Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 1,403 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:
Le Rayon Vert (1986)
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Struck by Lightning
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 628 out of 1403
  2. Mixed: 284 out of 1403
  3. Negative: 491 out of 1403
1,403 movie reviews
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    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 63
    Gimme the Loot
    A nose-to-the-ground portrait of two believably aspirational protagonists and their constant hustle to make good on the movie's eponymous demand.
  2. Melancholia
    The poetic, referential succession of near-still images that opens the film so immaculately distills Melancholia's moody narrative and themes that it makes the two-hours-plus that follow seem impossibly redundant.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 75
    The Queen of Versailles
    Lauren Greenfield's film evolves from an ode to entitled obliviousness to a more evenhanded character study, tracing the fault lines that develop within the Siegel family.
  4. The Turin Horse
    Béla Tarr is the cinema's greatest crafter of total environments and in The Turin Horse, working in his most restricted physical setting since 1984's Almanac of Fall, he (along with co-director Ágnes Hranitzky) dials up one of his most vividly immersive milieus.
  5. I Wish
    I Wish has a tough time balancing the heartfelt with the saccharine and too often feels slight.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 75
    What Richard Did
    The film's structure as a character study helps to subtly underscore the flawed justifications of a privileged kid's thought patterns and unchallenged value system.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 75
    The Mill and the Cross
    Every bit as visceral an experience as Cave of Forgotten Dreams, and with a lead actor whose face radiates the same eternal quality as that of the late Klaus Kinski, The Mill and The Cross also feels a lot like live theater.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 100
    Room 237
    The doc positions The Shining as a comparably coiled, thematically overflowing microcosm--standing in for cinema, for history, for obsession, for postmodern theory buckling under the film's heft.
  9. Goodbye First Love
    A poignant sense of time's unyielding forward progress and a mood of deep adolescent sorrow aren't enough to overshadow the insufferable blankness of Goodbye First Love's navel-gazing protagonists.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 75
    West of Memphis
    By taking a disturbing and sometimes conflicted look at the prejudices that led to the West Memphis Three's imprisonment, it asks murky questions about how people could get something so wrong for so long.
    • Metascore: 80
    • Critic Score 75
    Pavilion
    George Washington this isn't, but there's enough heft here that the comparison can be tastefully made.
  12. Senna
    Asif Kapadia's documentary is ultimately less affecting and insightful on a universal thematic scale than on an individual, personal one.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 88
    Beyond the Hills
    It's Cristian Mungiu's staging and compositional skill that lends the material its true sense of dawning dread.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 75
    The Sessions
    It's the rare film to sell sex as something truly tender and life-affirming, and Helen Hunt, in particular, is lovely and poignant.
  15. Pariah
    It's important to talk at length about Pariah's aesthetic because of how it distracts from the emotional truthfulness of the sometimes heartbreaking, by and large gorgeously performed story.
  16. Downeast
    An exposé of how the financial structures that make businesses possible in America seem to conspire against genuine good will and non-self-serving ambition.
  17. Photographic Memory
    Ross McElwee is less anxious of death itself than of finally comprehending the vast faultiness of the life he's lived.
  18. Coriolanus
    Though his film's feel is pure Iraq and Afghanistan, Fiennes doesn't push those parallels unduly, and his central performances prove clear, nuanced, and incisive.
  19. The Central Park Five
    Though relentlessly and admirably logical, the movie constantly glosses over the buried human element.
  20. Wagner's Dream
    The title of Susan Froemke's documentary is both an expression of aspiration and a statement of achievement.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 75
    Two Years at Sea
    The stillness and silence with which we look upon Jake Williams ranges from curious to unnerving to fascinating.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 63
    Deceptive Practices: The Mysteries and Mentors of Ricky Jay
    It never bothers to attempt the one thing we'd expect and hope from a documentary about Ricky Jay: It doesn't try to bamboozle us.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 75
    Drive
    A lot of critics will talk about how the movie is a stripped-down, "pure" genre piece, and there's a lot of truth to that. What may not get as much press is the way stripped-down-ness is an affectation, and always has been.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 75
    Life of Pi
    The second act shifts the film from a lazy and comfy litany of introductions to a riveting fantasia of pure cinema, wherein Lee paints an oft-wordless picture of nature's harshness and grace, the perfect arena for Pi to have a Christ-like coming of age.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 75
    108 (Cuchillo de Palo)
    Renate Costa's doc gradually simplifies into an elaborate seesaw between general, journalistic scoopery and unabashedly personal confrontation.
  26. This Ain't California
    While the film is deeply romantic and nostalgic, possessing a genuine reverence for youth and rebellion, it's also something of a tragedy.
  27. Keep the Lights On
    More than just a relationship drama of striking specificity, this is a naked confession about addiction.
    • Metascore: 79
    • Critic Score 63
    Searching for Sugar Man
    Despite crafting a consistently engaging film, the director doesn't present the full scope of Sixto Rodriguez's life.
  29. The Law in These Parts
    A film for those who, whether here or in Israel, believe the law is the beginning, and not the end, of rights discourse.
  30. Our School
    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.
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