Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,775 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: 4,349 out of 7775
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7775
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7775
7775 movie reviews
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  1. Tanna
    The film blends the Bard with National Geographic, failing to make a case for the inexplicability of their union.
  2. John Wick: Chapter 2
    John Wick: Chapter 2 remarkably balances its predecessor’s spartan characterizations and plotting with a significant expansion of scale.
  3. The Escape
    It deals with a very ordinary emergency with deftness of touch, and the power of a singular performance.
  4. Send Help
    This is an immensely effective tropical island-set chamber drama in which two characters see their gender and labor relations start to reverse in ways that eventually reveal surprising ambiguities.
  5. Belfast
    Kenneth Branagh's film understands the malleability of memory, and it embodies cinema’s ability to offer a kind of escapism, but up until its climax it plays like a retreat from reality.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    How to Train Your Dragon
    This kid flick is just plain smart, packed full of imagination and surprise.
  7. Unrest
    Cyril Schäublin’s precisely framed snapshot of a microcosm of timekeepers ends up being a bit too, well, mechanical.
  8. Civil War
    Frightening, even-tempered, and disarmingly humane, Civil War is intelligent precision filmmaking trained on an impossible subject.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Side Effects
    Like Magic Mike, Side Effects is enlivened by Soderbergh's jazzy style and laidback moralism, bringing to mind the work of another connoisseur of genre, Robert Altman.
  10. Blindspotting
    The film takes aim at myriad targets and bluntly satirizing them in disparate styles that never mesh into a cohesive whole.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Invisible War
    Kirby Dick's spartan use of graphics and statistics conveys arguments with little grandstanding.
  12. A Private War
    A Private War ultimately sides with the late journalist’s assertion that the whos and whys of war matter far less in journalism than finding the right human-interest angle to hook an audience.
  13. The Wolfpack
    Crystal Moselle aims her cinematic arrow at the hearts of the same choir that Andrew Jarecki's stunted aesthetics preach to.
  14. Infinite Football
    Corneliu Porumboiu resists spelling anything out but the bare essentials, instead continuing his project of inviting viewers to closely parse the acerbic day-to-day banalities of post-Ceausescu Romania.
  15. Morris from America
    Chad Hartigan's film is especially perceptive about the effect of external influence on personal development.
  16. The Plagiarists
    This is a rigorous film concerned with questions of cultural appropriation, learned behavior, and the very texture of life in our content-saturated present (a feeling not exclusive to urban centers), but one with the good humor and wisdom to disguise itself as something far more familiar.
  17. Together
    That Together treats its body horror as just another wrinkle in the complexities of what it means to love someone else is writer-director Michael Shanks’s smartest move.
  18. Rich Hill
    Rich Hill is poverty porn, examining lower-class spaces with pity as its operative mode and engendering little more than a means for viewers to leave the film acknowledging its sadness.
  19. Song Without a Name
    The film is strikingly fixated on exploring loss and pain on an intimate and personal scale.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Dark Days
    The documentary enables its viewers to confront poverty on a human level by presenting its subjects, for the most part, like anyone else, living lives, despite their socioeconomic difference, relatable to our own.
  21. Martin Eden
    Pietro Marcello’s film works better as a story of self-loathing and self-destruction than it does as a social critique or political statement.
  22. Captain America: Civil War
    The undeniable fun of Civil War's action scenes only exacerbates the failure of the narrative to adequately contend with its own themes.
  23. The Eyes of Orson Welles
    The Eyes of Orson Welles honors the central paradox of Welles: that he was a joyful poet of alienation who was, like most of us, both victim and victimizer.
  24. Late Fame
    Its desire to resist easy storytelling paradigms around artists is admirable, but without punching up or down, the film feels like it’s pulling punches altogether.
  25. The Stones and Brian Jones
    Via the film’s juxtaposition between footage of Jones performing in front of fawning crowds with the dark personal stories of those who knew him best, Nick Broomfield bitingly undercuts the rock star’s veneer of public adoration.
  26. Finding Vivian Maier
    This is less a portrait of an artist as a young woman than a psychological evaluation of a slippery subject.
  27. Cusp
    At its best, the documentary’s aura of desolation suggests a verité version of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.
  28. The Set-Up
    Robert Wise’s The Set-Up isn’t noir by any serious definition, its boilerplate fatalism undone by overbearing moralizing and the fact that Ryan’s boxer is too one-dimensionally good to register as tragic.
  29. Super Dark Times
    The transformation of a teen into a serial killer isn't credible compared to the portrait of idle suburban adolescence.
  30. Middle of Nowhere
    In a cinema landscape where the representation of the black female experience is most visibly explored through the modes of outlandish comedy, unironic melodrama, or not at all, Ava DuVernay's take is a decidedly refreshing one.
  31. The Thieves
    A dazzling heist film that can't help but come off as duly influenced by Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's trilogy, South Korea's number one box-office champ of all time is never less than clever.
  32. When Evil Lurks
    Demián Rugna’s harrowing film spares no one from the cruelty of its world.
