Slant Magazine's Scores

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:
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
1,406 movie reviews
  1. The filmmakers spend vastly more time chronicling bigoted remarks from Romanians about gypsy life than they do actual gypsy life, so a minor crisis of perspective hangs over Our School.
  2. Hong Sang-soo once again corroborates auteurist theory at the same time that he reveals the potential shortcomings of its practice.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 75
    Jay Bulger's seemingly erratic documentary formally channels Ginger Baker's almost defiant refusal to lead a life that adheres to a linear narrative.
  3. Sergei Loznitsa's documentaries are mainly compilations of archival footage, so it makes sense that his first fiction film is also essentially a compilation, an array of dynamic, aggressive bits rather than one coherent text.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 100
    The pangs of romance, eroticism, anguish, and longing (both for the stolen moments of private passion and for the sense-making schematics of Empire) transcend any period of cinema Tabu may evoke.
    • Metascore: 78
    • Critic Score 75
    The documentary provides a birdsong of perseverance in the face of irrational violence, immense historic anger, and grim, seemingly insurmountable realities.
  4. Christopher Nolan's capper of his Batman trilogy is a summer blockbuster of grand inclinations in both form and content.
  5. Worry and sadness are palpable, but so is wry humor and irony as Song ponders age and mortality with a sensitive eye for emotions and a strong sense of composition.
  6. The Guard is John Michael McDonagh's caustically funny riff on cop and crime films.
  7. Documentarian and subject, past and present blur together like bleeding watercolors in Raymond De Felitta's gripping memoir.
  8. Alice Winocour's take on this true story carries the superficial trappings of a period drama, but its perspective is entirely contemporary.
  9. Director Mahmoud Kaabour is Fatima's grandson, and she instantly seizes on--lightly, in her way--the guilt and panic that's inspired him to make this film.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 63
    Although we never really get to know He or Miao, despite following them around vérité-style, director Yung Chang expertly captures the rays of Western culture bouncing off them.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 75
    Director David Gelb details, among other things, the painstaking process that goes into creating mouthwatering pieces of sushi.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 75
    Tobias Lindholm's hostage-negotiation drama that wields its verité style for maximum tension.
  10. Not only sets up the writer's life as representative of the transitions of early modern Jewish life, but posits his oeuvre as an ongoing chronicle of the shift from a vibrant, unified Yiddish culture to a fractured world-in-exile.
  11. This lovely film is ultimately an articulation of something at once simple and universal: the discontent of traveling through life with sad resignation.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 63
    The images, while beautiful, are sentimental, as if Kleber Mendonça Filho is trying to negotiate too much.
  12. The film shrewdly opts not to proffer its own hypothesis about the true reasons behind the Gibson family buying Frédéric Bourdin's story.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 88
    A playfully self-reflective rumination on what writer-director Terence Nance has described as "self-awareness through experience with love."
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 75
    Deceptively modest on nearly all accounts, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die employs seemingly minor directorial contrivances to ruminate on a unique quarrel.
  13. The film's inquiry into the artistic method remains somewhat at the superficial level, but the directors do a fine job of emphasizing both the circumstances that lead to the music's creation and the satisfying result of the irrepressible sounds.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 63
    The end results are mixed but nevertheless scintillating and provocative enough to be worth taking seriously.
  14. The mixture of different techniques and varied views results in a rich, multi-faceted look at one of America's most misguided policy initiatives.
    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 63
    It pays to consider even the small details of society's greatest investment in the future: our future generations.
  15. Even as an "18 months later" epilogue ensures us that everything's hunky dory, this is one surprisingly grim celebration of a group Rapaport obviously loves.
  16. A lot of evil is laid on the table in El Sicario, and the film makes a big, if exquisitely subtle show, of theorizing that there's no way to explain how it got there.
  17. A shallow romanticization of Batista-era Cuba -- when the nation was a tropical paradise for the delectation of American jetsetters -- and what the revolution left in its wake.
  18. If Rebirth's subjects are active guides documenting a fluid psychological landscape, Jim Whitaker constructs a specific cinematic geography around them with stunning time-lapse photography of Ground Zero.
  19. Its meta-cinematic "think piece"-ness is redeemed by the slinky symmetries drawn between Massadian's own auteur-ship and the protagonist's narrative role.