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. Janis: Little Girl Blue
    It grounds us so effectively in Joplin's emotional realm as to partially rekindle the social transcendence that her voice must have represented for its owner.
  2. Meadowland
    Both Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson understand the greatest pain of loss to be rooted in its searing inexpressibility.
  3. (T)error
    It displays a staggering propensity for examining its unauthorized scenario without succumbing to either too insular or too general a set of assertions.
  4. Bare
    Dianna Agron, suddenly inspired to let go, proves the perfect on-the-prowl foil to Paz de la Huerta's free spirit.
  5. Western
    After the film's early optimism and speculative midsection, Western struggles to manage all the rich dramatic irony of its final half hour, perched uneasily between plot and stasis.
  6. Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
    It highlights the potent dichotomies that, combined with Bergman's relatively unmediated beauty, made the actress luminescent both on and off screen.
  7. Flowers of Shanghai
    Flowers of Shanghai operates on the whole much like Yoshihiro’s music, filling your senses like a thick haze, holding you rapt without petitioning for your attention.
  8. Microbe and Gasoline
    Microbe and Gasoline is enervating for both relishing whimsy and looking behind it to absorb the yearnings of youth and its attendant complications in all their nakedness.
  9. The Pearl Button
    Despite the defeated tone of Patricio Guzmán's tales, a spotlight is placed on the power of persistence.
  10. Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
    This is activist filmmaking that manages to be both angry and elegiac in its recounting of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.
  11. Dukhtar
    The film functions as a love letter to Pakistan, despite the misogynistic culture it exposes.
  12. Mediterranea
    The film is unwaveringly attentive to problematizing the dividing line between predator and prey.
  13. Toy Story 4
    The film seamlessly interweaves fun escapades and earnest emotions, but it lacks the visual power of its predecessor.
  14. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    Ebulliently funny, visually inventive, and above all passionately committed to the idea that heroism isn't a burden but an uplifting realization of our best qualities.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Magnificent Seven
    The Magnificent Seven fights an uphill battle in matching the scope and thrills of its source material.
  16. Ixcanul
    The film's structure, however stifling, is filled with gorgeous imagery and nuanced symbolism.
  17. Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
    The absence of a central narrator for the most part prevents the film from devolving into gratuitous pedagogy.
  18. Band of Robbers
    It places more focus on the childish fabulousness of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer than the racial reckoning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
  19. Sand Dollars
    It respects and plumbs the feelings of all three main characters while surfacing the economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender power imbalances in their relationships.
  20. Funny Bunny
    Alison Bagnall and her talented leads appear to effortlessly achieve a tone that's tricky to sustain, one that abounds equally in absurdism and empathy.
  21. Song of Lahore
    The final note of optimism is consistent with the documentary's overall tone and interest in perseverance.
  22. Le Mans
    Le Mans needs to be rediscovered so that it can be hopefully embraced as one of star Steve McQueen’s finest hours.
  23. The Dark Horse
    Despite the occasional cliché, this film mostly feels as messy as life, and as movingly complicated.
  24. Democrats
    According to the film, individual misdeeds aren't the final enemy, but the byproduct of an unregulated regime.
  25. Stinking Heaven
    As in Nathan Silver's previous work, what could have been a rote retread of Pasolini's Teorema blossoms into a study of factional identity and power dynamics.
  26. The Creation of Meaning
    In the simultaneously heady and lyrical The Creation of Meaning, we're obviously implicated in that comment, as the film views the meaning-making process as something malleable and dependent on perspective.
  27. Rolling Papers
    It neither glorifies nor castigates pot usage, letting consumers speak for themselves without the intrusion of an omnipresent voice.
  28. Doctor Strange
    Nothing that Marvel Studios has produced can compare to the visual splendor of Scott Derrickson's Doctor Strange.
  29. Viva
    The drag in the film rejects the U.S.-centric obsession with "realness" and the acrobatics that come with it.
  30. Kubo and the Two Strings
    It offers a powerful metaphor for the manner in which we carry the memories of our departed inside ourselves.
  31. The Edge of Seventeen
    The smartest thing about Kelly Fremon Craig's teen dramedy is its measured take on its protagonist's theatrics.
  32. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Its feminist perspective checkmates the frat-boy misogyny and machismo that too often mar films set in combat zones.
  33. King Georges
    Erika Frankel’s documentary is finally revealed to be a story of prolonged adjustment to retirement, and a poignant illustration of sublimated redemption.
