Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 1,406 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 32% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 65% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 10.2 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 51
Highest review score:
Leviathan
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 631 out of 1406
  2. Mixed: 284 out of 1406
  3. Negative: 491 out of 1406
1,406 movie reviews
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  1. The Trip
    Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon's shtick - a relentless verbal sparring comprised of dueling impressions, poetry recitations, absurdist riffing, and comic one-upmanship - works best in small doses.
  2. Footnote
    Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a sour, rather unpleasant affair that hinges on acts of Jews behaving badly.
  3. Marley
    The bloat and heft of Marley's narrative scope leaves the viewer awash in a sea of historical "facts" with very little sense of the human experience behind the curtain of celebrity.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 88
    Le Havre
    For Carl Dreyer, to film a miracle took a single shot; for Bruno Dumont, a whole film. In Le Havre, Aki Kaurismäki needs four shots to capture his - and what an ordinary event it is!
  5. To Be Heard
    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.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 75
    Under African Skies
    It does lightly suggest scintillating questions about the responsibility artists have in reflecting current political moments in their music.
    • Metascore: 82
    • Critic Score 88
    Mysteries of Lisbon
    A marvelously elastic storyteller, a dry wit, and a Rivettean anti-determinist, the Chilean auteur Raúl Ruiz is fascinated by narratives that dilate from within, images seemingly full of secret passageways, and fabulists who collect tales like toys.
  8. It's Such a Beautiful Day
    By favoring the repetition of gestures over plot or graphics, Don Hertzfeldt argues that animation is, at its essence, a kinetic rather than simply visual form of expression.
  9. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia
    Nuri Bilge Ceylan has to be the least kinetic of working filmmakers - and not simply in the sense of static camerawork or lack of narrative momentum.
  10. The Inheritors
    Assembled from short, naturalistic shots of people at work, the documentary becomes a bittersweet testament to labor and a damning representation of a vicious cycle, its images speaking entirely for themselves.
  11. Fill the Void
    The film unfolds in unhurried dramatic terms that come to take on an almost fatalistic force.
  12. Beginners
    One of the most distinct pleasures of Beginners is the way it puts together fragments of someone's life-presumably the filmmaker's, although little does it matter-with humility, and without vying for some complete whole.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 88
    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.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 75
    No
    A singular biopic and a snapshot of a society renewed, No unaffectedly celebrates faith in democracy, and, surprisingly, truth in advertising.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 50
    Blancanieves
    Pablo Berger digs for emotional intensity in his gothic retelling of Snow White and only uncovers layers of gloss.
  16. Sister
    Ursula Meier's film is sustained by a sturdy emotional engine and some intrepidly thoughtful characterization.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 63
    Django Unchained
    While the rush toward a conventional climax is confusing, and more than a little disappointing, there's an undeniable pleasure that emerges in seeing Tarantino juggle the dynamite of his ideas, even when they prematurely pop off in his face.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 88
    Skyfall
    Bond's latest is a remarkable high watermark for the series: at once solemn and deeply funny, sexy and sad, self-conscious without all the rib-bruising elbowing.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 75
    Tchoupitoulas
    The overall experience is entirely immersive, thanks not only to the filmmakers' handheld camera, but also to the illusory nature of the staging.
  20. 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.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 100
    Consuming Spirits
    Not only a monstrous visual achievement, but one of the most uniquely humanistic animated features of all time.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 63
    Hell and Back Again
    Unlike most war documentaries, which tend to only skim the surface of its gun-toting subjects' lives, photojournalist Danfung Dennis's Hell and Back Again isn't content to merely capture warriors in combat.
  23. A Simple Life
    A Simple Life may have one of the most accurate titles in all of cinema, as the film has a bracingly casual sense of day-to-day working-class life that recalls the films of Jean Renoir or, more recently, Olivier Assayas.
  24. Battle Royale (2000)
    Maybe Battle Royale's ultimate punchline is its inexplicable ability to fool some people into taking it seriously.
  25. Tuesday, After Christmas
    At first glance, Tuesday, After Christmas seems, in both form and content, only a modestly ambitious endeavor. Yet the singular attention with which it carries out its aims-and the rigorous success it ultimately attains-is nonetheless unsparing, and bracing.
  26. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    The director's clear-minded approach allows her subject's more challenging aesthetic-political mix to shine through, even if it's at the inevitable expense of her own filmmaking proclivities.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 63
    Something in the Air
    Despite a fixation on fire as a cleansing agent (explosions, burning paintings, or a blazing house), the film, enveloping as it is, proves woefully short on burning dramatic or thematic intensity.
    • Metascore: 81
    • Critic Score 25
    Silver Linings Playbook
    When one stops to consider how irksomely on the nose so much of this is, the qualities which intend to most readily ingratiate the film with us begin to appear perceptibly disingenuous and false.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 88
    Upstream Color
    Upstream Color is lush, rhythmic, and deeply sensual, a film of exceptional beauty.
  30. The Secret World of Arrietty
    Offers exactly what its title promises, unveiling this secret milieu through thoroughly meticulous animation.
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