Slant Magazine's Scores

For 7,772 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:
7772 movie reviews
  1. From the opening montage alone, it's clear that Australian director Kieran Darcy-Smith plans to play his cards close to the vest in this maddeningly underwritten thriller/domestic-drama hybrid.
  2. The film works best when it focuses viewer attention most acutely on the story, deflecting it away from the director's manipulations.
  3. The Prey doesn't have the obsessive pull of a great thriller, as it's undeniably an impersonal toy, but it's a hell of a toy.
  4. The alignment with Herman's perspective, even as it never downplays the gravity of his crimes, leads the film into a set of obvious conclusions.
  5. Ably leads us through its extensive investigation, faltering only when the camera lingers on Jeremy Scahill for a touch too long at the expense of his interview subjects.
  6. We're never far away from a crude digression demoting an ethereal sense of artistry to hunkered-down artifice.
  7. The filmmakers certainly exaggerate (i.e. exploit) their subject, but for a community that prides itself on shock value, there seems no sufficient alternative.
  8. There's nothing behind all this sturm und drang but a lineup of insubstantial ciphers, all false fronts and empty words in a pretend world not quite conducive to emotional investment.
  9. The documentary is committed not to some pseudo-factual documentary tradition, but to a more engaging realist poesis.
  10. The art of storytelling is both of distinct narrative interest and personal issue in the latest payload of calcified nonsense from one of modern cinema's oddest would-be auteurs.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kazakh cinema's stalwart auteur Darzhan Omirbaev adapts Crime and Punishment to modern-day Almaty, but with little to say beyond the obvious.
  11. The film's aesthetic is marked by off-tempo editing and a tone that vacillates between grim and coy, and though it's occasionally visually evocative, it's also unmistakably over-calculated.
  12. Forlorn depictions of love and death may dignify Neil Jordan's film, but narrative withholding ultimately drives a stake into its unmistakable heart.
  13. It showcases the evolving interests and talents of Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, but expands them and channels them into a more traditional thriller framework.
  14. Ridiculousness played with a straight face, the film is endearing even if it's never quite hilarious.
  15. We may find out how Gedeck's character reacts to her isolation, but we're never privy to her actual feelings, largely because in a film about a sudden onset of solitude, Pölsler is far too afraid of silence.
  16. James Marsh carries forward the mood and menace of the opening into the balance of the work, perfectly matching his aesthetic strategies to the story's shifting moral terrain.
  17. The film's most striking quality, and it's not insignificant, is director Margarethe von Trotta's refusal to fossilize the controversies she dramatizes.
  18. And that's the thing with Epic: It's something close to an animated masterpiece, provided it's watched on mute.
  19. Perhaps the first important film about street hoops, even if the overall product struggles from a lack of focus.
  20. Its looseness adequately portrays Plimpton as an inwardly conflicted figure, but it fails to make much of a case for his legacy outside of The Paris Review's still-noticeable brand.
  21. The film unfolds in unhurried dramatic terms that come to take on an almost fatalistic force.
  22. Writer-director Nika Agiashvili buys into the concept of the American dream with the zeal of a true believer.
  23. The film is an ultra-violent parody of unearned self-entitlement, of people who feel tricked into a lifestyle they refuse to challenge for the comforts it still offers.
  24. The convoluted mockumentary setup indicates that this is all meant to be taken as a meta exercise in Hollywood-insider rib-nudging, although the proceedings rarely rise to the occasion.
  25. The research and elucidating synthesis on display effectively illuminate the pernicious aura of a lifestyle pursued by the yearning, lost souls of the time.
  26. Justin Lin strives to approximate something like Ocean's Eleven for petrosexuals, but testosterone outweighs wit and cleverness at every turn in Chris Morgan's starched script.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Minimalist in its aesthetics and soundtrack, quiet and deliberate in its plot, but nonetheless familiar--endearing and a vital addition to the small but growing Tibetan cinema.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Kim Ki-duk's film makes an exaggerated, undeserved show of its cruelty, indignity, and aspirations of importance.
  27. The film is densely plotted, occasionally bordering on the convoluted, but the clarity and inventiveness of the direction keeps the drama and the action constantly percolating.

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