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 Mother of All Lies
    Through her use of recreation, Asmae El Moudir suggests that the act of documentary filmmaking can turn historical truths into fiction, in which everyone becomes an active participant.
  2. Housebound
    You grow to feel as if you're arbitrarily changing the channel back and forth from a diverting horror film to a promising odd-couple comedy.
  3. Hail Satan?
    The documentary shrewdly illustrates how media savvy can turn a fledgling protest into an international cause célèbre.
  4. Amrum
    Fatih Akin’s Amrum is a delicate coming-of-age parable tracking national identity and violence to their most intimate origin points during the waning days of the Third Reich.
  5. The Whistlers
    Corneliu Porumboiu’s film is very much a genre exercise, and a particularly Soderberghian one at that.
  6. The Dog
    It's informed with a subtle but disquieting subtext that insists on the pitfalls of allowing ideology to steer you away from common sense.
  7. Zola
    Janicza Bravo prioritizes character and personal eccentricity, in the process truly earning the screenplay’s cutting observations about how social media encapsulates culture’s ability to commercialize anything, especially ourselves.
  8. Talk to Me
    The film has a free-floating, nearly intangible sense of unease that greatly serves it.
  9. Midnight Special
    It starts off as a dynamic parable about faith before wilting into a glum and rather disingenuous paean to the family.
  10. Spa Night
    It recombines elements of the emigrant saga and the coming-of-age story into a searching, fresh-faced portrait.
  11. Inni
    As a document of a live show it looks like nothing else, but Vincent Morisset's greater aspirations, attempts to define or sum up the band through the inclusion of external material, come off as muddled and oblique.
  12. Tickled
    There's no sustained effort to answer the first question any editor or J-school instructor worth his or her salt would ask: So what?
  13. Rojo
    It masterfully sustains a sense of “wrongness” that will be felt even by those unfamiliar with Argentina’s history.
  14. The Guest
    David's perversity as a character is mostly disarming for how it illuminates the sadness with which a foe can so readily be confused for a savior.
  15. Margin Call
    A portrait of the eve of 2008's financial crisis that plays out with funereal inevitability, Margin Call loves speechifying, but the film is far more assured when lingering in the silence of its morally compromised characters.
  16. The Hand of God
    Throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s film, the line between miracle and cosmic prank, even tragedy, is rendered indistinguishable.
  17. Listen Up Philip
    By putting so much weight on his characters' speech, Alex Ross Perry's is an approach with honestly few contemporaries in American independent film.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Vic + Flo Saw a Bear
    The film presents its tonal switch-ups and narrative swerves with a deadpan belligerence by turns stimulating, calculated, and poignant.
  19. Los Reyes
    The film is a quietly radical attempt to view the world from a non-human perspective.
  20. The Wild Goose Lake
    The film’s masterstroke is that its fugitive antiheroes are framed by an environment that reflects their criminal lives back at them.
  21. The Holy Mountain
    The Holy Mountain is nothing if not exuberant while cartwheeling its way through the cosmos and back through the non sequitur-strewn plains and deserts, towns and cities, ridges and ranges of Mexico.
  22. The Wonders
    Like a rural Fellini, Rohrwacher mixes the mundane with the absurd to create a sometimes fabulous tale that always feels palpably real.
  23. World on a Wire (1973)
    Fassbinder's sumptuous 205-minute epic is intriguing as a prototype for later and more palatably cynical sci-fi standards like "Blade Runner" or even "Total Recall."
  24. Wonder Woman
    Wonder Woman is a strong, at times even rousing, application of the superhero film formula, but it ultimately can’t transcend the constraints of the genre.
  25. Murina
    With so much screen time devoted to portraying its main character’s complexities, the other characters remain half-developed, and to the detriment of the film’s themes.
  26. Something in the Dirt
    The film’s sheer fun and invention counterbalance its main characters’ abject failure in their search for meaning and success.
  27. Tito and the Birds
    The Brazilian animated feature offers relief from the impersonal assault of contemporary pop culture.
  28. 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.
  29. Boys Go to Jupiter
    Julian Glander powerfully channeling the ennui of his characters with images of everything from vacant parking lots to empty swimming pools.
  30. Spencer
    Pablo Larraín’s film readily conjures a paranoia-suffused atmosphere of fear for what might happen at any moment.
  31. The Image Book
    It’s through exercising a certain kind of madness that the film connects even at its most disjointed.
  32. The Revenant
    What pushes the film, at long last, into the icy river, is its very design, as a monument to slick, mercenary grandeur.
  33. The Kingmaker
    The film confirms that the ruthless knack of the wealthy and powerful to remain so is a universal impulse.
  34. Incredible But True
    Quentin Dupieux’s latest endlessly draws out every stilted interaction for maximum deadpan effect.
  35. Cassandro
    Like any good fighter film, Cassandro builds to the sort of incredible final bout that makes your hairs stand up and the rest of your body want to.
