma, as if they were the first generation to settle into a middle-class existence after a youth spent on the fringes.
  79. The Last Rites of Joe May
    Watching Dennis Farina dominate every scene is a joy, and thankfully the actor makes the most of this opportunity.
  80. The Son of No One
    The Son of No One is driven by mood and atmosphere to the extent that the stakes-free story and interest-free characters seem almost incidental, and such is surely the movie's saving grace -- a perverse style that overshadows a severe lack of substance.
  81. Young Goethe in Love
    What unfolds is a predictably anguished story of true love thwarted by material circumstances, or in the terms dictated by the film, rationality triumphing over romance.
  82. RA. One
    But all the charm in the world wouldn't make Ra.One's sanctimoniousness seem any more genuine.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    The Double
    If the idea of a political thriller with a modern-day Cold War theme resonates with you or something in our collective unconscious, my FOMO levels are higher than a lonely night on Facebook.
  84. Like Crazy
    Outside of Felicity Jones's work, the film, directed and co-written by Drake Doremus, usually feels like it's soullessly connecting dots, a far cry from the Before Sunrise-style substance its Yank-meets-Euro chattiness might suggest.
  85. Anonymous
    Anonymous leaves one bereft of any meaningful knowledge of these personages or the theatrical energy of their age, and earns the obscurity it figures to acquire even if the war between Team Edward and Team William blazes on.
  86. Silver Bullets
    Joe Swanberg's idea of making audiences "happy" is by acknowledging what his supporters and detractors have been saying about him for a number of years, but presenting these things within the same game of elliptical story-unraveling and confession that's governed most of his other films.
  87. Sidewalls
    Animation, motion graphics, and slow motion all pop up at some point, further splintering Sidewalls into a pandering pastiche of better films.
  88. My Reincarnation
    My Reincarnation has an effective bifurcated structure that testifies to the level of trust Jennifer Fox clearly established with her subjects.
  89. 13
    The filmmakers are so generally clueless about getting the most out of a provocative concept that it's like running into a subtextual brick wall.
  90. In Time
    Justin Timberlake can't elevate what amounts to relatively simplistic, formulaic material, but his headlining turn exhibits sufficient charisma and wit to make In Time a passably diverting action-packed waste of time.
  91. All's Faire in Love
    All's Faire in Love's lackluster compositions and absence of rhythm are a perfect match for writer-director Scott Marshall's script (co-written with R.A. White and Jeffrey Ray Wine), which operates according to a Revenge of the Nerds-style us-versus-them template almost as stagnant as Ricci's phoned-in turn.
  92. The Rum Diary
    The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson's amorphous hodgepodge of a film, wants to be many things: period recreation, social commentary, morality play, romance, an insider look at the newspaper game.
  93. God's Land
    The movie's understanding of how the group taps into people's deep need to believe ensures that the film remains not only fair-minded, but sensitive to the tortured emotions of its conflicted central characters.
  94. Retreat
    Retreat's wheels are constantly spinning, but they're not always taking us anywhere.
  95. Hipsters
    An over-the-top Russian musical about hipsters set in 1950s Moscow, where getting a non-pastel-colored tie is a mafia-mediated operation and a saxophone is considered a concealed weapon? Yes, please.
  96. Puss in Boots
    For all the fuss, it dissolves almost immediately upon contact.
  97. Janie Jones
    First thing to get out of the way: No, David M. Rosenthal's third feature, Janie Jones, has nothing to do with the famous song by the same name that opens the Clash's self-titled 1977 debut album. Perhaps that might have made this film far more interesting film it is.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Reunion
    Importing WWE's brand of hokey fighting--the most memorable scene, during which Cena jumps from a ledge onto a helicoper, recalls in-the-ring rope-jumping than anything else--into a place where there is an alarming amount of real bloodshed seems unnecessary and somewhat imperious.
  99. The Three Musketeers
    A moment's patience is soon rewarded by Anderson's vast store of rich, intoxicating imagery.
  100. Cargo
    Cargo can feel like a "film about human trafficking" from beginning to end.
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