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. Friends with Benefits
    For a film that had once made some pretense toward exposing such dangerously submissive attitudes toward Hollywood romance, Friends with Benefits's conclusion can't help but seem more than a wee bit disingenuous.
  2. Captain America: The First Avenger
    Tommy Lee Jones provides wisecracking levity as Rogers's commanding officer, Hayley Atwell supplies the aforementioned buxom chest and accompanying tough-girl grit as Rogers's British love interest, and Johnson directs with flair, his set pieces defined by both muscularity and clarity.
  3. World on a Wire (1973)
    Fassbinder's sumptuous 205-minute epic is intriguing as a prototype for later and more palatably cynical sci-fi standards like "Blade Runner" or even "Total Recall."
  4. The Woman with the 5 Elephants
    Watching Svetlana Geierat work, parsing the wild complexities of language as she converts Russian into German, the doc becomes a meditation on enforcing order in a world that refuses to accept it.
  5. Fire in Babylon
    Perhaps because the Caribbean serves as its main setting, Fire in Babylon simply can't help but take it easy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Life, Above All
    By the time the narrative winds toward its key revelation, even the most earnest viewer is numbed and emotionally desensitized by the unfathomable bleakness already overcrowding the screen.
  7. Sarah's Key
    Sarah's Key becomes a musing ("meditation" would be too generous) on the importance of uncovering the past that fails to honestly contemplate why such an act is significant.
  8. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    Throughout this American Graffiti-like Circadian shuffle, we can sense these characters coming to grips with human realities that they dare not vocalize.
  9. Another Earth
    The hanging specter of a phantom planet puts a lot of pressure on Another Earth, a resolutely small parable of grief that often feels menaced by its big-idea concept.
  10. A Little Help
    Michael J. Weithorn's direction underlined its understatement via self-consciously patient camerawork and a doleful score, all in order to further the mournful mood.
  11. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    Despite gestures toward modernity and clumsy humanism, the film feels regressive, presenting a version of modern China that's as much of an anesthetized fairy tale as its costume-drama past.
  12. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
    The fact that Yates marshals a mile-long grocery list of business with the grace and poise of an orchestra conductor, and makes it look easy, isn't just flattery, it's an indication of his method.
  13. Hood to Coast
    Hood to Coast mostly suffers from an incessant soundtrack that stuffs the film with a peppiness that blocks the tragedy of its characters from view, as well as their overcoming it.
  14. The Tree
    This is one film that's overly reliant on a dubious central symbol, schematically employed.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Girlfriend
    Girlfriend doesn't present us with anything life-affirming, challenging, or expectation-beating about a lead character with Down's.
  16. Impolex
    It lulls us into its reckless passivity to the point that even the comedic duds possess a languid hint of funny.
  17. Lucky
    The film is a collection of consciously quirky indie tropes in place of any meaningful narrative, and you can practically see the notebook the filmmakers may have written in during a brainstorming session in a college screenwriting seminar.
  18. Daylight
    Daylight reaches an apex of terror that it never quite tops.
  19. Winnie the Pooh
    Pooh's moral triumph isn't all that weighty, but it's almost existentially profound to see the silly old bear forgo honey a little while longer because of someone else's needs.
  20. Tabloid
    A slick, entertaining offering, playing at times like a tarted up "E! True Hollywood Story."
  21. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    What's most disappointing about Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish is how it fails to deliver on the hybridizing NYC gimmickry of its title.
  22. Farmageddon
    Farmageddon quite piquantly raises questions about the dim figures who determine what's suitable for national consumption, but it's more eloquently an ode to a group of dysfunctional, if essential, underground misfits.
  23. Zookeeper
    It's monumentally terrible. "Big Mommas: Like Father, Like Son" now has competition for worst picture of the year.
  24. Horrible Bosses
    As its titular tyrants, Spacey, Aniston, and Farrell all revel in their over-the-top noxiousness, though the latter is mysteriously given short shrift even though his performance is far and way the most novel and gonzo.
  25. Summer of Goliath
    Nicholas Pereda shows nothing short of immense promise here, especially in his enigmatic framing and collaborative effort with his regular DP, Alejandro Colonado.
  26. The Chameleon
    If Barkin and Grondin create a swamp's worth of deceptive intricacies in their moments together, the rest of the cast is regulated to expository mop-up duty.
  27. The Sleeping Beauty
    Judging from The Sleeping Beauty, and the previous "Bluebeard," the provocations stop with the choice of the material, as the tone and style of these films are jarringly well-behaved.
