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. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    Weird accordingly (or is it accordion-gly?) takes everything to new heights of glorious ridiculousness.
  2. Bros
    Bros is ultimately let down by its pat perspectives on modern romance and social justice.
  3. EO
    EO feels freed of plot, free of expectation, driven only by the need to honor its own internal, poetic drive.
  4. Broker
    Even when it edges toward sentimentality, Broker is redeemed by Kore-eda Hirokazu’s customarily bracing humanism.
  5. The Fabelmans
    The Fabelmans is a provocative investigation of the cinematic medium from one of its great masters.
  6. Holy Spider
    Holy Spider trickily manages to bridge the gap between social realism and exploitation cinema in a way that hints at how both are rooted in a similar place of gritty authenticity.
  7. De Humani Corporis Fabrica
    Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s film is one of the supreme cinematic examinations of the body’s magnificent malleability.
  8. Queens of the Qing Dynasty
    Ashley McKenzie’s film blossoms into a moving story about two people trapped by the institutions that they’re beholden to.
  9. See How They Run
    The film breaks little new ground but is at least a notable improvement on, well, The Mousetrap.
  10. Moonage Daydream
    Brett Morgen is less interested in factual biography than in eliciting a sense of the man as an artist and personality.
  11. Return to Seoul
    Davy Chou’s Return to Seoul quickly blooms as a study in contrasts, sublimely juxtaposing character and culture.
  12. The Good Boss
    In the end, Fernando León de Aranoa’s film suggests that there may not be a lot of daylight between a good boss and a true villain.
  13. A Compassionate Spy
    The suggestion that Ted Hall’s actions were that of simple and pure heroism leaves Steve James’s documentary in tension with the more nuanced view that Hall seemed to have of himself.
  14. The Story of Film: A New Generation
    The films collected in A New Generation speak for themselves even when they don’t necessarily slot neatly into Mark Cousins’s curlicue thinking.
  15. Dos Estaciones
    For all its lush cinematography, capturing regional custom and dramatic panoramas alike, this is a film about repression, an inhibition that no amount of tequila can take away.
  16. Clerks III
    Kevin Smith toys with death in Clerks III as a shortcut to bring emotion to a film that otherwise has no meaningful hook.
  17. Saloum
    With expert visual precision, the film flows into each new, wild narrative wrinkle as if it were the most logical thing in the world.
  18. Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.
    After a while, you want to know what line of inquiry the film is pursuing—what greater paths it’s wandered to.
  19. Samaritan
    Perhaps the fairest description of Stallone’s performance is that it’s only as one-note as the material, his stern tough-guy muttering and grimacing just about right for a screenplay that feels like it’s been plucked out of a dustbin left untouched since 1995.
  20. Funny Pages
    Funny Pages eschews the platitudes and carefully scripted character arcs that often cause coming-of-age tales to feel not only predictable but coated in a sheen of nostalgia.
  21. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    George Miller’s film is a passionate exploration of how image-making is inextricable from storytelling.
  22. Private Desert
    Aly Muritiba’s film is always telling the viewer that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters.
  23. Mother and Son
    Léonor Serraille’s Mother and Son is a lovely film about feminine strength that also refuses to glorify motherhood.
  24. Spin Me Round
    Cleansed of all risk and personality, Spin Me Round subsides, as though with a sigh, into the reheated sauce of mediocrity.
  25. The Territory
    Alex Pritz’s documentary provides an affecting look at indigenous lives at the frontline of deforestation in the Amazon.
  26. Orphan: First Kill
    William Brent Bell’s film proves that not every horror concept has the potential to be franchised.
  27. Day Shift
    Day Shift’s first half is an unexpectedly focused, consistent pleasure, while the second sags under the weight of recycled set pieces.
  28. Fall
    Scott Mann’s film succeeds by simply committing to and steadily ratcheting up the ludicrous awesomeness of its premise.
  29. Thirteen Lives
    Avoiding excessively heightened melodrama, Thirteen Lives doesn’t substitute it with much that one couldn’t already find in the copious amount of available coverage of the real-life incident.
  30. El Gran Movimiento
    Writer-director Kiro Rosso’s sociological, pseudo-documentary film suggests a mosaic resolving out of innumerable shards.
  31. Emily the Criminal
    The film may not suffer from didacticism, but it’s at its most volcanic when it promises to blossom into a study of a generation’s financial difficulties.
  32. The Magician
    The Magician might have worked better if it could have sustained for its first several sequences a sense of genre confusion.
  33. Prey
    Prey proves to be an apropos title, as the film is cowed by John McTiernan’s original Predator.
  34. Bullet Train
    David Leitch’s film pulls off the notable feat of making human beings out of cartoonishly violent psychopaths.
