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 6.3 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. Sister
    Ursula Meier's film is sustained by a sturdy emotional engine and some intrepidly thoughtful characterization.
  2. A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
    To dismiss it as simply an act of hipster appropriation is to cop out, because appropriation is the film's thematic meat.
  3. Us
    Even though it’s not as tidily satisfying as Get Out, the new film is both darker and more ambitious, and broader in its themes.
    • 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.
  5. Closed Curtain
    The next step in Jafar Panahi's personal cinema of captivity, a fully fictionalized, wildly bewildering work which imagines a man at war with his own creative impulse.
  6. Moana
    Compared to your average Disney princesses, Moana is neither selfishly rebellious nor simplistically innocent.
  7. The Wailing
    Na Hong-jin's The Wailing is a work of thriller maximal-ism, a rare case of more actually being more rather than less.
  8. The Empty Hours
    Aarón Fernández captures one of the most heartening elements of sex: that it doesn't always oblige our rules or expectations.
  9. White Sun
    Deepak Rauniyar may be more skilled dramatist than inspired image-maker, but his admirably balanced and humane social and political perspective is bracing nevertheless.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    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.
  11. Two Trains Runnin'
    Sam Pollard's documentary teeters on reaching a higher plane of meaning simply through the efficiency of its information.
  12. Tchoupitoulas
    The overall experience is entirely immersive, thanks not only to the filmmakers' handheld camera, but also to the illusory nature of the staging.
  13. Cousin Jules
    It's a bit reductive in terms of a personal portrait, but this is a film that's not concerned with telling the story of a man, instead making him a representative symbol of a mostly bygone way of life, a reminder of both the fleeting nature of individual experience and the steady patterns of a broader human existence.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Skyfall
    Bond's latest is a remarkable high watermark for the series: at once solemn and deeply funny, sexy and sad, self-conscious without all the rib-bruising elbowing.
  15. Thunder Soul
    Forcefully traditional and sentimental, Thunder Soul benefits most from the cinematic turn of the actual events it documents, which allowed the beloved teacher's life to end on a perfectly bittersweet note.
  16. Amanda
    Carolina Cavalli’s film consecrates a ferocity as refreshing as it is infectious.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Consuming Spirits
    Not only a monstrous visual achievement, but one of the most uniquely humanistic animated features of all time.
  18. Memoir of a Snail
    Adam Elliot, whose work is no stranger to despondency, never allows the film to fully succumb to despair.
  19. 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.
  20. Your Name.
    Even at its most outrageously bizarre, Your Name is bound together by a passionately romantic core.
  21. 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.
  22. You, the Living
    Humor and sorrow are equally immediate emotions throughout, whether in the writer-director's traditionally structured setup-punchline scenes or his strange non sequiturs
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Upstream Color
    Upstream Color is lush, rhythmic, and deeply sensual, a film of exceptional beauty.
  24. Dreams
    A story of hazy memories that’s also a city symphony, Dreams elegantly captures the disorienting rush of first love and the frustrations and anguish that stem from romantic fantasies colliding with reality.
  25. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    It infuses an outdoorsy survival tale and a coming-of-age story of friendship with Taika Waititi's penchant for distaff flakiness.
  26. Mikey and Nicky
    Few films have so exquisitely captured how straight American men reveal their affections and insecurities to one another, as well as how they’re both threatened and awed by each other.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Hell and Back Again
    Unlike most war documentaries, which tend to only skim the surface of its gun-toting subjects' lives, photojournalist Danfung Dennis's Hell and Back Again isn't content to merely capture warriors in combat.
  28. The Hate U Give
    The film lays out the complexities of contemporary race relations with a deliberateness that frequently edges over into didacticism.
  29. Faya Dayi
    The documentary’s aesthetics strikingly channel the euphoric feelings induced by Ethopia’s top cash crop.
  30. Daughters of the Dust
    This is a work of art that's as much a cinematic probe, and a challenge to mythologizing past eras, as it is an ancestral history lesson.
  31. Battle Royale
    Maybe Battle Royale's ultimate punchline is its inexplicable ability to fool some people into taking it seriously.
  32. Goodnight Mommy
    In the third act, the film devolves into an extremely unsettling series of sadistic tortures, the kind of stuff that would appeal largely to fans of Funny Games.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Fishing Place
    Rob Tregenza is always questioning what can be accomplished with the simple building blocks of cinema.
