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 Attack
    The film is most interesting as an articulation of how its main character's initial status as an emblem of inter-religious understanding quickly dissolves following a suicide bombing.
  2. Daughters of Darkness
    Kümel’s impulse to remain on the waning edge of eroticism turns what could’ve been another cheap thrill into a genuinely unsettling examination of the human race’s most happily sanctioned form of vampirism: man-woman couplings.
  3. Scrapper
    Charlotte Regan’s film is a baffling clash of two incompatible visions.
  4. Happy People: A Year in the Taiga
    It would be inaccurate to call Happy People: A Year in the Taiga the newest Werner Herzog film.
  5. The New Girlfriend
    François Ozon is never willing to fully engage with the ridiculousness of his material, resulting in an uneasy mix of wry distance and unearned emotion.
  6. Enemies of the State
    The film’s concession to the fungible nature of presented reality comes across not as indecisive but courageous.
  7. Youth (Spring)
    Twenty years on from Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, we return with Wang Bing to the factory floor, but this time he doesn’t muster the formal strategies or the narratological scope that once allowed him (and us) to imagine broader implications for China’s future.
  8. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
    A playfully self-reflective rumination on what writer-director Terence Nance has described as "self-awareness through experience with love."
  9. Far From Men
    The film often suggests a less defiant cover of The Defiant Ones, yet it's a must-see for Viggo Mortensen's characteristically wonderful performance.
  10. Of Horses and Men
    On one hand, the film is surely a celebration of a land's distinct creatures and the people who live among them, but on the other, it's a culture's biting auto-critique.
  11. Forbidden Films
    The documentary takes an equivocal stance, implying that just because a film should not be shown doesn't mean that it should be banned.
  12. The Creation of Meaning
    In the simultaneously heady and lyrical The Creation of Meaning, we're obviously implicated in that comment, as the film views the meaning-making process as something malleable and dependent on perspective.
  13. Raising Bertie
    The documentary mistakes its access to quotidian behaviors as evidence of the need for comprehensive educational and financial reform.
  14. Lost Soulz
    Lost Soulz is a road-trip movie driven by good vibrations and the joy of making music.
  15. Art College 1994
    The precise contrast of stasis and flux, of the sublime and the quotidian, of simple personal dreams swallowed up by massive national ambitions, characterizes Liu Jian’s latest.
  16. Cryptozoo
    Dash Shaw’s deceptively simple animation regularly descends into phantasmagoria that delivers on his story’s strange premise.
  17. 40 Acres
    40 Acres continually finds clever ways to either subvert familiar story beats or to make them land with extra impact.
  18. Crazy Rich Asians
    The filmmakers’ ability to seamlessly explore rapidly shifting Chinese cultural norms within the context of the classic trope of a mother who’s hostile toward her son’s partner is the film’s most impressive feat.
  19. In Order of Disappearance
    The film has been executed with a sense of formally stylish and thematically symmetric panache.
  20. My Father's Dragon
    The hot streak for Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon cools with My Father’s Dragon.
  21. The Duke
    The film misses an opportunity to delve particularly deeply into the keenly relevant issues of inequality and social disconnection that so animate its protagonist.
  22. When Fall Is Coming
    The film is a bit too muddled to bring its main character fully into focus, despite Hélène Vincent’s best efforts to do so.
  23. The Body Snatcher
    Even if the narrative threads aren’t as tightly focused on exploring a complex theme as one might hope, The Body Snatcher nevertheless manages to still send chills, and predominately through Wise’s fleet direction and Karloff’s unflinching embodiment of a real-world monster.
  24. You Are Not My Mother
    The primacy that it places on its dopamine drip of dread undercuts whatever genuine commitment it might have toward mental illness and trauma.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Becoming Traviata
    It works as a reminder of the important interactiveness of the performing arts, of actors evoking the drama, action, and emotion that computers and machines cannot.
  26. Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins
    The film is at its best when its focus remains on Ivins’s fierce commitment to her ideals and willingness to speak her mind.
  27. Dream Scenario
    Kristoffer Borgli’s film presents a perfectly absurdist setup that allows Nicolas Cage to flex his singular acting muscles in increasingly hilarious directions.
  28. Wild Nights with Emily
    The film’s playful tone is a corrective to a century of scholarship that insisted on projecting the image of a moody spinster onto Emily Dickinson.
  29. Big Hero 6
    The film quickly becomes a study of grief and retribution, and the question of how exactly technology can and should be utilized in the treatment of these emotions.
  30. Bad Hair
    The narrative works through the many contradictions brewing inside its main character in the wake of his personal actualization without ever feeling like a dramatic checklist.
  31. The Pirogue
    Moussa Touré's worldview, like Ousmane Sembene's, is characterized by the feeling that, at the end of the day, some degree of loss or defeat is inevitable.
