Slant Magazine's Scores

For 7,776 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 6.3 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:
7776 movie reviews
  1. Florian Habicht unwisely shifts his focus from Sheffield and its unique denizens to the band's personal history, effectively turning the film into an episode of Behind the Music.
  2. The narrative works through the many contradictions brewing inside its main character in the wake of his personal actualization without ever feeling like a dramatic checklist.
  3. Perhaps Sanjay Rawal's most fascinating excursion into agriculture's dark side is the vineyards of Napa Valley, where the practically Eden-like scenery masks a dreary labor model.
  4. Yell the word "independent" loud and long enough and people might forget that they're seeing the same old, patronizing Hollywood clichés, recycled, rebranded, and regurgitated for their gullible, eager consumption.
  5. Once the media caravan departs, the doc meanders, torn between its obligation to reportage and its interest in a town riven by America's thirst for justice.
  6. The film soon settles into a confident, well-staged groove, primarily because of two unambiguously terrific performances.
  7. To dismiss it as simply an act of hipster appropriation is to cop out, because appropriation is the film's thematic meat.
  8. There's much more plot floating around during the sequel, all leading up to a climax at the "KEN Conference" that suffers in comparison to Silicon Valley's mockery of the same milieu.
  9. It shrugs off the bigger questions about Iranian politics its first half appears to raise, falling back instead on a gestalt of the eternal, Kafkaesque regime, wherever the viewer may find it.
  10. By rooting Noni's self-image issues in a controlling mother, the script provides the film with a tame, melodramatic structure that dulls the thorny matters of identity and expression at its center.
  11. Gabe Polsky's quiet yet welcome achievement is to allow us to see the individual amid the politics, clearly and sympathetically.
  12. The film is ultimately, and disappointingly, revealed to be a contraption that's less concerned with mental portraiture than with getting all of its expository ducks in a row.
  13. Perhaps Karen Leigh Hopkins's intent was to subtly suggest the surreal aspects of the story, but ultimately she underplays her hand.
  14. This is a confident work that smashingly updates the Southern gothic for contemporary generations.
  15. The filmmakers play Catherine's disgustingly narcissistic sense of entitlement as endemic to the supposedly girl-next-door charms befitting the film's thoroughly normative gender politics.
  16. The cinematographic approach of the film suggests some unholy hybrid of the aesthetic and genre indulgences of Michael Bay and the hyper-literalist plot construction of Christopher Nolan.
  17. Whereas "Bad Santa" was nastier and riskier, as well as more mischievously winsome, A Merry Friggin' Christmas is as curiously timid as it is morally dubious.
  18. If there's any ambiguity to be found in the film's prolonged last gasps, which reach for tragedy, but only sow more epistemic confusion, it's of a mawkish and unpalatable variety.
  19. A reminder that crime movies pointedly inspired by other, better genre films can still be enjoyable, if they wear their influences lightly and cleverly connect them to something tangibly human.
  20. The film is spare, empathic, and deeply introspective, and its imagery, such as a pelican fascinated by its own reflection, is so sublime in its kookiness as to be worthy of Werner Herzog.
  21. The film places its characters in a reflexive historical continuum that dooms them to be mere demonstrative types from start to finish.
  22. Rather than commit to exploring Jessabelle's existential crisis, the filmmakers opt to pile on the clichés straight until the rotten denouement.
  23. The film quickly becomes a study of grief and retribution, and the question of how exactly technology can and should be utilized in the treatment of these emotions.
  24. Timidity and perhaps fear, of visual confinement, of lingering emotional engagement, closes Nacho Vigalondo's most promising windows.
  25. Much like his hero, Christopher Nolan's goal seems to be to take the humor and wildness out of imagination, to see invention in rigidly practical and scientific terms.
  26. Christian Schwochow's film is a tense psychological slow burn, putting us in the muddled headspace of its protagonist as she gradually comes unglued.
  27. This is muckraking journalism that moves confidently with the brio of an action thriller.
  28. As the psychology of the characters hardly connects with their distinctive milieu, the film merely suggests a conventional family drama littered with empty pot-shots at governmental authority.
  29. It's easy to see how Daniel Simpson's desire to return the found-footage genre to its roots resulted in cheap imitation.
  30. Refusing to mourn anything, displaying a Futurist-style disdain for the past, Sion Sono imagines a world in which static adherence to old ideas leads directly to doom.

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