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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  1. Gloria Bell
    The film’s open-ended narrative tends to be undermined by the simplicity of its thematic signifiers.
  2. Two Plains & a Fancy
    No description can do justice to its best moments, which render the absurd and sublime one and the same.
  3. Captain Marvel
    The film doesn't pay nearly enough attention to Danvers’s crucial emotional metamorphosis from dual-identity self-doubter to fearless warrior battling to keep Earth safe.
  4. Island of the Hungry Ghosts
    The film is a haunting portrait of the island as a purgatorial realm between the poles of isolation and liberation.
  5. I'm Not Here
    Throughout, J.K. Simmons invents the film with a primordial physicality of loneliness and self-loathing.
  6. An Elephant Sitting Still
    The film’s gritty, mundane agonies come to feel like a series of moral tests with genuinely unpredictable outcomes.
  7. The Hole in the Ground
    The film gradually becomes something more than a mixtape of horror gimmicks as it homes in on a frightening real-world subtext.
  8. The Wedding Guest
    Michael Winterbottom’s film succeeds in translating the problematics of intercultural conflict into thriller fodder.
  9. Giant Little Ones
    Keith Behrman’s film comprehends the malleable, often inscrutable nature of desire.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Woman at War
    It balances its various modes so carefully and efficiently that it achieves a graceful unity, if a strange one at that.
  11. Styx
    The film is a penetrating an indictment of the bureaucratic obstacles placed in front of refugees.
  12. Mapplethorpe
    In Mapplethorpe, the ultimate purpose of the film seems to be the reductive portrayal of the artist as yet another tormented queer destroyed by his tendencies toward vice.
  13. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    Chiwetel Ejiofor announces himself as a sensitive, shrewdly restrained filmmaker with his quietly assured directorial debut.
  14. The Competition
    Claire Simon knows that the best way to capture the anxiousness of a moment is to leave it unembellished.
  15. The Changeover
    It’s this carefully managed equilibrium between the inherent preposterousness of its mystical milieu and the convincing emotional reality of Laura’s journey that ultimately makes The Changeover, for all its muddled mythos, a lively and engaging excursion into an unusually naturalistic world of magic.
  16. How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World
    If the film sometimes feels too small in comparison to its predecessors, it manages to make the most of its quietest moments.
  17. Paddleton
    The film largely plays its scenario with a straight and gooey face, coaxing its actors to indulge their worst tendencies.
  18. The Iron Orchard
    Director Ty Roberts’s film is unable to realize that its subject matter is that of a horror story.
  19. Wrestle
    The documentary shines a piercing light on the sorts of people that our governments would too often rather forget.
  20. The Dreamed Path (Der traumhafte Weg)
    That the film adheres, upon close scrutiny, to the rough shape of a classical romantic tragedy—a seemingly intuitively understandable genre—only confirms the extreme degree to which Schanalec’s idiosyncratic manner of storytelling skirts and frustrates expectations.
  21. The Kindness of Strangers
    The film’s repetitive and lifeless dialogue robs otherwise charismatic performers of distinguishing characteristics.
  22. The Unicorn
    The documentary illuminates how art and artists live together in a symbiotic existence, each giving as well as taking.
  23. Isn't It Romantic
    As the film becomes increasingly reliant on predictable narrative tropes, it evolves into the very thing it set out to parody.
  24. Happy Death Day 2U
    Happy Death Day 2U pushes further than even matters of life and death into a realm in which stakes don’t even really apply anymore, concerned as it is not with how we live our best lives, but with how we can be the best possible versions of ourselves.
  25. Birds of Passage
    Money corrupts, Cristina Gallego and Ciro Guerra’s would say. Easy money corrupts completely.
  26. Donnybrook
    The film knots several strands of new-millennium despair into something that very nearly approximates greatness in its first half.
  27. Fighting with My Family
    While it pays lip service to the fascinating theatrical norms of pro wrestling, the film ends up expending most of its energy on its search for barriers that Paige can break through.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ruben Brandt, Collector
    The film doesn’t apply the necessary touch and precision to balance its sleek, chromed parts into a revving whole.
  29. United Skates
    The documentary brings to the foreground a fascinating and, moreover, beautiful culture lurking in the background of other stories.
  30. What Men Want
    This gender-swapped update of What Women Want doesn’t pass up the opportunity to undercut itself whenever it gets the chance.
  31. The Prodigy
    The filmmakers fail to realize that the darkest horror here doesn’t lie in the triumph of true evil, but in seeing how far a regular family will go to protect itself before doing the right and necessary thing, however hard or horrible it might be.
  32. High Flying Bird
    Steven Soderbergh’s film considers modern media as a vehicle for revising white patriarchal capitalism.
  33. Under the Eiffel Tower
    It’s tough to root for the pair when neither of them experiences genuine hardship. In the end, all dramatic conflict here is sunny and soporific.
