Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. 12 Years a Slave
    Steve McQueen's film practically treats Solomon Norhtup as passive observer to a litany of horrors that exist primarily for our own education.
  2. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
    If it’s possible for a parable to be too simple to even qualify as a parable, the convincingly dim Snow White represents the dopey standard.
  3. One Battle After Another
    Paul Thomas Anderson’s dark comedy One Battle After Another turns overreaching into an art form.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Amour
    This isn't the work of a newly moral or humanistic filmmaker, but another ruse by the same unscrupulous showman whose funny games have been beguiling us for years.
  5. La La Land
    Every element of La La Land is bound up in a referentiality that largely precludes the outpourings of emotion we come to musicals for.
  6. The Look of Silence
    If The Look of Silence still remains a gripping, vital, consequential documentary, it's in spite of its approach rather than because of it.
  7. Son of Saul
    The film's meticulousness orchestration only calls attention to its dubious sense of purpose, which lies beyond human subjectivity.
  8. Hit the Road
    For too much of its running time, Panah Panahi’s film is untethered from any kind of captivating narrative purpose.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Seventh Continent (1989)
    By concentration exclusively on humanity’s negativism, Haneke proves to be as damagingly reductive of life’s possibilities as the emotional malaise he sets out to expose.
  10. The Seventh Seal
    The Seventh Seal, assisted by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer’s richly overexposed images, operates as though it contains the undiluted essence of life’s fueling dialectic formula. Occasionally it does, most notably in the terrifying arrival of the self-flagellants to a weak-willed village. But the road-trippers in Bergman’s follow-up, Wild Strawberries, achieve a far greater grace and clarity with only a fraction of the heavy lifting.
  11. The Little Mermaid
    The Little Mermaid is the story of one packrat pre-tween princess whose undersea kingdom is only matched in depth by her remarkable sense of consumer-minded entitlement.
  12. Newtown
    Its enervated address of both mental-health treatment and gun laws receives few constructive articulations beyond a single scene.
  13. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
    It places regurgitated ideas into the mouths of gifted actors, then drops them amid a kooky story that plays like an elaborate distraction from what little the film actually has to say.
  14. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    As in Rogue Nation, Fallout‘s action scenes are cleanly composed and easy to follow, and so abundant as to become monotonous.
  15. Hereditary
    In writer-director Ari Aster's smugly agitating feature debut, the devil is certainly in the hackneyed details.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
    Comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick and Julie Dash are inevitable, but Raven Jackson’s search for the sublime lacks both the rich philosophical inquiries of the former and the dense, lived-in specificity of the latter.
  17. The Shape of Water
    The Shape of Water has been made with a level of craftsmanship that should be the envy of most filmmakers, but the impudent, unruly streak that so often gives Guillermo del Toro’s films their pulse has been airbrushed away.
  18. Moneyball
    True to Hollywood's tireless efforts to fit square-peg material into roundish genre niches, this wavering, intermittently smart story of daring to think differently flattens its narrative into formula.
  19. Last Days in Vietnam
    For American viewers who don't know, the doc will be a worthy footnote to a long bout of deliberate cultural amnesia, but it's too telling that the Vietnamese remain in the background.
  20. Krisha
    It rams home the main character's relentless downward spiral though an incessant parade of grandstanding stylistic flourishes.
  21. I Saw the TV Glow
    The film is a mesmeric but frequently muddled exploration of transgender self-actualization.
  22. The Lost Daughter
    For a while, Olivia Colman’s expressive performance carries the film, with little narrative distraction or stylistic conspicuousness.
  23. Argo
    Undeniably rousing, but deeply irresponsible, Argo fans the flames surrounding historical events likely to still remain raw in the memory of many viewers.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Master
    The Master is Paul Thomas Anderson with the edges sanded off, the best bits shorn down to nubs.
  25. Black Bag
    By the time the film comes to the end of its brisk runtime, it feels like nothing much has actually happened, despite all the narrative convolutions.
  26. Cinderella
    Despite its prodigious charms, it has probably destroyed more lives than any other Disney film, forcing a specific, unrealistic romantic archetype that truly does only exist in fairy tales onto generations of impressionable children, who would grow up desperate, needy, and crushed.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I'm Still Here
    The film has trouble excavating any coarse humanism from this decidedly human story, opting instead to paint the family at its center in broad, uninspired strokes.
  28. After the Storm
    The stock character types that Hirokazu Kore-eda employs across the board are pretty much open books from the start.
  29. War Witch
    Though ostensibly a character study, it's nevertheless characterized by the vaguely moralizing tone of an issue film, one whose candor in the face of brutality seems calculated for maximum liberal appeal.
  30. Hamnet
    Though Hamnet is concerned with bottomless grief and the unique power of art to express the inexpressible, it can’t help but telegraph its themes loudly and incessantly, its emotional register off-puttingly monotonous.
  31. Weiner
    Josh Kriegman and Elyse Sternberg's film never discovers a greater purpose beyond its undeniable sideshow appeal.
