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. The Dark Horse
    Despite the occasional cliché, this film mostly feels as messy as life, and as movingly complicated.
  2. The Gift
    Joel Edgerton's boilerplate direction is a blessing for a genre increasingly saddled with literal visualizations of madness.
  3. The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs
    The film speaks lyrically to a peoples’ determination to find a meaningful way to live in a rapidly changing modern world.
  4. Dear Mr. Brody
    The film poignantly draws a straight line from the economic anxieties of the past straight to the present.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    I Killed My Mother
    I Killed My Mother is a film best heard than seen, as the earnest, nimble scrubbiness of Dolan's screenplay is ill-served by his conceited visuals, an aesthetic mode that feels insecurely borrowed from perfume commercials and the work of Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-Wai.
  6. Victoria
    One can chart the very moment that Victoria's existence slips out of the routine into the nightmarish, and there's no escape by temporal omission.
  7. Broker
    Even when it edges toward sentimentality, Broker is redeemed by Kore-eda Hirokazu’s customarily bracing humanism.
  8. Queen of Earth
    Every beautiful, resonant image in writer-director Alex Ross Perry's film is fraught with neurotic, diaphanous riddles.
  9. Paddington
    The film recalls its stylistic forbears at their best: flowing with whimsy, but never at the expense of the beating heart of its human (and animal) characters.
  10. Women Talking
    For better and worse, writer-director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Women Talking is most noteworthy for its imagery.
  11. Mississippi Grind
    Ryan Boden and Anna Fleck convey an engagingly low-key atmosphere, pervasive with wayward souls haunted by poor choices.
  12. The League
    At its most engrossing, the film vibrantly sketches out the historical roots of the Negro baseball leagues.
  13. Mother of George
    Beautiful, poetic, and hard-hitting without the use of excessive force and deeply layered with evolving and regional nuances of feminine experience
  14. Wetlands
    For its general ludic obsession with all things generally thought of as disgusting, the German film Wetlands is stuck in the anal stage.
  15. Sholem Aleichem: Laughing in the Darkness
    Not only sets up the writer's life as representative of the transitions of early modern Jewish life, but posits his oeuvre as an ongoing chronicle of the shift from a vibrant, unified Yiddish culture to a fractured world-in-exile.
  16. Las Acacias
    This lovely film is ultimately an articulation of something at once simple and universal: the discontent of traveling through life with sad resignation.
  17. A River Changes Course
    A delicate documentary about a way of life that's slowly disappearing, yet gives way to nothing new.
  18. Expedition to the End of the World
    A visual pleasure, and refreshingly free of message or structure, but it leaves an aftertaste similar to that of an awkward party spent among intellectuals.
  19. Icaros: A Vision
    The film has a calming and inevitable quality, and a leisurely sense of pacing that favors image and sound over narrative propulsion, that slows our own biorhythms, fostering our sensorial empathy with the passengers.
  20. The Graduates
    While Hannah Peterson, with her emphasis on quiet moments and mementos mori, effectively suffuses The Graduates with a mournful absence of life, she also reminds us of the warmth that can be so typical of high school.
  21. Wild Tales
    Each of the six vignettes that make up this unusually energetic anthology pertains to the methods of calculated mass dehumanization that are (barely) hidden beneath the practices of social institutions.
  22. Corpus Christi
    It’s within the murky realm of self-doubt and spiritual anxiety that it’s at its most audacious and compelling.
  23. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
    It isn’t long into the film when the hagiographic soundbites from famous interviewees become the dominant mode.
  24. Buoyancy
    The film never quite pushes beyond the archetypal nature of its scenario to fully unearth its characters’ psychological turmoil.
  25. The Royal Hotel
    In this film of clammy anxiety, the potential of male violence is made to feel as scary as the actual article.
  26. 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.
  27. Best of Enemies
    Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville reinforce the very circumstances they outwardly condemn.
  28. On Body and Soul
    On Body and Soul's fusion of romance, comedy, ultraviolence, and political commentary has the logic of a lucid dream.
  29. Buzzard
    This is a study of a man who's hard to like, harder to dismiss, and impossible to pigeonhole.
  30. 24 Frames
    Movement and progress are the organizing principles throughout Abbas Kiarostami's final, posthumously released film.
  31. Personal Shopper
    The film explores the extent to which Olivier Assayas’s characters have always found, and lost, their identities through the aid of their surroundings.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Neighboring Sounds
    The images, while beautiful, are sentimental, as if Kleber Mendonça Filho is trying to negotiate too much.
  33. Ailey
    Not even Alvin Ailey’s peers can articulate the innovations and soulfulness of his choreography half as well as his work itself.
  34. The Teacher
    There's a Tarkovskian layer of social despair in the web of corruption joining the child and the adult, the bedroom and the nation.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Tatami
    The film limply gestures at ideas around women’s rights and athlete boycotts.
  36. Babyteeth
    It incorporates addiction, age-inappropriate romance, mental illness, and terminal disease into its plot without collapsing into a movie-of-the-week black hole.
  37. The Jungle Book
    Jon Favreau draws heavily on his film's animated predecessor for plot, characterizations, and more, but doesn't know how to fit these familiar elements into his own coherent vision.
