Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Life Upside Down
    The film could aim with a bit more precision at the price of its characters’ evident comfort.
  2. birth/rebirth
    Birth/Rebirth serves as a perverse correction, recalibrating decades of dilution to reemphasize the moral weight and emotional anguish at the heart of Shelley’s novel.
  3. Fair Play
    Chloe Domont has conjoined a familiar fantasy of the powerful hedge fund magnate with brutally familiar quotidian details of a relationship that’s about to undergo a profound stress test.
  4. You Hurt My Feelings
    The film deals forthrightly with the question of purpose and whether or not it can be found in a career.
  5. Cat Person
    Cat Person only succeeds when it stays in a space of mystery and unknowing.
  6. Shotgun Wedding
    The film has a rather perfunctory feel, as if it were unwilling to go all in on its ludicrous concept.
  7. Close
    The film reminds us that any coming of age is a risky business where finitude and mourning are the only guarantees.
  8. Missing
    Humor for the sake of humor is a worthwhile pursuit, but Missing’s final act is more unintentionally funny than intentionally funny.
  9. Skinamarink
    Skinamarink is confidently made, and certain upside-down images are especially creepy, but its spell is broken by its sheer, ungodly slowness, which springs from a paucity of ideas.
  10. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
    Promising but failing to deliver the colorful characters and winding, breakneck plot of a caper, Operation Fortune may itself be a ruse, but it’s not a convincing one.
  11. Chess Story
    Philipp Stölzl craftily melds the genres of period drama and psychological thriller, not for the purposes of reheated nostalgia, but to shed a cold light on the recursions of historical trauma.
  12. M3GAN
    There’s enough sardonic humor to keep the proceedings edgy enough, but it’s hard not to wish that the filmmakers would’ve taken a cue from their eponymous villain and really pushed things past the boundaries of good taste.
  13. Alice, Darling
    The emotional crux of Alice Darling is less the manner in which it lays out a roadmap for an exit from an abusive relationship and more its attentiveness to the profound ramifications of such relationships for the women in them.
  14. A Man Called Otto
    The film is so toothless that its protagonist is ultimately about as forbidding as a warm hug.
  15. The Pale Blue Eye
    The film often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart.
  16. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    There are only clichés in this rise-and-fall material, with the sole distinctive wrinkle being the weight given to the rise versus the fall.
  17. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
    Lizzie Gottlieb’s documentary is a celebration of a profound, dying privilege.
  18. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
    Given that big-studio children’s animation so often feels like it was created by algorithm, it’s refreshing to see a kid’s cartoon like <em>The Last Wish</em> that’s filled with too many ideas rather than too few.
  19. Babylon
    [Chazelle’s] torturously glib cynicism is quite the attitude around which to build an epic boondoggle of this sort. Equally as heinous is the 11th-hour optimism that he then attempts to tack onto Babylon via a jaw-droppingly wrongheaded climactic montage.
  20. The Old Town Girls
    The Old Town Girls never seems to have a strong enough sense of the kind of film it wants to be to pull together its more interesting elements into a coherent whole.
  21. Avatar: The Way of Water
    For all the genuine thrills provided by its pioneering pageantry, Way of Water ultimately leaves you with a soul-nagging query: What price entertainment?
  22. Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
    Nina Menkes’s documentary comes dangerously close to inhabiting its own title.
  23. Slumberland
    Slumberland lacks the sense of danger that Winsor McCay liberally infused into his stories.
  24. 2nd Chance
    2nd Chance a terrific American tall tale as well as a cautionary tale and a ripping good yarn.
  25. Violent Night
    Ultimately, it’s the filmmakers’ insistence on both subverting the expectations of the family Christmas film and upholding them that leaves Violent Night feeling like it wants to have its Christmas cookies and eat them too.
  26. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    However faithfully the film transposes the plot and themes of the source material, it struggles to capture the spirit, ironing out D.H. Lawrence’s modernity-skeptical modernism and losing sight of his poetic vision.
  27. Devotion
    This unfocused, awkwardly paced film never quite gets off the ground and, as a result, will do little to change perceptions of the Korean War as the “forgotten war.”
  28. Strange World
    While Strange World’s examination of generational tension is tender and inspiring, as well as nicely tied to its theme of the necessity of adapting to changing times, the film’s sci-fi elements and environmental message are more half-baked in their execution.
  29. She Said
    Ultimately, She Said is more concerned with eliciting the audience’s admiration than its understanding, its compassion, or even simply its interest.
  30. There There
    The artifice of There There certainly generates an added layer of frisson that might not have been there were the film shot under more conventional circumstances. But the root material has enough rich humanity and taut conflict to it that the result would have succeeded regardless.
  31. The Menu
    For as potent as the film’s shocks can be in the moment, it’s difficult to shake off that the screenplay lacks for the breadth of variety that’s necessary to make more than just a restaurant’s tasting menu take flight.