  34. I Lost My Body
    It focuses equally on moments of shared connection and incidental loss until the two feel indistinguishable.
  35. 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.
  36. 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.
  37. Two Step
    A zig-zagging, free-associational genre item that's mostly concerned with stretching the generally narrow tonal rules of what a thriller can be.
  38. Summer 1993
    The film's screenplay is impressive for how crucial plot points emerge as backdrops to the explicit purpose of a scene.
  39. Starred Up
    The cautious optimism with which it answers questions about rehabilitation and forgiveness is credible because the characters and setting feel so thoroughly authentic.
  40. The Guardians
    The film captures the pictorial beauty of old-fashioned farm life, but director Xavier Beauvois is careful not to romanticize hard labor for its own sake.
  41. Mirai
    The fabric of the fantasy world depicted in the film lacks the cohesion of its central theme about appreciating one’s place in a family tree.
  42. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    The action consistently snaps the film into focus, but it also further illustrates how badly the decision to split this narrative into two parts throws off the delicate rhythm that’s made Mission: Impossible arguably the most consistently entertaining American action franchise of all time.
  43. Benediction
    Terence Davies’s film is a rhapsodic portrayal of an upper-crust milieu in which words are wielded like weapons by people who might otherwise be pariahs.
  44. A War
    Tobias Lindholm stages his claims through clunky dramaturgical scenarios, with the seams exposed at every turn.
  45. She Dies Tomorrow
    Perhaps as a result of her attempting to avoid all matter of clichés, not just of genre, Amy Seimetz revels in vagueness.
  46. Living
    Living has the feel of a film afraid to fully step out of its predecessor’s giant shadow.
  47. Tuesday, After Christmas
    At first glance, Tuesday, After Christmas seems, in both form and content, only a modestly ambitious endeavor. Yet the singular attention with which it carries out its aims-and the rigorous success it ultimately attains-is nonetheless unsparing, and bracing.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    The World's End
    An ordinary drama embellished and in some sense infringed on by genre elements rather than the other way around.
  49. Chinese Portrait
    The simplicity of bodies barely moving before a camera that brings their quotidian temporality into a halt is nothing short of a radical proposition in our digital era.
  50. Destry Rides Again
    Above all, Destry Rides Again is fun, with a variety of stars and character actors utilizing their charisma with an expert sense of ease and offhandedness.
  51. Mountains
    Mountains interprets leisure not so much as the opposite of work or struggle, but a stance that can and should suffuse each moment of life, not discounting those we sell to make a living.
  52. Skin Deep
    Though as fresh and conceptually far-reaching as a David Cronenberg film, it traffics in body ambivalence more than body horror, striking an eerie, wistful tone.
  53. Lost Illusions
    Lost Illusions leans heavily on voiceover narration that, for better or worse, draws attention to its novelistic mode of its storytelling.
  54. Menashe
    Striking throughout are the seemingly caught-on-the-wing moments that subtly enrichen the film’s characterizations.
  55. Picnic at Hanging Rock
    It’s the characters’ ceaseless need to fully understand, outsmart, and undermine nature’s sway that drives them into fervor and, often enough, leads them to shuffle off this mortal coil.
  56. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
    The director's clear-minded approach allows her subject's more challenging aesthetic-political mix to shine through, even if it's at the inevitable expense of her own filmmaking proclivities.
  57. Nitram
    Implicit in the film’s bleak but sympathetic portrait of a disturbed and shunned young man is that sometimes it takes a village to make a monster.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Woman at War
    It balances its various modes so carefully and efficiently that it achieves a graceful unity, if a strange one at that.
  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.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    To Live and Die in L.A.
    To Live and Die in L.A. exhibits a remarkable degree of kineticism, evident in several memorable chase sequences, the film’s headlong momentum abetted by Wang Chung’s dynamic score.
  62. Right Now, Wrong Then
    Spotting and processing the countless differences between the parts offers pleasures on various levels.
  63. Ford v Ferrari
    At a time when the nation continues to weigh the fate of its auto industry, James Mangold’s depiction of the Ford Motor Company facing its first major financial threat transparently plays to nostalgic reveries of the industry’s golden age.
  64. 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.
  65. The Mitchells vs. The Machines
    While the film certainly lays out the dangers of technology run amok, it also sees its power to connect people.
  66. The Chambermaid
    Lila Avilés’s film reserves the possibility of flirtations with disaster to turn into acts of emancipation.