  34. Lords of Chaos
    Jonas Åkerlund’s breezy approach to this material not only cheapens the music, but also has the effect of downplaying the severity of the scene’s truly unsavory politics.
  35. The Gospel of Eureka
    The documentary is uniquely attuned to the fickle whims of history, politics, and biographical circumstance.
  36. Alita: Battle Angel
    Battle Angel is by some distance the most entertaining of the recent crop of would-be franchise starters, exciting on its own merits while leaving just enough of its world tantalizingly unexplored to actually fuel our interest in wanting to see where its characters go from here.
  37. Cold Pursuit
    It’s the way the film’s humor specifically subverts its genre’s expected emotional valences that makes it so effective.
  38. Velvet Buzzsaw
    With its silvery sheen and sexy lure of celebrity actors being naughty, the film recalls the decadent, self-consciously chic art it parodies.
  39. Miss Bala
    The Mexico of this film is merely a place of abject lawlessness, whose hellishness exists only to stoke our fascination for how the protagonist grows as a person by drawing on her inner strength.
  40. Arctic
    The film has a raw immediacy that can only be achieved when most cinematic excesses have been eliminated.
  41. Daughter of Mine
    Unlike My Life in Pink, Daughter of Mine sidesteps all ambiguity, as the film reveals everything about its characters straight away, leaving little room for unexpected complexities about their predicaments to develop.
  42. Piercing
    If the film is mildly disappointing, it’s because it doesn’t go far enough. It confidently prepares us for a frenzy that never quite materializes.
  43. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    The deconstruction of corporatized play culture gets run through the sequelizer machine, with predictably acrid results.
  44. Outlaws
    The grim Australian biker drama Outlaws is little more than an endless stream of brooding, yelling, and “badass” posturing broken up by grisly violence and gratuitous sex scenes.
  45. The Wild Pear Tree
    Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film takes a leisurely approach to narrative that’s both intensely dialogical and transfixingly visual.
  46. Never Look Away
    Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film prioritizes the sentimental over the true, the tidy moral over the messy reality.
  47. Polar
    The film’s horniness and amorality, a slap in the face of fanatically cautious contemporary mores, might’ve been more shocking if it weren’t placed so firmly in quotation marks.
  48. Serenity
    The film’s twist ending exists only to retroactively justify writer-director Steven Knight’s feeble stylistic choices.
  49. Tito and the Birds
    The Brazilian animated feature offers relief from the impersonal assault of contemporary pop culture.
  50. The Invisibles
    The film doesn’t bring to light otherwise unexplored aspects of the experience or memory of persecution and genocide.
  51. The Image Book
    It’s through exercising a certain kind of madness that the film connects even at its most disjointed.
  52. The Kid Who Would Be King
    Joe Cornish’s film is vigilant in its positivity and hope for the future at nearly every turn.
  53. Glass
    M. Night Ghyamalan’s film is aimed at an audience from whom he cringingly craves fealty.
  54. An Acceptable Loss
    Writer-director Joe Chappelle’s An Acceptable Loss is a B movie with a morally urgent message.
  55. The Heiresses
    Ana Brun’s performance as Chela anchors our attention where Marcelo Martinessi’s understated visuals might otherwise lose it.
  56. Fyre
    Chris Smith’s documentary about the 2017 Fyre Festival implosion resists the urge to revel in cheap social media schadenfreude.
  57. Adult Life Skills
    The film uses the grieving process to lend the proceedings a sense of unearned emotional gravitas.
  58. Perfect Strangers (Perfectos Desconocidos)
    Manolo Caro's film uses its characters as rigid markers of cowardice, lust, and entitlement.
  59. Replicas
    The climax’s bizarre left turns culminate in a final image so bewildering that were the film not so relentlessly dour it might have clarified Replicas as an absurdist comedy.
  60. The Upside
    The film becomes overrun by an increasingly preachy and tiresome series of life lessons about race, class, and love.
  61. Touch Me Not
    Touch Me Not‘s commingling of narrator and narrative, character and actor, fiction and documentary suggests that cinema itself is capable of being a manner of touch, the site of a nebulous and freeing encounter between people.
  62. The Aspern Papers
    The words of Henry James have never sounded as leaden and preposterous as they do in Julien Landais’s The Aspern Papers.
  63. The Venerable W.
    The Venerable W. is at times downright dowdy, but there’s an ever-present sense of rage and despair burbling beneath its placid surface.
  64. The Vanishing
    The Vanishing seems truly troubled by its action violence in a way that many similar thrillers aren’t.
  65. Second Act
    A blatantly telegraphed mid-film twist helps turn Second Act into one of the strangest and most misguided rom-coms of any year.
  66. Welcome To Marwen
    The whole endeavor feels like a disservice to Mark Hogancamp’s story, in no small part because no one in the film feels human, even outside doll form.
  67. Bumblebee
    Bumblebee exudes some of the tediousness of a reformed sinner who decries hedonism, trying hard to convince us that it now believes in something.
