Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,769 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 6.4 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: 4,345 out of 7769
  2. Mixed: 1,491 out of 7769
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7769
7769 movie reviews
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  1. Dunkirk
    In devoting so much time to the dull, counterproductive mechanics of the action assembly, Dunkirk dispenses with nearly all other elements of drama.
  2. The Artist
    The Artist neatly sidesteps this unsolvable dilemma by ignoring everything that's fascinating and memorable about the era, focusing instead on a patchwork of general knowledge, so eroded of inconvenient facts that it doesn't even qualify as a roman à clef.
  3. Resurrection
    At times, Resurrection seems to outright taunt viewers for trying to make sense of it all.
  4. Aladdin
    Aladdin is ultimately less offensive than patently ridiculous, mostly because its ethnic white noise is really just an excuse for Robin Williams—as a postmodern blabbermouthed genie who grants Aladdin three wishes—to put on the most elaborate, narcissistic circus act in the history of cinema.
  5. A Ghost Story
    An empty exercise in imitative long-take aestheticism, A Ghost Story fills its distractingly round-cornered frame with endless repetitions on a visual gag.
  6. Private Life
    Instead of offering a probing, nuanced view of the burgeoning technologies and sciences involved in this relatively new outgrowth of the OBGYN industry, though, Tamara Jenkins uses her setting as fodder for lame and discomfiting physical comedy.
  7. Saint Maud
    Rose Glass utilizes a provocative scenario for a vague and deadly serious art exercise.
  8. 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.
  9. Battle Royale
    Maybe Battle Royale's ultimate punchline is its inexplicable ability to fool some people into taking it seriously.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    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.
  11. The Secret in Their Eyes
    Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.
  12. Love & Mercy
    Bill Pohlad seems never to have met a metaphor he couldn't bludgeon into its most rudimentary and literal interpretation.
  13. Pride
    The film the tough true story has spawned is as formulaically cheery, didactically "uplifting," and fundamentally false as a Disney sports movie.
  14. Ava
    The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.
  15. Beasts of No Nation
    Cary Joji Fukunaga’s artistry registers less as psychological imprint than as a measure of his professional bona fides.
  16. Enough Said
    Enough can't be said about how the late James Gandolfini comes so close to saving writer-director Nicole Holofcener's latest articulation of white suburban anxieties.
  17. Tori and Lokita
    The film subjects its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation.
  18. Gloria Bell
    The film’s open-ended narrative tends to be undermined by the simplicity of its thematic signifiers.
  19. Avengers: Endgame
    Every serious narrative beat in the film is ultimately undercut by pro-forma storytelling, or by faux-improvised humor.
  20. The Tribe
    The film is more interested in performance and symbolism than in the meaning of its characters' words or their substitutive gestures.
  21. The Breadwinner
    Cross-dressing in the story is merely a tool for survival, but such border-crossing is inevitably rife with unintended consequences beyond narrative ones.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Tatami
    The film limply gestures at ideas around women’s rights and athlete boycotts.
  23. The Wife
    Glenn Close's perennial look of astonishment and resilience commands the action to the point of turning every other screen element into a gratuitous prop.
  24. Lady Macbeth
    It isn't until its final moments that Lady Macbeth turns into the kind of meaningless, mean-spirited, and proudly irredeemable non-character study that likens it to, say, last year's emptily foreboding Childhood of a Leader.
  25. I Carry You with Me
    Heidi Ewing’s tale of immigration and deportation afflicting the lives of a Mexican gay couple flashes its reason for being at every turn.
  26. A Monster Calls
    A Monster Calls is both governed and straitjacketed by director J.A. Bayona’s competent impersonality.
  27. Buck
    Life lessons abound in Buck, most of them tied to endlessly reiterated comparisons between man and horse.
  28. The Stroll
    The Stroll is overtly broad, detached, and full of ready-made empowerment rhetoric.
  29. Flora and Son
    Flora and Son is far more invested in making its characters likable and cute rather than risking audience sympathies.
  30. The Revenant
    What pushes the film, at long last, into the icy river, is its very design, as a monument to slick, mercenary grandeur.
  31. September 5
    The film isn’t interested in anything that would detract from providing audiences with the sustained pleasure of watching a clock-ticking thriller.
  32. King Richard
    Rarely has a film used its foreknowledge of a happy ending as a reason to remain so uncritical and incurious of its central subject.
  33. Marguerite
    Xavier Giannolli consistently glosses every sequence with a stagey kind of humor, and at the main character's expense.
  34. Ghost Trail
    Jonathan Millet’s film is unconvincing and unnaturally contorted into its shape.
  35. Capernaum
    Zain Al Rafeea's naturalness, however uncanny, only makes the film's maneuverings seem all the more obvious.
  36. 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…"
  37. Notes on Blindness
    Its fatal mistake is to make up for blindness, instead of embracing it as something other than a liability.
