Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,786 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 6.2 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: 4,357 out of 7786
  2. Mixed: 1,495 out of 7786
  3. Negative: 1,934 out of 7786
7786 movie reviews
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    • 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. Kung Fu Panda 2
    Exquisite looking but substantially hollow.
  14. 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.
  16. 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.
  17. Our Land (Nuestra Tierra)
    The film is less a portrait of one martyred man than a mosaic of a resistant community.
  18. Pillion
    If there’s humor to be found in some of the particulars, it’s never to judge or to poke fun, but to revel in the very real delights of consensual sexual roleplay.
  19. White Building
    The film’s depiction of life impacted by urban transformation conjures a palpable aura of entrapment and helplessness.
  20. The Night of the 12th
    The film wants for deeper characterizations or a closer detailing of criminal procedure.
  21. Matter Out of Place
    Consisting largely of long takes sans music or commentary, the film uncovers the paradox that trash, so apparently devoid of meaning or use-value, needs little commentary.
  22. Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio
    The film is marked by wild flashes of invention, all born of painstaking craft and devotion.
  23. Wood and Water
    Jonas Bak’s semi-autobiographical film is a gentle depiction of modern alienation.
  24. The Scary of Sixty-First
    In a way, the film feels like a true heir to the petulant, low-budget horror cinema of the ‘70s and ‘80s.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Arrebato (1979)
    Arrebato is an arresting feat of self-aware filmmaking, lashing together experimental tendencies with the tropes and trappings of genre cinema.
  26. Azor
    With its elegantly restrained cinematography, exquisitely understated performances, and quietly sumptuous production design, Azor embodies the same well-mannered urbanity as its protagonist.
  27. What We Left Unfinished
    Mariam Ghani’s documentary spurs audiences to consider the politics that underlies any artistic activity.
  28. The Real Thing
    The film reveals Kôji Fukada to be playing a patient, very resonant long game, underscoring the struggle to wrest oneself out of social vices.
  29. Blizzard of Souls
    The filmmakers are unafraid of the picturesque, lighting scenes so they resemble old-master canvases.
  30. Survival Skills
    While mostly pulling off this tricky balancing act of humor and real-life horror, the film doesn’t quite go far enough in its critiques.
  31. Koko-di Koko-da
    Nothing hinders surrealism more than the sense that its creators are actively working for it, though Koko-di Koko-da is nonetheless difficult to dismiss.
  32. Buoyancy
    The film never quite pushes beyond the archetypal nature of its scenario to fully unearth its characters’ psychological turmoil.
  33. Coup 53
    Once Taghi Amirani turns his attention to the coup itself, his film snaps into shape, with Walter Murch skillfully knitting together new and old interviews to lay out the story in highly dramatic form.
  34. Picture of His Life
    Amos Nachoum has a vulnerability that he manages to locate in animals without diminishing their capacity for violence.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Police Story 2 (1988)
    Though ostensibly sub-Hitchcockian wrong-man mysteries, with a liberal serving of cop-drama clichés rounding out the narrative framework, the films are better enjoyed as purely cinematic catalogues of set pieces and sight gags, spectacles of breathless physical excess.
  36. Possum
    In the end, there's little payoff for all the repetitive series of evocative visions and mute stares.
  37. Winter Brothers
    If nothing else, the film is a feat of formal conception and craftsmanship.
  38. Damsel
    It's well established by now that the mythic Old West was always a trope written and controlled by men, and that there's really no bottom to which men won't stoop when women are a scarce quantity. In its mad rush toward performative allyship, the film exhausts every possible means of conveying those bombshells.
  39. Let the Sunshine In
    Claire Denis finds the inexorable beauty (and sadness) in that most corrosive and fugacious of feelings.
  40. The Rider
    It manifests a mounting sense of disillusionment, suggesting that the rodeo lifestyle many characters so unreservedly romanticize often leads to physical and psychological ruin.
  41. Zama
    How strange and apt that the year’s most sensorially and ideologically dense film is also a comedy of microaggressions, built on the minor workplace humiliations of a pencil-pusher in the 1790s.
  42. Ismael's Ghosts
    Arnaud Desplechin’s latest simultaneously collapses and expands his entire body of work, reflexively revealing its many layers, like a pop-up book.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Police Story (1985)
    Like many of the most compelling martial-arts movies, the Police Story films more closely resembles a dance picture than any kind of action blockbuster, with meticulously choreographed fight sequences standing in for fan-baiting musical numbers.
  44. Western
    The absence of anything traditionally "painterly" reflects an ambivalent attitude toward the kind of capitalistic pro-growth machinations on display in the film.
  45. Before We Vanish
    On its own, this is a fun, broadly satirical alien-invasion film, more self-aware than self-serious, but its beauty, its poignancy, comes from its relationship to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's other work.
  46. Lover for a Day
    The film is yet another of Phillippe Garrel's densely anecdotal studies of romantic fidelity.
