Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Sorry We Missed You
    It’s difficult to imagine a more socially engaged or powerful condemnation of the exploitative gig economy than Ken Loach’s latest.
  2. Days
    Reciprocity might be impossible in a world rigged against queerness, Tsai seems to say, which doesn’t mean that certain things can't still be shared.
  3. Undine
    The film questions the fixed nature of human behavior in a world whose borders are constantly shifting.
  4. Siberia
    Abel Ferrara doesn’t require traditional dream logic, as his grasp of the nitty-gritty quotidian of longing is inherently uncanny.
  5. The Roads Not Taken
    The film is an unending source for the worst possible clichés and most overdone series of graphic matches in the history of film editing.
  6. Saudi Runaway
    Camera, character, and cameraperson are one throughout, and the effect is exquisitely suffocating.
  7. Swallow
    Fortunately for the film, Carlo Mirabella-Davis continually springs scenes that either transcend or justify his preaching.
  8. Emma.
    This lively adaptation plays up the novel’s more farcical elements, granting it a snappy, rhythmic pace.
  9. The Trouble with Being Born
    In the end, the film suffers from the same issue as its moody androids: enervation borne out of repetition.
  10. The Invisible Man
    Through to the end, you can’t get off on the thrill of this film’s craftsmanship without also getting off on the spectacle of more than just Cecilia brought to the brink of destruction. Like its style, The Invisible Man’s cruelty is the point.
  11. The Assistant
    With The Assistant, writer-director Kitty Green offers a top-to-bottom portrait of incremental dehumanization, and, on its terms, the film is aesthetically, tonally immaculate.
  12. Guns Akimbo
    Writer-director Jason Lei Howden’s humor might have been tolerable if his film was at least reasonably imaginative.
  13. The Salt of Tears
    Philippe Garrel illustrates the absurdity behind the myth of the complementary couple with the same cynicism that permeates his previous work but none of the humor or wit.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 23, 2020
  14. Greed
    The film takes occasional stabs at comic grotesquerie, but it’s brought back to earth by an insistent docudrama seriousness.
  15. Saint Frances
    It has almost enough genuine charm and heart to compensate for the moments that feel forced.
  16. Wendy
    Wendy veers awkwardly and aimlessly between tragedy and jubilance, never accruing any lasting emotional impact.
  17. Disappearance at Clifton Hill
    What distinguishes the film from much of its ilk is Albert Shin’s ongoing taste for peculiar and unsettling details.
  18. Onward
    While Onward begins as a story of bereavement, it soon turns to celebrating the payoffs of positive thinking.
  19. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    Robertson’s sense of having witnessed friends and collaborators get washed away by bitterness and addiction was more fulsomely evoked by The Last Waltz.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Call of the Wild
    The film’s avoidance of cruel Gold Rush realities is more than made up for by its spirited kineticism and by its deepening of the man-dog bond that forms the heart of London’s story.
  21. Corpus Christi
    It’s within the murky realm of self-doubt and spiritual anxiety that it’s at its most audacious and compelling.
  22. The Photograph
    The film is at its best when it’s focused on the euphoria and tribulations of its central couple's love affair.
  23. Sonic the Hedgehog
    Throughout, any and all subtext is buried under the weight of Jim Carrey’s mugging.
  24. The Misogynists
    Onur Tukel’s film doesn’t live up to the promise of this fleet-footed opening.
  25. Downhill
    Downhill never makes much of an impact as it moves from one mildly amusing cringe-comedy set piece to the next.
  26. Buffaloed
    The filmmakers allow their characters to learn the usual humanist lessons, in the process eliding the ramifications of their scenario.
  27. The Times of Bill Cunningham
    The film undermines Cunningham’s egalitarianism by linking him directly with the kind of elite snobbery and wealth fixation he abhorred.
  28. The Cordillera of Dreams
    For Patricio Guzmán, to gaze at the Cordillera is to comprehend the range of history and the possibility of its distortion.
  29. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    Birds of Prey feels at times less like its own story and more like a trailer for what’s coming next.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    And Then We Danced
    Levan Akin offers up a swooning gay romance as the centerpiece from which all of his other ideas radiate.
  31. Cane River
    The film’s awkwardness is expressive of the pain and confusion of wrestling with truths that shake one’s conception of identity.
  32. The Lodge
    It’s best appreciated not with the parts of your brain responsible for reason and judgment, but in the unthinking terror centers, where the film’s style of God-fearing fanaticism also resides.