  33. Funny Face
    The clothing may be couture, but Funny Face’s plot is strictly wash, rinse, repeat.
  34. Diana Kennedy: Nothing Fancy
    In this time of peril and chaos, Elizabeth Carroll’s documentary is a balm for the soul.
  35. Dial M for Murder
    What tends to make even lesser Hitchcock films shine is his innate gift for directing performers, and this accounts for many of the pleasures of this ditty.
  36. 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.
  37. Graceland
    The film's plot isn't unusual, but director Ron Morales strips it down to its primal essence.
  38. Whitney
    For most of Kevin Macdonald's film, Whitney Houston seems a guttering flame in a public crosswind, with only fleeting celebration given to the wildfire of her success.
  39. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    It only conveys the awesome strangeness of its characters and their universe when director Brian Singer breaks away from the perpetual build-up of the film's unwieldy plot.
  40. Land of Mine
    Land of Mine's fitful jolts of suspense can't compensate for the story's wholly familiar trajectory.
  41. Polite Society
    From the first blow to the last, Polite Society is a charm offensive that simply doesn’t let up.
  42. Thoroughbreds
    Cory Finley's screenplay is full of sharp, exactingly timed exchanges whose rat-a-tat rhythms exert a spellbinding pull, even if the dialogue at times comes off as artificial and mannered.
  43. The Bob's Burgers Movie
    Throughout the film, the quick-hit jokes from the show’s rich cast of oddballs serves to suggest a vibrant world outside of the Belchers.
  44. Bring Her Back
    The film has a white-hot nerve of pain running inside it that burns right through the screen.
  45. Black Girl (1966)
    Decolonization in Black Girl isn't only a myth, but also a myth that actually strengthens the consumerist caste systems.
  46. The LEGO Batman Movie
    The film is an unbroken chain of one-liners, sight gags, and pop-culture references, and the hit-to-miss ratio is high.
  47. Kate Plays Christine
    It movingly posits acting as a metaphor for the search for connection, through visceral texture rather than platitude.
  48. Afterimage
    Andrzej Wajda's film is a lean, unwavering look at the effects of artistic idealism in the face of fascist doctrine.
  49. La Cocina
    La Cocina goes further than recasting the American dream as a nightmare and the much sought-after visa as a ticket to infinite exploitation.
  50. House
    Equal parts brilliant, baffling, ridiculous, and unwatchable.
  51. The Image You Missed
    The film finds Dónal Foreman exploring the suggestive gaps that exist between his own biography and that of his father.
  52. Monica
    Monica is an unsentimental exploration of its main character’s search for personal fulfillment through human connection.
  53. Microbe and Gasoline
    Microbe and Gasoline is enervating for both relishing whimsy and looking behind it to absorb the yearnings of youth and its attendant complications in all their nakedness.
  54. Trainwreck
    The script doesn't revel in Amy's quite harmless flaws, or at least examine them in the spirit of benevolence.
  55. Emily
    The film takes advantage of the leeway for speculation afforded by its subject’s reclusive nature.
  56. 10,000 km
    It ends up feeling like an unsatisfying cautionary tale on how much detachment is too much detachment.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Orlando
    Rarely have source material, director, and leading actress been more in alignment than in Orlando.
  58. When Lambs Become Lions
    Think Michael Mann’s Heat but in East Africa and with real-world stakes.
  59. Origin
    Thanks to Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s unflappable performance, the theories that Isabel Wilkerson laid out in her book emerge with an emotional clarity that can be forceful, but the film’s often inelegant, choppy structure also works against that clarity.
  60. Rebuilding
    If there’s any sense of motion in the film, which is largely defined by its patient camerawork and editing, it’s in Dusty’s gradual recognition of and response to the emotions that accompany his corporal yearning to remain in place.
  61. Point Blank
    Fred Cavayé shoots his action with both vigorous propulsion and visual lucidity. Unfortunately, however, his story's revelations, all of which are related to a recent corporate bigwig's assassination, arrive at least two-to-three scenes after they've already become obvious.
  62. Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
    It highlights the potent dichotomies that, combined with Bergman's relatively unmediated beauty, made the actress luminescent both on and off screen.
  63. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    The effect of Sophie Fiennes's unmoored approach to her subject is to take us out of normal time and put us on Grace Jones time.
  64. Blast of Silence
    Haunting, remote, and workmanlike, Blast of Silence may be the only film I’ve ever seen with a trip on the Station Island Ferry in which I expected a tumbleweed to flit across the deck.
  65. A House of Dynamite
    Kathryn Bigelow’s nerve-shredding A House of Dynamite stares down impossible questions about an unthinkable scenario.
  66. Okja
    In Okja, a transporting protest fantasy becomes another shrill dust-up in the waging of the culture wars.
  67. The Great Flood
    Even in comparatively conventional mode, Bill Morrison's work still benefits from the poetic potential of nature's repossession of its own elements.