  35. A Love Song
    The film relies on wide shots of distant mountains to stand in for a fruitful interrogation of what it means to occupy the open terrain of the U.S.
  36. Vengeance
    Though its lack of emotional escalation could be read as intentional, Vengeance is ground to a repetitive halt by B.J. Novak’s preaching.
  37. Not Okay
    Not Okay doesn’t make any points that, now over a decade into the ubiquity of social media, aren’t painfully obvious.
  38. Nope
    The film’s fantastical meta-commentaries don’t completely cohere but have a winning go-for-it audaciousness.
  39. My Old School
    The film is a perfectly entertaining retelling of an offbeat tale, but it’s also superficial and borderline exploitative.
  40. The Gray Man
    The Gray Man is a noisy, flashy spectacle that piles clichés atop ludicrous plotting and sprinkles it all with half-funny quips, all in the hope of bulldozing the audience into submission.
  41. Where the Crawdads Sing
    The film spins a soapy yet dramatically inert and often tone-deaf yarn about societal rejection and female empowerment in the wetlands of North Carolina.
  42. She Will
    She Will can’t decide if its horror or comedy, nor does it strike the balance that would harmoniously hybridize them.
  43. The Deer King
    The Deer King leaves one with the impression that it hasn’t given itself enough room to truly soar.
  44. Gone in the Night
    The film’s ominous atmosphere derives less from the mystery of a disappearance and more from the scary business of getting older.
  45. Pacifiction
    Pacifiction uses its thin narrative elements as a pretense to explore the texture of uncertainty, suspicion, and inaction.
  46. Marx Can Wait
    Marco Bellocchio uses his film, a delicate mix of biography and autobiography, as the catalyst for long-delayed therapy.
  47. Persuasion
    The film proves again that the modern-day veneration of Jane Austen as the patron saint of the rom-com is also an act of simplification.
  48. Murina
    With so much screen time devoted to portraying its main character’s complexities, the other characters remain half-developed, and to the detriment of the film’s themes.
  49. This Much I Know to Be True
    The accumulating effect of this airy and resonant film’s formal devices is that of a heartbroken artist learning to reengage with society.
  50. Thor: Love and Thunder
    Across Taika Waititi’s film, a war against the gods feels like an afterthought to a bad rom-com.
  51. Mr. Malcolm's List
    The period romance has been increasingly experimented with in recent years, yet both straight dramas and convention-spoofing comedies almost always end up upholding the strict boundaries of the genre as if to prove the limits of reimagining the past.
  52. The Black Phone
    Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill are adept enough at setting up rich, evocative horror concepts, but they don’t always know what to do with them once they’re in place.
  53. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On
    Dean Fleischer-Camp’s Marcel the Shell with Shoes On convincingly proves that bigger sometimes is better.
  54. Elvis
    The protracted rubbernecking at Elvis’s inexorable decline epitomizes a film that regularly backs away from its keenest observations about the icon to merely, and superficially, bask in his star power.
  55. Lightyear
    The film is a slickly produced but soulless spectacle whose jokey banter and space-opera action drowns out the story’s emotional beats.
  56. Spiderhead
    By resolving its story around a mano-a-mano, the film narrows its understanding of a system in which exploitation is privatized.
  57. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    The film abounds in honest and at times disarmingly off-the-cuff moments that are borne out of character contrasts.
  58. Official Competition
    Official Competition is another film about filmmaking, but it escapes hermeticism by homing in on actors and acting.
  59. Brian and Charles
    The original Brian and Charles short focused entirely on its titular characters, and it’s clear that was for the best.
  60. Jurassic World Dominion
    When Dominion isn’t suffocating itself with world-building, much of it frustratingly untapped, it’s wholly given over to corny fan service.
  61. Funny Face
    The clothing may be couture, but Funny Face’s plot is strictly wash, rinse, repeat.
  62. Hustle
    Hustle doesn’t really seem to know who its characters are, much less how they fit into the complicated web of sports, media, and finance that defines the NBA.
  63. Mad God
    Mad God offers a dense cornucopia of genre-fueled outrageousness that’s gradually united by a concern with cycles of warfare.
  64. Lost Illusions
    Lost Illusions leans heavily on voiceover narration that, for better or worse, draws attention to its novelistic mode of its storytelling.
  65. The Phantom of the Open
    The film loses its satiric edge as it begins to melodramatically detail how Maurice Flitcroft inherited the mantle of folk hero.
  66. Dashcam
    Dashcam is nothing if not consistent, as it’s every bit the empty provocation as the troll at its center.
  67. Crimes of the Future
    David Cronenberg stares upon humanity’s need to evolve toward some kind of survival with a serene, godlike assurance.
