Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,775 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: 4,349 out of 7775
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7775
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7775
7775 movie reviews
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  1. War for the Planet of the Apes
    The psychological wars that have made the prequels simmer with tightly wound tensions are given their most cutting treatment yet.
  2. Loitering with Intent
    It's a comedy concerned with myopia that doesn't succumb to the self-obsessed pitfalls of that subject.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Testament of Youth
    The film's inferno of horrors are undoubtedly visceral, but psychologically implosive rather than entrails-exploding.
  4. Joy of Man's Desiring
    A chronicle the act of labor as both a universal function of life and a spectacle in itself.
  5. Medeas
    Writer-director Andrea Pallaoro's feature-film debut isn't especially beholden to plot or dialogue, impressionistically shaping its story through pervasive silence.
  6. Ghost in the Shell
    The primary pleasure of the film resides in its awareness of the impossibilities of unity, whether physical or cultural, within a rapidly transforming global milieu.
  7. 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?
  8. When Marnie Was There
    The film at first plays like a refresher and throwback to Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, before revealing itself to be less minimal than minor.
  9. Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine
    The doc adopts the viewpoint specifically of those who knew him best, and seeks to separate the person from the emblem.
  10. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie
    The film is packed with mirthful pranksterism, a vigorous anti-authoritarian streak, and literal potty humor.
  11. The Witch
    The reworking of a tired horror trope into a transformed feminist symbol stands out as an impressive act of genre revisionism.
  12. James White
    It confronts the hard realities of a world in which few make it to maturity without their share of scars, and no one makes it out of adulthood alive.
  13. Mistress America
    Mistress America is both the most concentrated and antic film in Noah Baumbach's unofficial New York trilogy.
  14. Nasty Baby
    The film is a compelling addition to Sebastián Silva's cinema of compassionate comeuppance.
  15. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    The formalism fashions effective textural shortcuts to behavioral understanding that the remarkable cast fills in with chilling, convincing finesse.
  16. Tangerine
    Its triumph is primarily a matter of style, a visionary revelation every bit as expressionistic as its main character's electric sense of shade.
  17. Christmas, Again
    Charles Poekel displays an assured directorial hand and maintains a modest, appealing, even droll sensibility throughout.
  18. Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck
    Director Brett Morgen distinguishes the biographical documentary by viewing himself as more of a curator than a film director.
  19. The Summer of Sangaile
    Writer-director Alanté Kavaité's film is a string of softly weaved pictorial metaphors steeped in reverie.
  20. Wild Canaries
    Lawrence Michael Levine's film occupies a sweet spot between the self-aware and taut.
  21. Losing Ground
    The film is a patient exploration of the enlaced connections between professional and emotional sectors.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Faults
    The film obliquely addresses its narrative mysteries through the conversational cracks of two people in enforced proximity.
  23. Seymour: An Introduction
    Ethan Hawke's concentration on Seymour Bernstein isn't a betrayal of his own ego massaging, but rather an attempt to have a genuine soul-bearing conversation.
  24. Ejecta
    The cogent character study nestled inside all the bombast remains crafty for its rare commingling of artful storytelling and genre nonsensicality.
  25. Coast of Death
    It convincingly insists that the human figure is no more vital to the image than the rapidly shifting landscape it inhabits.
  26. Aferim!
    The film's black humor is inextricably tied to serious questions about moral relativism and personal responsibility.
  27. Farewell to Hollywood
    It suggests that a disease isn't a product of one single person's body, but the eruption of an entire family history of unarticulated desire.
  28. Sicario
    Denis Villeneuve's film views life in the age of the modern-day drug war as an ever-crescendoing existential nightmare.
  29. La Sapienza
    The mannered direction is at its most effective when it inspires an enhanced sensitivity to the import of every gesture, visual or verbal.
  30. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
    Even though the film takes on a more overtly fictive aesthetic after he's kidnapped, Michel Houellebecq's understated presence lends the proceedings a factual quality throughout.
  31. That Guy Dick Miller
    A fawning tribute to the cult legend, enriched by a subtle current of sadness that prevents the documentary from turning into a glorified DVD supplement.
  32. The Face of an Angel
    Michael Winterbottom's film is a mess of tones, but not of ideas, which could well sum up the director's prodigious but uneven oeuvre.
  33. The Connection
    The film feels utterly infatuated by the cop/crook dividing line long-since drawn, if not flogged, by Michael Mann.
  34. Of Horses and Men
    On one hand, the film is surely a celebration of a land's distinct creatures and the people who live among them, but on the other, it's a culture's biting auto-critique.