  33. Gretel & Hansel
    Beginning with the reversed names in its title, the film announces itself as a distinctly feminine spin on the Grimm fairy tale.
  34. Incitement
    Admirably, Yaron Zilberman’s film focuses on the cyclical nature of violence in a decades-old conflict.
  35. The Rhythm Section
    The film’s occasional gestures toward pseudo-feminist empowerment only compound the hollowness of its protagonist.
  36. José
    Li Cheng gets much closer to capturing his characters’ predicaments when he trusts the images alone.
  37. To the Ends of the Earth
    If Kurosawa is less interested in narrative dynamics, it’s because he’s focused on an acute understanding of societally and sociologically conditioned behavior.
  38. The Turning
    The film casts its source narrative as a delusional fantasy through which to enact the effects of possible traumas that go completely unexplored.
  39. The Last Full Measure
    The film largely evades any perspectives that might question the institutions that put our soldiers in harm’s way.
  40. Dolittle
    Dolittle’s inability to completely develop any of its characters reduces the film to all pomp and no circumstance.
  41. Bad Boys for Life
    The film may leave you wondering what purpose this franchise serves if not to give expression to Michael Bay's nationalist, racist, and misogynistic instincts.
  42. Intrigo: Death of an Author
    The film evinces neither the visceral pleasures of noir nor the precision to uncover deeper thematic resonances.
  43. Weathering with You
    Contemporary outrage could’ve potentially counterpointed the film’s increasingly mawkish tendencies.
  44. VHYes
    The film settles much too comfortably into the well-trodden footsteps of other works.
  45. Like a Boss
    Its inconsistent, half-baked characterizations would be more forgivable were they at least in the service of some inspired comedy.
  46. Earth
    With Earth, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s visual strategy is to wow us with tangibility and data, though he doesn’t give up aesthetic experimentation altogether in this survey of Anthropocene calamities.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Underwater
    William Eubank’s Underwater is neither a too-big-to-fail event film nor a relatively low-budget genre sleeper. In other words, it doesn’t put in the effort to reach for the heights of Alien or plant its tongue firmly in cheek a la Deep Blue Sea.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Gentlemen
    The London of this film is practically a match for Guy Ritchie’s filmmaking: a characterless mockery of its former glories, smooth and bland and just a bit more monied than before.
  49. The Informer
    Outside of the Easy Money series, Kinnaman has rarely been allowed to utilize his tightly wound intensity this explicitly.
  50. Les Misérables
    The film serves as both caustic update to Victor Hugo’s monolithic novel and cautionary tale about the future.
  51. Three Christs
    By the end, it’s as if a good doctor’s god complex has been taken up by the film itself.
  52. The Grudge
    Nicolas Pesce evincing little of the promise he showed in his prior films, and even less drive to remake the old into something new.
  53. A Rainy Day in New York
    The film’s skittishness is particularly maddening considering that Woody Allen has nothing to artistically to prove.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Song of Names
    In the end, the film is unable to bridge the gap between the emotions it elicits and the messages it imparts.
  55. Cats
    This adaptation gets straight to the heart of the material, which is basically two hours of stray cats introducing themselves.
  56. Ip Man 4: The Finale
    The film is overstuffed with characters and subplots that ultimately have little to do with Ip Man and his legacy.
  57. Invisible Life
    Only rarely does Karim Aïnouz allow for loopholes to refreshingly emerge from the film’s stylistic deadlock.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The film, hyper-aware of the shadow cast by the franchise’s history, struggles to both honor and redeem the past before everything comes to a close.
  59. Clemency
    Chinonye Chukwu’s film is a morality play with a true sense of contradiction and melancholia.
  60. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
    The documentary is enjoyable, but one suspects that its subject may have found it soft.
  61. Seberg
    Throughout, the filmmakers occlude the most fascinating and potentially powerful elements of Jean Seberg’s history.
  62. Black Christmas
    The filmmakers’ overly simplistic depiction of good and evil is mitigated to some degree by the presence of Landon (Caleb Eberhardt).
  63. Jumanji: The Next Level
    For all the emphasis on video game characters who can be swapped out on a whim, it’s the players themselves who come across as the most thinly drawn and interchangeable beneath their avatars.
  64. Chinese Portrait
    The simplicity of bodies barely moving before a camera that brings their quotidian temporality into a halt is nothing short of a radical proposition in our digital era.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bombshell
    The film is too irreverent in tone and narrow in scope to place Roger Ailes’s criminality in a larger, more meaningful context.
