Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,768 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: 4,345 out of 7768
  2. Mixed: 1,490 out of 7768
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7768
7768 movie reviews
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  1. Dolphin Tale 2
    Writer-director Charles Martin Smith's tin ear for dialogue and contrived symbolism is as unmistakable as his enormous heart.
  2. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    The film abounds in excruciatingly obvious, often precious, articulations of grief, where armchair philosophizing volleys back and forth with punishing abandon.
  3. Rocks in My Pockets
    This inventive animated feature about depression and familial roots suggests NPR's "The Moth" storytelling series by way of Persepolis, mixing mesmerizing memoir monologue with whimsical animation.
  4. Wetlands
    For its general ludic obsession with all things generally thought of as disgusting, the German film Wetlands is stuck in the anal stage.
  5. The Blue Room
    The film abounds in guilt and grief, reveling in a general sense of hopelessly broken social connection.
  6. Last Days in Vietnam
    For American viewers who don't know, the doc will be a worthy footnote to a long bout of deliberate cultural amnesia, but it's too telling that the Vietnamese remain in the background.
  7. God Help the Girl
    Stuart Murdoch clearly knows quite a bit about crafting pop tunes, but the film's consideration of the work of songwriting is totally flippant.
  8. Life of Riley
    Alain Resnais's overpoweringly beautiful final film dares to push through the ghosts that inhabit the present, standing between the pessimism of an ill-spent past and the optimism of an undefined future.
  9. Gringo Trails
    Pegi Vail beautifully edited film somehow addresses a lot, but ultimately says nothing at all.
  10. Kelly & Cal
    A romantic drama complicated by a stroller and a wheelchair, and its first mistake is in assuming some kind of equity between the two vehicles.
  11. Clouds of Sils Maria
    The pleasure in watching the film becomes a linguistic one as Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart masterfully sharpen their words and hurl them at each other like projectiles out of a blowpipe.
  12. Frontera
    By turns abrasive and stately, sermonic and impartial, plot-heavy and meandering, often within seconds of each other.
  13. Memphis
    The film's music is the city itself as well as a subtle suggestion that Tim Sutton's own digital cinema is just as elusive and intangible as Willis's unwavering sense of dissatisfaction.
  14. Naked Opera
    A film that outwardly wants its depiction of class privilege to be ridiculing and farcical, but lacks the ability to express these critiques in lieu of the means of the class on the chopping block.
  15. The Identical
    The film's so preoccupied with being "inspirational" that it disastrously fails to evoke the allure of rock n' roll, particularly in America in the 1950s, when it represented an erosion of racial and sexual barriers.
  16. As Above, So Below
    The film predictably alternates in scaring its characters by tapping into their deepest fears and having them rub shoulders with the relics of a past that insists on being undisturbed.
  17. Life of Crime
    Down to its too-crisp rubber Nixon masks, Daniel Schechter's film revels in obnoxiously self-aware period detail.
  18. The November Man
    Roger Donaldson embellishes an already overly plotty scenario with hollowly attractive genre superfluities.
  19. Starred Up
    The cautious optimism with which it answers questions about rehabilitation and forgiveness is credible because the characters and setting feel so thoroughly authentic.
  20. The Naked Room
    By eschewing even basic B-roll footage, it ends up feeling even more stripped down than Frederick Wiseman's patient inquisitions, yet nearly as complex overall.
  21. The Damned
    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.
  22. The Notebook
    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.
  23. Last Weekend
    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.
  24. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    The film's attempt at political commentary amounts to a half-baked treatise on good governance in the face of tyranny and socioeconomic exploitation.
  25. The Calling
    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.
  26. Stray Dogs
    Tsai isn't making a social-problem film here, and his critique of patriarchal control is secondary to his portrait of unbearable psychic conditions.
  27. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    Thomas Allen Harris's documentary consistently takes agency away from the art itself with a litany of talking heads.
  28. The Congress
    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.
  29. If I Stay
    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.
  30. When the Game Stands Tall
    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.
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