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. Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    In the documentary, the game is a make-believe war of pent-up frustrations linking race, nation, and manhood, one which teenage boys named Mohamed can actually win.
  2. The Inheritors
    Assembled from short, naturalistic shots of people at work, the documentary becomes a bittersweet testament to labor and a damning representation of a vicious cycle, its images speaking entirely for themselves.
  3. Grave Encounters
    Twelve long years after "The Blair Witch Project" pushed the first-person-POV subgenre to horror's forefront, and four years after [Rec] expertly refined the formula, Grave Encounters can't even pretend to be anything other than hopelessly derivative.
  4. Echotone
    Director Nathan Christ dithers between fashioning the film as a glossing study of metropolitan personality and a virtual advertisement for the groups included.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bobby Fischer Against the World
    Note the noticeable uptick in the cleverness of the on-screen graphics or fitfully remember the movie poster's tagline, "His Greatest Match Was in His Mind," and you'll belatedly come around to the jarring downshift into Fischer's latter-day paranoia and anti-Semitism.
    • 36 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Beware the Gonzo
    As Beware the Gonzo happily dreams up its nerdy hero's victories over bullies, school censorship, and feeling like a nobody, it seems to do so from another time.
  7. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
    Manages to be intimate and impersonal at the same time, a trait constantly reinforced by his portrayal of not only Ceausescu but the populace he led, represented, and controlled for nearly three decades.
  8. We Were Here
    Simply and devastatingly letting five residents of San Francisco share their reminiscences of that city's nightmarish "war zone" in the early, horrific years of AIDS, We Were Here creates a harrowing, streamlined oral history.
  9. My Kingdom
    If this oddly delineated narrative often falls between two stools, then the replacement of brightly bombastic opera battles with dimly lit, more conventional action sequences is a similarly unwelcome development.
  10. Apollo 18
    A nasty, cleverly revealed monster might have redeemed some of the monotony of the first (seemingly endless) hour, but the beasty here manages to be ludicrous, dull, and unoriginal somehow all at once, compromising the marginal hope you may have been holding out for the film.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Where Soldiers Come From
    A four-year study of an Afghan war-bound group of friends (the mother of Cole, the goofy joker of the group, compares the boys to the characters in The Deer Hunter), Courtney's documentary is equal parts heartfelt and public-television predictable.
  12. Tanner Hall
    Francesca Gregorini and Tatiana von Furstenberg's film is episodic, but the episodes don't achieve any kind of cumulative effect.
  13. Burke and Hare
    Broadness this indolent hardly even stirs one to antipathy.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Simply put, the documentary is full of cool talking heads pontificating rather than taking physical action.
  15. Warrior
    O'Conner continues to exhibit a deft knack for melding interpersonal drama with athletic competition in ways that, despite his tales' clichés, earn their melodramatic manipulations through genuine empathy for characters' plights.
  16. Shark Night 3D
    It's refreshing to see Shark Night 3D director David R. Ellis try to pull off a semi-sincere second-generation "Jaws" rip-off, even if he doesn't quite succeed.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Love Exposure
    Japanese poet and cult filmmaker Shion Sono defines himself as an anti-establishment artist partly out of cynicism and partly thanks to his romantic concept of libertarianism.
  18. That Girl in Yellow Boots
    The figure of the poor white girl whose sex work is justified by a really noble cause, set of circumstances or sheer charisma, is, of course, not a new cinematic premise.
  19. Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    The testimony we hear from suspects' neighbors and similarly curious media underlings feels muted, like a halfhearted repetition.
  20. Seven Days in Utopia
    God bless Robert Duvall. An American cinematic institution, our greatest living actor makes the fortune-cookie bromides of Matthew Dean Russell's Seven Days in Utopia sound like Yates.
  21. Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame
    Hark's new film is a consummately bizarre crowd-pleaser that throws everything at the viewer from makeshift plastic surgery by acupuncture to death by spontaneous combustion.
  22. Little Girl (La Pivellina)
    The film lacks the immediacy of the Dardenne brothers' pictures, the electrifying sense that anything might happen, while also avoiding their penchant for redemptive resolutions.
  23. I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    An understated--and at times, clinical to a fault--Oedipal drama of long-simmering resentment and familial love's ambiguities, I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive risks bringing chilly subjectivity to sensational raw material.
  24. Rebirth
    If Rebirth's subjects are active guides documenting a fluid psychological landscape, Jim Whitaker constructs a specific cinematic geography around them with stunning time-lapse photography of Ground Zero.
  25. Colombiana
    Zaldana is such a sultry and surprisingly heartfelt executioner that she often finds a way to make this by-the-numbers genre retread feel, if not fresh, then at least sporadically electric.