  34. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    With its fine-tuned comic timing and feeling of constant action, Into the Spider-Verse is downright invigorating, and that’s evident even before it gets to its dazzling, dimensional-colliding climax.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    King Jack
    Harsh punishments are dished out in a way that jolts the material away from coming-of-age cliché.
  36. Certain Women
    The threat of feeling slighted links every small and large ripple of drama in Kelly Reichardt's film.
  37. Swiss Army Man
    Even as it invites snarky ridicule, the film dares you to buy into its singular earnestness.
  38. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    What comes through clearly by the end of the film is the act of one artist's eccentric generosity breathing new awareness into the life of another.
  39. Antarctica: Ice and Sky
    The documentary advances its cause through an intimately diaristic depiction of hard work done well.
  40. River of Grass
    Kelly Reichardt's film is a wry, appealingly raggedy look at the impossibility of conjuring up excitement from boredom.
  41. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    It presents a captivating portrait of one of the era's greatest defenders of artistic freedom and a true American original.
  42. The Fits
    This singular mix of character study and mysterious mood piece might not have come off quite so successfully if not for Royalty Hightower's internal performance.
  43. Joshy
    The film feels most real, even at its most absurd, when focused on the idea of closure as a kind of fantasy.
  44. The Lure
    Agnieszka Smoczynska's film is most poignant when it simply stares at its own strangeness.
  45. Morris from America
    Chad Hartigan's film is especially perceptive about the effect of external influence on personal development.
  46. Under the Shadow
    The film's horror is spookily and movingly expressive of the tenuous position of women in 1980s Iran.
  47. Lovesong
    So Yong Kim's film ultimately manages a convincing articulation of friendship between women.
  48. Equity
    The film ultimately succeeds in offering a fresh female-centered perspective on its genre material.
  49. Fort Buchanan
    Benjamin Crotty's film is content to drift free-associatively through the intricacies of group mechanics via an expressive free-form structure.
  50. Diamond Tongues
    Throughout, Pavan Moondi and Brian Robertson purposely indulge Hollywood formula only to subvert it.
  51. The Light Between Oceans
    Derek Cianfrance's film is a beautifully sustained study in adult themes of emotional crisis.
  52. Born in Flames
    It fuses documentary and dramatic sequences into a free-form narrative that exists somewhere between essay film, political manifesto, and exploitation.
  53. The Handmaiden
    With The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook has made a gigantic leap as an artist, but he retreats to lurid cartoonishness just as he’s earned your trust.
  54. 11 Minutes
    Jerzy Skolimowski's formal control over the material is so masterful that the textual particulars are revealed to be beside the point.
  55. Patriots Day
    As long as Patriots Day is concerned with recreating the sense of ambient chaos among sparring investigators and an anxious community, it’s immersive and thrilling.
  56. An Eye for Beauty
    Denys Arcand fashions a commandingly leisurely pace that allows us to follow these people who walk a tightrope separating ecstasy from misery.
  57. Don't Think Twice
    It displays an intimate chemical understanding of the exhausting and unrelentingly impotent agony of failure.
  58. Genius
    It makes a convincing argument for viewing Thomas Wolfe's work as a product of the excess and exuberance of the 1920s.
  59. April and the Extraordinary World
    The film provocatively has audiences see the world's current ecological concerns in a different and unexpected light.
  60. Annabelle: Creation
    Like Lights out, David F. Sandberg's previous film, Annabelle: Creation is a haunted-house horror story that plays on our primeval fear of the dark.
  61. A Cure for Wellness
    Most gratifying throughout A Cure for Wellness is the moment-to-moment anticipation of where Gore Verbinski will put his camera next.
  62. Above and Below
    The documentary lingers on silences and reveals its subjects only through moments of quotidian behavior.
  63. I Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman
    The documentary is an attempt to capture something of Akerman's infectious spirit and thirst for worldly experience, as both an artist and a human being.
  64. Notfilm
    Ross Lipman's gloriously egalitarian approach to culture means that his complex argumentation never becomes inaccessible.
  65. Café Society
    As clarified potently by the film, most of life is spent distracting oneself from matters of the closest personal significance.
  66. The Shallows
    What makes the film churn so forcefully for so long is Jaume Collet-Serra's visual acrobatics.
  67. As I Open My Eyes
    Leyla Bouzid successfully dramatizes how young people eroticize peril and risk due to a lack of experience.
