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 6.4 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Psychomagic, A Healing Art
    Whether or not the 91-year-old Alejandro Jodorowsky makes another film, Psychomagic could easily stand as a fitting encapsulation of the themes of suffering and transcendence that have run throughout his work.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Black Is King
    Out of a dazzling fusion of the hottest trends of American R&B and Afrobeat, this visual album proposes a pan-African vision of legacy, abundance, and unity, making it Beyoncé’s most wide-reaching and ambitious effort yet.
  3. I Used to Go Here
    The film is almost sadistically driven to turn a woman’s trip down memory lane into fodder for cringe humor.
  4. Waiting for the Barbarians
    Ciro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel’s apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere.
  5. She Dies Tomorrow
    Perhaps as a result of her attempting to avoid all matter of clichés, not just of genre, Amy Seimetz revels in vagueness.
  6. Summerland
    Throughout, the film’s characters exhibit little life outside of their moments of tragedy and symbolic connections.
  7. The Fight
    The film justly draws attention to the perpetual work that must go into preserving democratic institutions.
  8. A Girl Missing
    Kôji Fukada adores stray textures that stick in the proverbial throat and free-associatively affirm his characters’ rootlessness.
  9. Radioactive
    Marjane Satrapi’s film could have benefited from the tangy humor and cynicism of her graphic novels.
  10. Amulet
    The film never feels as satisfying or as haunting as its bow-tying epilogue strives for.
  11. Fisherman's Friends
    The script doesn’t contain many lines that ring true, and a few clang wildly off-key.
  12. The Rental
    Dave Franco has a mighty command of silence as a measurement of emotional aftershock.
  13. The Painted Bird
    Václav Marhoul’s film is at its most magnificent when it lingers on the poetry of its images.
  14. Blessed Child
    Filmmaker Cara Jones offers a poignant testament to the baggage and insecurities hounding her own life.
  15. Ghosts of War
    The film’s unreflective earnestness is haunting in all the wrong ways.
  16. Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
    It’s in certain characters’ trajectories that the Ross brothers locate the tragic soul of the bar.
  17. Relic
    The film heralds the arrival a bold and formidable voice in horror cinema.
  18. Greyhound
    With no vividly drawn humans on display, the action feels like rootless war play.
  19. The Beach House
    The character drama becomes afterthought as it’s superseded by action.
  20. The Old Guard
    Though it smartly prioritizes the bond of relationships over action, the film is in the end only somewhat convincing on both counts.
  21. We Are Little Zombies
    The film is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a world where emotions are accessed and revealed primarily through digital intermediaries.
  22. The Wages of Fear (1953)
    Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages of Fear now seems much less like Salt of the Earth-as-a-potboiler and a lot more like the spiritual godfather to every testosterone-fueled thrill ride since.
  23. Palm Springs
    The film smuggles some surprisingly bleak existential questioning inside a brightly comedic vehicle.
  24. Hamilton
    The show offers testimony to the power of communal storytelling, just as mighty on screen as on stage.
  25. Family Romance, LLC
    We are never quite sure of the extent to which situations and dialogues have been scripted and, as such, it’s as though Herzog were more witness than author, more passerby than gawker, simply registering Japan being Japan.
  26. Force of Nature
    The film presents its scattershot cop-movie tropes in earnest, as if, like hurricanes, they were natural, unavoidable phenomena.
  27. John Lewis: Good Trouble
    The film is well-outfitted with telling, thematically rich shards of historical information.
  28. All I Can Say
    The film refuses to shy away from the unvarnished honesty of Blind Melon frontman Shannon Hoon during his brief moment of fame.
  29. My Spy
    Peter Segal’s film is pulled in so many different directions that it comes to feel slack.
  30. The Audition
    With great clarity, the film conveys how discipline can be directed both inward and outward.
  31. Irresistible
    These are desperate times, but if Jon Stewart wants to tack toward a more Frank Capra vein, that’s just fine. We already have one Adam McKay.
  32. House of Hummingbird
    The film is never more intense than when it’s finding parallels between its main character’s anomie and Korea’s dehumanizing expansion.
  33. A Regular Woman
    Where When We Leave built to simple outage, this one concludes with a rush of complex, conflicting emotions.
  34. Run with the Hunted
    Some of the film’s narrative threads are frustratingly unresolved, while others are wrapped up in arbitrary fashion.
  35. Wasp Network
    The final product feels like more of an interesting and beautifully filmed anecdote than compelling political and human drama.
