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. Anne at 13,000 ft
    The film intimately immerses us in the psyche of a woman for whom each day is a minefield of uncomfortable interactions.
  2. I'm Your Man
    The film’s disarming romcom sensibilities are an unlikely yet fitting vehicle for timely ruminations on AI.
  3. Yakuza Princess
    This grimly self-serious tale of violent destiny is consistently drowned out by Vicente Amorim’s overreaching visual style.
  4. Who You Think I Am
    Unlike the novel, the film ultimately trades its main character’s account of her own suffering for her therapist’s pathologizing assessment.
  5. Memory House
    Memory House, much like Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Donnelles’s recent Bacarau, makes no secret of its disgust for neocolonialism, capitalism, or fascism, though it’s more skeptical of violent resistance even when exercised in self-defense.
  6. We Need to Do Something
    We Need to Do Something mainly succeeds at suggesting a more compelling film beyond its bathroom walls.
  7. Cinderella
    With an overload of winking, Kay Cannon’s Cinderella displays a contemptuous attitude toward fairy tales in general.
  8. Mogul Mowgli
    The film’s poignancy derives from its profound understanding of its main character’s identity crisis.
  9. The Year of the Everlasting Storm
    These shorts capture everything from how fear of the unknown can rewire relationships to the natural world exerts its pull on us all.
  10. Candyman
    Candyman doesn’t merely note the connection between fear and remembrance, it also interrogates it from every possible angle.
  11. Mosquito State
    The film hauntingly suggests that a man’s most rational move in a rigged society is to fade away into the ecosystem.
  12. No Man of God
    As an exploration of the misogyny that drove Bundy’s crimes, Amber Sealey’s film mostly falls short of its potential.
  13. Together
    Together’s dramaturgy perfectly, if unintentionally, underscores the suffocating nature of pandemic living.
  14. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    On the screen, Shang-Chi is rotely defined by the same “gifted kid” impostor syndrome as so many other self-doubting MCU heroes before him.
  15. Reminiscence
    Reminiscence’s noir adornments inadvertently feel closer to parody than loving homage.
  16. The Night House
    The film upends the clichés that practically define the ghost story in surprising and intriguing ways.
  17. 499
    The film raises pertinent questions about Mexico’s mixed cultural heritage and the contested representation of reality.
  18. Demonic
    Like District 9, the film is a genre outing with big ideas that’s more committed to the power of arsenals and pyrotechnics.
  19. Cryptozoo
    Dash Shaw’s deceptively simple animation regularly descends into phantasmagoria that delivers on his story’s strange premise.
  20. Don't Breathe 2
    The film’s gore is just as likely to invoke fear as to serve as a killer punchline to one of Rodo Sayagues’s set pieces.
  21. Homeroom
    Despite the film’s narrow scope, it’s hard to not be impressed by the political and civic engagement of its teen subjects.
  22. In the Same Breath
    In Wang Nanfu’s extraordinary documentary, contemporary political structures are as much of a disease as Covid-19, and, in the long run, the deadlier foes.
  23. The Meaning of Hitler
    Though uneven, the film is clever about avoiding age-old conundrums regarding the disavowal of the language of horror.
  24. Respect
    When Jennifer Hudson is singing her heart out, not so much approximating Aretha’s voice as channeling her soul, the effect is transportive.
  25. Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time
    The film synthesizes the nihilistic tone of The End of Evangelion with the more hopeful terms of the anime’s original intended finale.
  26. Beckett
    It’s thanks to a kind of tug of war between background and foreground that Beckett succeeds as a piece of entertainment.
  27. Whirlybird
    At its best, Matt Yoka’s documentary vividly captures how personal demons shape creative output.
  28. Free Guy
    There’s so much discernible IP baked into Shawn Levy’s film to make its calls for artistic ingenuity feel hypocritical at best.
  29. Bring Your Own Brigade
    Lucy Walker’s absorbing study of California’s 2018 wildfires consistently goes in illuminating and surprising directions.
  30. Swan Song
    The disconnect between the realities of different generations of gay men is one of Swan Song’s most unexpectedly joyful through lines.
  31. Materna
    Rarely do the filmmakers show people mutually affecting one another in cycles of pain and control, rather than blaming phantom figures.
  32. The Suicide Squad
    Throughout the film, James Gunn renders the half-grim, half-absurdist nature of the Suicide Squad with delightfully bloody abandon.
  33. In Front of Your Face
    The film is an obsessive rumination on the little squabbles and inconveniences and pleasures that add up to the bulk of our lives.
  34. Compartment No. 6
    Juho Kuosmanen’s film interestingly thrives off of an ironic juxtaposition of character and environment.
