Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,767 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: 4,344 out of 7767
  2. Mixed: 1,490 out of 7767
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7767
7767 movie reviews
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  1. Killer Elite
    Killer Elite is pleasurable enough, but with a steadier hand, it could've been one for the books.
  2. Abduction
    Odds are John Singleton doesn't know he's made one of the funniest films of the year.
  3. Moneyball
    True to Hollywood's tireless efforts to fit square-peg material into roundish genre niches, this wavering, intermittently smart story of daring to think differently flattens its narrative into formula.
  4. Machine Gun Preacher
    Marc Forster regards the real-life Childers's evolution from heroin-addicted, wife-beating (implied), gun-toting oblivion to born-again do-gooderism with motorized aloofness.
  5. Dolphin Tale
    If its plotting can be slight, the film's restraint and earnestness help prevent it from ever tipping over into outright mawkishness, and its performances similarly avoid over-the-top histrionics.
  6. Pearl Jam Twenty
    Wholly uninterested in puffing up his subjects into an iconic rock outfit on a par with their idols Led Zeppelin and the Who, Crowe instead merely tells their story free from the constraints of rise-fall-rise clichés.
  7. Art History
    The staging of this dissociative roundelay is still presented in a forcefully lo-fi format, prizing roughly framed shots, improvisation, and flat characters, but there are ever clearer indications that Swanberg is producing something more than empty-headed slacker cinema.
  8. There Was Once...
    A not insignificant act of oral history, Gabor Kalman's There Was Once… makes for considerably less compelling cinema whenever it turns its focus away from the talking-head testimony of the Holocaust survivors of Kalosca, Hungary.
  9. Thunder Soul
    Forcefully traditional and sentimental, Thunder Soul benefits most from the cinematic turn of the actual events it documents, which allowed the beloved teacher's life to end on a perfectly bittersweet note.
  10. The Whale
    When considering the best voiceover artists in cinema history, Ryan Reynolds doesn't immediately come to mind as an especially dynamic one.
  11. A Bird of the Air
    Naturally, given the film's somewhat precious air of spiritualism, the parroted phrase that speaks most clearly to Lyman is a quotation from the book of Ecclesiastes that gives the film its title and gives Fiona a chance to offer a blithely optimistic interpretation of that most dour of Biblical books.
  12. Toast
    Joan aside, the film goes down easy enough.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    White Wash
    "Why are there so few black surfers?" That's the question posed by Ted Wood's incisive, if ultimately repetitive, documentary White Wash, and to answer the question the film digs deep into US political and social history.
  14. Weekend
    A ticking stopwatch hangs over Weekend that amplifies the intensity of every conversation, every fight, every drink, every copulation. In other words, it's a device.
  15. Puncture
    Puncture's story only moves forward thanks to Evans's charm. But a good lead performance can't single-handedly save thin material.
  16. Limelight
    Limelight focuses far too much on the club's downfall and not nearly enough on what attracted its denizens there in the first place, managing only to preach to the choir, forgetting to also take it to church.
  17. One Fall
    One Fall is a bafflingly lame assemblage of self-help platitudes, the sort of film in which every narrative detail is specifically placed to pave the way for a pat moral you've grasped before the opening credits have barely concluded.
  18. Straw Dogs
    Despite Lurie's part-time efforts to lend the film some sense of place, the impulse to hot-ify everything from Peckinpah's considerably more earthbound original ultimately outpaces his meager good intentions.
  19. I Don't Know How She Does It
    The witticisms are delivered via a suffocating glut of audience hand-holding, which includes constant doc-style confessionals, whimsical on-screen text, studio-audience sound effects, voices in Kate's head, and voiceover narration.
  20. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    The key to good, or at least effective, agitprop (and Oliver Stone and Michael Moore know this) is that, yes, it must simplify matters, but it necessitates canny presentation so that it may truly get into viewers' blood streams and rile them.
  21. My Afternoons with Margueritte
    Germain's bonhomie with the bistro regulars has the feel of a TV comedy pilot, which is more than can be said of the monologues he speaks to his cat, one on the inadequacies of the dictionary.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Weird World of Blowfly
    If The Weird World of Blowfly is any different from other documentaries about eccentric characters from music-world obscurity, it's in the contentious topics Clarence touches on in his cantankerous speech.
  23. Sound It Out
    The film mostly works because it doesn't overplay the consequence of its subject.
  24. Silent Souls
    Folklore, rituals, and the past weigh heavily on Silent Souls, which is somewhat endemic of films from Fedorchenko's home country of Russia.
  25. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Shut Up Little Man! fails to legitimize its topic as one of any significance.
  26. Prince of Swine
    Played as broadly and as crudely as you please (in terms of acting, direction, "edgy" dialogue), Prince of Swine paints a grimly ugly portrait of male sexual violence and female submission.
  27. Happy, Happy
    The filmmaker looks to American modes of visual and aural expression to give Happy, Happy its soul, but all her fetish accomplishes is depersonalizing her story, making a sitcom of her character's lives.
  28. Berlin 36
    Excepting a momentary late-film lapse into eye-rolling double-exposure tomfoolery, the film is as aesthetically bland as a film could conceivably be, the perfunctory camerawork imbuing the proceedings with an ugly, indistinctive gloss.
  29. 3
    3 is a smidgeon film. Take a smidgeon of scientific/ethical discussion, throw in a pinch of dance/poetry/dream sequences, tie the whole thing up with split-screen montages and you no longer just have a film about a love triangle, but a Godardian objet d'art.
  30. Restless
    Gus Van Sant's cinema, which of late has been fixated on immersing viewers in particular times and spaces, takes a detour into excruciating quirkland with Restless.
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