  36. You Should Have Left
    David Koepp is a fatally un-obsessive craftsman, one who’s fashioned a horror film that resembles a tasteful coffee table book.
  37. Mr. Jones
    The film is an unnervingly beautiful tribute to the lives lost during the Holodomor, and to the people who have seen the world for what it is, instead of the dream of it they’re instructed to believe.
  38. 7500
    Convenient plot twists undermine its early pretense that it’s aiming for something other than to exploit our deepest, most regressive fears.
  39. 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.
  40. Da 5 Bloods
    Lost in so much bombast is the kind of story about its main characters’ lives that could’ve affirmed Spike Lee’s critique of America.
  41. Hill of Freedom
    It isn’t without its pleasures and insights, but it’s ultimately little more than an excuse for Hong to try out a new stylistic color in his auteurist palette.
  42. Artemis Fowl
    Artemis Fowl concocts an adventure that requires its privileged hero to go virtually nowhere, physically or emotionally. As if he ordered it on Instacart, conflict is simply dropped off on his front stoop, and all he has to do is throw on some shoes and sunglasses to pick it up.
  43. You Don't Nomi
    Has the time come to ask if the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction?
  44. Sometimes Always Never
    The film unites its seemingly disparate strands of somber drama and deadpan comedy into a surprisingly cohesive whole.
  45. The King of Staten Island
    Throughout, Judd Apatow dramatizes the ideal of community with an almost Eastwoodian sense of rapture.
  46. Tommaso
    Abel Ferrara’s film is about that precise feeling of living with an itch unscratched.
  47. Shirley
    Every scene in Josephine Decker’s film operates at a maximum frenzy fraught with subtext.
  48. The Infiltrators
    The film is never more compelling than when relying on footage of the real radical DREAMer group the National Immigrant Youth Alliance.
  49. On the Record
    Russell Simmons’ victims’ sense of their own complex relations to historical power structures emerges from the film’s lucid recounting of the sexual assault allegations against him.
  50. The Vast of Night
    Director AndrePatterson never breaks the film's incantatory spell with pointless freneticism, patiently savoring the great thrill of genre stories: anticipation.
  51. The High Note
    Everything here wraps up as tidily as it does in your average Hallmark Channel movie.
  52. Crystal Swan
    Throughout the film, it’s as if mundane objects hold the remedies for the wretchedness of everyday life.
  53. The Lovebirds
    Once the film shifts into a broader comedic register, it no longer capitalizes on Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae’s gift for gab.
  54. The Painter and the Thief
    Throughout the documentary, Benjamin Ree upsets conventions, offering a moving portrait of two lost souls.
  55. Inheritance
    Simon Pegg occasionally fulfills the nightmarish potential of the film’s fairy-tale premise.
  56. Take Me Somewhere Nice
    From beneath defensive layers of distanced comic despair emerges a sincere story about a young woman’s emotional reconciliation with her troubled place of origin.
  57. The Trip to Greece
    The series’s ambient preoccupation with death is foregrounded more than ever before with this film’s main dramatic subplot.
  58. Military Wives
    The film seems almost content to have you forget about everything that inspired it in the first place.
  59. Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy
    In this time of peril and chaos, Elizabeth Carroll’s documentary is a balm for the soul.
  60. The Wolf House
    The film’s animation leans into its most jerky, artificial qualities, all the better to enhance the atmosphere of bizarre unreality.
  61. Fourteen
    Dan Sallitt recognizes that even the sturdiest of friendships are inevitably tested by time and the evolution of personal responsibility.
  62. Capone
    Every scene is virtually self-contained, and so Capone feels as if it’s starting all over again from frame to frame.
  63. Spaceship Earth
    The film offers a refuge of idealism and intellectuality in an age that’s actively hostile to both of those qualities.
  64. Arkansas
    The film’s insistence on keeping the stakes low throughout is probably its key strength.
  65. On a Magical Night
    Christophe Honoré deposits all his chips on the comedic premise at the expense of character study and gravitas.
  66. Clementine
    There’s a hint of Jane Campion’s own uncanny perversion of the banal throughout Lara Jean Gallagher’s film.
  67. Driveways
    The film’s devotion to the belief that kindness can be a balm for almost any hurt is deeply moving.
  68. A Good Woman Is Hard to Find
    The film’s early scenes turn the stuff of paying bills and managing kids into manna for an unsettlingly intimate domestic thriller.