  26. Love Crime
    The film is less corporate parable than intricately crafted revenge drama whose intensively detailed plotting can't hide the fact that the whole thing seems like a lot of work for a glaringly modest payoff.
  27. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Avoids funny one-liners like the plague, choosing in their place to deliver only squishy faux-outrageousness that, like Sudeikis's one-note stud, exudes an unwelcome air of self-satisfaction.
  28. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    Handsomely mounted and shot with an eye for nocturnal Parisian mystery by Guillaume Schiffman, Gainsbourg somewhat mercifully peters out after the grande scandale of the provocateur's reggae version of "La Marseillaise," which earned him the wrath of French patriots.
  29. The Debt
    Its performances are resourceful and affecting, with Chastain and Worthington in the past sequences, and Mirren and Wilkinson in the later chapters, exuding a complicated mess of responsibility, guilt, sacrifice, revenge, and regret.
  30. The Caller
    The way in which the action indulges in long, underlined silences furthers the overriding sense of trying too hard to muster up a suspenseful mood from a conceit better suited to a half-hour television program.
    • 18 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Stripped Down
    Stripped Down seems to prove, if other films hadn't already for you, that a director haunted by traumas and wrestling with demons doesn't necessarily produce artistically substantial films.
  32. Tales from the Golden Age
    The first four of the film's 1980s-set episodes are shorter in length and more anecdotal in nature than the last two and deal primarily with the pageantry and inflexible customs behind the regime with a perspective at once amused and bemused.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Special Treatment
    A portrait of gender-and job-transcending ennui, Special Treatment paints a vulgar picture of two apparently interwoven professions: prostitutes and shrinks.
  34. A Proper Violence
    There's absolutely no fresh perspective here; just more juiceless samplings of what's already been cooked to death.
  35. Iron Crows
    A maddeningly blunt and syrupy rendering of a piquant socio-economic configuration, Park Bong-Nam's Iron Crows is ultimately third-world documentary filmmaking at its most exploitatively surface-groping.
  36. Chasing Madoff
    The fawning personal-life segments are overdone, and undermine the film's compelling reportage about Madoff's ruse and downfall.
  37. The Family Tree
    A few trite race and religion jokes goose up what's mostly a sentimental story of a dysfunctional family suddenly and magically learning to function again.
  38. 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy
    For a film so proud of its trail-blazing status ("the first 3D erotic movie"), 3d Sex and Zen is certainly driven by the same good old symptoms.
  39. Our Idiot Brother
    Shat makes Our Idiot Brother work is the endless appeal of watching Rudd's lovable idiot run roughshod over the sophisticated New York mini-universe while winning the confidence and admiration of everyone around him.
  40. Higher Ground
    Lacking both spiritual and narrative spark, Vera Farmiga's directorial debut suffers from her flat performance and a moribund, weirdly sex-joke-spiked narrative.
  41. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Does Katie Holmes's hubby get script-doctoring rights even on her own film projects? That would explain why Troy Nixey's inane Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, co-written and produced by Guillermo del Toro, at times suggests an anti-Rx PSA.
  42. Circumstance
    Since Mehran's embrace of hardline Islam is never dramatized or elaborated on in any insightful way.
  43. Brighton Rock
    Brighton Rock never brings its baby-faced hood antihero, the scarfaced Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley, pouting and hunched in the late-DiCaprio manner), into a semblance of human plausibility.
  44. Spy Kids: All the Time in the World
    Even the use of the 3D format -- and the 4D "Aroma-Scope," which allows the viewer to enjoy various odors in sync with the film -- adds to its good-natured earnestness.
  45. Fright Night
    One of the minor triumphs of this Fright Night remake is Farrell's coolly assured performance, a cocksure spectacle of masculine virility far more intimidating to his character's victims, male and female alike, than the razor-sharp fangs Jerry uses to munch on human neck meat.
  46. Conan the Barbarian
    The re-whatevered Conan the Barbarian feels unexpectedly low-rent, even with its multi-million-dollar backdrops and ear-splitting, rumbling soundtrack and (presumably post-converted) 3D imagery.
  47. The Hedgehog
    The Hedgehog ultimately illuminates only the continued lameness of employing out-of-leftfield tragedy for cheap bathos.
  48. The Tiniest Place
    Going back to the scene of trauma is a familiar Latin American strategy for dealing with its wars and dictatorships through art, but The Tiniest Place takes a disturbingly literal approach to such wound-scratching homecoming.
  49. Summer Pasture
    The faces of the culture - a group of nomadic Tibetans who raise yak and harvest caterpillar dung from ramshackle tents in the Chinese mountains - resist all but the most vague of ecological or political calls-to-action.
