Slant Magazine's Scores

For 7,779 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:
7779 movie reviews
  1. From its first draw of blood onward, it bolts down a foreseeable slasher-movie trajectory, laying on thick the dramatic irony while constantly inventing new reasons to punish its characters for old iniquities.
  2. János Szász's film is a thoroughly provocative WWII screed that almost deliberately goes out of its way to avoid sentimentality or bathos of any sort.
  3. The filmmakers are content to idealize everyone's unchecked narcissism and idle privilege--an inquiry-free recipe for disaster in an age when the American wealth gap is wider and more detrimental than ever.
  4. The film's attempt at political commentary amounts to a half-baked treatise on good governance in the face of tyranny and socioeconomic exploitation.
  5. The premise of faith-based assisted suicide as a motivating factor for a madman's killing spree is initially intriguing, but quickly revealed as solemn window dressing.
  6. Tsai isn't making a social-problem film here, and his critique of patriarchal control is secondary to his portrait of unbearable psychic conditions.
  7. Thomas Allen Harris's documentary consistently takes agency away from the art itself with a litany of talking heads.
  8. The film lacks the manic fly-by-night invention of, say, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, or even the ripe erotic ambiguity of something like Avatar.
  9. The film, based on the novel by Gayle Forman, is an almost deliberate confirmation of Alison Bechdel's claim that women in film are so often shown only in relation to men.
  10. Jim Caviezel commits only to the level of God-like omniscience that Mel Gibson whipped into him a decade ago, and as such his character often seems less a teacher than an appropriately shadowy figurehead of authority.
  11. Whereas a single, stinging one-liner would have sufficed Jacques Tourneur or Fritz Lang, Frank Miller's overcompensating flood of pulpy dialogue only renders his characters flat and sans empathy.
  12. Its offbeat aesthetic largely flaunts for appeal, suffocating character and thematic ambition underneath its flashiness.
  13. More than just a thorough examination of hardcore pornography, Christina Voros's doc is also a sort of chronicle of the filmmaking process.
  14. Sean Ellis doesn't so much understand Filipino society as merely sees it as grist for standard genre fare, perhaps hoping that the foreign setting will somehow automatically make the clichés feel fresh.
  15. If the film defies conventional form, it does so without the gravitas that conceptual cohesion brings, quickly rendering its experimentation into gratuitous aesthetic masturbation.
  16. Jennifer M. Kroot plays things a bit too straight and safe by giving into basic emotional and thematic possibilities of each period in Takei's prolific early life and subsequent Hollywood career.
  17. Ira Sachs's push for heartrending poetry makes it clear that the film is putting too fine a gloss on the acute pains of one small tragedy.
  18. An immensely gifted physical performer, Donnie Yen isn't strong enough an actor to suggest an authentic inner life to his character beyond a vague sense of stone-faced dissatisfaction.
  19. The film is uproariously funny, but its laughs don't come with an aftertaste of cynicism so much as they are the aftertaste of cynicism.
  20. A visual pleasure, and refreshingly free of message or structure, but it leaves an aftertaste similar to that of an awkward party spent among intellectuals.
  21. Cherien Dabis is least successful at connecting her character May's marital crisis to the rumblings of her repressed heritage.
  22. Lost in this barely coherent and clichéd hugger-mugger is the initial killer-website conceit and the attending erotic dread, which is retrospectively revealed to be an illusory siren call.
  23. The female characters on Mad Men are probably the show's strongest asset, but here they're hollow to the point of insult.
  24. The internal crisis of its protagonist amounts to the flicking of an on/off switch rather than the ebb and flow of a consciousness being born.
  25. Level Five pictorializes the cruel moment when curiosity encounters tragedy, and the all-too-human abandonment of interest that can follows.
  26. In the end, any and all potential B-movie fun is extinguished by Ragnarok's depressingly listless anonymity.
  27. For a life beyond mere DVD supplementary material, the film could use a dose of rigor to balance out its steady stream of congratulatory pit stops.
  28. The film finally works because of its multitudinous interests in adolescent shell-shock, where paralysis and uncertainty can only be momentarily assuaged through gendered outrage.
  29. It comes as no surprise that writer-director Vincent Grashaw wrote the first draft of this movie soon after graduating high school.
  30. For all the brawn on display, the film never slows down to take in the thrill and talent of hand-to-hand combat.

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