  68. Fire Island
    The film is filled with a subtextual nostalgia for a fleeting youth and the urgency of figuring things out before it’s too late.
  69. The Tsugua Diaries
    The Tsugua Diaries is something like Memento for an age of isolation and listlessness.
  70. R.M.N.
    R.M.N. is more suspense thriller than procedural, and it’s content to have the audience walk on the razor’s edge of doubt and fear through much of its two-hour running time. Perhaps too content.
  71. There Are No Saints
    At its best, Alfonso Pineda Ulloa’s film gleefully embodies the grungy spirit of classic exploitation cinema.
  72. The Bob's Burgers Movie
    Throughout the film, the quick-hit jokes from the show’s rich cast of oddballs serves to suggest a vibrant world outside of the Belchers.
  73. Digger
    Georgis Grigorakis’s film may not revolutionize the western genre by transposing it to an unlikely setting, but it doesn’t dilute it either.
  74. Final Cut
    Unlike One Cut of the Dead, Michel Hazanavicius’s similar ode to low-budget resourcefulness often rings false.
  75. Emergency
    Emergency is uneven, but it’s grounded by dynamic performances and a vivid portrayal of the minutiae of friendship.
  76. Men
    Men is ultimately about as deep as its title, a swipe at the multi-faceted terribleness of its titular subject that rarely gets beyond being a mere catalogue of the different ways that guys can be irritating around and dangerous toward women.
  77. Hold Your Fire
    The film’s aesthetic approach is purposeful, echoing the us-or-them sentiment held by both groups aiming guns at the other.
  78. Downton Abbey: A New Era
    A New Era’s acknowledgement that some things must die for new things to be born works to justify the film’s title by quietly linking its themes of entitlement and survival.
  79. Firestarter
    This new Firestarter is an almost anachronistically short production whose elements just sit there like mishandled kindling.
  80. Deception
    With his Deception, Arnaud Desplechin renders one of a great author’s slighter works titanic by comparison.
  81. The Last Victim
    Distractingly indebted to No Country for Old Men, the film’s wild tonal swings mostly leave it feeling impossibly disjointed.
  82. Montana Story
    The film is initially distinguished by its poetic understatement, only for it to eventually succumb to staleness.
  83. Top Gun: Maverick
    The film fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Tom Cruise’s recent star vehicles and reaffirms Joseph Kosinski as a blockbuster craftsman par excellence.
  84. Pleasure
    The film fiercely homes in at the moral perversity of an industry at a particular intersection of capitalism, patriarchy, and digital-age spectacle.
  85. The Takedown
    The Takedown’s supposedly inclusionary, pro-immigrant messaging is constantly undermined by puerile and dated humor.
  86. Dragnet Girl
    Dragnet Girl features an array of seemingly debased molls and violent loners who blow off steam with punching bags in between petty wrongdoings, but it never outright vilifies any of them.
  87. The Bad Guys
    The Bad Guys is a heist film that steals all of its moves.
  88. The Cathedral
    The Cathedral is a deeply humanist film, but it’s also a relentlessly bleak exorcism of a family’s intolerances.
  89. Firebird
    There are clichés and then there are only clichés, and Firebird is suffocated by them.
  90. Anaïs in Love
    For all of its farcical overtones, the film contains many shrewd observations about the power games inherent in relationships.
  91. Lux Æterna
    If the film-within-the-film is a vapid fetishization of women’s martyrdom, Lux Æterna is a willful exercise in repulsing its own audience.
  92. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    At its finest, this psychedelic, horror-strewn romp’s artistry perfectly reflects the intensity of Strange navigating endless alternate realms.
  93. Human Factors
    Despite the mystery of the home invasion becoming increasingly tangential, Human Factors remains a compelling puzzle-box.
  94. Memory
    Martin Campbell’s film never shakes off its familiarity, and as such seems destined to, well, be lost to public memory.
  95. Fire of Love
    The film oscillates between the playfully on the nose and the existentially profound with the confidence of a volcano chaser surfing on a river of lava.
  96. Los Conductos
    A collage-like tale of vengeance told with an often impressionistic elusiveness, the film can also be bewildering in its juxtapositions.
  97. The Innocents
    The Innocents adopts a slasher-esque vibe that, however airlessly aestheticized, feels lurid for the sake of being lurid.
  98. The Tale of King Crab
    A film that so clearly takes delight in the unfolding of a story and the unpacking of an enigmatic character is refreshing in an arthouse landscape where such narrative qualities are often relegated to secondary concerns.
  99. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    Despite this clever setup, Tom Gormican’s film isn’t the self-reflexive skewering of Hollywood that one might expect.
  100. Father Stu
    The film is a Hollywood-approved show of Old Testament judgment that sees all people as sinners and thus deserving of all the punishment they receive.
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