Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,788 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 6.2 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: 4,359 out of 7788
  2. Mixed: 1,495 out of 7788
  3. Negative: 1,934 out of 7788
7788 movie reviews
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  1. 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.
  2. She Will
    She Will can’t decide if its horror or comedy, nor does it strike the balance that would harmoniously hybridize them.
  3. 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.
  4. Werewolf
    The film achieves a strange irony, as its formal abstractions serve to heighten our emotional connection to the characters.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. Inside Out 2
    The film’s visual complexity isn’t matched by the actual journey the core emotions take back to the forefront of Riley’s mind, which can’t help but feel like a more convoluted retread of the first Inside Out’s abstract buddy comedy.
  8. Crystal Swan
    Throughout the film, it’s as if mundane objects hold the remedies for the wretchedness of everyday life.
  9. 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.
  10. The Fall Guy
    Whenever its main characters are pulled apart, the movie magic, in every sense of the phrase, dissipates, leaving us with a bland, derivative action-comedy that’s never quite as funny or thrilling as it thinks it is.
  11. Creed III
    The film comes down to a draw between its flashes of brilliance and its missed opportunities.
  12. Wicked
    Wicked’s frequent patches of sluggishness are particularly frustrating because so much of the film—especially the songs—is glorious.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Khodorkovsky
    The director glosses over rather than digs deep into such interesting aspects as the varied opinions of the men under Khodorkovsky who've had to flee the country because of him.
  14. The Biggest Little Farm
    The film is often quite moving in spite of its evasions, suggesting a real-life Charlotte’s Web, but one wonders what an artist with a bit more distance might’ve made of such rich material.
  15. Laurence Anyways
    It takes cojones for a filmmaker to chase Fassbinder's ghost, but it takes heart and talent to damn near catch up with it.
  16. Sollers Point
    Sollers Point is a moving and elusive blend of naturalism and melodrama, less a character study than an analysis of a community.
  17. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    Steve James is clearly positioning the film as a rallying cry, and its weaknesses as art might bolster its strength as reformatory theater.
  18. Dukhtar
    The film functions as a love letter to Pakistan, despite the misogynistic culture it exposes.
  19. 1971
    Johanna Hamilton's 1971 represents a mind-blowing scoop disguised as a fairly garden-variety issue doc.
  20. Hounds of Love
    Hounds of Love builds to a crescendo that earns its emotional catharsis while staying true to its roots as a truly chilling and intense thriller.
  21. A Most Wanted Man
    Anton Corbijn constructs a stifling world of shadowy surveillance and intersecting national interests, building on John Le Carré's sense of moral and emotional exhaustion.
  22. Spaceship Earth
    The film offers a refuge of idealism and intellectuality in an age that’s actively hostile to both of those qualities.
  23. Arbitrage
    If the film covers well-tread territory (a morally bankrupt player trying to prolong his own influence), it does so with pinpoint control of mood and theme.
  24. Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery
    Rarely do the interviewees express their own thoughts on Beltracchi, as Birkenstock lets him speak for himself, for better and for worse.
  25. The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant
    Bitter Tears offers a sensory feast that’s expanded on by the elaborate dialogue, which is poetic even as translated into English, and by the astonishingly sensual and fluid movements of the actors and the camera.
  26. The World to Come
    The film presents a world that too often feels as if it’s a product of the present day.
  27. School Life
    School Life is unfortunately committed to keeping its subjects, especially Headfort’s students, at arm’s length.
  28. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    The characters' emotional vacancy feels like another auteurist tic to which Yorgos Lanthimos is dauntlessly committed.
  29. Wind River
    When Taylor Sheridan is left to his own devices, his work seems more abrupt and shallow, no more so than when he resolves all of this film's lingering questions in one unremittingly nasty sideswipe of a flashback.
  30. Free Angela & All Political Prisoners
    It foists its own retelling of Angela Davis's story over any contemplation of her politics, effectively neutering their power as it could apply to today in the hands of a proper film essayist.
  31. Futura
    Pietro Marcello, Francesco Munzi, and Alice Rohrwacher’s documentary rather faithfully captures the spirit of our times.
  32. Air
    Air is shot through with an infectious energy, but it’s more poignant for the way that it rhymes the histories of its actors in the public eye with all that Nike’s creatives were struggling to reconcile when they were chasing after Jordan.
  33. Far Out Isn't Far Enough: The Tomi Ungerer Story
    Brad Bernstein's documentary proves that Ungerer's legacy is as historically significant as it is artistically.
  34. Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)
    The film doesn’t totally succeed in capturing the show’s scope or thematic through line.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Marnie
    The film’s themes, along with its avalanche of formal signifiers, are all fused together in the magisterial hunting sequence.
  36. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
    The action choreography is as brutal as you expect, though the repetition in style from the first two films makes the effect less surprising.
  37. The Raid: Redemption
    This mostly no-nonsense, floor-by-floor ass-kicking panorama is admirably humble.
