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. Johnny English Reborn
    As ticklish as one might find the idea of an equivalent Mr. Bean character occupying the driver's seat of a James Bond parody, it's likely that even a competent manifestation of such a scenario would pale in comparison to what Mike Myers and Jay Roach pulled off with apparent ease in their Austin Powers films.
  2. Elevate
    Long on hopefulness but short on sobering realities, Elevate proves a compelling if superficial look at the arduous path traveled by Senegalese teens hoping to make it to America for a higher education and an NBA career.
  3. Norman
    Alternately maudlin and snarky, Norman just doesn't risk enough, and can be consigned to the status of what the school drama geek would call "some contemporary, obscure, teen-angst thing."
  4. Snowmen
    I'm not sure what part of Snowmen doesn't scream completely inappropriate, sentimental Manichean drivel.
  5. Glitch in the Grid
    Eric Leiser's hackneyed documentary/stop-motion hybrid Glitch in the Grid presumes social importance by simply referencing the relationship between modern young artists and their inability to express themselves amid a failing U.S. economy.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Revenge of the Electric Car
    Revenge of the Electric Car, which details the resurgence of interest in the mass production of the battery car, is sometimes too slick for its own good.
  7. Pina
    Go after Pina and you're going to have to go through a mob of modern-dance zealots first.
  8. Paul Goodman Changed My Life
    This bio-documentary of a New Left godfather presents a formidable character simpatico with today's zeitgeist in his championing of "spontaneous uprising."
  9. The Mighty Macs
    The Mighty Macs is a film from another planet, where stories are told, obliviously, in cryptic, nonsensical code, and people talk to each other in sugarplum proverbs no earthbound adult would ever inflict on another, not even on the set of a Hallmark Original Movie.
  10. Oranges and Sunshine
    The film is so careful to avoid the luridness that would seem inevitably to accompany an excavation of child kidnapping, forced labor, and rape, that the result is a plodding, overly tasteful procedural that holds up its hero as an incorruptible embodiment of goodness.
  11. You All Are Captains
    Oliver Laxe goes full-on meta by casting himself in the role of a visiting moviemaker who travels to Morocco to shoot footage with disadvantaged children living in a shelter.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Klitschko
    Smartly, Sebastian Dehnhardt's film eschews hype and goes far beyond mere talk, shows as well as tells, by including fascinatingly instructive slow- mo shots of both men's fights to highlight the differences between the brawny duo, often mistaken for identical twins.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Le Havre
    For Carl Dreyer, to film a miracle took a single shot; for Bruno Dumont, a whole film. In Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki needs four shots to capture his - and what an ordinary event it is!
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Oka!
    As a film stupefied by its exotic setting, Oka! almost drops its walking stick of a plot as it wanders through the Central African Republic's jungle, getting blissed out on the sensuous delights of the surrounding wildlife and local Bayaka music.
  15. The Descendants
    In a development that seemed to begin in earnest with "Sideways," a large part of The Descendents seems to operate on a non-narrative level.
  16. Margin Call
    A portrait of the eve of 2008's financial crisis that plays out with funereal inevitability, Margin Call loves speechifying, but the film is far more assured when lingering in the silence of its morally compromised characters.
  17. The Catechism Cataclysm
    The film is an 80-minute shaggy-dog story about the seductive power of storytelling and the weird places it can transport us; too bad writer- director Todd Rohal doesn't take us any place worth going.
  18. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    Not everyone's life is compelling enough to warrant the documentary treatment, but whether this truism applies to master puppeteer and current Sesame Street producer Kevin Clash is a question that Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, Constance Marks's fawning portrait of the Muppet- master fails to answer.
  19. The Thing
    You can tell a lot about the film from its rough handling of the materials supplied by its predecessor, using these commonalities both to identify the bond between the two and signal how much further it's willing to push things.
  20. The Big Year
    Director David Frankel can't lend the inflated sitcom dilemmas of the characters any life, and most mysteriously screenwriter Howard Franklin, whose work in the '90s frequently had appealing quirk and flavor, gets the dubious credit for adapting a 1998 nonfiction book about these hobbyists' pursuit of pink-footed geese and Northern Shovelers.
  21. Footloose
    If the Footloose remake had its own signature dance, it'd be called the Push-Pull, as this hip-to-be-sorta-square movie, much like the small-town teens within it, has a mind for propelling itself toward a progressive future while continually being yanked back by cherished hallmarks of the past.
  22. Father of Invention
    There's no spark or humor to the film's situations, just the sense of capable actors trying to make the best of a hopeless situation.
  23. Fireflies in the Garden
    The actors are left to go through the motions of a sterile script that director Dennis Lee tries to bring to life not through, for example, Watson's brilliant capacity for facial nuance, but through canned artifice.