  47. The Other Side of Hope
    The Other Side of Hope fulfills the vague sense of its aspirational title as a film limited in scope and led only by the guidance of its maker's skeptical positivity.
  48. Mudbound
    As striking as Mudbound's combat scenes are, they largely exist as setup for the postwar-set second half of the film, which scrutinizes the way that the atrocities witnessed in Europe laid bare the unsustainable hypocrisy in America's own bigoted divisions.
  49. On the Beach at Night Alone
    Hong Sang-soo simultaneously positions filmmaking as the ultimate act of atonement and evasion, eviscerating himself so that he may live to stage several more films about the futility of getting hammered and worshipping and bedding gorgeous young women.
  50. Most Beautiful Island
    Many genre movies in which bad things happen to women end with them fighting back, but here, as people surely would in real life, they just take the money and run.
  51. Félicité
    Alain Gomis never reconciles throughout how the film's disparate parts are meant to fit together.
  52. Tempestad
    This is a heartfelt essay film that digs into several instances of trauma occasioned by Mexico's drug war.
  53. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
    It brims with empathy and righteous outrage at the treatment of trans people, but with only a vague organizational structure, it ultimately feels scattershot, passionately covering a number of important issues without quite unifying them into a coherent whole.
  54. Barracuda
    It's anchored by a pair of dynamic, intuitive performances which mine the psychological complexities of an understandably troubled relationship.
  55. Autumn, Autumn
    The film is a record of everyday spaces and the emotionally charged human dramas that pass through them.
  56. Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous
    Throughout, Christopher Doyle acknowledges that time and reality are often marked by a slippery subjectivity.
  57. Boris Without Béatrice
    The film offers an oxymoronic parable that’s been utilized countless times by cinema, in loose reiterations of A Christmas Carol: The protagonist must learn humility after learning that the world revolves around him.
  58. Jackals
    Though far more elegant in execution than most Rob Zombie-imitating films, Jackals smugly wears its violent tediousness as a badge of honor.
  59. The Villainess
    When one finally puts together the pieces of the film’s scattered narrative puzzle, The Villainess doesn’t add up to all that much beyond a slick march toward an act of bloody revenge.
  60. England Is Mine
    England Is Mine is a tour ride through a legend’s formative years that’s more concerned with the familiar signposts than the intricacies of the scenery along the way.
  61. Kékszakállú
    Like Shohei Imamura, Argentinian writer-director Gaston Solnicki can be understood as a cinematic "entomologist."
  62. The Chaser
    The opaque ethics of The Chaser elide the reductive nature of binary pairs, focusing instead on the far more piquant complexity of human behavior.
  63. Halloween II (2009)
    Treading well-worn ground to diminishingly creepy returns is a bone-deep problem for Zombie’s latest, especially with regard to his characters.
  64. You, the Living
    Humor and sorrow are equally immediate emotions throughout, whether in the writer-director's traditionally structured setup-punchline scenes or his strange non sequiturs
  65. Whatever Works
    As it unfolds, Whatever Works assumes an increasing note of poignancy, becoming a quasi-optimistic story about securing whatever little love you can in this fakakta world.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Summer Hours
    It’s a testament to Assayas’s empathy that he is able to build the entirety of his drama in the distance between his principals’ forgivable self-interest and their quiet kindness.
  67. Star Trek
    Like the original cast’s best movie, The Wrath of Khan, this Star Trek essentially turns out to be a war film, with the occasional philosophical timeout to discuss love, friendship, and duty until the next bone-crunching fistfight or multi-weapon rumble with the Romulans. But Bana’s villain lacks the wit and corny majesty of Ricardo Montalban’s.
  68. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    The action is perfunctory and forgettable, albeit no more so than the script's range of clichés.
  69. Quantum of Solace
    Updating this anachronistic cash cow with the scrappy and sexy Craig still looks like a wise move, but it requires a greater quantum of style than Solace provides.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Just Happened
    Generally, the film is a compelling portrait of Hollywood egoism, though it suffers from this very egoism itself. It’s hard to tell where the film is representing reality, and where it is representing a caricature of reality.
  71. Fraulein
    Fraulein almost entirely shuns backstory, coloring around the lives of its characters with ostentatious style (in this case, fuzzy-wuzzy visual vibes and music tailored to each character’s generation) and hoping audiences won’t mind filling in the blanks.
  72. Take Out
    Economic anxiety is rarely spoken about in the film, but the life-and-death importance of dollars and cents is felt in every frame.
  73. Lion's Den
    Although the film is essentially contemplative, there’s little here worth contemplating.
  74. Viva
    Viva‘s intentionally flat performances and flatter double entendres...mercilessly satirize the Playboy mindset even as the film revels in the kitschiness of it all.
  75. My Blueberry Nights
    Every shot is painstakingly thought out, but less emphasis is placed on the human face than on the surfaces that reflect it and the objects that obscure it, and the overall effect is close to that of fetish art.