  38. Zulu
    A good platter for a great, underappreciated classic of British cinema (under the direction of American expatriate Cy Endfield)—light on supplements but strong in presentation.
  39. Slalom
    The film’s real subject is a young woman awakening to her oppression, rendered poignant in all its awkwardness by Noée Abita.
  40. The Hunting Ground
    Kirby Dick's films don't go far enough in explaining how a culture of rape can pervade in vastly different institutions, but they're ruthless about holding them accountable.
  41. While We're Young
    Noah Baumbach lobs jokes with hectic editing and a Sturgesian velocity, but much of this cross-generational comedy is frantic and wearisomely superficial.
  42. Urchin
    Harris Dickinson imbues the film with a singular style, as well as a self-awareness that’s introspective without stooping to outright self-flagellation.
  43. Mediterranea
    The film is unwaveringly attentive to problematizing the dividing line between predator and prey.
  44. Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)
    Sly Lives! pays appropriate credit to its subject’s greatness by not devolving into pity even after depicting Stone at his lowest points.
  45. Dallas Buyers Club
    Conventional but never sanctimonious, it balances out its familiar recovery angle with a healthy measure of sardonic wit.
  46. Better Man
    Walking a dizzying line between the stupid and the profound, this exuberant, positively unique biopic is as hard to resist as it is to believe that it got made in the first place.
  47. 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.
  48. The Imposter
    The film shrewdly opts not to proffer its own hypothesis about the true reasons behind the Gibson family buying Frédéric Bourdin's story.
  49. The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography
    Errol Morris films Dorfman and her work with a rapt attentiveness that maps the nostalgic and regretful stirrings of her soul.
  50. Dead Lover
    The can-do spirit of Dead Lover, as evidenced by the way it couples goofy sound effects with cuts and camera movements, takes it a long way.
  51. Left-Handed Girl
    In a young girl’s face is all of Left-Handed Girl, as Nina Ye, like Shih-Ching Tsou behind the camera, translates the immensity of this sprawling saga into immediate, intimate detail.
  52. Güeros
    A good story, full of life and related with intelligence and a sense of humor.
  53. Win It All
    There's an artisanal scruffiness to Win It All that testifies to Joe Swanberg’s quiet fluidity as a filmmaker.
  54. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
    The film embodies the alienating angst of millennial life in all its nakedly neurotic glory.
  55. Fort Buchanan
    Benjamin Crotty's film is content to drift free-associatively through the intricacies of group mechanics via an expressive free-form structure.
  56. The Promised Land
    Even when it’s painting its story in broad strokes, the film plays expertly to audience emotion.
  57. My Brilliant Career
    If the narrative is slightly schematic in the way it sets up a binary between Harry and freedom, it’s never didactic. That’s thanks to Armstrong’s clear-eyed direction, which never feels the need to underline its points, relying on selections from Schumann’s “Scenes from Childhood” to lend the film a mood of droll wistfulness.
  58. The Harder They Come
    The Harder They Come’s greatest asset may still be its soundtrack, which makes such a stirring impact because it provides a cathartic release from the grim realities depicted on screen.
  59. Ornette: Made in America (1985)
    Shirley Clarke's portraiture eschews cohesive biography and often spirals off into lyrical dissonance.
  60. Introduction
    The film is a modern melodrama of grit, beauty, jagged edges, and resonant dead ends and false starts.
  61. Revenge of the Mekons
    What emerges is a portrait of a fully committed band that could never quite make it and of the rock n' roll project as something between a (very serious) hobby and a full-time career.
  62. Incitement
    Admirably, Yaron Zilberman’s film focuses on the cyclical nature of violence in a decades-old conflict.
  63. The Nightingale
    The violence of Jennifer Kent’s film doesn’t seem to build upon its themes so much as repeat them.
  64. Child's Pose
    The film thrives on ambiguity, keeping all things blurry outside its main character's focused perspective, its myopia sustained by Luminița Gheorghiu's tough, quietly intense performance.
  65. Grandma
    Writer-director Paul Weitz's proudly boisterous star vehicle for Lily Tomlin has about as many ambitions as it does delusions.
  66. The Man Who Knew Too Much
    Produced in England in 1934, The Man Who Knew Too Much was perhaps the first of Alfred Hitchcock’s films to openly attempt the autonomously cinematic, aggressively syntactic perfection with which he would later become synonymous.
  67. Presence
    The unoriginality of Presence’s story eventually calls out the POV conceit as a one-note gimmick, especially when the tension is dialed up in the film’s second half.
  68. I, Tonya
    The film’s habit of courting and then insulting the viewer is a conscious nod to the cycles of abuse that mark Tonya Harding’s story, but the filmmakers’ attempts to implicate their audience are I, Tonya's broken shoelace, too pat and glib to be convincing.
  69. Evolution
    The film interprets itself, offering an essay on rape and gender fluidity that locks us out of the cognitive process of digesting it.
  70. Caesar Must Die
    Deceptively modest on nearly all accounts, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's Caesar Must Die employs seemingly minor directorial contrivances to ruminate on a unique quarrel.