  69. Our Mothers
    Around his main character, writer-director César Díaz builds a complex but unpretentious interrogation of national belonging.
  70. The Wretched
    The filmmakers don’t examine the psychological terror, the bitterness, and lust that gave rise to many of the works they cherish.
  71. Bull
    Director Annie Silverstein tries to enrich the tropes of her class-conscious buddy scenario by canceling them out.
  72. Bad Education
    Rather than a simplistic, straightforward parable of greed, Bad Education depicts its true events with a surprising amount of depth and ambiguity.
  73. Extraction
    Chris Hemsworth’s hyperbolically skilled soldier is borne of childish fantasies about the order of the world.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Beastie Boys Story
    Often feels like a cross between a TED talk and a memorial service, but one gets the sense that Diamond and Horovitz are finally getting years’ worth of grief off their chests. The cumulative effect is, at the very least, touching.
  75. 1BR
    The film gives palpable expression to the sense of hopelessness felt by those who fall under the control of cults.
  76. True History of the Kelly Gang
    In more than one sense, Justin Kurzel’s aggressively strange film queers the myth of the oft-lionized Ned Kelly.
  77. Selah and The Spades
    Through its exploration of Selah’s complexities, as well as the bravado and posturing that comes with being a credible drug dealer, Selah and the Spades locates a larger truth about the presentation of self and maintaining one’s image.
  78. Children of Paradise (1945)
    Carné’s France, unlike the fiddle-dee-dee of Victor Fleming’s cotton pickin’ South, is a poetic realist’s wonderland, a gateway to a dreamworld where human laws are mere judicial errors and love is so painful to hold onto it can only be savored in the moment.
  79. The Quarry
    Only Michel Shannon’s off-kilter timing brings The Quarry to sporadic life.
  80. A White, White Day
    There’s a moving study within the film of a man in emotional paralysis learning to redirect his love from the past to the present, but it’s too often obscured by a muted revenge yarn that’s no less banal because it’s tastefully directed.
  81. Trolls World Tour
    At its best, the film doesn’t just privilege altered states of consciousness, it is an altered state of consciousness.
  82. We Summon the Darkness
    The film’s cat-and-mouse antics play out with no sense of escalation or invention.
  83. Sea Fever
    Writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s film is undone by earnestness.
  84. Nafi's Father
    The film vibrantly articulates all that’s lost when people are held under the draconian decree of warlords.
  85. Days of Cannibalism
    The film ultimately depicts a world in which people are left with no other option but to devour their own.
  86. Atlantis
    The film’s use of scale to drive home the absurdity of its characters’ actions sometimes calls to mind Werner Herzog’s tragicomic existentialism, as well as early silent cinema.
  87. Vivarium
    This a parable about adulthood boasts deeply cynical takes on home, community, and childrearing.
  88. Resistance
    The film functions as a handsomely mounted biopic that tells a little-known story with considerable passion.
  89. 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.
  90. Blow the Man Down
    Without Margo Martindale, the film would be a sharp and tightly constructed nautical noir. With her, it becomes a memorable one.
  91. Deerskin
    In Deerskin, Quentin Dupieux mines the absurdism that is his signature with newfound forcefulness.
  92. Bloodshot
    Given its hero’s imperviousness, the film’s chaotically edited action sequences tend to be devoid of suspense.
  93. The Hunt
    The film was almost canceled for being too partisan, so it’s ironic to discover that it’s practically apolitical.
  94. Heimat is a Space in Time
    Thomas Heise’s documentary seeks to excavate real human thought and feeling beneath the haze of larger political structures.
  95. Stargirl
    It comes across like yet another casualty in the long line of stories about men having their eyes opened by their angelic girlfriends.
  96. Slay the Dragon
    The film is suitably direct, clear-eyed, and exhaustive in documenting the massive impacts that gerrymandering has, particularly on communities of color.
  97. Big Time Adolescence
    The film is at its weakest when it has to do drama, since the fallout of Mo and Zeke’s actions feels perfunctory and tossed-off in the rush to an ending, a hasty come-down after the proverbial party.
  98. Welcome to Chechnya
    David France’s most remarkable accomplishment emerges from an aesthetic commitment of a very particular kind.
  99. The Way Back
    The film makes the path to basketball glory and the road to personal redemption seem oddly effortless.
  100. Hope Gap
    So many grandiose tactics portend a grander revelation than the film’s otherwise low-key three-hander delivers.
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