  32. Mommy
    When Xavier Dolan's tremendous empathy for the abandoned, medicated, and economically stressed is given full visual flight, it's easy to get lost in the rush.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Highest 2 Lowest
    The more the film diverges from Kurosawa’s, the more confident and distinguished it becomes.
  34. Sweat
    Sweat mostly adheres to a time-honored tale of the pitfalls of fame, despite its ultra-modern context.
  35. Starlet
    The film works as a charming aesthetic exercise with its jerky camera and inadvertent cuts, as a contemplation on intergenerational female bonding.
  36. Eastern Boys
    A ferocious plea for character salvation within a milieu where money and bodily affect are the raison d'être for human existence.
  37. The Silent Partner
    Though Duke’s film lacks the warmth and humanism of Something Wild, it’s possessed of a similarly idiosyncratic edginess.
  38. As I Open My Eyes
    Leyla Bouzid successfully dramatizes how young people eroticize peril and risk due to a lack of experience.
  39. Power Ballad
    Like the fraught relationship between its two musician characters, the film never finds the right groove.
  40. Cosmos
    Andrzej Zulawski's film experiment ranks somewhere between captivatingly off the wall and utterly exhausting.
  41. Kill
    Kill continually finds clever ways to defy our expectations through the particular placement of dramatic beats, surprising shifts in tone, and even just the way it keeps flipping the geography of the action.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Neil Young Journeys
    As great and intimate as Live at Massey Hall 1971 may be, it's not as transportive as this filming of a Neil Young performance at the venue 30 years later.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Old Dog
    Minimalist in its aesthetics and soundtrack, quiet and deliberate in its plot, but nonetheless familiar--endearing and a vital addition to the small but growing Tibetan cinema.
  44. Land and Shade
    The landscape seems to push the characters away at the same time that it anchors them into place, suggesting that elsewhere is a promise that only dreams can keep.
  45. tick, tick...Boom!
    tick, tick… BOOM! never quite resolves that tension between well-attended wake and intimate memoir.
  46. She Is Conann
    Decadent, hermetic, and gleefully hostile to realism, Bertrand Mandico’s film is the cinematic equivalent of a French Symbolist poem.
  47. She Said
    Ultimately, She Said is more concerned with eliciting the audience’s admiration than its understanding, its compassion, or even simply its interest.
  48. Sweet Dreams
    The film captures the putrefaction of colonial rule with a morbid sense of humor.
  49. Beast
    The narrative has a gambit that steers Beast into the terrain of a horror film, offsetting the sentimentality of the audience-flattering romance.
  50. Little Woods
    Nia DaCosta indulges one of rural quasi-thriller’s most tiresome gambits: humorlessness as a mark of high seriousness.
  51. Joe
    Director David Gordon Green finds a balance between symbolism and realism in his storytelling that allows the film to be many things at once.
  52. Jay Myself
    Jay Maisel’s former home suggests a bastion of creativity in a neighborhood whose rough edges have been completely sanded down.
  53. Utama
    Stock story beats of generational dispute run throughout Utama, existing mainly to show off the widescreen possibilities of the Scope frame.
  54. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
    After a while, it’s hard not to feel like Radu Jude is simply shooting fish in a barrel.
  55. Tehran Taboo
    The film is full of astute, and poetically staged, critiques of the parallel worlds resulting from Iran's police state.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Decade of Fire
    Decade of Fire’s purpose is to make known how those in the Bronx must continue to fight even today against forces hellbent on their erasure.
  57. The Crime Is Mine
    It draws on the giddily rules-trampling pre-war mood as Chicago. But while its protagonists are as driven by a desire for fame and money as the amoral starlets of the Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse musical, the film has more than grinning cynicism at its core.
  58. Thor: Ragnarok
    Thor: Ragnarok is the flamboyantly roller-disco entry in an already uncomplicatedly cartoonish side franchise.
  59. Narco Cultura
    Director Shaul Schwarz, sans judgment, presents us with two men who epitomize how accepted and engrained narco culture has become in Mexico.
  60. Bird
    As evocative as it is, the film’s use of small-town squalor as a blank canvas for artful indulgences often detracts from its purported authenticity.
  61. La Sapienza
    The mannered direction is at its most effective when it inspires an enhanced sensitivity to the import of every gesture, visual or verbal.
  62. Splendor in the Grass
    Inge’s scenario unravels alarmingly once the two would-be lovers start to drift apart thanks to Deanie’s nervous breakdown and the simultaneous (almost psychically connected) market crash of 1929, but the first half of the film is a tour de force of deferred urges, contortion acts of awkward intimacy, and the thrill of adolescence.
  63. Queen & Slim
    For a spell, Melina Matsoukas’s film exudes the concision of an old B movie.
  64. Novitiate
    The film's meditative and excessive sides never quite cohere, giving the impression of watching two distinct films that are jostling against each other, rather than united in a single story.
  65. (T)error
    It displays a staggering propensity for examining its unauthorized scenario without succumbing to either too insular or too general a set of assertions.