  24. Connected: An Autoblogography About Love, Death & Technology
    One of the film's main problems is the fact that Shlain is so invested in connecting her father's scientific findings... with an astonishingly linear history of the world that she fails to see the more private connections that flicker in and out of her verbose voiceover.
  25. The Dead
    The Dead ultimately doesn't have much of a pulse, as it fails to transcend the banality of its inevitable theme.
  26. My Week with Marilyn
    Only the star performances in My Week with Marilyn, cartoonish as they are, make seeing the film worth the effort.
  27. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    The film seems almost to have been produced spontaneously, by gears of a larger system as they mesh together right this instant, culled from the ether with the words "Customers Who Also Liked Dogtooth and Winter's Bone Liked This…"
  28. Trespass
    A jerky, clamorous domestic thriller that attempts, with nonsense and expletives turned up to full volume, to say something thrillingly profound about the depths of misery one can reach while doing financial damage control.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Happy Life
    First-time writer-director Michael M. Bilandic's tongue-in-cheek, bare-knuckles approach to his ultra-low budget paean to a dying breed is a welcome piece of independent filmmaking.
  30. To Be Heard
    This arc may sound particularly familiar on paper, but To Be Heard finds the unique passions and heartaches in all three stories, allowing the viewer to become invested in whatever outcome befalls each subject.
  31. 1911
    Adhering to what is apparently a formula for national superproductions, 1911 throws dates and names on the screen with unceasing speed and frequent irrelevance -- gratuitously identifying a walk-on as "German diplomat."
  32. Texas Killing Fields
    Texas Killing Fields's mood is one of drowning in quicksand, though said atmosphere is the byproduct of both Ami Canaan Mann's often dreamy direction and an editorial structure that intermittently devolves into elliptical incongruity.
  33. The Sons of Tennessee Williams
    This time-tested project of tracing gayness back to when its shame was so explicitly enforced feels not only passé, and naïve, but mostly unproductive in a post-Judith Butler world in which drag queens are on TV teaching biological women how to better perform womanhood.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Woman on the 6th Floor
    It plays everything safe, keeping all its edges rounded and its lips sealed in territory ripe for sociopolitical commentary, making even The Help's glib depiction of African American servitude seem nearly honest.
  35. Real Steel
    If familiarity is endemic to this feel-good drama, there's nonetheless also something to be said for competent amalgamation and regurgitation of tired genre tropes.
  36. The Ides of March
    Clooney's films as director often begin with a familiar point A and conclude at a less-familiar point B, deriving much of their interest from the circuitous path required to navigate the shift.
  37. The Nine Muses
    The Nine Muses is the kind of nonfiction film I actively hope for: a picture of intuitive, free-associational power that cuts far deeper emotionally than a dry recitation of dates and facts could ever hope to.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    As thorough as the filmmakers are in providing a political context for Fishbone, they're often reduced to tunnel vision in an attempt to lift the unheralded band to its rightful place in music history.
  39. Dirty Girl
    There's a girl, and she's prone to dirty acts, but that's just one patch of this arbitrarily stitched quilt of white-trash, Bible-Belt transgression, which flattens under the weight of a truckload of half-realized ambitions.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    The desire to eat someone's ass is almost always superficial; there's no thought of sustenance, and more sophisticated pleasures are usually imminent. Not so with The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence).
  41. Blackthorn
    Blackthorn's last-man-standing circumstances, far from a cautionary tale about the cost of the gunslinger life, are glorified as the height of macho nobility.
  42. The Way
    The making of The Way must have been a nice moment for father and son, but why must the rest of us suffer?
  43. Courageous
    Even the logos for the companies involved in its making (Sherwood Films and Affirm Films) and distribution (TriStar Pictures) scream that this will be a message from on high.
  44. Dream House
    A modest genre entry, Dream House also benefits from the fact that any movie with good enough sense to cast Elias Koteas is automatically better as a result, even if he is utterly wasted here.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    What's Your Number?
    Watching Faris's reactions to the bizarre material that makes up this film is like witnessing someone with a weird sense of humor make a string of jokes that no one's even catching.
  46. Carnage
    One doesn't have to look too closely at Carnage's final shot to marvel at the way Polanski refuses to haughtily indict his audience in the pettiness of his characters' behavior.
  47. American Teacher
    The movie is a curious blend of teacher-appreciation mandate and recruitment video, though it's not always clear at whom the narration's gravely spoken factoids are directed.
  48. Finding Joe
    Finding Joe maintains that every person should, as Joseph Campbell wrote, "find your bliss," a potentially valuable nugget of wisdom that this film manages to reduce to 80 minutes of celebs giving themselves hugs.
  49. Surrogate Valentine
    The relationship between the two leads neither deteriorates nor seriously improves and last-minute romantic developments don't so much as give shape to the narrative as play as perfunctory gestures of closure.