  71. Benda Bilili!
    The film's inquiry into the artistic method remains somewhat at the superficial level, but the directors do a fine job of emphasizing both the circumstances that lead to the music's creation and the satisfying result of the irrepressible sounds.
  72. Gerhard Richter - Painting
    The end results are mixed but nevertheless scintillating and provocative enough to be worth taking seriously.
  73. Pom Poko
    Takahata’s wondrous film is itself at constant interplay between the unsentimental realities of human progress (and expansion) and the unbound thoughts and creative perspectives that fantasy can entertain without necessarily being reduced to mere entertainment.
  74. Maestro
    With Maestro, Bradley Cooper has essentially reduced Leonard Bernstein’s boundary-pushing life and legacy to the sum total of its most accessible (read: audience-friendly) elements: his interpersonal relationships.
  75. Baden Baden
    The film plays like it's been methodically configured to snuff out an even marginal indulgence of its characters' emotions.
  76. Project Hail Mary
    Phil Lord and Christopher Miller put a comedic spin on Andy Weir’s more straightforward 2021 novel Project Hail Mary, recasting the author’s hopeful vision of productive communication with extraterrestrials as an unlikely buddy comedy.
  77. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
    The film is about the idea of Andy Kaufman, about how artists channel their influences and keep the dead alive.
  78. Relic
    The film heralds the arrival a bold and formidable voice in horror cinema.
  79. 3 1/2 Minutes, 10 Bullets
    A barbed inquiry into this particular notion of "self-defense," enabled by the quotidian racism state and perpetuated de jure by the state.
  80. A Band Called Death
    The film is made impetuously watchable and disarmingly emotional by the filmmakers' strong command of docudrama and nonfiction narrative style.
  81. Chi-Raq
    A Spike Lee joint in the urgent sociopolitical register of Radio Raheem's boombox—a call to arms that's also a call to disarm.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
    Soi Cheang richly draws the city as both prison and refuge, where brutal exploitation sits alongside the residents’ deep sense of solidarity and cooperation.
  83. Thelma
    It’s the balance of comedy and existential drama that truly elevates Thelma.
  84. Who's Crazy? (1966)
    Thomas White's is a bizarre, undisciplined romp through snowbound Belgian vistas and '60s signifiers alike.
  85. Waitress: The Musical
    The film accomplishes its principal goal of capturing Sara Bareilles’s spectacular take on Jenna Hunterson, especially in its close-ups of the singer-songwriter.
  86. Love Lies Bleeding
    In the end, it’s a memorably girthy, if not evenly muscled, ode to the treacherousness but ultimate value of romantic love.
  87. The Invite
    By the time The Invite burrows into the heart of its main characters and reveals the scope of their regrets and longings, it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t strike a chord of genuine emotion.
  88. Girls State
    For chafing against existing systems designed by and for men, the storytelling structure of the film befits the female experience in American politics.
  89. Calvary
    One may feel dissatisfied by the 11th-hour turn toward lyrical fatalism, and mildly insulted by the presumptuous attitude it seems to choose as it sends us on our way.
  90. The House I Live In
    The mixture of different techniques and varied views results in a rich, multi-faceted look at one of America's most misguided policy initiatives.
  91. Breakfast at Tiffany's
    Blake Edwards’s discontent-but-charmed portrait of a long-lost New York state of blithe is, like most Blake Edwards films, narratively scattershot but reliably fixated on the cinematic chemistry of social relations in a mod (and post-mod) era, which invariably boil down to genders and the extent to which individuals ascribe to their assigned sex roles.
  92. Suzume
    The film is consistently delightful, offering up an unrelenting supply of shimmering, sun-dappled visuals and a sweet, strange story about a young girl making peace with her past.
  93. Apprentice
    Writer-director Boo Junfeng casually reinvigorates the prison drama, boiling its elements down to their primal essence.
  94. Apples
    The film's rendering of the interplay of memory, identity, and grief is disappointingly vague.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Keep On Keepin' On
    Slowly, the powerful message of heart and soul winning out over an impaired body and over-thinking mind develops into the core drama of this otherwise modest doc.
  96. The Hunt
    The film is in part an exceedingly black comedy that parodies proper society's eager, self-righteous naïveté on the subject of its children.
  97. A Touch of Sin
    As depicted by Jia Zhang-ke, the balance between the spoils and moral rot of murder are far preferable to the debasing rigors of tradition and hollow nationalism.
  98. The Beguiled
    The Beguiled serves as proof that what goes for naturalism in Sofia Coppola’s dominion still verges on being decorative to the point of self-parody.
  99. On the Adamant
    Unwilling to risk subjectivity or authorial input, and also lacking in the forensic detail that might have provided a more in-depth analysis of the Centre de jour l’Adamant and its functioning, On the Adamant ultimately feels half-formed.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Winter Kills
    Even if you don’t go in with a conspiratorial mindset, one viewing of this riotously entertaining, chillingly perceptive film could leave you wondering if some larger force is at play, protecting the targets of this should-be New Hollywood classic by keeping it in the dark after all this time.
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