  66. Empty Metal
    The film is greater in its confrontational force than the sum of a dozen festival breakthroughs lauded for their fearlessness.
  67. Richard Jewell
    Ironically, Clint Eastwood is as condescending of Jewell as the bureaucrats he despises.
  68. Cunningham
    While some individuals are inevitably more compelling than others, as a whole the entire series, and “63 Up” in particular, is completely enveloping as it draws us into the latest happenings of these people we’ve followed for so long.
  69. The Two Popes
    There isn’t anything in the bleeding-heart positions espoused by Jorge Bergoglio that complicates Pope Francis’s public persona.
  70. The Disappearance of My Mother
    It’s fascinating to see Benedetta Barzini in academic action, like an ethnographer of the patriarchy herself, bringing back news from its most glamourous yet rotten core.
  71. Midnight Family
    It’s the mix of the humane and the calculating that gives the film its empathetic power.
  72. The Aeronauts
    As a suspense film, it’s so sluggishly structured that it borders on the avant-garde.
  73. The Wolf Hour
    The film is all surface, and its depiction of trauma becomes increasingly exploitative and hollow as it moves along.
  74. Knives and Skin
    The film gets so lost in its affected idiosyncrasies that it stops probing any discernible human feelings.
  75. In Fabric
    Strickland’s film is another fetish object that rues the perils of fetishism.
  76. Daniel Isn't Real
    Its performatively extreme imagery thinly masks a rather banal view of male subjectivity and inner conflict.
  77. I See You
    The film’s tone is extremely eerie, with creeping camera movements, striking imagery, abrupt edits, and a delicately sinister score.
  78. When Lambs Become Lions
    Think Michael Mann’s Heat but in East Africa and with real-world stakes.
  79. Little Joe
    Jessica Hausner confidently expresses a thorny and disturbing theme, though perhaps with too much confidence.
  80. 1917
    The most thrilling and haunting details here are actively undermined by the chief technical gimmick of the film.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Little Women
    Individual scenes are set to the rhythm of the young women’s conversations, which at times approach Gilmore Girls-level warp speed.
  82. Feast of the Epiphany
    Its sensitivity to how something as seemingly ordinary as food can have an immense emotional impact is consistently and unobtrusively profound.
  83. Queen & Slim
    For a spell, Melina Matsoukas’s film exudes the concision of an old B movie.
    • 89 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    63 Up
    Throughout, the remaining participants take stock of private and career successes as well as perceived failures.
  85. 21 Bridges
    It’s difficult to imagine a worse time to release Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges than the present.
  86. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
    Marielle Heller takes a script that many filmmakers would turn into cringe-inducing treacle and interrogates the sentimental trappings.
  87. Frozen II
    Woke Disney, trying to navigate a tricky representational path, steps all over itself throughout.
  88. Shooting the Mafia
    Kim Longinotto is so eager to celebrate her hero that she also glides past thornier portions of Letizia Battaglia’s life.
  89. The Good Liar
    An airport novel of a movie, Bill Condon’s The Good Liar is efficient and consumable, if a bit hollow.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Dark Waters
    Todd Haynes’s film intermittently hits upon a few original ways of representing its ripped-from-the-headlines mandate.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    How to Train Your Dragon
    This kid flick is just plain smart, packed full of imagination and surprise.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Charlie's Angels
    All the feminist virtue-signaling in the world can’t conceal the film’s creative conservatism.
  93. The Hottest August
    The documentary represents a city ground down by inequality and division, where millions of selves who have by and large given up on one another.
  94. I Lost My Body
    It focuses equally on moments of shared connection and incidental loss until the two feel indistinguishable.
  95. The Report
    In the end, it can’t help but sentimentalize the better angels that supposedly reside in the land of liberty’s flawed human fabric.
  96. Last Christmas
    Clarke works hard to make the messy, perpetually flustered Kate relatable, but the film surrounds the character with a community as kitschy and false as the trinkets she sells in Santa’s shop.
  97. Midway
    In the film, the Battle of Midway suggests something out of a photorealistic animated film.
  98. Klaus
    Sergio Pablos’s film is essentially a metaphor for its own unique and refreshing mode of expression.
  99. The King
    If only the film made more of the curious tension between Timothée Chalamet’s Henry and Robert Pattinson’s dauphin.
  100. Primal
    The film too often suggests an Under Siege that’s been pointlessly larded with critters from Jumanji.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »