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. Crisis
    Time and again, the film shortchanges the human elements of its stories for drug stats that can be Googled in a matter of seconds.
  2. Rifkin's Festival
    As Rifkin’s Festival drones on, the wastefulness grows offensive in a manner that’s unusual even for Woody Allen’s misfires.
  3. The Vigil
    Keith Thomas’s film hums with uncanny dread, milking the close juxtaposition of living and dead for all its worth.
  4. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    The film finds its purpose most pointedly when it zeroes in on the unambiguous relationship between Holiday and “Strange Fruit.”
  5. Sin
    Andrei Konchalovsky’s film is fascinated with the creation of great art in the midst of socio-political turmoil.
  6. Test Pattern
    The film strikingly punctuates the detachment of realist drama with the expressionism of psychological horror.
  7. Fear of Rain
    The film portrays mental illness with all the nuance and insight of Jared Leto in Suicide Squad.
  8. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    Best exemplified by its fixation on culottes, the film never feels like more than a half-formed in-joke between close friends.
  9. The Wanting Mare
    It’s as if Nicholas Ashe Bateman is commenting on a distinctly American suburban malaise, using a fictional place, digitally made, to get at a real, painful truth about being stuck in a place you didn’t choose, amid circumstances you didn’t create.
  10. CODA
    The film is at its most moving in those rare moments when it’s capturing the nourishing bonding ritual among a deaf family.
  11. Cusp
    At its best, the documentary’s aura of desolation suggests a verité version of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.
  12. Land
    The film’s overtly non-specific title is surely meant to suggest some kind of pared-down elementality, but, in the end, it mostly just reflects the story’s lack of definable character.
  13. Passing
    A sickened rage and psychological nuance courses through every meticulously arranged frame of the film.
  14. Prisoners of the Ghostland
    The film is a profound disappointment in part because it feels so overdetermined to live up to Sion Sono and Nicholas Cage’s respective brands.
  15. On the Count of Three
    Jerrod Carmichael is a volatile director and an electric actor, but Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s screenplay routinely force the characters into formulaic, trivializing scenarios.
  16. Little Fish
    The film gets at the profound truth that our relationship with another person is, at its core, a collection of shared memories.
  17. Earwig and the Witch
    The problem with Earwig and the Witch has more to do with its confused plotting than its more or less serviceable animation.
  18. Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)
    Questlove’s Summer of Soul is as much an essential music documentary as it is a public service.
  19. Censor
    Censor unfortunately pulls back from its social interrogation just when it’s working up a head of steam.
  20. Judas and the Black Messiah
    Shaka King’s film, anchored by two sterling lead performances, complicates the expected narrative of martyrdom.
  21. How It Ends
    The film is so economical in its momentum, and its tone of comic wistfulness so uniform, that its string of tableaux rarely feels jerky.
  22. The World to Come
    The film presents a world that too often feels as if it’s a product of the present day.
  23. PVT Chat
    Ben Hozie’s wry, observational film positions a young man’s repressed sexual paranoia as a reflection of a more general social malaise.
  24. A Glitch in the Matrix
    Rodney Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express.
  25. The Dig
    The Dig clearly relishes in having found so many fascinating real people arriving at one place at once.
  26. Saint Maud
    Rose Glass utilizes a provocative scenario for a vague and deadly serious art exercise.
  27. The Little Things
    John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things blends two modes of the serial killer film, both of which have been shepherded by David Fincher.
  28. Palmer
    After a while, the film’s parade of contrivances subsumes the acutely observed friendship at its core.
  29. Just Don't Think I'll Scream
    This intimate found-footage memoir is driven by a frantic internal monologue that will feel painfully familiar to many cinephiles in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
  30. The Night
    It’s at the juncture between horror and philosophical surrealism that Kourosh Ahari’s film is at its most provocative.
  31. Malcolm & Marie
    Expending so much energy anticipating our avenues of interpretation, Malcolm & Marie leaves us with little to interpret.
  32. Identifying Features
    The film is as much about the act of seeing and observing as it is about not seeing, about struggling to recognize that which might not clarify much at all.
  33. Preparations to be Together for an Unknown Period of Time
    Lili Horvát’s film delights in wallowing in ambiguity, contradiction, and doubt.
  34. Supernova
    Supernova is so obviously structured that it often seems to be imposing meaning on its characters.
  35. No Man's Land
    No Man’s Land mostly suggests a performance of allyship on the filmmakers’ part.