  50. Mozart's Sister
    Mozart's Sister is too often just one more rehashing of the "Aw, didn't women have it tough then" thematic that never forces the viewer to acknowledge that maybe they haven't got it as great as we'd like to think today.
  51. Griff the Invisible
    Director Leon Ford displays a wonderful empathy in his examination of Griff and Melody's lonely environments, allowing their fringe perspectives to flower organically from the mise-en-scène.
  52. 5 Days of War
    Renny Harlin seems now incapable of taking a movie even as far as a few frames.
  53. The Journals of Musan
    If The Journals of Musan indicates anything, it's that people, for the most part, either can't or simply aren't willing to comprehend the circumstances behind others' actions.
  54. Programming the Nation?
    A pseudo-investigative documentary shakily committed to the subject of subliminal messaging in America, but curiously indulgent about giving the singer of Queensryche time to spout off about whatever enters his head.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A Horrible Way to Die
    The adventitious use of loud and strange blasts of music may theoretically make sense to heighten the film's creepiness, but here, like everything else, they don't exactly make a perfect fit and serve more as the final nail in the coffin for the film's lack of tonal cohesion.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Amigo
    Amigo finds John Sayles rather closer to his worst, alternating gracelessly between fleshing out the characters caught in the middle of international conflict and turning them into dots and arrows in a flowchart of historical relevance.
  57. One Day
    One Day conveys a real sense of the poignancy of individual lives unfolding over time, but the film's ultimate embrace of conventionality ultimately undercuts the not inconsiderable accomplishments the project had worked so hard to achieve.
  58. 30 Minutes or Less
    Watching 30 Minutes or Less, a proudly stupid action comedy that's awfully lethargic for all its slam-bang propulsion, it's tough to pinpoint who exactly Ruben Fleischer thinks he is.
  59. Final Destination 5
    If the series really does end here, may this final installment be hailed as a triumph of poetic justice.
  60. Glee: The 3D Concert Movie
    The film is as emotionally manipulative as the show, but it's never appeared more truthful in its aspiration to inspire - and profit in the process.
  61. Bad Posture
    Once it gets its nominal plot and character development out of the way, Bad Posture turns out to be pleasantly surprising.
  62. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    The extreme largesse of Anselm Kiefer's project, his radical certainties and devotion, all call for a more intrusive probing.
  63. The Help
    High school creative-writing-class ironies of all kinds abound in The Help.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    Inescapably and poignantly colored by the revolutionary events that would take place in Egypt in the years since its making, Scheherazade brims with faith in storytelling as art's great way of lifting society's veils.
  65. The Last Circus
    Subscribes to the belief that moderation is a four-letter word, flying about with an abandon that begets exhilaration as well as exhausting messiness.
  66. Senna
    Asif Kapadia's documentary is ultimately less affecting and insightful on a universal thematic scale than on an individual, personal one.
  67. Littlerock
    Confronting the concept of alienness in a California desert town, this modest tapestry finds equivalent dignity in history-conscious travelers and natives weighed down by roots or inertia.
  68. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    Like the film that constrains him, a prequel to Planet of the Apes, perhaps James Franco understands his performance as something that will one day evolve into something far greater.
  69. The Mouth of the Wolf
    We experience the delay of the fantasy of the happy old couple in their country home in cinematic time as, for most of the film, the only body these lovers have is the spellbinding combination of visual fragments serving as apparitions to their voices.
  70. The Change-Up
    Yet as is so often the case with the frat-boy genre to which this film panders, so many gags feel like desperate, self-conscious attempts to be outrageous that the effect of its abundant cursing and boob shots is more depressing than delirious.
  71. Protektor
    Engendering an experience both visually slick and narratively sprawling, the apropos-of-nothing professionalism of Protektor often feels more like branding than filmmaking.
  72. Habermann
    Habermann may not be a pragmatic classic of the "Army of Shadows" mold, but it falls within the upper-mid bracket of WWII movies because it doesn't attempt to understand or define the tragedy it approaches.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Mysteries of Lisbon
    A marvelously elastic storyteller, a dry wit, and a Rivettean anti-determinist, the Chilean auteur Raúl Ruiz is fascinated by narratives that dilate from within, images seemingly full of secret passageways, and fabulists who collect tales like toys.
  74. Gun Hill Road
    Of the film's three principals, it's only teenage Michael--more than ably embodied by screen newcomer Harmony Santana--that writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green seems to have much of a feel for.
  75. Cold Fish
    A hybrid of the millionth send-up of the repressed/impotent Japanese patriarch and the "bad buddy comedy" that Barry Levinson held up as exhausted and bankrupt with 2004's "Envy."