  28. Ironclad
    By making John such an unrepentant freedom-opposing monster, Ironclad denies itself any moral thorniness.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Rapt
    It presents itself in a sleek suit and tie, carrying itself from the moment it enters the room with a steadfast gait that suggests there's no dotted line it can't get us to agree to sign.
  30. Septien
    Like many films early in a director's career, it plays more as a sketchbook of intended future endeavors than as a cohesive and fully realized vision in its own right.
  31. The Ward
    Its ostentatious sense of horror -- think later-day Argento -- is far from suggestive, though some of its queasier moments effectively tap into our fears of not-so-bygone forms of invasive physical therapy.
  32. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    Not only sets up the writer's life as representative of the transitions of early modern Jewish life, but posits his oeuvre as an ongoing chronicle of the shift from a vibrant, unified Yiddish culture to a fractured world-in-exile.
  33. The Ledge
    There's nothing wrong with establishing a field of unlikable characters, but The Ledge not only relies on paper-thin stereotypes, it keeps its allegiances clear from the beginning.
  34. Project Nim
    To drive home the pathos of Nim's mistreatment, James Marsh frequently makes questionable use of the creature's apparent similarity to human beings, trading complex analysis for easy sentiment.
  35. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    Even as an "18 months later" epilogue ensures us that everything's hunky dory, this is one surprisingly grim celebration of a group Rapaport obviously loves.
  36. Small Town Murder Songs
    So intent on being "art" that it's seemingly indifferent to providing simple niceties such as compelling performance, plot, and an atmosphere that isn't predictably oppressive.
  37. Monte Carlo
    Mistaken-identity shenanigans and gooey romance are Monte Carlo's prime commodities.
  38. Delhi Belly
    In spite of its conspicuously crude sense of humor, Delhi Belly is much more family-minded and innocent than it would like its young target audience to believe.
  39. Terri
    Terri, a generously spirited dramedy in the high-school-misfit genre (indie division), finds director Azazel Jacobs taking a calling-card approach to his second feature.
  40. Polytechnique
    Though it's as schematic in construction as Incendies, the film doesn't grind along to a ponderous plot; it's unnerving abstraction of its subject matter more daringly relays Villeneuve's view of the human cost of gender warfare.
  41. Love Etc.
    Love is both a many-splendored and painful thing according to Love Etc., a multi-subject documentary about the various states of amour that, while never succumbing to glibness, also fails to rise above superficial geniality.
  42. Crime After Crime
    It not only makes for riveting cinematic drama (all the more impressive given that it relies so heavily on recounted words rather than illustrated actions), but for first-rate muckraking.
  43. Aurora
    What Puiu seems to be suggesting is that the complexities of human behavior and relationships are beyond the power of the law to comprehend, but are they also beyond the power of the cinema?
  44. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    While I still protest Bay's too-hasty cutting (many shots are good enough to warrant a few extra seconds), his set pieces, and his sets, are magnificently entertaining.
  45. Larry Crowne
    At least Roberts has some star wattage to burn; her megawatt smile is the only thing that ultimately pierces, however faintly, the film's blinding schmaltz.
  46. The Perfect Host
    Although it fancies itself as rigidly complex as a well-played chess match, Nick Tomnay's The Perfect Host is really a game without any rules, one where characters and situations exist in total thrall of the next shocking twist.
  47. Beginning of the Great Revival
    Beginning of the Great Revival is muddled, all right, but it's the helter-skelter speed at which it ticks off names and incidents, both in hopelessly confused action and on-screen text, that seems nearly unprecedented.
  48. Raw Faith
    Peter Wiedensmith's methods aren't as cinematic as they could be, but even this seems to ably mirror Marilyn Sewell's humility.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cars 2
    A crass and uncharacteristically threadbare cash-grab.
  50. The Best and the Brightest
    Writer-director Josh Shelov (working with co-writer Michael Jaeger) is trolling in fertile, easy territory, but rather than mine the subject for what it's worth, he resorts to depressingly cheap mistaken-identity shenanigans and raunchy "he-milk" gags.
  51. Turtle: The Incredible Journey
    Though it boasts its fair share of shots that approximate the turtle's first-person point of view, the film's most dominant presence is its heavy-handed maker.
  52. Bad Teacher
    Despite aping its title in order to suggest quality by association, Bad Teacher has nothing in common with "Bad Santa" -- including, alas, a genuinely nasty sense of humor.