  68. Vice
    Vice is as noisy as the media landscape that writer-director Adam McKay holds in contempt.
  69. Destroyer
    The filmmakers treat their material sternly and humorlessly, as if there's some great moral lesson to be imparted from Erin's inexhaustible blotto jerkiness.
  70. Bird Box
    Many sections of Bird Box don’t hold up to a second’s scrutiny; the conceit’s silliness and convenient scare tactics make Shyamalan’s take on infectious-suicide horror seem downright subtle by comparison.
  71. The Mule
    The film finally ends up souring its perspective on responsibility with a hardened take on the limits of the American dream.
  72. Mortal Engines
    After a while, it all starts to feel like a showreel for the film’s special-effects team than an honest effort to tell a story.
  73. Mary Poppins Returns
    For all of its slavish devotion to Mary Poppins, the sequel doesn't even seem to recognize its greatest attribute: its star.
  74. Aquaman
    Often divertingly colorful and busy to a fault, the film seems to dare us to mock the world of comics' most risible superhero.
  75. The Quake
    When the devastating quake finally strikes, it creates a truly suspenseful scenario of vertiginous falls and last-minute saves.
  76. Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki
    Kaku Arakawa's documentary is a candid snapshot of a great artist as an old man.
  77. Mary Queen of Scots
    As effective as director Josie Rourke is at exposing the emotional and physical toll of reigning as queen when exploring Mary and Elizabeth's relationship, her portrait of an endless string of betrayals ends up as simply faceless and impersonal.
  78. Dumplin'
    As it proceeds through a series of teary reconciliations in the last half-hour of its 110-minute run time, the film's didactic drama begins to grate, its treacly emotions feeling increasingly unearned.
  79. Clara's Ghost
    Bridey Elliott avoids the smug pitfalls of narratives concerned with privileged people drinking themselves into a stupor.
  80. On the Basis of Sex
    On the Basis of Sex is too often busy revering Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her confidence and brilliance to bother with presenting her as a living, breathing human being.
  81. Capernaum
    Zain Al Rafeea's naturalness, however uncanny, only makes the film's maneuverings seem all the more obvious.
  82. The Charmer
    Director and co-writer Milad Alami's film feels like several fused-together trial drafts of the same narrative.
  83. Ben Is Back
    As the film hurtles toward its tense climax, you may find yourself both deeply resenting its narrative contrivances and passionately rooting for its protagonists.
  84. Tyrel
    Sebastián Silva never indulges platitude, and so the qualified hope of the film’s ending isn’t merely affirming but also miraculous.
  85. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
    With its fine-tuned comic timing and feeling of constant action, Into the Spider-Verse is downright invigorating, and that’s evident even before it gets to its dazzling, dimensional-colliding climax.
  86. Divide and Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes
    Alexis Bloom’s keenly insightful and deeply depressing documentary is probably best viewed not as a record of the past but a document of what’s to come.
  87. Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett
    Luke Fowler allows us to access some of the intimate details of Bartlett’s life in intriguingly indirect ways.
  88. Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle
    While the film’s perception of the politics of the jungle is often profound, the same cannot be said of its take on the human world.
  89. Mirai
    The fabric of the fantasy world depicted in the film lacks the cohesion of its central theme about appreciating one’s place in a family tree.
  90. Anna and the Apocalypse
    The film's biggest problem is its inability to lend its clichés and tropes any dramatic thrust or satirical bite.
  91. Sicilian Ghost Story
    The film is determinedly unclassifiable, blurring genres with a fervor that grows tedious.
  92. Robin Hood
    Robin Hood’s shameless silliness only takes it so far, as the film is frequently undermined by Otto Bathurst’s wobbly direction.
  93. Amazing Grace
    It offers a profound glimpse of one of the greatest and most influential voices in modern music.
  94. Becoming Astrid
    Despite convincing performances, the film is hampered by its stylistic and moral conventionality.
  95. Creed II
    Creed II is absent of both the topically political atmosphere of Rocky IV and the bravura action of Ryan Coogler's Creed.
  96. The Christmas Chronicles
    The film Despite its weird flourishes, the film succumbs to the tropes and emotional contrivances of the family melodrama at its core.
  97. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    The Crimes of Grindelwald gets more comedic and emotional mileage out of Newt’s interactions with his various creatures, particularly the adorable platypus-like one with a nose for gold, than most of its human-centered scenes.
  98. Stan & Ollie
    At its best, Stan & Ollie shows how the private and personal dimensions of art are achingly inseparable.
  99. Ralph Breaks the Internet
    When Ralph Breaks the Internet ignores the glittering marvels of the internet and focuses on the rapport between its two leads, it's deeply moving.
  100. Shoah: Four Sisters
    By uniting these four interviews in particular, Claude Lanzmann emphasizes the impossibility of moral clarity in the unthinkable circumstances into which Germany’s invasion of Eastern Europe threw its Jewish population.
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