  38. Sorry Angel
    Much more interesting than Jacques and Arthur's relationship is Christophe Honoré's subtle portrait of the early '90s as a time of accelerated mortality and mourning, but also of material encounters of all kinds.
  39. Karl Marx City
    Petra Epperlein's personal ties to the subject matter provides the documentary with a necessary anchor point.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Great Mouse Detective
    Mouse Detective, though, just tries to get by with nothing more than the novelty of having rodents play detective, and then pulls the rug out from under it by showing, however briefly, the human Holmes and Watson.
  41. Blazing Saddles
    A limp, shapeless mess of a film trades in a genuine respect for westerns’ tropes for purile vulgarity and joy-buzzer showmanship.
  42. Sunset Song
    Terence Davies's sheer talent for creating sensuous images conveniently masks how little of this feeling actually emerges from the plot these images illustrate.
  43. Transpecos
    Violence in Transpecos is sparse, but the filmmakers use it with a narrative precision that highlights the unforgiving consequences that accompanies every choice in this desolate borderland.
  44. Re-Animator
    It is almost as though these filmmakers are afraid they’ll never get the chance to make another one, and Re-Animator doesn’t hesitate in being an almost operatic, larger than life comedy of splatter. While it paints with a big (red) brush, it is never boring.
  45. Supernova
    Supernova is so obviously structured that it often seems to be imposing meaning on its characters.
  46. Madre
    Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s feature-length Madre contemplates how memories of loss linger and distort the present.
  47. Dust Bunny
    The film’s writing is the sort that begs you to find it cute and quirky, which makes it quite grating if you don’t.
  48. Beyond the Lights
    By rooting Noni's self-image issues in a controlling mother, the script provides the film with a tame, melodramatic structure that dulls the thorny matters of identity and expression at its center.
  49. Last Flight Home
    Last Flight Home is an anguished therapy session disguised as a meditation on life and death.
  50. Once Upon a Time Verônica
    The film is simply too conscious of its form and its global-market ambitions to ever feel honestly interested in the themes it purports to cherish.
  51. The Impossible
    A sham realist's disaster movie, tackily insulting the deaths of 300,000 people by reducing the horrors of the Indian Ocean tsunami to a series of genre titillations.
  52. Le Week-End
    Both keenly calculated and flowing with offbeat, naturalistic detail, Hanif Kureishi's jewel of a script reflects his sensibilities as a playwright.
  53. Five Fingers For Marseilles
    What happens in this neo-western isn't dictated by the tried and true themes of classic westerns but by the films themselves.
  54. Gilbert
    Gilbert exposes a wealth of unsuspected pain and tenderness beneath Gottfried's often thorny exterior.
  55. The Burmese Harp
    Ichikawa Kon’s 1956 film The Burmese Harp is a tender almost-musical film about the horrors of war and the obliteration of identity.
  56. Hoppers
    It falls well short of providing any satisfying exploration of its weighty theme of persuasion versus violence in the face of oppression.
  57. Montana Story
    The film is initially distinguished by its poetic understatement, only for it to eventually succumb to staleness.
  58. I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive
    An understated--and at times, clinical to a fault--Oedipal drama of long-simmering resentment and familial love's ambiguities, I'm Glad My Mother Is Alive risks bringing chilly subjectivity to sensational raw material.
  59. Something, Anything
    The film turns what at first seemingly appears as Kodak moments into a study of a soul in transition.
  60. Emergency
    Emergency is uneven, but it’s grounded by dynamic performances and a vivid portrayal of the minutiae of friendship.
  61. Flowers of Shanghai
    Flowers of Shanghai operates on the whole much like Yoshihiro’s music, filling your senses like a thick haze, holding you rapt without petitioning for your attention.
  62. Train to Busan
    When divorced of message-mongering, the film’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen.
  63. American Sniper
    Clint Eastwood startlingly grips the audience with his sense of hypnotic silence, which carries suggestions of what might be termed politically apolitical pragmatism.
  64. The Raft
    The film uses Santiago Genovés’s experiment to scrutinize memory and capture the feeling of life under a very curious sort of dictatorship.
  65. The Pirates! Band of Misfits
    The film is content as it is to run clever one-liners and 19th-century pop-cultural references into the same comedic whirlpool.
  66. Never Gonna Snow Again
    With Never Gonna Snow Again, Malgorzata Szumowska presents a charm against apocalyptic despair but also willful ignorance, insisting that, with sufficient imagination, we can face a climate crisis of our own making.
  67. Family Portrait in Black and White
    Julia Ivanova, a Canadian filmmaker, doesn't judge Olga; she refuses to see her through the eyes of a presumably better-off first-world citizen.
  68. Milford Graves Full Mantis
    Jake Meginsky's documentary is insular, precious, and too pleased with its unwillingness to reach out to the unconverted.