  66. Some Kind of Heaven
    The film is most tragic and humorous when hints of the outside world break through the suffocatingly cheerful façade of the Villages.
  67. All This Panic
    There's plenty of life in this honest, impressionistic portrait of a cohort of 21st-century American girls.
  68. From Afar
    The film renders visible a very complicated, and awfully repressed, truth not only about gay desire, but desire in general.
  69. Tangerines
    For all of the potential, historically specific revelations regarding nation and religion, Tangerines elects to become bathetic hokum.
  70. 1945
    The fractured rhythm of 1945 and the desolate aesthetic are engrossing, but Ferenc Török's film doesn't linger.
  71. 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.
  72. Malcolm X
    With Malcolm X, Lee doesn’t so much inject his sensibilities into the lifeline of his subject, but rather comes to see how his place as a film director can be integrated within the social movement of X’s message.
  73. Fantastic Planet
    Fantastic Planet’s blend of straightforward, almost elementary storytelling (any missing context is filled in via a voiceover by Jean Valmont as the adult Terr) with heady themes and eroticized imagery marks the film as a relic of an era with much looser standards around the dichotomy of the children’s film and the adult drama.
  74. Final Destination: Bloodlines
    Bloodlines finds frights and fun alike in a string of gory kills.
  75. 4 Days in France
    There’s something liberating about such a steady creative hand that rejects justifying the twists and turns of a storyline, which becomes in 4 Days in France something akin to cruising itself.
  76. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
    This is history that Americans should know, and the filmmaker approach Rumble as an introductory survey course.
  77. The Party
    It captures the qualities of live theater that are rarely transmitted to film, of being immediate, alive, and spontaneous, as if the viewer is just a stone's throw away from the characters.
  78. The Great Man
    It exploits the military aesthetics that lend themselves so well to breathtaking sounds and visuals without fetishizing them.
  79. The Iron Claw
    With scalpel-like precision, the film exposes the agonies of fathers, sons, and brothers.
  80. Keep the Change
    With a surprisingly compassionate eye, the film susses out the comic and tragic elements borne from the daily struggle of living with autism.
  81. A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks
    John Maggio’s documentary is workmanlike in presentation but scintillating in its content.
  82. The Tale of King Crab
    A film that so clearly takes delight in the unfolding of a story and the unpacking of an enigmatic character is refreshing in an arthouse landscape where such narrative qualities are often relegated to secondary concerns.
  83. Rust and Bone
    It runs a complicated bait and switch on its audience, passing ostensible exploitation fodder through a high-toned prestige filter.
  84. Eye in the Sky
    Director Gavin Hood treats the aesthetics of high-tech surveillance as the opaque membrane through which the prosecution of the War on Terror must pass.
  85. Kiki
    When compared to the high-stakes dramas at the center of Paris Is Burning, where sex workers dreamed of becoming supermodels, Kiki feels rather tame.
  86. The Illinois Parables
    Even more diverse than the film's historical material is its eccentric mash-up of styles and approaches.
  87. Concrete Utopia
    This darkly comic and consistently revealing tale suggests that, without four walls around us to prop them up, most of our morals would crumble into dust.
  88. Frantz
    The pacing is so humorless and funereal that it squelches the possibility of heat or conflict arising between the characters.
  89. The Fight
    The film justly draws attention to the perpetual work that must go into preserving democratic institutions.
  90. This Is Not a Movie
    The documentary adroitly demonstrates that Robert Fisk is still motivated by the boyish curiosity that drew him to journalism.
  91. Like Father, Like Son
    The film scores all of its thematic points early, commenting intriguingly, if ultimately rather obviously, on the demands of Japanese patriarchy.
  92. Most Beautiful Island
    Many genre movies in which bad things happen to women end with them fighting back, but here, as people surely would in real life, they just take the money and run.
  93. Filmworker
    Tony Zierra interviews Leon Vitali at length, and he’s a commanding camera object with an obvious wellspring of longing and pain.
  94. The Silence of Others
    Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar’s documentary is monumental for its clamorous sounding of an alarm.
  95. Fair Play
    Chloe Domont has conjoined a familiar fantasy of the powerful hedge fund magnate with brutally familiar quotidian details of a relationship that’s about to undergo a profound stress test.
  96. She Will
    She Will can’t decide if its horror or comedy, nor does it strike the balance that would harmoniously hybridize them.
  97. Queen of Katwe
    The film is a mere fulfillment of familiar tropes, but it approaches sports movie's conventions with a light, funk-inflected touch.
  98. Werewolf
    The film achieves a strange irony, as its formal abstractions serve to heighten our emotional connection to the characters.
  99. Pop Aye
    It too quickly opts out of its Scenes from a Marriage-like potential for what amounts to an augmented take on The Straight Story.
  100. A Field in England
    Ben Wheatley's film is a reckless combination of period piece, war drama, broad comedy, psychedelic fever dream, and occult horror-scape.
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