  50. Shit Year
    Shit Year is a thematic twin to Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," both heightened fables about the slow disintegration of a retired actress mourning her now-dead career by retreating inward.
  51. 50/50
    The movie is far more successful in its execution of the young-man-meets-mortality element, warranting its existence by bringing some well-considered verisimilitude to what feels like rare movie territory.
  52. The Skin I Live In
    This is a beautiful vision, but in telling too many flowery secrets, it's also one that unnecessarily keeps its queerness in the closet.
  53. A Dangerous Method
    As rigorous and stimulating as its thematic inquiries are, A Dangerous Method ultimately rests as much on its performances, and in that regard, it succeeds far more than it fails.
  54. Melancholia
    The poetic, referential succession of near-still images that opens the film so immaculately distills Melancholia's moody narrative and themes that it makes the two-hours-plus that follow seem impossibly redundant.
  55. Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    Flip-flopping traditional genre dynamics in a manner more cute than uproarious, Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil charts the Three's Company-style shenanigans that ensue when two West Virginia bumpkins cross paths with a group of camping college kids.
  56. Take Shelter
    It's not easy to give a character study concerning mental illness the aspect of a psychological thriller without some notes of exploitation or trivialization creeping in, and Take Shelter makes a few missteps.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Joy
    Sergei Loznitsa's documentaries are mainly compilations of archival footage, so it makes sense that his first fiction film is also essentially a compilation, an array of dynamic, aggressive bits rather than one coherent text.
  58. Bunraku
    Writer-director Guy Moshe's crime saga is a work of second-generation derivation, weaving together scraps from homages to Westerns, film noir, samurai films, gangster pics, and class-warfare dramas.
  59. Benda Bilili!
    The film's inquiry into the artistic method remains somewhat at the superficial level, but the directors do a fine job of emphasizing both the circumstances that lead to the music's creation and the satisfying result of the irrepressible sounds.
  60. Journey from Zanskar
    It's the rare urgent-issue movie that refuses to pummel you with the importance of its subject matter, which in this case involves the shameful, potential extinction of a culture.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Man Nobody Knew: In Search of My Father, CIA Spymaster William Colby
    At the same time that director Carl Colby probes into the true character of his mysterious father through an arsenal of interviews with those that knew him, he gives equal weight to the dark chapters of America's history that his father's life traversed.
  62. In Search of God
    This is didactic self-help drivel of the worst kind, as filmmaker Rupam Sarmah creates a return-to-the-origin narrative contaminated by what Kathryn Bond Stockton would surely call "kid Orientalism."
  63. Killer Elite
    Killer Elite is pleasurable enough, but with a steadier hand, it could've been one for the books.
  64. Abduction
    Odds are John Singleton doesn't know he's made one of the funniest films of the year.
  65. Moneyball
    True to Hollywood's tireless efforts to fit square-peg material into roundish genre niches, this wavering, intermittently smart story of daring to think differently flattens its narrative into formula.
  66. Machine Gun Preacher
    Marc Forster regards the real-life Childers's evolution from heroin-addicted, wife-beating (implied), gun-toting oblivion to born-again do-gooderism with motorized aloofness.
  67. Dolphin Tale
    If its plotting can be slight, the film's restraint and earnestness help prevent it from ever tipping over into outright mawkishness, and its performances similarly avoid over-the-top histrionics.
  68. Pearl Jam Twenty
    Wholly uninterested in puffing up his subjects into an iconic rock outfit on a par with their idols Led Zeppelin and the Who, Crowe instead merely tells their story free from the constraints of rise-fall-rise clichés.
  69. Art History
    The staging of this dissociative roundelay is still presented in a forcefully lo-fi format, prizing roughly framed shots, improvisation, and flat characters, but there are ever clearer indications that Swanberg is producing something more than empty-headed slacker cinema.
  70. There Was Once...
    A not insignificant act of oral history, Gabor Kalman's There Was Once… makes for considerably less compelling cinema whenever it turns its focus away from the talking-head testimony of the Holocaust survivors of Kalosca, Hungary.
  71. Thunder Soul
    Forcefully traditional and sentimental, Thunder Soul benefits most from the cinematic turn of the actual events it documents, which allowed the beloved teacher's life to end on a perfectly bittersweet note.
  72. The Whale
    When considering the best voiceover artists in cinema history, Ryan Reynolds doesn't immediately come to mind as an especially dynamic one.
  73. A Bird of the Air
    Naturally, given the film's somewhat precious air of spiritualism, the parroted phrase that speaks most clearly to Lyman is a quotation from the book of Ecclesiastes that gives the film its title and gives Fiona a chance to offer a blithely optimistic interpretation of that most dour of Biblical books.
  74. Toast
    Joan aside, the film goes down easy enough.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    White Wash
    "Why are there so few black surfers?" That's the question posed by Ted Wood's incisive, if ultimately repetitive, documentary White Wash, and to answer the question the film digs deep into US political and social history.
  76. Weekend
    A ticking stopwatch hangs over Weekend that amplifies the intensity of every conversation, every fight, every drink, every copulation. In other words, it's a device.
  77. Puncture
    Puncture's story only moves forward thanks to Evans's charm. But a good lead performance can't single-handedly save thin material.
  78. Limelight
    Limelight focuses far too much on the club's downfall and not nearly enough on what attracted its denizens there in the first place, managing only to preach to the choir, forgetting to also take it to church.
  79. One Fall
    One Fall is a bafflingly lame assemblage of self-help platitudes, the sort of film in which every narrative detail is specifically placed to pave the way for a pat moral you've grasped before the opening credits have barely concluded.
  80. Straw Dogs
    Despite Lurie's part-time efforts to lend the film some sense of place, the impulse to hot-ify everything from Peckinpah's considerably more earthbound original ultimately outpaces his meager good intentions.
  81. I Don't Know How She Does It
    The witticisms are delivered via a suffocating glut of audience hand-holding, which includes constant doc-style confessionals, whimsical on-screen text, studio-audience sound effects, voices in Kate's head, and voiceover narration.
  82. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    The key to good, or at least effective, agitprop (and Oliver Stone and Michael Moore know this) is that, yes, it must simplify matters, but it necessitates canny presentation so that it may truly get into viewers' blood streams and rile them.
  83. My Afternoons with Margueritte
    Germain's bonhomie with the bistro regulars has the feel of a TV comedy pilot, which is more than can be said of the monologues he speaks to his cat, one on the inadequacies of the dictionary.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Weird World of Blowfly
    If The Weird World of Blowfly is any different from other documentaries about eccentric characters from music-world obscurity, it's in the contentious topics Clarence touches on in his cantankerous speech.
  85. Sound It Out
    The film mostly works because it doesn't overplay the consequence of its subject.
  86. Silent Souls
    Folklore, rituals, and the past weigh heavily on Silent Souls, which is somewhat endemic of films from Fedorchenko's home country of Russia.
  87. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Shut Up Little Man! fails to legitimize its topic as one of any significance.
  88. Prince of Swine
    Played as broadly and as crudely as you please (in terms of acting, direction, "edgy" dialogue), Prince of Swine paints a grimly ugly portrait of male sexual violence and female submission.
  89. Happy, Happy
    The filmmaker looks to American modes of visual and aural expression to give Happy, Happy its soul, but all her fetish accomplishes is depersonalizing her story, making a sitcom of her character's lives.
  90. Berlin 36
    Excepting a momentary late-film lapse into eye-rolling double-exposure tomfoolery, the film is as aesthetically bland as a film could conceivably be, the perfunctory camerawork imbuing the proceedings with an ugly, indistinctive gloss.
  91. 3
    3 is a smidgeon film. Take a smidgeon of scientific/ethical discussion, throw in a pinch of dance/poetry/dream sequences, tie the whole thing up with split-screen montages and you no longer just have a film about a love triangle, but a Godardian objet d'art.
  92. Restless
    Gus Van Sant's cinema, which of late has been fixated on immersing viewers in particular times and spaces, takes a detour into excruciating quirkland with Restless.
  93. Jane's Journey
    Despite the fact that Goodall narrates the bulk of the material, there are scant details about her concrete contributions to animal and life science save for her observing of chimp-made tools.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Mill and the Cross
    Every bit as visceral an experience as Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and with a lead actor whose face radiates the same eternal quality as that of the late Klaus Kinski, The Mill and The Cross also feels a lot like live theater.
  95. Drive
    A lot of critics will talk about how the movie is a stripped-down, "pure" genre piece, and there's a lot of truth to that. What may not get as much press is the way stripped-down-ness is an affectation, and always has been.
  96. Inside Out
    Inside Out should be wild and violent, playing on the soap-operatic mood swings that drive televised wrestling; instead it's one or two murders away from being a Lifetime movie of the week.
  97. Love in Space
    The weightlessness that dominates the film is no special effect.
  98. Contagion
    A germophobe's worst nightmare, Contagion touches on all the dramas big and small, mostly big, we've come to associate with catastrophes such as this, and does so as if it were hurriedly going down and adapting a list of bullet points, never lingering on any one drama in a particularly meaningful fashion.
  99. Brother's Justice
    Dax Shepard delivers an I'm Still Here-style mockumentary of staggering incompetence with Brother's Justice.
  100. Shaolin
    Only Jackie Chan, in a comedic supporting role as a Zen-trained cook who applies his culinary techniques on the battlefield (he "stir-fries" one enemy in a giant pot and "kneads" another like dough), provides any measure of relief.
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