  53. The Names of Love
    Chockfull of ideas in a way that's both scattershot and more than a little exciting.
  54. Passione
    Expressionistic rather than analytical, Passione, John Turturro's cinematic ode to the music of Naples, Italy, unfolds as a compendium of tuneful performances bracketed with the barest of contextualization.
  55. A Love Affair of Sorts
    David Guy Levy's movie foregrounds the potential ugliness of modern technology in order to comment on it. But that doesn't make the film's visuals any less hideous.
  56. Leap Year
    Leap Year is a story of survival, and its poised aesthetic is remarkably keyed to its main character's shell-like behavior.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Vincent Wants to Sea
    Complacent with road-movie tropes, director Ralf Huettner and screenwriter Florian David Fitz's Vincent Wants to Sea is likeable insofar as it's familiar.
  58. General Orders No. 9
    Under the modern mannerisms lies a rather clumsily Romantic -- one might say Wordsworthian -- rant that juxtaposes urbanity against a nebulous, fictitious past.
  59. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
    Can't mask that, at heart, it's merely a trifling tour documentary that gives further excessive attention to the late-night star's 2010 ouster as The Tonight Show host.
  60. A Better Life
    Save for its loving, plaintive, and thorough tour of the seldom-filmed East L.A., A Better Life is, top to bottom, derivative-of Polanski in its direction and of "Bicycle Thieves" in its plot (even Alexandre Desplat's gussy score suggests Angelo Badalamenti playing Mariachi Night).
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    While it may not pack the rollicking drama of his first feature, Street Fight, Marshall Curry's timely If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front likewise chronicles the personal tale behind political headlines.
  62. The Art of Getting By
    If not for its lack of self-awareness, The Art of Getting By would seem to be a spoof of ennui-inflicted teen dramas, because how else to explain the fact that Gavin Wiesen's debut is comprised of only clichés of clichés?
  63. Green Lantern
    Martin Campbell, though a capable director of action (Hal's training session with the Michael Clarke Duncan-voiced Kilowog is proof of that), doesn't have a poet's instincts.
  64. Jig
    Jig doesn't twist itself into the self-important, exploitative think piece on youth ambition that Spellbound was, but it does convincingly suggest that its subjects are in it for more than sport.
  65. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    If you're wondering where the Jim Carrey of "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Dumb and Dumber" fame went, don't look to Mr. Popper's Penguins for answers.
  66. Battle for Brooklyn
    Battle for Brooklyn brings up larger quandaries about urban development which it doesn't begin to address.
  67. R
    If the trajectory of R foreshadows tragedy early and often (what prison film doesn't?), the filmmakers manage to infuse quiet moments of reflection and panic into each man's traumatic experience.
  68. Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    Andrew Rossi's documentary allows The New York Times a kind of nail-biting self-portraiture as it peers off the precipice of (hopefully) a 2.0 rebirth.
  69. Buck
    Life lessons abound in Buck, most of them tied to endlessly reiterated comparisons between man and horse.
  70. Kidnapped
    Its scenario and criminals devoid of any representational depth, and without any substantial ideas underlying its carnage, the film ultimately just assumes the sadistically pragmatic POV of its one-dimensional thugs, pitilessly doling out brutality as a practical means to an end.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Viva Riva!
    The near-slapstick escapes sit uneasily with the raw bits of very adult sex and cringe-worthy close-ups of brutality that dominate the rest of the proceedings.
  72. Road to Nowhere
    The script is busy and unconvincing, and much of the acting is lousy, but there are haunting touches.
  73. Super 8
    J.J. Abrams's latest puts a modern spin on classical material, though here reinvention isn't the goal so much as slavish duplication embellished with muscular CG effects.
  74. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    Kitsch sprung from the lame imagination of adults who probably wish their tweeners lived their lives like Judy Blume characters.
  75. Le Rayon Vert (1986)
    Those who find Rohmer heroines difficult - that is, demanding because they are three-dimensional, non-formulaic creations with an intricate set of foibles and needs - might even be won over by the depth and poignancy of Delphine, one of its maker's most generously etched characters.
  76. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    Queen of the Sun is honey pornography with an activist heart.
  77. Reversion
    While Reversion sets up a complex communication platform for a universe being slowly ripped apart, it doesn't know how to relate this idea in human terms.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Agrarian Utopia
    The Northern Thailand pastoral settings are so refreshing and mesmerizing that they alone can provide the movie's raison d'être.
  79. One Lucky Elephant
    A uniquely passive reminder of the dangers of showering exotic creatures with anthropomorphic affection.