  76. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone
    There are no new explanations here, just a better packaged version of what Anno already delivered, which makes You Are (Not) Alone very attractive but fundamentally pointless.
  77. The Walker
    Paul Schrader blends lethargic self-referentiality with anemic political jabs in The Walker.
  78. 300
    Snyder attaches no larger significance to his arresting visuals. He’s only intent on eliciting “Whoa, dude!” reactions, of which there are fewer and fewer once it becomes clear that there’s nothing sustaining the centerpiece razzle-dazzle sequences except awful dialogue and no-dimensional characters.
  79. The Wayward Cloud
    Tsai's most off-putting work is nonetheless worthy of intense and ongoing consideration.
  80. Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience
    By acknowledging and publicizing its subjects’ writing, the film proves a stirring tribute to those who fight; in their stories, it offers a potent reminder that war is a hell suffered both externally and—more permanently—internally.
  81. Rocky Balboa
    Stallone yearns to investigate the loneliness of a man who can’t get over the past, an endeavor which entails unwieldy speeches (delivered by the actor in his patented “yews guys” patois) and reflective shots of the city’s skyline.
  82. Casino Royale
    Casino Royale is one of the good ones and not just for the way it wittily recontextualizes several series touchstones.
  83. Sólo con tu pareja
    This sexy, often funny comedy about AIDS is missing one important thing: a crucial sense of danger.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Idiocracy
    Idiocracy is too scattershot and compromised to push the conceptual bleakness beyond the realm of lowbrow comedy, though Judge’s cultural ire remains bracing throughout: For all the characters’ slapsticky imbecility, Judge makes it clear that it’s their docile acceptance (read: political inactivity) that makes them true dumbasses.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts
    Lee foregoes useless speechifying, opting instead to create an epic document of New Orleans’s struggle, death, abandonment and subsequent reconstruction (a requiem in four acts) that should prove instructive for years to come, if not in facts than for its emotional scope: an up-close, deeply empathetic and soulful journey through the stories that make up this catastrophe.
  86. Mission: Impossible III
    Shallow to its core and as propulsive as a runaway locomotive, it's the most blatantly summer movie-ish of the Mission Impossibles. And also, surprisingly, the most viscerally entertaining.
  87. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
    Radiating a startling intensity, the film demands to be reckoned with.
  88. Silent Hill
    Despite its often-overwhelming nonsensicality, there’s ultimately something irresistibly fiendish about Silent Hill, which not only condemns holier-than-thou religious zealots, but also—if I understand its gruesome finale—seems to be firmly on the side of the Devil.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance
    Format owes much to Short Cuts, but Haneke’s wintry vision lacks Altman’s sense of life overflowing beyond the frame.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Memories of Murder
    The film is overlong at 132 minutes, but never dull or predictable, especially in delivering an ambiguous ending that goes against the grain of most Hollywood slasher films. One wishes it strayed even further from the land of the Hannibal Lecter, then we’d really have something.
  91. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    Oshii’s attention to detail is ravishing and his distractions of time and space evoke what it must be like to be trapped within the confines of M.C. Escher’s “Sky and Water.” Pity then that Innocence is so impenetrable, both aesthetically and philosophically.
  92. Hero
    Hero is elliptical, primal, radically disjointed, and female-empowering. Everything a wu xia should be…and then som
  93. They Came Back
    It’s rather amazing how far the film is able to coast on its uniquely fascinating premise, even if it isn’t much of a stretch for its director: Campillo co-authored Laurent Cantet’s incredible Time Out, a different kind of zombie film about the deadening effects of too much work on the human psyche, and They Came Back is almost as impressive in its concern with the existential relationship between the physical and non-physical world.
  94. She Hate Me
    Most contracts are negotiated with John Hancocks, but in She Hate Me, deals are sealed with hot lesbian action. Spike, get a clue.
  95. King Arthur
    Revisionist mythmaking of the most bland variety, the Jerry Bruckheimer produced King Arthur purports to tell the true tale of the ancient British hero and his valiant Knights of the Round Table by stripping away the magic, mystery, and majesty of the fable and replacing it with grim n' grimy realism.
  96. Springtime in a Small Town
    The film exudes a sense of fleetingness; however static these lives may be, Tian's narrative perfectly evokes a changing season.
  97. Dawn of the Dead
    This new Dawn of the Dead doesn't stop to take a breath, and remains frequently scary and engaging in the moment without leaving much to chew on afterward.
  98. The Battle of Algiers
    Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is a political tract that understands itself also as a cinematic exercise.
  99. Ichi the Killer
    Unhinged even for Takashi Miike, Ichi the Killer suggests a bloody and ejaculate-stained Rorschach inkblot, reveling in ultraviolence that can be interpreted to flatter any adventurous audience's sensibilities.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    25th Hour
    With all of its oversights and indulgences, 25th Hour is still a persuasive, undeniably fascinating film—watching Lee throw everything on his mind into the fray, no matter how irreconcilable with the story, makes for an interesting experience.
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