  32. Rat Film
    Inherent to director Theo Anthony's misappropriation of the essay form is a conflicting account of precisely which history his documentary seeks to investigate.
  33. The Girl and the Spider
    Zürcher spins byzantine webs of audiovisual stimuli from an ultimately modest dramatic core, and not only is the larger narrative design unclear before it’s finally revealed, it’s easy to get stuck dwelling on the minutia along the way.
  34. Project Nim
    To drive home the pathos of Nim's mistreatment, James Marsh frequently makes questionable use of the creature's apparent similarity to human beings, trading complex analysis for easy sentiment.
  35. Pina
    Go after Pina and you're going to have to go through a mob of modern-dance zealots first.
  36. Blind
    Unfortunately, the film's occasionally thrilling visual sleight-of-hand comes at the ultimate service of a boilerplate early-mid-life-crisis drama.
  37. Footnote
    Joseph Cedar's Footnote is a sour, rather unpleasant affair that hinges on acts of Jews behaving badly.
  38. Mustang
    The film punctuates the sisters' confinement with various episodes united by their contrivance.
  39. The Woman Who Left
    It suffers by resembling arty, didactic bloat when it most begs for a more sophisticated dramatic touch.
  40. Maiden
    Director Alex Holmes ultimately takes a frustratingly simplistic approach to his thematically rich material.
  41. Rye Lane
    Rye Lane’s antic energy and caricatured portrait of England’s capital city fail to make its central romance truly resonate.
  42. 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.
  43. Steve Jobs
    The screenwriter's signature verbal-diarrhetic dialogue allows for a nonstop blaring of actorly chops that, like the movie at large, is nothing if not committed.
  44. 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.
  45. Blancanieves
    Pablo Berger digs for emotional intensity in his gothic retelling of Snow White and only uncovers layers of gloss.
  46. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
    The documentary's labored juxtapositions create fission, the feel of a director scrambling to dictate the game.
  47. Blade Runner 2049
    Denis Villeneuve’s film is designed to reward the audience for recognizing references in the midst of an action pursuit, and, after an hour or so of the clipped and earnest signifying, one may find themselves nostalgic for Ridley Scott’s unforced indifference to the issue.
  48. Step
    By fitting Cori, Tayla, and Blessin's lives into a predetermined narrative arc, Step reduces the girls to plucky, up-by-the-bootstraps archetypes.
  49. Wadjda
    It doesn't play like reality, but like boilerplate filmic fantasy, and its novel setting and inception struggles seem positioned as a beard--or veil, if you will--to mask its mediocrity.
  50. Invisible Life
    Only rarely does Karim Aïnouz allow for loopholes to refreshingly emerge from the film’s stylistic deadlock.
  51. Jackie
    Pablo Larraín's film bluntly hammers home the notion that history is framed by perception rather than reality.
  52. Under the Sun
    Under the Sun's overall aesthetic identifies a willingness to settle for an easy condemnation of an obviously abysmal regime, while not doing anything challenging or enlightening with all the outstanding footage collected.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Big Short
    Its fourth-wall-breaking wags a finger at the perceived facile nature of celebrity-driven mass culture even as it ultimately condescends to audiences.
  54. A Fantastic Woman
    Superficial when it means to be elliptical and regressive in its attempts to promote pride and tolerance, Sebastián Lelio’s film is beautiful but vacant, the type of melodrama that reminds us that they shouldn’t always make them like they used to.
  55. 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.
  56. The Hate U Give
    The film lays out the complexities of contemporary race relations with a deliberateness that frequently edges over into didacticism.
  57. A White, White Day
    There’s a moving study within the film of a man in emotional paralysis learning to redirect his love from the past to the present, but it’s too often obscured by a muted revenge yarn that’s no less banal because it’s tastefully directed.
  58. A War
    Tobias Lindholm stages his claims through clunky dramaturgical scenarios, with the seams exposed at every turn.
  59. The Night of the 12th
    The film wants for deeper characterizations or a closer detailing of criminal procedure.
  60. The Nest
    Sean Durkin’s sweated-over filmmaking tediously lifts a familiar tale of domestic dysfunction to the level of myth.
  61. The Voice of Hind Rajab
    Watching actors interact with an authentic recording of a child on the brink of death is less an invitation to audiences to wrestle with the horrors of war and more with the ethics of the film’s creative choices.
  62. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    The Bone Temple doesn’t pack the moment-to-moment kineticism of the prior films.
  63. Waves
    This is a rare case of a film that’s stronger when it colors inside the lines than radically traces outside of them.
  64. The Martian
    The film goes in for the idea of texture and tics and human behavior, but there's no conviction, and no real push for eccentricity.
  65. Perfect Days
    The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous.
  66. American Honey
    This is a patchwork dystopia of white poverty whose facets are both difficult to deny and to prove exist precisely as depicted.
