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. The Northman
    While the canvas of Robert Eggers latest is considerably broader than that of The Witch and the Lighthouse, it feels as if its psychological chaos hasn’t expanded accordingly.
  2. Ambulance
    Rarely have Michael Bay’s frenzied stylistic tics been so effectively intertwined with the substance of one of his films.
  3. Metal Lords
    Peter Sollett’s coming-of-age comedy betrays rather than upholds the values of the very kids it wants to revere.
  4. Aline
    Valérie Lemercier’s film feels at once like a vanity project for its maker and a glorified fan tribute.
  5. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    With this film, nuance seems to have disapparated from the wizarding world altogether.
  6. Donbass
    The film’s collisions between the grave and the comic are crucial to its vision of a society cracking under the weight of its own inconsistencies.
  7. Cow
    Throughout Andrea Arnold’s film, a kind of affective connection is formed between animal and the cinematic apparatus.
  8. The Bubble
    The film’s toothless showbiz satire mostly comes down to teasing its characters for their entitlement and self-importance.
  9. Barbarians
    Throughout, Barbarians oscillates between smugness and apprehensiveness about the film that it’s trying to be.
  10. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood
    Apollo 10½ ultimately suggests that memory distorts and amplifies just as much as it preserves.
  11. Gagarine
    The film is at its most effective and engaging when simply capturing the vibrancy of a world onto its own.
  12. Babi Yar. Context
    Sergei Loznitsa continues to mine the archives for what amount to living documents of a past that, as is all too clear, reverberate into the present with devastating force.
  13. The Contractor
    The film’s rote action-movie plotting is calibrated in a ponderously straight-faced way so as to give it some semblance of gravity.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Mothering Sunday
    For all of the film’s somberness, its depiction of an era of rigid class divisions and incalculable loss still comes through the hazy, soft-focus goggles of nostalgia.
  17. Everything Everywhere All at Once
    The film works magic by embracing excess, finding a kind of harmony and possibility within it, and reminding us of the beauty and lunacy of the human experience along the way.
  18. 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.
  19. Infinite Storm
    Not only does Infinite Storm lack for a complete vision, it’s all too comfortable in settling for mawkishness.
  20. The Lost City
    The Lost City is proof that star power and chemistry can only take a film with a mediocre script so far.
  21. Windfall
    Windfall has a difficult time landing on the right tone or getting a bead on its characters.
  22. Deep Water
    After a dangerous, even personal, first half, Deep Water becomes crude in all the wrong ways.
  23. 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.
  24. Jane by Charlotte
    The film neglects to find a conceptual framework for its prolonged consideration of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s eventual revelation: “I have always loved you, but it’s much clearer to me now.”
  25. The Outfit
    The Outfit is a dapper, twist-filled crime story that relies more on dialogue than gunplay to move the action.
  26. The Adam Project
    Ultimately, the film tries so hard to do so much that it doesn’t end up doing any of it particularly well.
  27. Ultrasound
    Ultrasound never quite figures out how to keep going once its mysteries have been unraveled.
  28. Offseason
    Keating’s film forgets the cardinal rule of good pastiche: that if you’re not building something new from familiar pieces then you’re just regurgitating old ideas.
  29. Gold
    Throughout, Efron seems almost determined to wipe away the last vestiges of his youthful looks.
  30. Turning Red
    After a first hour that may well hit Zoomers and their millennial parents in the feels, Turning Red gradually runs out of steam.
  31. Great Freedom
    In Great Freedom, the question of love is refreshingly never too far from bodily intimacy, irrespective of what kind of love that is.
  32. Huda's Salon
    Formally, Huda’s Salon is nothing if not effective, sustaining the unrelenting tension of its opening scene for the duration of its runtime.
  33. The Batman
    The film stands apart for thoughtfully suggesting that Batman might actually one day make Gotham a better place, and not merely a safer one
  34. Dear Mr. Brody
    The film poignantly draws a straight line from the economic anxieties of the past straight to the present.
  35. The Desperate Hour
    The Desperate Hour’s broad, vague rendering of its characters is part and parcel of its troubling approach to its material.
  36. Studio 666
    The film’s funny and shocking gore too often plays second fiddle to meandering comedic bits revolving around the band’s recording sessions.
  37. The Burning Sea
    The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.
