Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,786 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 6.2 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: 4,357 out of 7786
  2. Mixed: 1,495 out of 7786
  3. Negative: 1,934 out of 7786
7786 movie reviews
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  1. Ammonite
    Francis Lee’s compulsion to make Mary Anning stand in for something broader than herself keeps tripping up the film.
  2. 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.
  3. Zappa
    The documentary is determined not to be a typical rock-god story with predictable rise-and-fall arcs.
  4. Fatman
    If it weren’t so airless, it’d be easier to appreciate Fatman a character study of Santa’s midlife woes.
  5. 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
  6. Freaky
    Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.
  7. Coded Bias
    The documentary dives down the rabbit hole to chillingly, comprehensively expose how algorithms can perpetuate bias in often unforeseen and unjust ways.
  8. The Climb
    The film slides seamlessly between empathizing with its clueless bros and making them objects of unsparing derision.
  9. Mank
    The film's most haunting sequences are self-contained arias in which characters grapple with their powerlessness.
  10. The Dark and the Wicked
    This supernatural fable elevates the subtext of Bryan Bertino’s earlier work to the level of text.
  11. Let Him Go
    Despite a searing performance from Diane Lane, writer-director Thomas Bezucha’s film ultimately self-immolates.
  12. 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.
  13. Kindred
    It’s difficult to shake that the film finishes saying what it has to say long before it staggers to the end.
  14. Jungleland
    Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams.
  15. 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.
  16. Madre
    Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s feature-length Madre contemplates how memories of loss linger and distort the present.
  17. Wolfwalkers
    The storyline’s edges are frayed just enough to give it the gentle distance of a tale recalled though the gauze of myth and memory.
  18. His House
    Throughout, Remi Weekes forcefully, resonantly ties the film’s terror to the inner turmoil of his characters.
  19. The Witches
    This is a sleek-looking vehicle that’s eager to be scary but not comfortable being ugly.
  20. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    Too often, the film teases big, wild comedic set pieces that end up deflating almost instantly.
  21. Synchronic
    About a drug that sends its users back in time for seven minutes, the film holds your hand and walks you through its chronology mazes
  22. Sound of Metal
    Darius Marder’s film captures, with urgency and tenderness, just how enticing the residue of the past can be.
  23. Ham on Rye
    The film’s purposeful archness challenges the sentimentality that marks many a film and real-life ceremony.
  24. Dating Amber
    Dating Amber rather seamlessly strips itself of its hyperbolic affectations to reveal a heartbreaking story of emancipation through friendship.
  25. Bad Hair
    The film has an exciting, lived-in quality that elevates what are otherwise some markedly unsteady attempts at horror.
  26. Rebecca
    The film is a pretty bauble of a thing that ticks off the story’s shock revelations in an efficient, if not particularly surprising, fashion.
  27. This Is Not a Movie
    The documentary adroitly demonstrates that Robert Fisk is still motivated by the boyish curiosity that drew him to journalism.
  28. Nocturne
    If Quirke’s film means to mimic the tunnel vision of its protagonist, it does so perhaps too effectively, losing its thematic potency as it travels on a predictable trajectory, involving spooky drawings and sisterly spats, all the while leaving the existential miasma sitting out of frame.
  29. Evil Eye
    Evil Eye is a feast of timidly undeveloped raw material.
  30. Honest Thief
    The repetitious plot is more ritual than text as we watch yet another Liam Neeson avenger defy the will of younger, unscrupulous men.
  31. French Exit
    In French Exit’s best passages, sadness and curt, resonant comedy exist side by side unceremoniously.
  32. The War with Grandpa
    Only when left to their own devices do the film’s stars enter the less manic, more heartfelt realm of the book.
  33. Over the Moon
    At its most beguiling, director Glen Keane’s animated film Over the Moon mixes the unbridled free-association of playtime with an undercurrent of barbed satire.
  34. The Forty-Year-Old Version
    Radha’s remaking of herself contains an uplifting, unpretentious truth about aging: It’s never too late to make a new start.
  35. Charm City Kings
    The film looks for an emotional payoff by continually upping the stakes of its main character’s self-destructive short-term thinking.
  36. The Wolf of Snow Hollow
    Writer-director Jim Cummings reinvigorates an oft-told tale with personal, thorny preoccupations.
  37. Black Box
    The film ruminates on how virtuality infiltrates the deepest regions of our subconscious to reprogram the inner workings of the self.
  38. The Lie
    At the heart of Veena Sud’s film is the raw material for a potentially ingenious satirical domestic thriller.