  68. My Big Night
    Álex de la Iglesia's film is an explosion of kitsch, an intensely formalized mixture of farce and tragedy.
  69. Our Last Tango
    Throughout the documentary, the question of truth is equated to the essence of the tango.
  70. Queen of Katwe
    The film is a mere fulfillment of familiar tropes, but it approaches sports movie's conventions with a light, funk-inflected touch.
  71. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    Walter Salles reinforces the impression of Jia's own art as emerging fluidly from the vagaries of his own life and socioeconomic position.
  72. What We Become
    When Bo Mikkelsen springs his traditional yet cathartic climax, it's earned because the violence matters truly as violation.
  73. Paths of the Soul
    Zhang Yang achieves an astonishing immediacy by simply allowing the prostration process to play out over and over with minimal aesthetic interference.
  74. The Innocents
    Anne Fontaine's film is an allegory for women's condition more generally, in times of war or peace.
  75. Almost Holy
    Steve Hoover's documentary affords one an unusually intimate glance at the collapsed infrastructure of the former Soviet Union.
  76. Graduation
    Cristian Mungiu's film is more than just a cry of despair toward the hopelessness of life in modern-day Romania.
  77. Loving
    Loving finds little grooves of humanity to explore in its characters, and in its milieu, in between expected plot beats.
  78. Slack Bay
    Bruno Dumont's formalism is presently charged with a spark of simultaneously controlled and spontaneous mystery.
  79. Staying Vertical
    The film changes gears whenever one is lulled into believing that it has finally settled into a recognizable narrative pattern.
  80. The Red Turtle
    A pointed simplicity governs Michael Dudok de Wit's The Red Turtle, one that’s traditional of many survival tales.
  81. Raw
    Throughout Raw, Julia Ducournau exhibits a clinical pitilessness that’s reminiscent of the body-horror films of David Cronenberg.
  82. Risk
    Laura Poitras doesn't indulge in score-settling cheap shots, but seriously grapples with her contradictory subject.
  83. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
    This is a sports tale in which the character building has almost nothing to do with the sport.
  84. Mimosas
    Mimosas confounds its surface narrative with intimations of more layered meanings to come through a jockeying of story threads.
  85. Kiki's Delivery Service
    Kiki presents a world of fantasy in such a genteel, unforced manner that it only seems ordinary and mundane. As such, it feels like a touchstone for all of Miyazaki’s later, even greater works of cartoon storytelling art.
  86. The Thoughts That Once We Had
    Thom Andersen attempts to establish unity by effectively bridging vast swaths of film history into one cohesive body of work.
  87. The Phenom
    Noah Buschel shows that formula can be repurposed to serve empathetic ends without losing its self-actualizing appeal.
  88. Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
    The doc finds pathos in an amiable, fluid construction that chronologically charts the career (and political) ambitions of TV producer Norman Lear.
  89. Call Her Applebroog
    It implies that not even the concentrated self-scrutiny required to make art like Ida Applebroog's is enough to make sense of ourselves to ourselves.
  90. Paint It Black
    It combines the brooding intensity of a slow-burn thriller with the high-flown ornamentation of a gothic melodrama.
  91. Denial
    Denial shows that people’s misfortunes need not preclude them from living virtuous lives founded on basic human decency.
  92. Three
    The film shows how much Johnnie To still experiments with his form, especially as he continues to transition to digital cinema.
  93. Ants on a Shrimp
    It offers lively and layered images that reveal the chefs both as individuals and components of a larger social organism.
  94. Imperium
    It demonstrates both the fatal proximity and deceptive distance that can exist between the words and deeds of extremists.
  95. In Order of Disappearance
    The film has been executed with a sense of formally stylish and thematically symmetric panache.
  96. Ralph Breaks the Internet
    When Ralph Breaks the Internet ignores the glittering marvels of the internet and focuses on the rapport between its two leads, it's deeply moving.
  97. Transpecos
    Violence in Transpecos is sparse, but the filmmakers use it with a narrative precision that highlights the unforgiving consequences that accompanies every choice in this desolate borderland.
  98. Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil
    It highlights how the ownership of art serves as a marker of capital for distinguishing one institution over another.
  99. On the Silver Globe (1988)
    It becomes a bleak comic spit into the face of organized religion, organized society, and even organized narrative.
  100. The Lost Arcade
    The film's images have a loose, rough, textured liveliness that honors the spirit of Chinatown Fair.
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