  38. Dark Glasses
    After a brilliantly constructed opening, Dario Argento’s film gives the impression only of a giallo doodle.
  39. Big Gold Brick
    Brian Pestos’s flair for go-for-broke zaniness transmutes what might otherwise have been a lump of self-indulgent clichés into gold.
  40. 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.
  41. Flux Gourmet
    Peter Strickland’s playful mockery of performance art and excessively serious-minded “collectives” feels both insular and, at times, a shade too flavorless.
  42. Nobody's Hero
    The film goes from biting satire to broad farce and back as Alain Guiraudie fills it with both social observation and ludicrous incident.
  43. Coma
    A heady rush of ideas, the film’s avant-garde mélange of live-action footage, abstract video art, and multiple kinds of animation just barely masks that it’s a rather simple story about a Zoomer’s inner struggle with both her own mortality and that of the world.
  44. Both Sides of the Blade
    The studied ambiguity of what’s going on in Fire doesn’t keep it from often achieving the suspense of an accomplished erotic thriller.
  45. Small, Slow But Steady
    Small, Slow But Steady is one of the first great pandemic movies because it reflects the lessons about mutual support and communal perseverance that we should be taking from very familiar pandemic struggles.
  46. Alcarràs
    As a tribute to farmers’ way of life, its effective and at times moving, but as an exposé of the potential losses that a business-centric green revolution is in the process of incurring, it wants for a stiffer punch.
  47. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a deeply miscalculated mix of incoherent social commentary and over-the-top gore.
  48. That Kind of Summer
    That Kind of Summer never quite resolves into any one stance on its subjects, an equanimity that’s to its credit.
  49. Dog
    Dog cannily smuggles a nuanced inquiry of a social issue under the guise of popular entertainment.
  50. Leonora addio
    Leonora Addio is a wrestling with memory and history through a deeply personal, if at times indulgent, lens.
  51. Unrest
    Cyril Schäublin’s precisely framed snapshot of a microcosm of timekeepers ends up being a bit too, well, mechanical.
  52. The Novelist's Film
    The film proves that Hong Sang-soo has yet to exhaust his methods of deriving significance and beauty from the most quotidian of details.
  53. Uncharted
    The games are fixated on the idea of honor among thieves, but you wouldn’t know that from the antic, meaningless depiction of the betrayals that play out across the film.
  54. Taurus
    Taurus is in the business of self-aggrandizement, but this is a film that understands that stardom is inherently aggrandizing.
  55. Ted K
    Tony Stone’s avoidance of emotional manipulation in dramatizing Ted Kaczynski’s terror campaign is admirable, but only up to a point.
  56. Strawberry Mansion
    Strawberry Mansion playfully and delightfully draws parallels between the creative agency of dreams and the waking creativity of filmmaking.
  57. Incredible But True
    Quentin Dupieux’s latest endlessly draws out every stilted interaction for maximum deadpan effect.
  58. Kimi
    The film extend into impactful hyperbole the tensions inherent in the situation of being subjects of and subjects to incessant surveillance.
  59. Marry Me
    Marry Me plays out as the logical culmination of a multi-hyphenate icon’s indiscriminate commercial voracity.
  60. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Throughout, Josephine Decker effortlessly keys her intimate and eccentric style to her main character’s complicated inner turmoil.
  61. Catch the Fair One
    The solemnity of Josef Kubota Wladyka’s film is at odds with the gratuitousness of its violence.
  62. Blacklight
    Instead of elaborating its plot, Blacklight offers up repetitious, dialogue-driven scenes that deliver only the shallowest of exposition, advancing the story at a sluggish pace.
  63. Death on the Nile
    Once things get moving, it’s smooth sailing to the double-shocker of a denouement.
  64. Jackass Forever
    To see the old-timers pass the torch to their acolytes cements the improbable importance of Jackass in American pop culture.
  65. Last Looks
    Throughout Last Looks, the filmmakers tend to a conventional mystery that could have benefited from more satiric intention.
  66. Lingui, The Sacred Bonds
    The material realities of being a woman in Chad are expressed with profound sympathy in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s film.
  67. 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.
  68. Nanny
    Writer-director Nikyatu Jusu’s film ultimately proposes that survival is the greatest form of resistance.