  32. The Wonder
    The Wonder coheres as a powerful study of the way in which people are cloistered by their own stories.
  33. Spirited
    To say that the film grows tedious quickly would suggest that it wasn’t already trite from frame one.
  34. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    The film signals that Alejandro G. Iñárritu, perhaps, is unable to push the limits of his own artistic expression.
  35. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    Though its lugubrious and plodding narrative spins its wheels ahead of someone coming along to fill T’Challa’s shoes, Wakanda Forever does stand out for its depictions of grief.
  36. Paradise City
    If only everyone else had followed John Travolta’s lead, then the film might have lived up to its title.
  37. My Father's Dragon
    The hot streak for Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon cools with My Father’s Dragon.
  38. Missing
    The film ties itself into many knots as it chases the superficial sugar high of a big reveal.
  39. Something in the Dirt
    The film’s sheer fun and invention counterbalance its main characters’ abject failure in their search for meaning and success.
  40. Good Night Oppy
    Ryan White’s documentary is cute to a fault and filled with a rapturously uncomplicated glee about the joys of exploration.
  41. Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams
    The focus on Ferragamo’s craft, and the very structure of manufacture, is exciting, but the narrative’s tendency to embody the opposite of his innovativeness feels lazy and contradictory.
  42. Utama
    Stock story beats of generational dispute run throughout Utama, existing mainly to show off the widescreen possibilities of the Scope frame.
  43. Please Baby Please
    The film’s unapologetic level of artifice is at once the source of its pleasures and limitations.
  44. Argentina, 1985
    For a film about the crimes of a fascist military dictatorship that employed mass torture, rape, kidnapping, and murder as weapons of social control, Argentina, 1985 sure goes down smooth.
  45. Raymond & Ray
    Rodrigo García’s film is fastidious, tidy, and lifeless, with every obligatory gesture in its place.
  46. Black Adam
    The film has the courage of its convictions, suggesting that violence on behalf of an oppressed people isn’t only justifiable but even moral.
  47. Halloween Ends
    Just as David Gordon Green seems to have finally unshackled his legacyquel trilogy from the dead weight of the past, the film loses the courage of its convictions.
  48. Causeway
    It’s to Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry’s credit that what lingers is their characters’ uncertainty.
  49. Piggy
    Throughout, writer-director Carlota Pereda announces herself as a skilled manipulator of audience sympathies.
  50. Enys Men
    Enys Men might have been called A Blueprint for Revival: an attempt to restore to horror something that Jenkin feels has been lost. If only it didn’t lack the power to truly frighten us, it may have flourished.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Showing Up
    Deftly, Showing Up leaves unresolved the familial, creative, professional, and interpersonal matters at its core, staying true to its vision of an artistic environment perpetually caught between modest comfort and precariousness.
  52. Last Flight Home
    Last Flight Home is an anguished therapy session disguised as a meditation on life and death.
  53. Scarlet
    The film drifts so far into weightless fantasy that it practically dissipates before one’s eyes.
  54. Armageddon Time
    The film is an illustration of the transition from the ethical pliancy of youth to the moral discernment of adulthood.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    White Noise
    The film rarely articulates the book's ideas with any real sense of the outside world without resorting to the easy exaggerations that Don DeLillo peddled in the name of satire, which, while maybe fresh back in 1985, ring completely hollow today.
  56. Saint Omer
    If courtroom dramas are usually about taking a stand, Saint Omer shows us that the most impactful truths often go unspoken.
  57. Amsterdam
    The film recalls nothing less than Inherent Vice in its use of a threadbare detective narrative to explore both human interactions and grander ideas about the American society of its time.
  58. All That Breathes
    Shaunak Sen’s documentary is both otherworldly and humanizing, as if it were bridging a gap between different forms of existence.
  59. Hellraiser
    Any ambiguity over the veracity of the story’s events is quickly jettisoned to adhere to the demands of the leaden slasher-film plotting.
  60. Deadstream
    The film doesn’t quite live up to its promising premise and handful of clever camera gimmicks.
  61. Descendant
    With Descendant, filmmaker Margaret Brown finds poetry where most would see the opportunity for a polemic.
  62. Bones and All
    Both Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are sadly at a disadvantage given how many of the older actors gnaw at the scenery like it’s a still-warm cadaver.
  63. Till
    Because of Chinonye Chukwu’s willingness to let small-scale, ancillary scenes play out unhurried and at length, Till taps into to a deeper well of emotions than most biopics.
  64. Master Gardener
    For Paul Schrader, even a film called Master Gardener ultimately pivots on a man having to take out the macho trash.
  65. Project Wolf Hunting
    There’s an admirably propulsive, single-minded sense of purpose to the film’s commitment to gore.
  66. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    When it decides to sober up, the film’s comedy lurches into awkward attempts at melancholy.
  67. Stars at Noon
    In Claire Denis’s film, sex is the great equalizer, or at least the act that allows people to defer taking a firm moral or ethical stance.
  68. Walk Up
    With each new film, Hong Sang-soo’s work becomes more subtextual, more fraught, even funnier.
  69. A Couple
    A Couple ultimately constitutes not so much a footnote to Frederick Wiseman’s storied career as a beguiling little doodle in its margins.
  70. Ticket to Paradise
    George Clooney’s and Julia Roberts’s undimmed charisma brings enough grace notes to Ticket to Paradise that you could easily be taken in by its low-stakes frivolity.
  71. Smile
    Everything Smile is doing is familiar enough at this point to be considered old-fangled, but the striking precision of its craft sloughs away any sensations of déjà vu.
  72. My Imaginary Country
    By the end of My Imaginary Country, Guzmán has still not moved past the trauma of history. Nor, he suggests, has Chile. Not yet. But he does leave open the possibility of a future not beholden to that trauma and a nation that might now be able to write a new history for itself.
  73. The Banshees of Inisherin
    As dark as things get, the film never abandons its sly sense of humor.
  74. TÁR
    The film is consistently compelling visually and aurally, but neither Todd Field nor Cate Blanchett seem quite decided on whether Tár’s comeuppance is a grand tragedy or a cosmic joke.
  75. On the Come Up
    Jamila C. Gray lends credibility to Brianna Jackson, who happens to be searching for just that. She plays the damn role.
  76. Petrov's Flu
    Kirill Serebrennikov’s blackly comedic fantasia paints a none-too-rosy picture of Russia, or its Soviet past festering just beneath the surface.
  77. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
    Few films feel as excitingly jacked in to our current social climate as Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
  78. 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.
  79. The Good Nurse
    For a while, the work on the part of the performers is nuanced enough to distract us from the film’s implausibilities.
  80. Sick
    Throughout, the film’s characters impressively hold their own when forced to defend their lives, with director John Hyams catching every incident of bone-crunching mayhem as if he were shooting a martial arts film.
  81. Living
    Living has the feel of a film afraid to fully step out of its predecessor’s giant shadow.
  82. All the Beauty and the Bloodshed
    The warm, rueful, and sometimes angry All the Beauty and the Bloodshed accomplishes the goal of any documentary worthy of its genre by shining an insightful light onto what informs an artist’s vision.
  83. Don't Worry Darling
    Don’t Worry Darling has the swing-for-the-fences ambition that should have at least made it a noble and compelling folly, but its repetitiveness frustratingly undercuts its grandiosity.
  84. The Woman King
    The film is a historical action epic that, for all the novelty of its setting and subservience to contemporary attitudes, traffics in a lot of cliché narrative beats and ideologies.
  85. Wendell & Wild
    Henry Selick’s flair for phantasmagorical sights is on full display, though Wendell & Wild’s excessively CGI-enhanced look is a far cry from the grounded tactility of much of his prior work.
  86. The Silent Twins
    Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s film is unwilling to really sit with the peculiarity of its protagonists’ unique psyches.
  87. Pearl
    Pearl is ultimately an empty exercise in style masquerading as a character study, and for as fantastic as Mia Goth is, her performance mostly succeeds at making Ti West’s homages just a little bit easier to stomach.
  88. Empire of Light
    In Sam Mendes’s film, the power of the movies comes off feeling disappointingly like an afterthought to the script’s more romantic and socially oriented concerns.
  89. No Bears
    No Bears generally spends less time finding aesthetic articulations of its themes than it does building out an increasingly convoluted plot to support them.
  90. The Whale
    With The Whale, Darren Aronofsky brings a hollow sense of dignity to his schematic brand of cinematic misery porn.
  91. The African Desperate
    That The African Desperate is a send-up of art school is beyond doubt, but what’s less clear is just how far the satire goes.
  92. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    The climax has a certain primally cathartic power, but it doesn’t quite dispel the air of self-satisfaction that envelops the script.
  93. Women Talking
    For better and worse, writer-director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Women Talking is most noteworthy for its imagery.
  94. One Fine Morning
    The film’s storytelling is deceptively straightforward, rooted in realistic dialogue and Mia Hansen-Løve’s light touch as a visual stylist.
  95. The Inspection
    The film is too invested in treacly cinematic optimism for its character dynamics to feel sketched out beyond their basic narrative function.
  96. Corsage
    Writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s boldly restive biopic imagines Empress Elisabeth of Austria as a deeply restless soul chafing against the social limitations of her day.
  97. The Eternal Daughter
    The film is honest and poignant in its kaleidoscopic refractions of the frustration inherent in a process that’s only just beginning.
  98. Decision to Leave
    Throughout the film, one often feels the plot machinations working against Park Chan-wook’s poetry, though in a few cases poetry wins out.
  99. Aftersun
    Deftly constructed and utterly heartbreaking, Aftersun announces Charlotte Wells as an eminent storyteller of prodigious powers.
  100. Triangle of Sadness
    Writer-director Ruben Östlund’s pessimism ultimately leads the film toward a self-negating dead end.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »