Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 1,460 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 10.1 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 52
Highest review score:
Voyage to Italy (re-release)
Critic Score 100
Lowest review score:
Snowmen
Critic Score 0
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 656 out of 1460
  2. Mixed: 300 out of 1460
  3. Negative: 504 out of 1460
1,460 movie reviews
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    • Metascore: 77
    • Critic Score 63
    Brooklyn Castle
    It pays to consider even the small details of society's greatest investment in the future: our future generations.
  2. Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest
    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.
  3. El Sicario: Room 164
    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.
  4. Chico & Rita
    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.
    • Metascore: 76
    • 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.
  6. Rebirth
    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.
  7. Nana
    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.
  8. The Unspeakable Act
    Writer-director Dan Sallitt's fourth feature moves with confident boldness from the incestuous gauntlet its prologue impishly hurls down.
  9. The Hunter
    In The Hunter, writer-director Rafi Pitts manages an atmosphere of choked, ambiguous dread, somehow naturalistic and hallucinatory at once, that recalls nothing less than Godard's Alphaville.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 63
    Lore
    Copious amounts of landscape and wilderness shots cover up its schematic plot, as its indirect visual allusions take precedence over thematic development.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 75
    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.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 50
    Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai
    Takashi Miike lets his familiar tastelessness get the better of him, relishing the grisly seppuku-by-bamboo in unnecessary detail.
  13. Much Ado About Nothing
    The film is nothing without the physicality of the performers, as Joss Whedon's script handles the transition of Shakespeare's language to modern day indifferently.
  14. Buck
    Life lessons abound in Buck, most of them tied to endlessly reiterated comparisons between man and horse.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 50
    Elza (Le bonheur d'Elza)
    Capitalizes on a vibrant tropical location and a cast of capable, but the narrative makes disconcerting leaps from the poignant to the distractingly soap-operatic.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 63
    Easy Money
    The humanization of these antiheroic outlaws doesn't feel forced, but it does feel engineered, and there's never a viewer investment to match the story's wide expanse.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 88
    Flight
    A unique, audacious studio movie, kicking off as a star-driven spectacle before whittling itself down to a raw and riveting character study.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 38
    Martha Marcy May Marlene
    The film seems almost to have been produced spontaneously, by gears of a larger system as they mesh together right this instant, culled from the ether with the words "Customers Who Also Liked Dogtooth and Winter's Bone Liked This…"
  19. Inni
    As a document of a live show it looks like nothing else, but Vincent Morisset's greater aspirations, attempts to define or sum up the band through the inclusion of external material, come off as muddled and oblique.
  20. Margin Call
    A portrait of the eve of 2008's financial crisis that plays out with funereal inevitability, Margin Call loves speechifying, but the film is far more assured when lingering in the silence of its morally compromised characters.
  21. World on a Wire (1973)
    Fassbinder's sumptuous 205-minute epic is intriguing as a prototype for later and more palatably cynical sci-fi standards like "Blade Runner" or even "Total Recall."
  22. Night Across the Street
    It's a final film in the specific sense of Raúl Ruiz designing the larger part of it around a metaphorical contemplation of his own, imminent demise.
  23. The Miners' Hymns
    A study of the this former mining region in both its de-industralized present and its past state as an active coalfield, The Miners' Hymns arranges its two parts as a set of binary oppositions.
  24. Reality
    Matteo Garrone has a sure eye for outlandish set pieces that exhibit the expansive outlines of his ideas, but these spectacles are sporadic, and the spaces between them tend to lag.
  25. The Loneliest Planet
    Much of the film's final act is given to alienated walking, which too often plays as an abstract study of triangular arrangements in which non-speaking figures move across a barren terrain.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 50
    Bobby Fischer Against the World
    Note the noticeable uptick in the cleverness of the on-screen graphics or fitfully remember the movie poster's tagline, "His Greatest Match Was in His Mind," and you'll belatedly come around to the jarring downshift into Fischer's latter-day paranoia and anti-Semitism.
  27. A Dangerous Method
    As rigorous and stimulating as its thematic inquiries are, A Dangerous Method ultimately rests as much on its performances, and in that regard, it succeeds far more than it fails.
  28. Mud
    The film ultimately succeeds thanks to small details, from its deep-fried lingo and the swampy texture of its location photography to its uniformly expert cast.
  29. Submarine
    It cheats a little, using a mix of amateurish extreme close-ups and striking Welsh industrial vistas to substitute for real technical proficiency, but also applies more formal consideration than most films, namely teen-centered comedies, ever do.
    • Metascore: 76
    • Critic Score 75
    Dead Man's Burden
    It's always a pleasure to encounter genre ambition contained in such a sinewy-shot, emotionally resonant, and gorgeously photographed package.
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