  36. Night Across the Street
    It's a final film in the specific sense of Raúl Ruiz designing the larger part of it around a metaphorical contemplation of his own, imminent demise.
  37. La Piscine
    La Piscine is, more than anything else, a work of vivid sensory delights.
  38. No Sudden Move
    With One Sudden Move, Steven Soderbergh mixes an old-school 1950s noir with a modern sense of social self-consciousness.
  39. Safe
    We know nothing of this woman’s inner-traumas, the repressed memories or hidden pains of her youth, yet Moore, in an extraordinary milestone performance, gives us a glimpse inside Carol’s frail and lonely soul.
  40. Sisu: Road to Revenge
    Much of Road to Revenge plays like a spectacularly gory silent film, with Aatami taking out scores of Red Army soldiers in action scenes that are as inventive as they are incredibly funny.
  41. Stronger
    David Gordon Green zeroes in on the intricacies of Jeff Bauman and Erin Hurley's dysfunctional relationship, offering up an unassuming portrait of wounded love and solitude reminiscent in its sense of detail of the filmmaker's early work, like All the Real Girls.
  42. The Miners' Hymns
    A study of the this former mining region in both its de-industralized present and its past state as an active coalfield, The Miners' Hymns arranges its two parts as a set of binary oppositions.
  43. What Does That Nature Say to You
    Hong Sang-soo’s aesthetic is key to the resonance of his latest examination of an artist’s life.
  44. Horses of God
    Nabil Ayouch's film allows us see how young suicide bombers--"horses of God," as the man in charge of their mission calls them--might deserve our pity.
  45. September 5
    The film isn’t interested in anything that would detract from providing audiences with the sustained pleasure of watching a clock-ticking thriller.
  46. Pass Over
    Pass Over spins African-American hardship into existential myth, suggesting along the way such plays as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.
  47. At Eternity's Gate
    This is both a fitting tribute to an artist who rebuffed conventional painting techniques, and a disappointingly self-indulgent exercise, the efforts of a filmmaker whose affinity for abstractions often interfere with the story he’s trying to tell, and distract from the purported subject of the film.
  48. The Dance of Reality
    Alejandro Jodorowsky never manages to transcend the sense that he's indulging himself and participating in a hollow introspection unworthy of his prior cinema.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Pavements
    Alex Ross Perry’s Cubist portrait finds a fitting balance between reverence and mischievousness.
  50. Obvious Child
    Whatever your foreknowledge of low-budget Brooklyn dramedies, it's impossible that Gillian Robespierre's film won't lob you at least a few curveballs.
  51. Tim's Vermeer
    It chronicles the quest of a self-described "geek," and there are pleasurable frissons of discovery in the detective work.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Charley Varrick
    Ultracool.
  53. Chevalier
    Athina Rachel Tsangari's obvious skill can't hide the fact that her concept is one-note.
  54. Reality
    Matteo Garrone has a sure eye for outlandish set pieces that exhibit the expansive outlines of his ideas, but these spectacles are sporadic, and the spaces between them tend to lag.
  55. The Loneliest Planet
    Much of the film's final act is given to alienated walking, which too often plays as an abstract study of triangular arrangements in which non-speaking figures move across a barren terrain.
  56. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    Sasha Waters Freyer forges a poignant portrait of an artist attempting to transcend the limitations of his art by refusing to see the process through.
  57. King Richard
    Rarely has a film used its foreknowledge of a happy ending as a reason to remain so uncritical and incurious of its central subject.
  58. Shirley
    Every scene in Josephine Decker’s film operates at a maximum frenzy fraught with subtext.
  59. mother!
    If Black Swan was filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's fevered valentine to the artist's self-abnegating drive toward greatness, then Mother!, his loudest and most comprehensive work to date, is either a critique of or a doubling down on that impulse.
  60. What We Do in the Shadows
    The film sympathetically renders the small humiliations and inconveniences of life as an old-world vampire struggling with modernity.
  61. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    The legacy of Syd Fields's screenwriting manual hangs over 10 Cloverfield Lane, as it does all of Abrams's productions, which never even accidentally casts a whiff of subtext or authorial personality.
  62. The Worst Ones
    Part of what makes The Worst Ones tick with a pace close to that of a thriller is its self-reflexive relationship to genre and knack for referentiality.
  63. The Currents
    While The Currents can certainly be read as a portrait of a woman coming apart at the seams, it also offers a more expansive view of mental illness as a sensitivity not wholly pathological, but rather capable of reframing and refreshing the world.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bobby Fischer Against the World
    Note the noticeable uptick in the cleverness of the on-screen graphics or fitfully remember the movie poster's tagline, "His Greatest Match Was in His Mind," and you'll belatedly come around to the jarring downshift into Fischer's latter-day paranoia and anti-Semitism.
  65. A Dangerous Method
    As rigorous and stimulating as its thematic inquiries are, A Dangerous Method ultimately rests as much on its performances, and in that regard, it succeeds far more than it fails.