  69. The Forgiveness of Blood
    The film wisely avoids giving its material a large-scale epic quality it can't sustain, but it also results in a project that lacks the complexity to register as more than a handsome little sketch.
  70. Funny Pages
    Funny Pages eschews the platitudes and carefully scripted character arcs that often cause coming-of-age tales to feel not only predictable but coated in a sheen of nostalgia.
  71. Indie Game: The Movie
    Makes a compelling case for games as not only clever hand-eye coordination exercises, but also as manifestations of their creators' emotional and philosophical viewpoints.
  72. Declaration of War
    The surest sign that a filmmaker recognizes the insularity of his or her project is the presence of perfunctory attempts to hint at a wider political context.
  73. Anaïs in Love
    For all of its farcical overtones, the film contains many shrewd observations about the power games inherent in relationships.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Clan
    The Pablo Trapero film's parallels are drawn so bluntly that they lose all suggestive force, since there's little left to suggest.
  75. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    By partially demonstrating what a newer, fresher superhero movie might look like, Homecoming ultimately underlines its own genre-defined limitations.
  76. Prince Avalanche
    The psychological path of these characters is finely marked with signposts, but as Prince Avalanche reaches its destination, you almost wish it would have gotten a little more lost in the woods.
  77. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
    Given that big-studio children’s animation so often feels like it was created by algorithm, it’s refreshing to see a kid’s cartoon like <em>The Last Wish</em> that’s filled with too many ideas rather than too few.
  78. The Grandmaster
    The film, more likely to invite comparisons to the writings of Marcel Proust than the previous Ip Man films, is a gorgeous folly that never entirely emerges from its creator's head.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Loved Ones
    Sean Byrne endows his rote slasher material with the kind of blackly comic wit and levity that virtually guarantee its entry into the contemporary midnight-movie canon.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Golden Slumbers
    It puts value back on people who've historically been undervalued, both by the Khmer Rouge and, by lack of mention, cinema history at large.
  81. Honey Boy
    In Alma Har’el’s film, Shia LaBeouf’s plays an avatar of his father as an expressionistic act of self-therapy.
  82. The Killer
    David Fincher dabbles in the pleasures of genre without ever allowing the outlandish scenario to be treated with more respect than it deserves.
  83. Little Feet
    This is a micro-budgeted affair of the heart that's never precious or obnoxious, but tender and moving and occasionally explosive in its intrinsic emotion.
  84. Splitsville
    Splitsville thrives on the unpredictability of this formal freedom before settling back into a familiar Hollywood narrative formula: the comedy of remarriage.
  85. Results
    Andrew Bujalski seizes upon physical training as a resonant metaphor for the work and risk that are inherent in cultivating significant interpersonal connections.
  86. Appropriate Behavior
    Desiree Akhavan's tale of queer post-breakup funk shows more nuance, and racial dimension, than its cinematic cousins.
  87. 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.
  88. Witching and Bitching
    Álex de la Iglesia has a real flair for wild action sequences that remain exhilaratingly coherent and sensical.
  89. By the Time It Gets Dark
    Anocha Suwichakornpong earnestly and ambitiously attempts to redefine cinema’s conventional grasp of consciousness.
  90. Julieta
    Pedro Almodóvar’s object-oriented approach ends up blocking off the deeper emotional access that Alice Munro's stories so effortlessly attain.
  91. Ferrari
    That liminal space between the peaks and the valleys of a person’s life is what Michael Mann is most interested in exploring.
  92. News of the World
    The film sanctimoniously suggests that ignorance or distrust of the news is nothing new, but rather the bedrock of America’s formation.
  93. Summer Pasture
    The faces of the culture - a group of nomadic Tibetans who raise yak and harvest caterpillar dung from ramshackle tents in the Chinese mountains - resist all but the most vague of ecological or political calls-to-action.
  94. Whores' Glory
    While Michael Glawogger does make overtures in the wrong directions, he usually seems to know where to steer his material.
  95. Good Boy
    A horror tale told from the perspective of a dog, Ben Leonberg’s Good Boy is the sort of film that was always destined to live and die by the strength of its central gimmick.
  96. Planet of Snail
    Even with the heaviness of some of its subject matter, the documentary remains limpid and unsentimental until the very end, in keeping with its subject.
  97. Girl
    Lukas Dhont isn't really concerned with Lara's journey to find peace and balance, as he's interested only in her downward spiral of crisis.
  98. The Square
    While Ruben Östlund’s mastery of visually amplifying social unease is still very much intact, he’s partially undone here by his own thematic ambition, which, in scene after exquisitely staged scene, threatens to put too fine a point on otherwise thrillingly indeterminate situational comedy.
  99. They Drive by Night
    They Drive by Night never coalesces into a coherent whole, but as far as sturdy ’40s Hollywood melodramas go, it’s a pretty sweet two-for-one movie deal.
  100. The Club
    Pablo Larraín's thematic interests shift toward constructing a didactic tongue-lashing against the Catholic Church disguised as speculative fiction.
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