  80. Just Like Us
    Rather than a mature, multifaceted approach, the director's portraits of Dubai, Beirut, Riyadh, and Cairo are heavy on still-photo montages comprised primarily of smiling young people and spontaneous encounters with random jokesters.
  81. The Trip
    Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's shtick - a relentless verbal sparring comprised of dueling impressions, poetry recitations, absurdist riffing, and comic one-upmanship - works best in small doses.
  82. Bride Flight
    It's all very tastefully handled by Ben Sombogaart, shot in plenty of staid compositions whose denuded color scheme suggests a historical remove, but it rarely generates any heat, even during a pair of graphic, but not particularly erotic sex scenes.
  83. Trollhunter
    Injecting some down time to intimate a vast internal life is one thing, but needlessly approximating patches of wasted time is another, and Trollhunter's dully drawn characters suggest that the latter is closer to what André Øvredal came up with.
    • 13 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Love, Wedding, Marriage
    Love, Wedding, Marriage is a movie so shallow and wooden, its actors less models than mannequins, that it resembles a furniture catalogue.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    !Women Art Revolution
    Unlike Pamela Tanner Boll's truly inquisitive "Who Does She Think She Is?", which delves deeply and personally into the lives of a handful of working artist moms, Hershman Leeson introduces us only superficially to her dozens of pioneering friends.
  86. X-Men: First Class
    Despite his apparent comfort with F/X-heavy projects, the obligations of duty to the brand are too much for Matthew Vaughn's strange, singular voice, which rarely has the chance to shape the film unmolested by a curiously bland script.
  87. Turkey Bowl
    Well acted and wise enough to not excessively linger in its atmosphere of genial camaraderie and underlying regret and nostalgia, Turkey Bowl accomplishes its small-scale goals with aplomb.
  88. Mr. Nice
    Writer-director Bernard Rose effectively conjoures an atompshere of poetic stoned-1960s British rebellion, a feeling of woozy, intoxicating possibility that will not-so-eventually be squashed.
  89. Submarine
    It cheats a little, using a mix of amateurish extreme close-ups and striking Welsh industrial vistas to substitute for real technical proficiency, but also applies more formal consideration than most films, namely teen-centered comedies, ever do.
  90. Beginners
    One of the most distinct pleasures of Beginners is the way it puts together fragments of someone's life-presumably the filmmaker's, although little does it matter-with humility, and without vying for some complete whole.
  91. Tuesday, After Christmas
    At first glance, Tuesday, After Christmas seems, in both form and content, only a modestly ambitious endeavor. Yet the singular attention with which it carries out its aims-and the rigorous success it ultimately attains-is nonetheless unsparing, and bracing.
  92. Hello Lonesome
    Hello Lonesome isn't really that much of a movie, but it has something that a number of more polished pictures in the same vein don't: human decency. Sadly, that's noteworthy.
  93. The Hangover Part II
    If The Hangover was a boorish blackout fantasy for our binge-drinking age, The Hangover Part II is something like the contents of a fraternity house's toilet the morning after an insane kegger-namely, regurgitated elements of a more entertaining prior adventure.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Tree of Life
    The Tree of Life's fetching images are like glowing shards of glass, and together they form a grandiose mirror that reflects Malick's impassioned philosophical outlook. It's unquestionably this great filmmaker's most personal work, a revelation of how he came to be, why he creates, and where he feels he's going.
  95. Empire of Silver
    From overwrought flashbacks of Third Master and Madame Kang's initial meetings (and sexual encounter), to the present-day arguments and maneuverings of Lord Kang, Empire of Silver is so determined to stage its material with reverence that it embalms any flickers of passion or tension.
  96. Kung Fu Panda 2
    Exquisite looking but substantially hollow.
  97. The Last Mountain
    Haney's movie is not great cinema, nor was meant to be, but as an introduction to one of the myriad dangers threatening our earth, it serves its cause well enough. And that, after all, is the whole point.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Beautiful Boy
    This complex emotional texture no doubt owes a lot to Bello's stunning performance, which works by screwing with the familiar conventions of reaction shots; she goes cold when we expect her to freak out and explodes when we expect her to be silent.
  99. Rejoice and Shout
    One is left wondering what exactly the now moldy "anything is possible" sentiments of our 44th president have to do with a music whose history and cultural meaning we've just spent the last two hours not learning nearly enough about.
  100. Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)
    The film is less a portrait of one martyred man than a mosaic of a resistant community.
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