  36. PG: Psycho Goreman
    This tongue-in-cheek gorefest gives the impression of an only semi-coherent joke on the audience.
  37. Locked Down
    Had the filmmakers taken a more easygoing approach, Locked Down might have landed in the realm of The Thomas Crown Affair.
  38. Outside the Wire
    The film’s arguments against endless war end up seeming more than a bit disingenuous, especially given how much time it spends glorifying the actions and morality of those who help buoy ongoing American occupation of foreign nations.
  39. Acasă, My Home
    The film is at its most moving when it lingers on the face of children who are impotent to return to the world they used to call home.
  40. The Mauritanian
    Kevin Macdonald’s film never captures the spectrum of a life lived in unimaginable extremis.
  41. Hunted
    Hunted intends to make a show of our desensitization to predator-prey relationships, but the greater purpose of its self-awareness never quite comes into clear focus.
  42. Bloody Hell
    The film’s manic blend of gore and relentlessly cheeky comedy eventually leads to diminished returns.
  43. Film About a Father Who
    Throughout, Lynne Sachs undercuts the image of the past as simpler or more stable than the present.
  44. Some Kind of Heaven
    The film is most tragic and humorous when hints of the outside world break through the suffocatingly cheerful façade of the Villages.
  45. Beautiful Something Left Behind
    Katrine Philp’s documentary boldly argues for a clear-eyed frankness in talking to bereaved children about loss.
  46. The White Tiger
    Ramin Bahrani’s film is a turbulent and snarkily self-aware melodrama about breathless social climbing.
  47. The Reason I Jump
    The film weaves together the stories of five mostly nonverbal autistic teens to present a rich tapestry of the autistic experience.
  48. Shadow in the Cloud
    Roseanne Liang leverages the absolute implausibility of the film’s later scenes into something brisk and exciting right to the very end.
  49. Herself
    Phyllida Lloyd’s film cannot escape its own somewhat mundane self-set contours.
  50. We Can Be Heroes
    Robert Rodriguez’s film, like The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D, fundamentally lacks a sense of wonder.
  51. Sylvie's Love
    The film never finds the spark that would imbue the love affair at its center with a sense of passion or urgency.
  52. Wonder Woman 1984
    The film shows a preference for forgiveness over vengeance, which feels like an okay way to end this particular year.
  53. Pinocchio
    Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s story trembles with corporeal strangeness and unpredictability.
  54. Monster Hunter
    Paul W.S. Anderson has simply combined the established iconography of the popular Capcom game franchise with prefab movie moments.
  55. The Father
    The film approximates the dislocation of its main character’s mind with a frighteningly slippery ease.
  56. Hunter Hunter
    Writer-director Shawn Linden skillfully draws us into the narrative before springing a series of startling traps—of both the narrative and literal variety.
  57. Greenland
    There are enough left turns here to allow us to shake the impression that we’ve been to this rodeo before.
  58. Promising Young Woman
    The film’s empowerment fantasy of a woman who steamrolls male egos is as stylish and fun as its portrait of gender relations is dire.
  59. News of the World
    The film sanctimoniously suggests that ignorance or distrust of the news is nothing new, but rather the bedrock of America’s formation.
  60. The Midnight Sky
    The film minimizes the tragedy of the human race’s near-complete annihilation by positioning it as the backdrop for the world’s most grandiose deadbeat-dad redemption arc.
  61. Wild Mountain Thyme
    Jamie Dornan is a stiff whom Jon Hamm immediately upstages, and this dynamic underscores why the film is so tedious and unsatisfying.
  62. The Stand In
    The film allows the scion of one of Hollywood’s most notable families to interrogate her relationship with celebrity in self-aware fashion.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wander Darkly
    What could have been a profound study of grief and psychological trauma is diluted with needless structural and stylistic obfuscation.
  64. Minari
    The film’s orderliness of plot somewhat undermines the sense that the family at its center is steeped in a truly messy situation.
  65. Let Them All Talk
    Steven Soderbergh’s signature formal gamesmanship enlivens what could have been a stodgy scenario.
  66. The Prom
    Ryan Murphy’s vibrant film adaptation makes a closer-to-seamless whole of the story’s disparate parts.
  67. Kill It and Leave This Town
    Mariusz Wilczyński’s animation style strikes an unlikely balance between the childlike and the proficient.
  68. 76 Days
    The documentary may be the defining portrait of the dawning of the Covid-19 pandemic.