  35. 3 Hearts
    Throughout, Benoît Jacquot never loses sight of the primordial compulsions that drive feelings and expressions of great love and beauty.
  36. Court
    Chaitanya Tamhane's grand canvas is Indian society as represented by its legal system, and what it reveals is none too flattering.
  37. Sunshine Superman
    It depicts counterculture where those stranded outside the barriers of conventional society seek to push past natural boundaries to intermingle with the metaphysical in midair.
  38. Before I Wake
    Before I Wake's images have a pleasing straightforwardness that parallels the openness of the young protagonist's longing for love.
  39. Experimenter
    Aesthetically, the film cunningly suggests life that exists solely within an academic experiment, closed off from chaos that isn't manufactured.
  40. Suffragette
    The film's episodes and attitudes register with searing immediacy while feeling true to their time period.
  41. The Sisterhood of Night
    The film is so unusually moving and penetrating because it refuses to cloud its emotions in distancing irony, anger, or nihilism.
  42. It's Such a Beautiful Day
    Despite all this macabre torment, It's Such a Beautiful Day involves a lot of sweet, plucky humor that represents a discreet softening of the angry sarcasm for which Hertzfeldt has become known.
  43. The Gift
    Joel Edgerton's boilerplate direction is a blessing for a genre increasingly saddled with literal visualizations of madness.
  44. The Harvest
    Director John McNaughton, once an agile orchestrator of seemingly incompatible tones, has retained his talent for teasing insinuation.
  45. The Great Museum
    The ghostliness of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna derives from an identity crisis, where digitization threatens to eradicate the gallery space.
  46. The LEGO Batman Movie
    The film is an unbroken chain of one-liners, sight gags, and pop-culture references, and the hit-to-miss ratio is high.
  47. One Cut, One Life
    The doc emerges not so much as a glimpse into the mind of a dying artist than as a factual drama on how loved ones are impacted by an individual's death.
  48. Heaven Knows What
    If nothing else, Heaven Knows What is one of the most harrowing cinematic depictions of drug addiction in recent memory, reliant less on formal gimmickry than on close observation of behavior.
  49. I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
    The transcendence that the film offers isn't to be taken lightly considering the near impossibility of living professionally as an artist.
  50. Forbidden Films
    The documentary takes an equivocal stance, implying that just because a film should not be shown doesn't mean that it should be banned.
  51. Tu Dors Nicole
    Lafleur denies Nicole the angsty treatments given similar characters in films like The Graduate and Frances Ha by refusing to saturate the film with an undergirding sense of charm, where the issues being faced are merely points of spasmodic uncertainty that will erode over time.
  52. The Farewell Party
    A neatly balanced tragicomedy about the easily blurred line between assisted living and assisted death.
  53. Güeros
    A good story, full of life and related with intelligence and a sense of humor.
  54. Louder Than Bombs
    Louder Than Bombs is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being.
  55. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    The difference between the film and its equally expensive contemporaries is Luc Besson's playful, childlike naïveté.
  56. Green Room
    The film is an unambiguous endorsement of violent revolt as the only effective response to such inhuman savagery.
  57. In the Shadow of Women
    Philippe Garrel's film uses its characters' stodgy, formal language to betray their self-consciousness.
  58. My Golden Days
    Arnaud Desplechin tries his hand at a coming-of-age tale, and does so with equal doses of mature reflection and youthful impetuosity.
  59. My King
    Maïwenn fashions a bracing film about co-dependency, capturing the erotic contours of subservience and flattery.
  60. A Tale of Love and Darkness
    The film mostly succeeds in capturing the nuances of an event that continues to arouse passionate debate to this day.
  61. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    The film's lampooning of a business built on pure surface extends to its riotous original songs.
  62. Guidelines
    It effectively implies that the subjects' troublemaking is the stuff of transience, a phase before they're ushered into the realm of adult responsibility.
  63. Welcome to this House
    If the documentary isn't quite dynamic in its revelations, it's considerably more so in its challengingly essayistic presentation.
  64. Rams
    Every moment in writer-director Grímur Hákonarson's strange and wonderful film is imbued with mystery and revealing dignity.
  65. Paulina
    It's unsettling and disconcerting in its complex examination of the gray area that lies between the morals we conceptually hold and the actions we’re willing to perform to affirm those beliefs in the world.
  66. Embrace of the Serpent
    Ciro Guerra's excesses in arthouse symmetry tend to arrive in the service of a just and angry correctivism.
  67. The Yes Men Are Revolting
    The Yes Men show that while reality might get lost in this struggle, the truth does occasionally emerge from the chaos.