  38. The Two Popes
    There isn’t anything in the bleeding-heart positions espoused by Jorge Bergoglio that complicates Pope Francis’s public persona.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bernie
    A surprisingly shapeless true-crime farce which never creates a convincing context for the odd relationship between a pious East Texas mortician and his sugar mama.
  40. Darkest Hour
    The film reinforces only the most simplistic and patriotic vision of Churchill, its closed-off view of the man reminiscent of the many tracking shots that wind through the underground tunnels of the U.K.‘s war command, constantly peeking into rooms with classified meetings as doors are abruptly closed to keep them secret
  41. Rich Hill
    Rich Hill is poverty porn, examining lower-class spaces with pity as its operative mode and engendering little more than a means for viewers to leave the film acknowledging its sadness.
  42. Trainwreck
    The script doesn't revel in Amy's quite harmless flaws, or at least examine them in the spirit of benevolence.
  43. Hatching
    The ham-handed allegorical construction, generically titled characters, and self-serious tone in its final third drains the story of the specificity that might have resulted in a more incisive critique of the perils of perfectionism.
  44. Life, Animated
    It never addresses Disney's wholly manufactured stranglehold on turning adolescent desire into a consumerist impulse.
  45. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    It unites a mélange of teen-film tropes into a narrative overburdened with cultural references and framing devices, and undermined by a lack of attention to character.
  46. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    It mistakes touch-and-go navel-gazing for comprehension, as if speaking to as many subjects as possible produces an inherently compelling take.
  47. What Maisie Knew
    David Siegel and Scott McGehee's film renders the rhapsodic Henry James novel of the same name into an abhorrent slice of tasteless familial drama.
  48. Frankenweenie
    Tim Burton's sense of playfulness feels forced throughout, and as the film progresses, any humor or inventiveness takes a backseat to tumultuous set pieces that reference Frankenstein.
  49. Catherine Called Birdy
    In simplistic and self-congratulatory fashion, the film renders its main character as a sort of feminist crusader who undermines the sexist traditions of her time.
  50. Dune: Part One
    Dune ends up feeling like an extended prologue for what one can only hope will be a sequel that will clarify its parables and paradoxes.
  51. Rush
    Ron Howard's by-the-seat-of-your-pants aesthetic makes the slower, darker sequences feel hurried and bland, especially when stacked up next to the racing sequences.
  52. Little Sister
    The film's attempt at political insight and portrayal of social malaise are meant to give it the illusion of depth.
  53. Higher Ground
    Lacking both spiritual and narrative spark, Vera Farmiga's directorial debut suffers from her flat performance and a moribund, weirdly sex-joke-spiked narrative.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Trials of Muhammad Ali
    Bill Siegel has made more of a Ken Burns-esque history book--that is, a medium more dry and factual--than a film.
  55. In Darkness
    It's the rare film that should not introduce new story elements or characters past its first act. In Darkness, a garbage movie applying for unlimited credit on the most meager collateral, is that film.
  56. Daughter of Mine
    Unlike My Life in Pink, Daughter of Mine sidesteps all ambiguity, as the film reveals everything about its characters straight away, leaving little room for unexpected complexities about their predicaments to develop.
  57. Scrapper
    Charlotte Regan’s film is a baffling clash of two incompatible visions.
  58. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    It would be inaccurate to call Happy People: A Year in the Taiga the newest Werner Herzog film.
  59. The New Girlfriend
    François Ozon is never willing to fully engage with the ridiculousness of his material, resulting in an uneasy mix of wry distance and unearned emotion.
  60. You Are Not My Mother
    The primacy that it places on its dopamine drip of dread undercuts whatever genuine commitment it might have toward mental illness and trauma.
  61. The Pirogue
    Moussa Touré's worldview, like Ousmane Sembene's, is characterized by the feeling that, at the end of the day, some degree of loss or defeat is inevitable.
  62. She Said
    Ultimately, She Said is more concerned with eliciting the audience’s admiration than its understanding, its compassion, or even simply its interest.
  63. School Life
    School Life is unfortunately committed to keeping its subjects, especially Headfort’s students, at arm’s length.
  64. Wind River
    When Taylor Sheridan is left to his own devices, his work seems more abrupt and shallow, no more so than when he resolves all of this film's lingering questions in one unremittingly nasty sideswipe of a flashback.
  65. Dust Bunny
    The film’s writing is the sort that begs you to find it cute and quirky, which makes it quite grating if you don’t.
  66. Last Flight Home
    Last Flight Home is an anguished therapy session disguised as a meditation on life and death.
  67. Once Upon a Time Verônica
    The film is simply too conscious of its form and its global-market ambitions to ever feel honestly interested in the themes it purports to cherish.
  68. The Impossible
    A sham realist's disaster movie, tackily insulting the deaths of 300,000 people by reducing the horrors of the Indian Ocean tsunami to a series of genre titillations.