  69. Resurrection
    The film is one of the more intrinsically frightening evocations of a traumatized mind since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
  70. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    Rather than thoughtfully reflect on post-collegiate ennui and disillusionment, the film settles for erecting a monument to its main character’s awesomeness.
  71. You Won't Be Alone
    Throughout You Won’t Be Alone, writer-director Goran Stolevski rejects the slickness that defines so-called elevated horror.
  72. Dual
    Riley Stearns’s film consistently tickles the funny bone, even when it comes at the expense of psychological nuance.
  73. Sharp Stick
    Sharp Stick shows that Lena Dunham’s preference for solipsistic protagonists with boundary issues has its limitations.
  74. Alice
    Alice plays as an inadvertent parody of contemporary liberalism’s fascination with and fetishization of ‘70s black radicalism.
  75. Watcher
    Watcher gives a feminist twist to a throwback genre, but never does its topicality dilute its gripping suspense.
  76. Brighton 4th
    The film unfolds at a pace that is unhurried yet self-assured, submerged in the rhythms that govern its characters’ lives.
  77. Master
    Mariama Diallo’s film never seems to fully buy into its horror trappings and ends up treating its characters as avatars for multiple grievances.
  78. Fresh
    Fresh is pitched as a kind of genre corrective, except its tone-deaf cheekiness only results in a feeling of dreary regression.
  79. Call Jane
    The film consistently fails to underline the risks and pressures faced by the women in an underground abortionist network in Chicago in the late ‘60s.
  80. Speak No Evil
    Until its contrived conclusion, the film plays as a queasy satire of conditioned interpersonal behavior.
  81. Clean
    While its plot is strictly by the numbers, Clean is elevated by its stylistic flair and propulsive pace.
  82. When You Finish Saving the World
    Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on, but he flattens his mother-and-son narcissists to the point of caricature.
  83. Breaking
    Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps 892 build tension primarily from character instead of incident.
  84. Happening
    This period drama manages the difficult task of speaking to our current moment without being didactic or preachy.
  85. The King's Daughter
    The film provides no space to explore its relationships, and as a result there’s little friction to the climax.
  86. Simple Passion
    The film makes no attempt to embody the themes that form the core of Annie Ernaux’s story in its aesthetics.
  87. Redeeming Love
    The film is too narrow-minded to explore the notion that a saint-like man may want to satisfy his normal carnal desires.
  88. The Last Thing Mary Saw
    The film comes to feel like a parody of a possession flick rather than a straightforward replication of the genre’s tropes.
  89. Scream
    It’s at a certain point toward the finale that this Scream becomes almost as drearily repetitious as the reboot culture that it skewers.
  90. The Whaler Boy
    The film is a vivid rumination on the fuzzy border between fantasy and reality.
  91. Sansho the Bailiff
    There’s a reason Sansho the Bailiff is often greeted by critics and audiences with something akin to rapture: It’s a work that divorces the existential riddles of faith from regimented dogma, favoring instead the practical challenges, contradictions, and ambiguities of life as it’s often lived.
  92. Italian Studies
    During an amnesiac’s atmospheric nighttime ramble through Manhattan, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured.
  93. The Pink Cloud
    After a while, writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s boldly mundane take on forced isolation gives way to a regular sort of mundanity.
  94. Belle
    For all of the film’s visually striking action and musical set pieces, it’s the generosity of spirit with which it approaches the modern teenage experience that’s its most impressive attribute.
  95. The 355
    The film treats its premise as the backdrop for a trite celebration of empowerment and teamwork among professional women.
  96. Expedition Content
    The issue of racism sits nestled under both this sequence and the field of anthropology as a whole, giving Expedition Content a nakedly ontological dimension that interrogates how images are produced and who produces them.
  97. King Car
    Renata Pinheiro’s film boasts the pleasures of shlock while sacrificing none of its philosophical rigor.
  98. The Velvet Queen
    Long stretches of the film are simply mesmerizing, but both Sylvain Tesson’s written compositions and the conversation between him and Vincent Munier often lapse into clichés about the distractions and decadence of modern society.
  99. The Matrix Resurrections
    Where the love story was a means-to-an-end afterthought in the first Matrix, it’s now the crux of the tale, and the emotional undercurrents are so intoxicating that it more than makes up for the relative inelegance of the action scenes.
  100. tick, tick...Boom!
    tick, tick… BOOM! never quite resolves that tension between well-attended wake and intimate memoir.
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