  69. Soul
    While most Pixar films pride themselves on presenting rich, fantastical responses to real-world wonderings, Soul keeps conjuring up visions that don’t correspond precisely enough to anything in the real world.
  70. I'm Your Woman
    Julia Hart drains the crime film genre of its macho bluster without replacing it with anything.
  71. Black Bear
    Shot through with darkly existentialist humor, the film finds Aubrey Plaza throwing a gauntlet to filmmakers who have typecast her in the past.
  72. Superintelligence
    The big disappointment of the film is that Melissa McCarthy’s performance is all Jekyll and no Hyde.
  73. My Psychedelic Love Story
    In Morris’s best films, such as The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, there’s a sense that the director is truly simpatico with his subjects. In My Psychedelic Love Story, though, Morris lets a fading never-quite-legend blather her way into a trap.
  74. Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan
    The film is affectingly poignant in its frequently uncomfortable presentation of Shane MacGowan’s physical ruination.
  75. Uncle Frank
    When the distance between uncle and niece shortens, Uncle Frank ceases to be a tender portrait of outsider kinship and transforms into a histrionic road movie with screwball intentions.
  76. The Croods: A New Age
    The film is brightly colored, inventively designed, and constantly flirting with the outright psychedelic, but it's so packed full of incident that it rarely gives its jokes the space to land.
  77. Ma Rainey's Black Bottom
    In his final role, Chadwick Boseman meticulously charts the breakdown of a man discovering, within the mirages of 1920s blackness, that pursuit and escape, fleeing from and running toward, are inextricably intertwined.
  78. Happiest Season
    The film translates the often difficult realities of a specific kind of marginalized love into a story with broad appeal.
  79. Collective
    The film reminds us that without investigative reporting there’s no democracy, and that traditional expectations around impartiality and objectivity may be untenable in the face of horror.
  80. Jiu Jitsu
    Nicolas Cage’s amusing turn as a kooky hermit with an affinity for newspaper hats often feels awkwardly spliced into the film.
  81. Embattled
    The film muddies its sense of moral righteousness by suggesting that violence and vengeance can only be defeated by more of the same.
  82. Vanguard
    The film is an uncanny reflection of the jingoism that Hollywood has been wrapping in glossy spectacle and exporting to foreign markets for decades.
  83. Come Away
    The film can’t seem to decide whether it’s fantasy or allegory and whether its characters are fan fiction or flesh and blood.
  84. Hillbilly Elegy
    Hillbilly Elegy feels like a bland feel-good story rather than one part of a longer tragedy with no clear end.
  85. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
    The greatest gift offered by the film is an empowering world that looks less like invention and more like real life.
  86. Ammonite
    Francis Lee’s compulsion to make Mary Anning stand in for something broader than herself keeps tripping up the film.
  87. The Life Ahead
    With its tough-minded characters from divergent cultures finding a common bond despite their differences, the film doesn’t deliver much in the way of surprises, but it turns out to be a starker and more honest piece of work than it might initially seem.
  88. Zappa
    The documentary is determined not to be a typical rock-god story with predictable rise-and-fall arcs.
  89. Fatman
    If it weren’t so airless, it’d be easier to appreciate Fatman a character study of Santa’s midlife woes.
  90. I Am Greta
    Even though it’s about a person who speaks with courage about the urgency of the global crisis, I Am Greta itself doesn’t possess enough of that urgency.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Nov 9, 2020
  91. Freaky
    Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.
  92. Coded Bias
    The documentary dives down the rabbit hole to chillingly, comprehensively expose how algorithms can perpetuate bias in often unforeseen and unjust ways.
  93. The Climb
    The film slides seamlessly between empathizing with its clueless bros and making them objects of unsparing derision.
  94. Mank
    The film's most haunting sequences are self-contained arias in which characters grapple with their powerlessness.
  95. The Dark and the Wicked
    This supernatural fable elevates the subtext of Bryan Bertino’s earlier work to the level of text.
  96. Let Him Go
    Despite a searing performance from Diane Lane, writer-director Thomas Bezucha’s film ultimately self-immolates.
  97. Triggered
    Once you get past the faux-provocation of the film’s title, it’s difficult to tell what ideologies the filmmakers are trying to skewer.
  98. Kindred
    It’s difficult to shake that the film finishes saying what it has to say long before it staggers to the end.
  99. Jungleland
    Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams.
  100. Come Play
    While it can be expected that high-concept horror movies will often be sewn together from the premises of recent genre successes, it’s much too easy to see the stitches in writer-director Jacob Chase’s Come Play.
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