  35. The Green Knight
    A methodical, if largely allegorical, exploration of its main character’s psyche, the film smooths out the enduring mysteries, opaque psychology, and narrative idiosyncrasies of its source material.
  36. Never Gonna Snow Again
    With Never Gonna Snow Again, Malgorzata Szumowska presents a charm against apocalyptic despair but also willful ignorance, insisting that, with sufficient imagination, we can face a climate crisis of our own making.
  37. The Evening Hour
    In spite of the film’s strikingly lived-in sense of place, the script’s melodramatic storytelling works against that verisimilitude.
  38. Jungle Cruise
    Jaume Collet-Serra’s deft touches elevate what otherwise feels like another formulaic contemporary Disney blockbuster.
  39. Nine Days
    Writer-director Edson Oda never really puts a unique spin on the familiar story of otherworldly figures peering in on the lives of the living.
  40. Enemies of the State
    The film’s concession to the fungible nature of presented reality comes across not as indecisive but courageous.
  41. Sabaya
    The film’s terseness could make it too cryptic for some, but that doesn’t blunt the impact of its most visceral or tender moments.
  42. Stillwater
    Stillwater gives itself over to drastic plot twists that derail what was already a film over-stuffed with narrative incident and ideas.
  43. Old
    In the moments when Old works, it’s because M. Night Shyamalan embraces the inherent weirdness of his material.
  44. Last Letter from Your Lover
    Across the film, director Augustine Frizzell balances a dynamic aesthetic energy with a generosity of spirit.
  45. Midnight in the Switchgrass
    Randall Emmett’s directorial debut is virtually indistinguishable from the scores of cheap VOD action thrillers that he’s produced to date.
  46. Settlers
    Settlers allows for weighty themes to play out inside a cramped domestic setting, wary of easy answers or moral platitudes.
  47. Vortex
    Merciless but affecting, Vortex suggests that one respite from the loneliness of life lived in the shadow of death is the realm of dreams.
  48. Mandibles
    The idle one-thing-after-another-ness of Mandibles is evocative, disturbing, and moving.
  49. Ailey
    Not even Alvin Ailey’s peers can articulate the innovations and soulfulness of his choreography half as well as his work itself.
  50. Eyimofe (This Is My Desire)
    Arie and Chuko Esiri’s film is understated in its attunement to the challenges of trying to escape a stagnant existence.
  51. Charlatan
    Throughout the film, Agnieszka Holland makes clear that she isn’t interested in easily digestible pop-psychology nuggets.
  52. Joe Bell
    The tired, tasteless gimmick at the center of the film inadvertently reveals its entire problem of perspective.
  53. Memoria
    Again in a Apichatpong Weerasethakul film, we find spirits lurking behind the everyday world, but in Memoria, they might just be repressed memories emanating from a world that never actually forgets.
  54. Blue Bayou
    The film’s evocative imagery doesn’t compensate for the story being told with such a heavy hand that it dulls, rather than sharpens, Justin Chon’s urgent political message.
  55. The Worst Person in the World
    The film may be the prime example of how to restore fun, significance, and even a little bit of sex to the well-worn terrain of the romantic comedy.
  56. Red Rocket
    Sean Baker is dedicated at the same time to the material realities of being poor in the United States and to the irreverent artificiality of snap zooms, smash cuts, and unexpected music cues.
  57. Titane
    Titane wildly expands on Julia Ducournau’s idiosyncratic interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration.
  58. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    As soon as LeBron and Dom are sucked into computer space, A New Legacy largely abandons its underlying criticism of soulless corporate regurgitation of art-as-product and instead becomes an exhausting tour through the Warner Bros. catalog.
  59. A Hero
    The film is a demonstrative examination of the way our raising of heroes onto social media pedestals diminishes the messy, sometimes impenetrable truth of human lives.
  60. Gunpowder Milkshake
    The fundamental ineptness of Gunpowder Milkshake appears to be a consequence of the exponentially swelling glut of streaming options.
  61. The French Dispatch
    Wes Anderson’s film is an often fascinating, wondrous exercise in complex narration and visual composition.
  62. Mama Weed
    Mama Weed is intended to wash over you, leaving good vibes in its wake, but it doesn’t challenge Isabelle Huppert or the audience.
  63. Bruno Reidal, Confession of a Murderer
    Vincent Le Port’s grim morality tale depicts a society caught between differing norms of discipline, punishment, and sex.
  64. Pig
    Nicolas Cage, in full martyr mode here, seems to get off on the perversity of, well, caging his brand of operatic hysteria.
  65. Bergman Island
    The film never sacrifices its ambiguity as it brings various threads about ghosts, relationships, art, and gender to a head.
  66. Flag Day
    Flag Day is little more than a near-two-hour montage of tear-streaked faces shouting blandly melodramatic lines at each other.