  39. I Carry You with Me
    Heidi Ewing’s tale of immigration and deportation afflicting the lives of a Mexican gay couple flashes its reason for being at every turn.
  40. Hopper/Welles
    Orson Welles and Dennis Hopper both understand that cinema’s inherent fakeness is the wellspring of its importance and its danger.
  41. A Call to Spy
    Because its focus is so split, the film lacks the pervasive sense of danger one expects from a spy thriller.
  42. The Glorias
    The film weaves its refreshingly unpredictable web as the strands of Steinem’s life spiral around each other through snippets of scenes that work efficiently and never preachily.
  43. Possessor Uncut
    Though Possessor favors nihilist spectacle to existentialism, Brandon Cronenberg is more interested in exploring emotional dislocation than Christopher Nolan.
  44. Dick Johnson Is Dead
    Dick Johnson Is Dead is very much a film about its own making, one which repeatedly exposes its artifice.
  45. Blood on the Wall
    Sebastian Junger and Nick Quested’s prismatic look at a devastating new chapter in the War on Drugs lacks for cohesiveness.
  46. Save Yourselves!
    The film fails to use its millennial characters to investigate contemporary attitudes about the possibility of world annihilation.
  47. 12 Hour Shift
    The plot, geared as much for comedy as horror, is wound with efficient build-up, and its revolving-door atmosphere is consistent enough to paper over some iffy acting, baggy dialogue, and more than a few minutes of wasted real estate.
  48. The Boys in the Band
    This new Boys in the Band is a Matryoshka doll of period piecery, a flashback of a flashback of a flashback.
  49. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    It pulses with relevancy in a time when debates over authoritarianism, protests, and the necessity of radicalism are convulsing America.
  50. On the Rocks
    There are few modern filmmakers who possess Sofia Coppola’s gift for capturing how our idealized, movie-fed ideas of “night life” reflect our longing for adventure as well as our loneliness.
  51. Beginning
    The low-key, serene natural beauty of Beginning’s setting provides a counterpoint to the often-disturbing events of the film.
  52. Tragic Jungle
    It operates in an ambiguous register, suggesting that a woman is working in unison with nature to dole out revenge for their exploitation.
  53. Kajillionaire
    The precarity and itinerant lifestyle of the central figures in Kajillionaire can be seen as a logical next step in Miranda July’s filmmaking trajectory.
  54. Ava
    Ava isn’t only banal, but also, in its half-hearted stabs at novel ideas, seemingly content with its banality.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    One of the most striking effects here occurs whenever Herzog and Oppenheimer slow down the film’s often-hectic pace to let viewers ponder the sheer beauty of the imagery, whether that’s painterly rendered details of landscape or the natural splendor of closely observed crystals and minerals.
  56. Wildfire
    The structure of Wildfire’s narrative doesn’t emerge out of a simplistic progression from strife to reconciliation, as writer-director Cathy Brady has her characters follow a realistically erratic trajectory.
  57. Another Round
    Thomas Vinterberg’s latest, like The Hunt, is ultimately a parable about breaking a social contract.
  58. The Truffle Hunters
    The film’s reminder of the fragility of agrarian traditions in the face of a merciless profit motive is delivered with tact and subtlety.
  59. Concrete Cowboy
    The film is stirring when it really dives into specificity.
  60. Pieces of a Woman
    When the film’s actors are given space to etch their characters’ feelings, they turn in strikingly naturalistic performances.
  61. The Nest
    Sean Durkin’s sweated-over filmmaking tediously lifts a familiar tale of domestic dysfunction to the level of myth.
  62. I Care a Lot
    Throughout, J Blakeson crafts sharp, curt dialogue that makes a fashion statement out of contempt.
  63. MLK/FBI
    The film refrains from any dubious moral calculations by giving King’s personal deceptions the same weight as his public morality.
  64. The Secrets We Keep
    The film is ultimately too tidy to embrace anything truly startling or unexpected, either stylistically or narratively.
  65. The Devil All the Time
    Every moment in The Devil All the Time is meant to be a galvanic, preachifying high point, and so the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot. One can scarcely imagine a duller lot of sacrificial lambs.
  66. One Night in Miami
    As much as the film seeks to understand how such major cultural figures navigated a political minefield, it nonetheless never takes its eyes off of its characters as people.
  67. Gunda
    By the time the credits roll on the film, we realize we’ve been watching not so much a sketch of the lives of farm animals as a threnody for their deaths.
  68. The Calming
    Song Fang’s latest moves glacially along in a largely unchanging emotional register, always keeping us at a distance.