  66. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
    Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero's film is a phantasmagoria of impressionistic horror, at once despairing, beautiful, haunting, and surreal.
  67. Cassandro, the Exotico!
    It wouldn’t be fair to call the film hagiographic, but the director’s empathy, if not love, for her subject hinders her from examining Cassandro’s wounds with much depth.
  68. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    It never resolves its commingling of the fanciful and the mundane into a particularly coherent argument about the legacy of trauma.
  69. El Planeta
    Amalia Ulman’s film is a bittersweet comedy of human behavior observed with a relaxed yet intently focused eye.
  70. Music
    Initially, more than mere fun, Angela Schanelec’s approach to storytelling is surprisingly affecting, but once you’ve figured out how to play, the game begins to feel a bit, well, ancient.
  71. Mud
    The film ultimately succeeds thanks to small details, from its deep-fried lingo and the swampy texture of its location photography to its uniformly expert cast.
  72. Nightcrawler
    Dan Gilroy's directorial debut only offers a familiar vision of today's newsman and producers as misery peddlers, and callow ratings slaves bordering on the monstrous.
  73. The Woman King
    The film is a historical action epic that, for all the novelty of its setting and subservience to contemporary attitudes, traffics in a lot of cliché narrative beats and ideologies.
  74. Cold Case Hammarskjöld
    The film is about a mystery that isn’t solved, and how that inconclusiveness spotlights the insidious functions of society.
  75. Asteroid City
    A dryly comedic bricolage of mid-century Americana and postwar anxieties with only the lightest dusting of plot, the 1950s-set Asteroid City finds Wes Anderson moving even closer to cultural curation and further from sustained storytelling.
  76. How to Blow Up a Pipeline
    Few films feel as excitingly jacked in to our current social climate as Daniel Goldhaber’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
    Francis Lawrence imbues the source material with visceral pleasure in well-wrought scenes vacillating between elaborate spectacle, breathtaking terror, and--occasionally--surprising beauty.
  78. Submarine
    It cheats a little, using a mix of amateurish extreme close-ups and striking Welsh industrial vistas to substitute for real technical proficiency, but also applies more formal consideration than most films, namely teen-centered comedies, ever do.
  79. Marguerite
    Xavier Giannolli consistently glosses every sequence with a stagey kind of humor, and at the main character's expense.
  80. Nouvelle Vague
    There’s an apparent contradiction between the radical spontaneity that Godard chases throughout the making of Breathless and the more conventional narrative approach of Linklater’s film, though spontaneity was perhaps always incompatible with the nature of this project.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Stranger
    As distinctively Wellesian as Citizen Kane, and packing nearly as many technical wonders.
  82. Cyclo
    An extraordinarily imaginative director, Tran fashions Cyclo into a sensualist nightmare.
  83. The Tales of Hoffmann
    If The Tales of Hoffmann fails as an emotional journey, it is sensational as a music video.
  84. Into the Inferno
    The busy-ness of its conceit grounds Werner Herzog in a documentary procedural form that's surprisingly conventional by his standards.
  85. The Truth
    The tactility of earlier Hirokazu Kore-eda imagery has been traded for a softer, more luscious, nevertheless melancholic dream world.
  86. Pearl
    Pearl is ultimately an empty exercise in style masquerading as a character study, and for as fantastic as Mia Goth is, her performance mostly succeeds at making Ti West’s homages just a little bit easier to stomach.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dead Man's Burden
    It's always a pleasure to encounter genre ambition contained in such a sinewy-shot, emotionally resonant, and gorgeously photographed package.
  88. Is the Man Who Is Tall Happy?
    A magnificently quizzical diagram of two ceaselessly inquiring minds in perfect tandem, like a raw X-ray of atomized creativity.
  89. Happy Valley
    Once the media caravan departs, the doc meanders, torn between its obligation to reportage and its interest in a town riven by America's thirst for justice.
  90. The Lovers
    Azazel Jacobs’s film takes some shrewd steps to update the comedy of remarriage for the age of the smartphone.
  91. The Front Page
    Milestone’s direction is only sporadically inspired.
  92. Hokum
    Damian McCarthy threads the needle between supplying old-school scares and a richly layered character piece that also functions as a meditation on his own perspective as a storyteller.
  93. Final Account
    Luke Holland’s stark and revealing documentary is a gift of memory to future generations, though it’s one that some will likely view as an unwelcome reminder of how everyday people can become complicit in incomprehensible evil.
  94. The Love That Remains
    Hlynur Pálmason, who has a background in visual art, explores the film’s family dynamics through a vignette-like structure that sometimes feels akin to walking through an art exhibition.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sound City
    Given Dave Grohl's reputation for versatility and good taste, the film's sturdy sense of forward motion may come as no surprise.
  96. 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.
  97. The Tarnished Angels
    Like Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, which creates a damning critique of media circuses that would allow a man to die if it means increasing readership, The Tarnished Angels understands the innate human desire to look at beauty or terror as the potentially catastrophic fuel of public interest.
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