  68. Runoff
    This emotionally affecting film never loses sight of the ethical complexity of forsaking a community in the name of an individual.
  69. Glass Chin
    The story wisely focuses on the cast's worn-in and jazzy repartee and expresses a perfectly modulated sense of self-awareness.
  70. Listen to Me Marlon
    Among the film's many revelations is the level of self-aware humility Brando exudes while talking about his life and creative process.
  71. Stations of the Cross
    Stations of the Cross acknowledges that putting theoretical behaviors and mindsets into practice can have unwieldy consequences if context and intent are wholly ignored.
  72. Stray Dog
    Ron "Stray Dog" Hall proves to be a welcome antidote to stereotypes about burly, bearded red-state RV dwellers.
  73. Jellyfish Eyes
    Takashi Murakami has invested the film with the same sort of primal pop-art aesthetic that distinguishes much of his art.
  74. The Kindergarten Teacher
    The film's denouement is at once shocking and organic because it echoes a well-paced but nasty children's fable.
  75. Meet the Patels
    In this picaresque documentary, the lightly comic musings of a likeable, somewhat nerdy Indian-American actor go surprisingly deep.
  76. 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.
  77. How to Smell a Rose: A Visit with Ricky Leacock at his Farm in Normandy
    A definitive reflection on the work of two great directors and the specific slices of cinema they so fruitfully cultivated.
  78. 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.
  79. Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery
    Rarely do the interviewees express their own thoughts on Beltracchi, as Birkenstock lets him speak for himself, for better and for worse.
  80. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    Miguel Gomes's formal talents, which include a flair for close-ups of elegantly smooth or weathered faces, transcend his soft spot for the didactic.
  81. Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
    Miguel Gomes combats austerity with expansiveness, leavened by doses of frivolity and scatology.
  82. Money Monster
    Jodie Foster manages the interlocking tones of outrage and low humor with an unfailing rhythm and an engagingly casual cynicism.
  83. The Great Man
    It exploits the military aesthetics that lend themselves so well to breathtaking sounds and visuals without fetishizing them.
  84. The Iron Ministry
    Though J.P. Sniadecki doesn't elucidate any broad structural motive, his film gradually adopts an engrossing rhythm among its clatter of steel and ambient chatter.
  85. Youth
    Tom Shoval, who eschews stylistic flourishes in order to focus on character, leaves the film's heavy lifting to the actors and his own screenplay.
  86. The Mend
    The film is defined by its staunch refusal to clarify its characters' emotional issues, marooning them instead in the messes those emotions have wrought.
  87. Theeb
    Theeb insists on the importance of preserving cultural difference against the totalizing vision of racial and religious hegemony.
  88. A Bigger Splash
    What intrigues, if in a lurid sort of way, is the film's fudging of projected viewer desires with its characters'.
  89. The Moving Creatures
    Caetano Gotardo's triptych of short tales features a sense of experimentation and poetic license mostly seen in European cinema.
  90. Kingdom of Shadows
    The visible numbness and empty stares of the doc's three subjects painfully evoke years of being gripped by the war on drugs.
  91. Sweaty Betty
    Sweaty Betty is a reminder that poetry comes in all shapes and sizes, and that art ultimately dictates its own terms.
  92. Tokyo Tribe
    Sion Sono's film imagines gangs not as rebels without a cause, but a lost generation of displaced, poisoned youths.
  93. Barista
    It captures the frustration and the longing of forever wanting more and better at the expense of casualness of being.
  94. Anomalisa
    The film's highpoint is one of the most remarkably moving sex scenes in all of American cinema, and the irony of it involving bland puppets is hardly lost on Kaufman and Johnson.
  95. Eye in the Sky
    Director Gavin Hood treats the aesthetics of high-tech surveillance as the opaque membrane through which the prosecution of the War on Terror must pass.
  96. Tired Moonlight
    It's to Britni West's credit that she's yoked the film's experimental sequences with the hard reality of characters trying to figure things out.
  97. The Fool
    It takes place entirely at night, and the dingy color palette, washed-out and intentionally drab, presents Russia as an almost alien landscape.
  98. Prophet's Prey
    One watches the film with an escalating sense of disbelief and horror, as Warren Jeffs is steadily revealed to be an even greater monster than we initially take him for.
  99. Hardcore Henry
    The film's unbelievably precise choreography of action seeks to tap into a universal feeling of powerlessness.
  100. Francofonia
    For all its congratulatory spirit, the film has the persistent feeling of an elegy bidding adieu to a bygone time.
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