  67. Housekeeping for Beginners
    In spite of the too-muchness of their performances, the actors wrestle for expressiveness and subtlety against the script’s more obvious and schematic telegraphing of not-quite-nuclear discontent and, ultimately, reconciliation.
  68. White God
    It affects a general air of artistically inclined realism, but it's mostly concerned with building tension via a steady accumulation of flatly conceived misery.
  69. Boy and the World
    One wonders how receptive young audiences should be to a film that puts its storytelling secondary to its message-making.
  70. Il Futuro
    A counterproductively "literary" film with no satisfying payoffs, Rutger Hauer's blind recluse notwithstanding.
  71. The Force
    Though initially compelling, Peter Nick's documentary is fundamentally without a clear perspective on its subject.
  72. 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.
  73. The Old Man & the Gun
    David Lowery has a carefree, bordering on insubstantial touch, which gives rise to several rank absurdities.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV
    The film might have benefited from taking a page out of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film and slowed down its flow.
  75. Gone Girl
    There's a comic streak to the film that suggests David Fincher may understand the material as trash, but it's the kind of affectation that only reinforces, rather than dulls, its insults.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Gandhi
    Though Kingsley’s saturnine poise is much more interesting in roles which call for varying degrees of slipperiness, he nevertheless manages to bring shades into the inherently monochromatic saintliness of the role with life-sized, profoundly felt gravity and dignity, all while executing that marvelous, peculiarly British trick (remember Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips) of seeming to age from within.
  77. The Untouchables
    Steeped in De Palma's glorious violence and sinuous cinematography, but stripped of his tricky sensuality and his anarchic self-reflective wit, The Untouchables boils down to a lot of talk.
  78. Sing Street
    All traces of grit from John Carney's earlier films have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness.
  79. The Innocents
    The Innocents adopts a slasher-esque vibe that, however airlessly aestheticized, feels lurid for the sake of being lurid.
  80. Lady and the Tramp
    Befitting its middle-ish chronological position, it’s not surprising that the serviceably cute but mundane Lady—a turn-of-the-century ditty about two love struck dogs from opposite sides of the gated community—might be the most ignorable, least assertive production of their golden era.
  81. Oki's Movie
    Hong Sang-soo once again corroborates auteurist theory at the same time that he reveals the potential shortcomings of its practice.
  82. After Yang
    Kogonada’s film doesn’t trust us to recognize the legitimacy of the other’s being without filtering it solely through the lenses of the ruling class.
  83. Monos
    Alejandro Landes’s film depicts amorality with minimal curiosity and a surplus of numbing stylistic verve.
  84. It Comes at Night
    The film’s minimalism is rigorous, but its every moment of barebones craftsmanship is accompanied by plodding drama and an unsustainable heap of unanswered questions.
  85. Breathe
    Aside from the innate understanding of female friendship dynamics, it's hard to see exactly what else Mélanie Laurent brings to this overly familiar story.
  86. John Wick: Chapter 4
    In the gradual development and expansion of the Wickaverse, the filmmakers seem to have lost the thread of what makes the first and, at times, second film in the series work so well.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In Between
    In Between is most affecting when its characters are at their least guarded, but as Nour, Salma, and Laila are hurt by those closest to them, Hamoud's film pulls back toward more formulaic expressions of conflict.
  88. I, Daniel Blake
    It's pock-marked by the conservative dramatic conventions and broad political gestures that have marred much of Ken Loach's recent output.
  89. Ex Machina
    In the end, more than just the machine remains an enigma.
  90. Non-Fiction
    Olivier Assayas drains the film of the playfulness at its margins, leaving only an esoteric lecture in its place.
  91. 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.
  92. Beach Rats
    Beach Rats is most compelling when it puts a self-aware focus on Harris Dickinson’s sculpted male figure.
  93. The Charmer
    Director and co-writer Milad Alami's film feels like several fused-together trial drafts of the same narrative.
  94. James and the Giant Peach
    Though certainly not a travesty of any sort, James and the Giant Peach does strike me as the weakest thus far of Dahl’s to-screen adaptations and this mostly has to do with the problems Selick encounters with mixing the world of imagination with the real world.
  95. Meru
    Its expositional crutch proves most inadequate when the team ascends the final pitch to the top after years of preparation in no more than a minute of screen time.
  96. Command and Control
    Robert Kenner's stylistic choices amplify the film's fetishistic fascination with the nuclear weaponry itself.
  97. The Misfits
    A perplexing misfire more than a complete dud, The Misfits‘s true legacy remains in the personal histories of those involved with the production rather than in the far more exceptional careers of the artists who brought it to its dull fruition.
  98. Victoria
    One can chart the very moment that Victoria's existence slips out of the routine into the nightmarish, and there's no escape by temporal omission.
  99. Women Talking
    For better and worse, writer-director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Women Talking is most noteworthy for its imagery.
  100. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
    It isn’t long into the film when the hagiographic soundbites from famous interviewees become the dominant mode.
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