  69. Night of the Kings
    The film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives.
  70. Space Dogs
    The film draws us through its play toward darker, too-seldom-considered sides of human and doggy nature.
  71. The Way I See It
    The final product feels like it would have been most appropriate as a video presentation for the Democratic National Convention.
  72. The Woman Who Ran
    Hong Sang-soo invests the ironic, despairing theme of the film with humor and empathy—an empathy that he suggests he cannot extend to the women of his life.
  73. The Disciple
    Chaitanya Tamhane gives full dimension to the rich, complex, and sometimes contradictory nature of the relationship between disciple and guru.
  74. Nomadland
    By juxtaposing beautiful vistas filled with promise, a rotted social safety net, and the scrappy itinerant workers navigating the space in between, Zhao generates a gradually swelling tension underneath her film’s somewhat placid surface.
  75. Enola Holmes
    Even when the plot occasionally falters, Enola’s continuous invitations to complicity renew the film’s momentum.
  76. Time
    It reminds us in eminently cinematic ways that behind the numbers and procedures of a court case are actual lives existing in actual, human time.
  77. City Hall
    Its provocations can seem savage at a glance, but they emerge from an observational tranquility that is uniquely Frederick Wiseman’s own.
  78. David Byrne’s American Utopia
    American Utopia feels as much like a balm as it is a surprisingly direct call to political action and social betterment.
  79. Alone
    John Hyams’s film refutes the frenetic clichés of so modern American thrillers.
  80. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
    Jia Zhang-ke’s film is a quietly reflective, intermittently rambling rumination on an explosively momentous period in Chinese history.
  81. Antebellum
    This is a film that employs imaginative twists to illuminate the racism that’s entrenched in American history and society.
  82. Notturno
    The film’s experiential approach emphasizes that the fragments of life it captures aren’t impersonal events on a timeline.
  83. Unpregnant
    Its few nutty ideas demonstrate how little distance Unpregnant manages to put between itself and a standard high-school comedy.
  84. Dear Comrades!
    It’s in its depiction of the communist party’s response to a peaceful demonstration that Andrei Konchalovsky’s latest is at its most effective.
  85. Cuties
    Maïmouna Doucouré has a remarkable grasp of the irrationality and volatility of middle-school social dynamics.
  86. Mulan
    Walt Disney’s Mulan remake perfunctorily recycles the worst aspects of the 1998 animated version and roundly fails to convincingly execute the few deviations that it does attempt.
  87. The Mole Agent
    That Maite Alberdi’s camera itself is present in The Mole Agent as a quasi-ethical concern suits the way Sergio, as he shuffles through the home’s hallways, gradually comes to be uncomfortable with his own surveillance.
  88. Feels Good Man
    That the democratization of the internet has opened a doorway for fascist ideologies to openly quash democratic ones is an irony that isn’t lost on the film.
  89. i'm thinking of ending things
    The film has a weird, ghostly, even beautiful pull, but it functions mostly on theoretical terms because Charlie Kaufman has thought it to death.
  90. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    The film suggests that Bill and Ted’s dreams of stardom, which have evolved into dreams of acceptance and expression, aren’t so stupid after all.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tenet
    Every time that Tenet stops to speak, it only emphasizes a hollowness within: how enamored it is of its own cleverness.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Binge
    If The Purge cynically saw humans as itching to unleash their pent-up violence, The Binge recognizes us all as horny nitwit fratboys at heart who need an excuse to cut loose.
  93. Ghost Tropic
    Bas Devos’s film is a street-lit trek through the eerily empty avenues and byways of a city at sleep.
  94. Epicentro
    It alternates political ponderings with a loose and discursive subtext in which Hubert Sauper explores the idea of Cuba as an island paradise.
  95. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
    A supplementary subject of most of Herzog’s work, which it shares with Chatwin’s, is a bottomless yearning for wonder.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Matthias & Maxime
    Xavier Dolan’s characters are of such broad definition that it’s impossible to regard them as anything other than aesthetic objects.
  97. Words on Bathroom Walls
    The film reeks of the extremely idealistic notions of young love that plague many a YA adaptation.
  98. The One and Only Ivan
    The charitable representation of Bryan Cranston’s character greatly diminishes the emotional resonance of the film’s dramatic turns in the final act.
  99. Unhinged
    Unhinged is essentially a nihilistic, style-free destructo-rama that’s designed to make us feel like shit.
  100. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    Peninsula feels like the work of an artist who misunderstood his past triumph, squandering his talent for the sake of a pandering, halfhearted encore.
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