  69. News of the World
    The film sanctimoniously suggests that ignorance or distrust of the news is nothing new, but rather the bedrock of America’s formation.
  70. Good Manners
    The film is a rebellion of surfaces that never quite reaches, or emanates from, the underpinning roots of its fable.
  71. The Dish & the Spoon
    Doesn't waste a moment on recognizable reality, consumed as it is with checking off various items from its list of clichés.
  72. Iron Crows
    A maddeningly blunt and syrupy rendering of a piquant socio-economic configuration, Park Bong-Nam's Iron Crows is ultimately third-world documentary filmmaking at its most exploitatively surface-groping.
  73. Captain Fantastic
    The film is premised on a radical act that it buries beneath a grueling avalanche of quirk.
  74. All the Money in the World
    As released, All the Money in the World is by and large a conspicuously manufactured thriller that moves between manipulative psych-outs.
  75. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    The film is inspirational only in the sense that it may inspire an uptick in Amazon searches for running gear.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wreck-It Ralph
    Nothing but broad, pandering indexes tailored to appeal to the arcade wistfulness the film never even bothers to convincingly evoke.
  77. Christine
    It largely fails to animate Christine Chubbuck's inner turmoil, focusing instead on broad, blunt externalities.
  78. Saturday Church
    Writer-director Damon Cardasis follows a rather didactic approach to his 14-year-old's protagonist's plight in Saturday Church.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Pieta
    Kim Ki-duk's film makes an exaggerated, undeserved show of its cruelty, indignity, and aspirations of importance.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    The overreliance on wisecracks and employing, and then mocking, clichés make it seem as if Honor Among Thieves is outright embarrassed by its source material and wants you to know it.
  81. The Final Master
    The film is a seemingly endless series of convoluted double-dealing, backstabbing, and factional realignment.
  82. It's All So Quiet
    There's literally no way to miss the memo that It's All So Quiet is about dealing with the encroachment of death, as it's there in every scene.
  83. Shame
    Shame articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction-in a vibrant city rendered dull and anonymous.
  84. Still Alice
    Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart's artful consideration of familial friction acerbated by disease, and vice versa, nearly saves Still Alice from the banality of its Lifetime-movie execution.
  85. In the Intense Now
    Although João Moreira Salles tries to tap into the pleasurable elements inherent to the essayistic as a cinematic form, such as making the merging of intimate and social reality poetically visible, his storylines never quite gel.
  86. The Invisible Man
    Through to the end, you can’t get off on the thrill of this film’s craftsmanship without also getting off on the spectacle of more than just Cecilia brought to the brink of destruction. Like its style, The Invisible Man’s cruelty is the point.
  87. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    Not everyone's life is compelling enough to warrant the documentary treatment, but whether this truism applies to master puppeteer and current Sesame Street producer Kevin Clash is a question that Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, Constance Marks's fawning portrait of the Muppet- master fails to answer.
  88. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    On the screen, Shang-Chi is rotely defined by the same “gifted kid” impostor syndrome as so many other self-doubting MCU heroes before him.
  89. Prey
    Prey proves to be an apropos title, as the film is cowed by John McTiernan’s original Predator.
  90. 1985
    Adrian is too flat as a character, his plight too generic, for his tears to count as something other than a sentimental ready-made.
  91. We Are What We Are
    Jim Mickle plays the scenario deadly straight and unintentionally exposes all of its attendant absurdities, leaving the cast stranded.
  92. RBG
    The film rarely presents a clear analysis of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's victories, reducing her work to empty slogans.
  93. Molly's Game
    There's a blank space at the core of Molly's Game that the protagonist cannot fill, unable as she is to represent anything beyond her esoteric narrative of unorthodox self-actualization.
  94. Dragonslayer
    Is Josh "Skreech" Sandoval the least deserving documentary subject ever?
  95. A Complete Unknown
    The bevy of documentaries, narrative films, and books about Bob Dylan’s breakout, ascent, and impact on the 1960s pop zeitgeist could fill a library, which makes this oversimplified retread of the same topic all the more tedious and superfluous.
  96. Emilia Pérez
    If a musical is supposed to communicate things that can’t be conveyed through normal dialogue, Emilia Pérez’s biggest problem is that it falls prey to redundancy, regurgitating the same ideas about identity, desire, violence, and redemption, betraying how little it has to say in the first place.
  97. Paddleton
    The film largely plays its scenario with a straight and gooey face, coaxing its actors to indulge their worst tendencies.
  98. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    Despite one or two moments of Venture Brothers-worthy fancy, the film is as by-the-numbers as any this series has ever offered.
  99. Hunter Gatherer
    A deliberately offbeat characterization of mental illness, Hunter Gatherer is ultimately a failed act of empathy.
  100. The Brand New Testament
    At first, the film’s dark humor is amusing, only for it to wear off once an actual plot kicks into motion.
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