  68. Happyend
    Sora Neo struggles to balance the immediacy of adolescent angst with the long-range outlook of using the students’ experience as a canary in the coal mine for society at large.
  69. Omar
    What Omar best portrays are the limitations that result from having an occupation, and the fight to overthrow it, dominate a person's entire life.
  70. Manhunter
    Mann’s focus is so esoteric that he slowly turns the garish thriller into a kind of poetry.
  71. Titane
    Titane wildly expands on Julia Ducournau’s idiosyncratic interest in the collision of flesh-rending violence and familial reconfiguration.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Scheherazade Tell Me a Story
    Inescapably and poignantly colored by the revolutionary events that would take place in Egypt in the years since its making, Scheherazade brims with faith in storytelling as art's great way of lifting society's veils.
  73. Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation
    It can't resist winking at how this franchise manages to defy the limits of both human endurance and its superstar's rickety public status.
  74. In the Last Days of the City
    By diagramming a vastly complicated metropolis like Cairo from an unabashedly first-person perspective, In the Last Days of the City interrogates middle-class privilege in a time of crisis as a series of either-ors: leaving for Europe or staying in Cairo, hiding at home or protesting in the streets, filming blindly or seeking retrenchment in broad certainty.
  75. Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara
    The story is kept at a stress-inducing simmer, with occasional surges of operatic emotion.
  76. Frozen
    The film's empowering themes of feminine strengths and bonds eventually flourish in novel fashion.
  77. They Died with Their Boots On
    Even if historical erroneousness intermittently undermines the film’s outlandish attempts at lionization, They Died with Their Boots On endures as one of the finest Flynn-de Havilland collaborations, providing a grand stage for the duo’s playful, poignant rapport.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?
    That undeniable off-screen friction only helps grease the wheels of the film’s compulsive forward momentum, supplying a crackling energy to scenes wherein, among other gothic horrors, pet birds are served up for supper with relish.
  79. Hatching
    The ham-handed allegorical construction, generically titled characters, and self-serious tone in its final third drains the story of the specificity that might have resulted in a more incisive critique of the perils of perfectionism.
  80. Bitter Money
    Wang Bing's documentaries are angry, raw testaments to the human spirit in the face of social injustice. In this regard, his latest, the harrowing, soulful Bitter Money, is fortunately no exception.
  81. Diamantino
    The film is at its strongest when depicting how Diamantino becomes a tool of politicians hoping to oust Portugal from the EU.
  82. 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.
  83. Life, Animated
    It never addresses Disney's wholly manufactured stranglehold on turning adolescent desire into a consumerist impulse.
  84. The Skeleton Twins
    Craig Johnson's film is ultimately most interested in what its jokes are implying or obscuring about the jokesters themselves.
  85. Mandibles
    The idle one-thing-after-another-ness of Mandibles is evocative, disturbing, and moving.
  86. The Monk and the Gun
    The film pulls off something truly bold: taking what are perhaps the most emotionally and symbolically loaded items in existence and subverting their meaning completely to end on a note of peace, joy, and hope for the future.
  87. Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present
    As entertaining as the documentary is, it never really measures up to the fascination and sheer force of personality of its subject.
  88. They Cloned Tyrone
    The satire here isn’t quite as on point as that of its predecessors, but it helps that Boyega, Parris, and Foxx share the sort of chemistry that even the most secretive government lab couldn’t cook up.
  89. She Rides Shotgun
    Nick Rowland’s film doesn’t seem to have faith in the story the novel tells.
  90. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    It unites a mélange of teen-film tropes into a narrative overburdened with cultural references and framing devices, and undermined by a lack of attention to character.
  91. The Rabbi's Cat
    Despite its flaws, the film is at least a consistent vision, attesting through both its story and animation to the rabbi's right to be different while also striving for human solidarity.
  92. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    It mistakes touch-and-go navel-gazing for comprehension, as if speaking to as many subjects as possible produces an inherently compelling take.
  93. Found Memories
    Julia Murat shows a fine grasp of form, letting her technique reflect the elements and moods of her story.
  94. Lancelot of the Lake
    Because Bresson’s cinematic personality is as deliberate and clean as it is, the viewer is tempted to chalk up the bizarre and moving experience of watching Lancelot du Lac to some latent spirituality or grace.
  95. 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
    78/52 comes to life when riffing on the psychosexual perversity of Psycho, which changed cinema's relationship with sex and violence.
  96. A Bigger Splash
    What intrigues, if in a lurid sort of way, is the film's fudging of projected viewer desires with its characters'.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    My Sunshine
    Okuyama Hiroshi spins poetry from seemingly inconsequential moments.
  98. Tabloid
    A slick, entertaining offering, playing at times like a tarted up "E! True Hollywood Story."
  99. Very Semi-Serious
    It doesn't seem to aspire to much more than proving that there are nice, talented people behind the New Yorker's walls.
  100. What Maisie Knew
    David Siegel and Scott McGehee's film renders the rhapsodic Henry James novel of the same name into an abhorrent slice of tasteless familial drama.
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