    • 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.
  68. 12 Days
    With a tender and respectful gaze, 12 DAYS (@distribfilmsus) sheds light on the relationship between the French state and the mentally ill.
  69. Mistress Dispeller
    The film is sensitively attuned to how people’s feelings are shaped by cultural norms.
  70. Elaine Stritch: Shoot Me
    Chiemi Karasawa's documentary is remarkable for its candor, but it's a brutal honesty that Elaine Stritch herself gladly offers.
  71. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    The film is a sensitive character study disguised as an unnerving exercise in body horror.
  72. Rimini
    The film fleshes out the perhaps familiar characterizations at its center by tying contemporary wounds to the persistent presence of Europe’s ugly history.
  73. Ray & Liz
    Ray & Liz generates pathos through its detailed attention to its characters' attempts to find permanence and meaning in a fundamentally unstable reality.
  74. A Thousand and One
    The film brims with authenticity and the electrifying emotional intensity of the best melodramas.
  75. 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple
    The Bone Temple doesn’t pack the moment-to-moment kineticism of the prior films.
  76. 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.
  77. The King of Escape
    Cruising for Alain Guiraudie seems to be the way of nature, a drive that doesn't discriminate.
  78. Waves
    This is a rare case of a film that’s stronger when it colors inside the lines than radically traces outside of them.
  79. 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.
  80. Neon Bull
    Everything in the film is understood to be a subsumed sex act, with actual sex serving as a contextualizing catharsis.
  81. Preparation for the Next Life
    One small, shrewd decision after another allows Preparation for the Next Life to sustain its naturalism to the end.
  82. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
    The film pokes fun at the conventions of detective stories but never becomes so self-aware that you stop taking it seriously.
  83. Young Mothers
    Young Mothers is a welcome return to form for the Dardenne brothers, balancing social observation with character study.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Testament of Ann Lee
    Mona Fastvold’s protean fable is tremulous, tricky, and intrepid, much like its pious protagonist.
  85. Salesman
    An immersive drama that bridges real-life details with the catharses of parables with expressionistic on-the-fly camerawork, a blend of the textural and the poetic that’s hallucinatory and profound.
  86. X
    While still intermittently thrilling as a basic retro-outfitted slasher, X ultimately comes off in a way that no porn (or horror) film should: like a tease.
  87. The Sparks Brothers
    The film embodies the idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek sensibilities of Ron and Russell Mael’s long-running cult American pop band.
  88. Uppercase Print
    The film metatextually insists that we not be taken in by new, more sophisticated methods of obfuscation.
  89. The Roaring Twenties
    Climaxing with a tableau that’s as iconic as it is melodramatic, The Roaring Twenties revels in a relativism that keeps its momentum fresh and elusive.
  90. Knock Down the House
    Rachel Lears’s film is a rebuttal to the position that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's election victory was an incidental event in American politics.
  91. The Train
    The Train makes unmistakably clear to us that heroism isn’t always black and white—that sometimes it’s simply about doing what’s right even if you don’t understand why.
  92. Coup 53
    Once Taghi Amirani turns his attention to the coup itself, his film snaps into shape, with Walter Murch skillfully knitting together new and old interviews to lay out the story in highly dramatic form.
  93. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    Dean Fleischer-Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On convincingly proves that bigger sometimes is better.
  94. 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.
  95. Good Time
    The Safdies play with time like it’s an accordion, stretching out notes of bliss and anxiety while compressing the daily lives of their characters in order to convey the constant state of hustle and stresses necessitated by being poor and hungry for drugs, cash, or a bite to eat in New York City.
  96. The Secret World of Arrietty
    Offers exactly what its title promises, unveiling this secret milieu through thoroughly meticulous animation.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Mastermind
    The Mastermind marks a new chapter in Kelly Reichardt’s ongoing tapestry of American life through the eyes of its eccentric outsiders, specifically capping off a trilogy about the intersection of art and commerce at differing stages of American capitalism.
  98. We Come as Friends
    It grows increasingly hopeless as it contrasts the alien paradise of the opening with the wastelands that resemble corporate dump sites.
  99. The Wound
    Though the film settles into a familiar coming-of-age trajectory, it's always enlivened by John Trengove's intimate, inquiring eye.
  100. Dying
    The film’s diligent script and nuanced performances are such that the depressing material stops short of turning into a depressing experience.
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