  76. Magic Trip
    At its best, Magic Trip evokes the freewheeling, idealistic, psychedelic vibe of an era's origins; at worst, it's a film in which people narrate their own druggie home movies.
  77. The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll
    There's nothing inherently flawed about this nomadic and potentially life-affirming narrative, but Rosenbaum manages to instill every moment on the road with a sense of shrill conventionality.
  78. The Whistleblower
    It reaches a peak of dramatic anguish in star Rachel Weisz's single moment of naked fury, rather than through the tenacity and compassion that define her crusading title character.
  79. Bellflower
    Evan Glodell's debut has the sweetness of a lullaby reverie and the blazing ferocity of a monster-car nightmare, a first-comes-elation, then-comes-madness structure that resembles that of "Blue Valentine," another tale focused on the commencement, and then collapse, of an affair.
  80. Assassination Games
    For anyone hoping that Jean-Claude Van Damme's self-reflexive turn in Mabrouk El Mechri's postmodern JCVD heralded a new career direction for "The Muscles from Brussels," Assassination Games puts those dreams firmly to rest.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Harvest/La Cosecha
    The Harvest/La Cosecha is another entry in the fast-growing agri-doc genre that seeks to upend naïve ideas of where your food comes from.
  82. The Smurfs
    Like the show, this boring, lazy, clumsily staged, overly lit, unnecessarily 3D-ed contraption even culminates with some half-hearted moral hectoring-in this case, the togetherness of the Smurfs works to validate heteronormative values.
  83. Good Neighbors
    Good Neighbors basically runs on the assumption that Montreal is the last place you would ever want to live.
  84. Crazy, Stupid, Love
    This schizophrenic conception of Gosling's character is indicative of the film's largely dichotomous view of romantic relationships.
  85. Cowboys & Aliens
    Brandishing a literal-minded title as laughable as the rest of its action, Cowboys & Aliens mashes up genres with a staunch dedication to getting everything wrong, making sure that each scene is more inane than the one that preceded it.
  86. All She Can
    The unconventional choice of extra-curricular activity for Luz sheds light onto the strange sport of powerlifting, in which teen girls are constantly weighed and sometimes told that they have 40 minutes to get three pounds off their bodies so they can compete.
  87. The Optimists
    This autumnal statement compensates for its fixed despair with bracing wit and a willingness to see acceptance of misery as the best of all possible options.
  88. House of Boys
    Call me crazy-stupid, but locker-room anal sex aside, didn't Christina Aguilera just enact this scenario last fall in "Burlesque"?
  89. Golf in the Kingdom
    The film, for all its trite lessons, forgets that people mainly play golf because they enjoy it.
  90. Sleep Furiously
    An affectionate, if uncomfortably stagnant, portrait of moribund rural culture.
  91. True Adolescents
    Glomming conceits and situations from a vast range of similarly themed films, it ambles along in a lethargic, good-natured manner, fitfully amusing but never approaching substantial.
  92. El Bulli: Cooking in Progress
    A unique restaurant like El Bulli probably deserves a more creative documentary than El Bulli: Cooking in Progress, a static portrait that comes off as less than inspired by its unusual subject.
  93. The Devil's Double
    The film's first act is wholly concerned with the juxtaposition of physical similarities and ideological opposites, and Tamahori spends entire sequences upending the balance between the two.
  94. Point Blank
    Fred Cavayé shoots his action with both vigorous propulsion and visual lucidity. Unfortunately, however, his story's revelations, all of which are related to a recent corporate bigwig's assassination, arrive at least two-to-three scenes after they've already become obvious.
  95. Life in a Day
    Only a few snippets escape the uncritical narcissism that the film celebrates and, despite their unimaginative employment, they stand as something of a rebuke to the film's dominant images.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Interrupters
    An inspirational and heartbreaking nail-biter, The Interrupters was more difficult for me to watch than any battle documentary I've seen in years.
  97. The Guard
    The Guard is John Michael McDonagh's caustically funny riff on cop and crime films.
  98. The Future
    Of all the vaguely philosophical, calculatedly left-of-center dialogue that peppers Miranda July's The Future, no line is more telling than the writer/director/star's late-film declaration, in the guise of her character Sophie, that "I'm saying okay to nothing."
  99. Attack the Block
    More "Bloody Kids" than "Super 8," more "Assault on Precinct 13" than "Jumanji," and, in the end, more "Be Kind Rewind" than "Adventures in Babysitting."
  100. Autoerotic
    Autoerotic's take on the me-me-me generation's inability for actual contact seems appropriate, but it lacks the nuance that makes "Denise Calls Up" so delicious to watch.
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