  67. Drive My Car
    At its most accomplished, the film unfolds with a voluptuous slowness and a sense that narrative endpoints are irrelevant.
  68. 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.
  69. Softie
    Writer-director Samuel Theis’s film is a noteworthy repurposing of the coming-of-age social drama.
  70. Ahed's Knee
    With Ahed’s Knee, Nadav Lapid plays a game with alter egos that’s at once canny and frustrating.
  71. The Velvet Underground
    Todd Haynes’s documentary excitingly captures an era’s explosion of creativity, one that bespoke new and challenging kinds of freedom.
  72. The Souvenir: Part II
    Joanna Hogg’s film is a work of understated warmth, profound emotional complexity, and eminently British dry humor.
  73. Benedetta
    Throughout Benedetta, Paul Verhoeven builds up a heady, campy mix of religious imagery, corporeal abjectness, and masochism.
  74. Annette
    The musical format proves a natural fit for Leos Carax’s love of the visual fantasies created by the cinema’s most basic means of illusion.
  75. The Witches of the Orient
    The film’s fanciful archival montages shrewdly demonstrate the ways in which memory and art seamlessly combine to document reality.
  76. No Sudden Move
    With One Sudden Move, Steven Soderbergh mixes an old-school 1950s noir with a modern sense of social self-consciousness.
  77. A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks
    John Maggio’s documentary is workmanlike in presentation but scintillating in its content.
  78. The Tomorrow War
    The Tomorrow War is little more than a clunky, Nolan-esque exercise in instruction-manual cinema.
  79. Bad Tales
    Narration, as the film reminds us, isn’t only a diversion but a form of authority, of power, and when authority is least conspicuous, it’s often at its most insidious.
  80. The Forever Purge
    As it strives for a grander metaphor of life in America, The Forever Purge resorts to sweeping generalizations that make the prior films in the series feel like pinnacles of subtlety.
  81. Kid Candidate
    The film doesn’t leave us with a complex sense of Hayden Pedigo as a person and political candidate trying to take on an unjust system.
  82. Zola
    Janicza Bravo prioritizes character and personal eccentricity, in the process truly earning the screenplay’s cutting observations about how social media encapsulates culture’s ability to commercialize anything, especially ourselves.
  83. Black Widow
    In its final moments, Black Widow gives its heroine the humanity she never quite gained in her appearances in prior Marvel films, and it’s a shame that this slight but crucial wrinkle to the familiar morality of so many superhero stories ultimately feels more like a twist than a springboard for a new, more morally enlightened era of the MCU.
  84. First Date
    The shadow of Risky Business looms large, and distractingly, over Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp’s film.
  85. The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
    While 52 remains something of a mystery, The Loneliest Whale renders him less of a metaphor.
  86. The Ice Road
    The film is a muddle of clichés and unremarkable action sequences that bleed together into a cacophony.
  87. My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To
    Jonathan Cuartas’s film vividly diagnose a sickness of insularity endemic to middle-class America.
  88. Werewolves Within
    The film becomes unexpectedly, effectively violent just when you’ve written it off as a glorified SNL sketch.
  89. Against the Current
    Against the Current’s style imposes a generic visual language onto a subject who’s anything but generic.
  90. F9: The Fast Saga
    At its best, F9 delivers the most spatially coherent, dynamic car scenes in the series to date.
  91. The American Sector
    The film accomplishes a restoration of sorts, allowing us to see how historical objects can confer meaning on a new context.
  92. Sun Children
    The film tends toward the dramatically monotonous, but its unwavering sense of purpose ensures that it’s also compellingly human.
  93. False Positive
    False Positive threads classic horror-film tropes with a woozy, partially comic sensibility but doesn’t fully commit to this approach.
  94. Fathom
    Throughout, there are moments when you may feel as if Drew Xantholoulos could push harder on the film’s philosophical implications.
  95. Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain
    It’s Morgan Neville’s impression of Bourdain as a time bomb existing in plain sight that allows Roadrunner to be more than a greatest-hits rundown of the man’s life.
  96. Luca
    Pixar’s most intimate and laidback effort since Ratatouille feels like a throwback to one of Mark Twain’s rollicking picaresque sagas.
  97. Sweat
    Sweat mostly adheres to a time-honored tale of the pitfalls of fame, despite its ultra-modern context.
  98. Les Nôtres
    The film is a j’accuse aimed at those complicit in oppressing the most vulnerable in order to protect the powerful.
  99. The Sparks Brothers
    The film embodies the idiosyncratic, tongue-in-cheek sensibilities of Ron and Russell Mael’s long-running cult American pop band.
  100. The Lost Leonardo
    The Lost Leonardo deals less with absolutes than fungible notions of perception and power.
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