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
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    As thorough as the filmmakers are in providing a political context for Fishbone, they're often reduced to tunnel vision in an attempt to lift the unheralded band to its rightful place in music history.
  1. This arc may sound particularly familiar on paper, but To Be Heard finds the unique passions and heartaches in all three stories, allowing the viewer to become invested in whatever outcome befalls each subject.
  2. Oliver Laxe goes full-on meta by casting himself in the role of a visiting moviemaker who travels to Morocco to shoot footage with disadvantaged children living in a shelter.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    This is a film which takes classic source material and imbues it on screen with a sense of wonder commensurate to its prior form, perhaps offering an even more visceral impression of the possibilities inherent to this beautiful, tragic world.
  3. The movie's understanding of how the group taps into people's deep need to believe ensures that the film remains not only fair-minded, but sensitive to the tortured emotions of its conflicted central characters.
  4. Retreat's wheels are constantly spinning, but they're not always taking us anywhere.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    It's as if Soderbergh expects the film to mostly resolve itself, rounded out by the asses-in-the-seats appeal of the material, rote thematic underpinning, and ample charms of the cast.
  5. Watching Dennis Farina dominate every scene is a joy, and thankfully the actor makes the most of this opportunity.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Assault raises many more questions than it answers, and its overall objective is puzzling and remains shrouded in political agenda.
  6. Even as it takes pleasure in imagining the wheeling and dealing that politicos make when no one is looking, it never offers as much insight into the process by which a president is made as its premise would seem to promise.
  7. The Love We Make is mostly about placing viewers in an icon's shoes as he makes a rehabilitative gesture toward a city with which he's grown considerable roots.
  8. With six protagonists serving as a cross-section of Tehran's youthful population, director Hossein Keshavarz's Dog Sweat is a somber, minor-keyed debut feature about the daily manifestations of oppression in contemporary Iran.
  9. Using a whirlwind of archival footage, maps, and split screens, Edmon Roch conveys Juan Pujol Garcia's reign as Europe's premiere spy in a constantly fluid fashion, aesthetically mimicking his crafty and cagey nature.
  10. The most dramatic material, such as Victor DeNoble's much-applauded congressional testimony, more or less traffics common knowledge without bothering to provide fresh emotional context.
  11. The surest sign that a filmmaker recognizes the insularity of his or her project is the presence of perfunctory attempts to hint at a wider political context.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Half-formed expressions of disappointment, hope, struggle, confusion, and boyish playfulness on faces otherwise marked by youth's inexperience, and a self-consciousness brought on by the curiosity of being filmed, constitute the most memorable moments of Lads & Jockeys, a documentary on 14-year-old aspiring jockeys in France.
  12. It works too hard to keep matters on an even, we're-all-more-alike-than-different keel, which is just one part of its chief problem of forcefully conveying information and intent.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Even if this Haruki Murakami adaptation amounts to a gorgeous but lethargic emo ballad, there's no denying the stately lyricism of its melancholy.
  13. At the very least, The Pill could have been a pleasant exercise in screenwriting sharpness if Fred and Mindy's situation had been confined and (un-)resolved within the confines of its very promising first scene.
  14. A freeform, New York-based variation on the Arabian Nights tales by Jonas Mekas is both a pan-narrative and a disarming portrait of its sweetly curious maker.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    When its third act erupts into full-blown theatrical maximalism, Tyler Perry's Temptation practically turns into Brian De Palma's Temptation.
  15. There's great potential for the kind of issues that are taken on, but nothing is resolved, and the biggest questions, of guilt and shame, the gulf of understanding between the first world and the third, remain unengaged.
  16. Nothing here is wrong, but beyond pointing out that sexually charged teenage girls are likely to be misunderstood in an oppressive small town, there's nothing that's especially insightful here either.
  17. A reasonably sensitive and occasionally insightful look into the mind and psyche of an impassioned and deeply troubled artist.
  18. Gambling on the unlikely redemption of a doom metal fuck-up, this potential rock-doc tragedy reveals a bromance of idol and idolator.
  19. One of its strengths is a knowledge of when to unfurl information, particularly for the strongest emotional effect.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    It's likely, then, that the film was directed by Susanne Rostock the same way Belfonte's new memoir, My Song, was written with Vanity Fair's Michael Shnayerson: to articulate, polish, and edit what the vociferous and at times alarmingly honest Belfonte wants to tell us without injuring his credibility outside of the left any further.
  20. Whatever one ends up thinking about The Snowtown Murders, it's difficult to deny that it's a deeply impressive work.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The film recognizes how resolutely derivative it is, and it deigns to relish rather than efface that quality. The result is a trifle, but a fairly amusing one.
  21. Nanni Moretti's latest is a mixed bag that too often settles for easy, superficial laughs.

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