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. Megadoc
    Mike Figgis’s anthem of aspiration and struggle leaves no doubt about Francis Ford Coppola’s beliefs.
  2. Battle of the Sexes
    Battle of the Sexes sacrifices some of its innate appeal by making ham out of the supposed relics of a less enlightened era.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
    The Mission: Impossible franchise seems almost crudely mercenary in its formula for success.
  4. Hive
    A layer of ambivalence facilitates our identification with Fahrije but also makes her a distinct character and not just an archetype.
  5. Cold in July
    While Jim Mickle's compositions lose much of their verve in the film's later half, his regard for the analog does not--and at the expense of perspective into his characters' emotional torque.
  6. Suburbia
    In the end, Suburbia’s greatest strength lies in its assertion of youth as a political state of mind.
  7. Mandabi
    Through it all Sembène maintains a steady, humanist touch.
  8. The Inspection
    The film is too invested in treacly cinematic optimism for its character dynamics to feel sketched out beyond their basic narrative function.
  9. The Devil's Bath
    Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala depict Agnes’s plight with empathy but with a horror maven’s sense of ratcheting unease and encroaching doom.
  10. Zootopia 2
    Zootopia 2 provides plenty of food for thought for its young audience, making a more expansive statement on the dangers of intolerance than the first film, and without sacrificing any of its charm, humor, or visual ingenuity along the way.
  11. One Of Them Days
    The film revives Friday’s spirit while bringing its own flavor, and taking the current state of the world into full account.
  12. The Adults
    The Adults affectingly captures the uniquely American ennui provoked by the banalities of a hometown and the lost utopia of childhood.
  13. Fire Will Come
    The film is much more in synchrony with the haziness of its imagery when it preserves the awkwardness between characters, the impossibility for anything other than life’s basic staples to be exchanged.
  14. In This Corner of the World
    Sunao Katabuchi displays a vivid, shattering awareness of how domestic routines can spiritually ground one during a time of demoralizing chaos.
  15. A Royal Affair
    The film is too tepid in its treatment of its central character and her situation to generate any real emotive charge.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Herman's House
    An involving documentary that doesn't offer a convincing argument against solitary confinement for those who may not fully realize what's objectionable about it.
  17. Thunder Road
    The ubiquitously involved star’s charisma can’t completely overshadow a sluggish plot... Nonetheless, its hard-charging chase sequences make it a vintage Dukes of Hazzard-flavored noir.
    • Slant Magazine
    • 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.
  19. Attenberg
    A boldly conceived assemblage of diverse and seemingly random fictional materials, Athina Rachel Tsangari's Attenberg is concerned with nothing less than those hardy perennials: sex, death, and modernity. And coming of age a little too late.
  20. Knuckleball!
    This chronicle of two athletes throwing baseball's funkiest, least respected pitch is given depth by their stranger-than-fiction underdog status and camaraderie with mentors who've had the same struggles.
  21. Breaker Morant
    A time-jumping narrative that’s rooted inside the linear temporal unfoldings of a pre-determined trial, Breaker Morant is like a conventional bloke in art—house clothing—but oh, what garb he has.
  22. Coded Bias
    The documentary dives down the rabbit hole to chillingly, comprehensively expose how algorithms can perpetuate bias in often unforeseen and unjust ways.
  23. The Dig
    The Dig clearly relishes in having found so many fascinating real people arriving at one place at once.
  24. Good Manners
    The film is a rebellion of surfaces that never quite reaches, or emanates from, the underpinning roots of its fable.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sing Your Song
    It's likely, then, that the film was directed by Susanne Rostock the same way Belfonte's new memoir, My Song, was written with Vanity Fair's Michael Shnayerson: to articulate, polish, and edit what the vociferous and at times alarmingly honest Belfonte wants to tell us without injuring his credibility outside of the left any further.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Simply put, the documentary is full of cool talking heads pontificating rather than taking physical action.
  27. The Blue Room
    The film abounds in guilt and grief, reveling in a general sense of hopelessly broken social connection.
  28. Almost Holy
    Steve Hoover's documentary affords one an unusually intimate glance at the collapsed infrastructure of the former Soviet Union.
  29. CODA
    The film is at its most moving in those rare moments when it’s capturing the nourishing bonding ritual among a deaf family.
  30. Fire Island
    The film is filled with a subtextual nostalgia for a fleeting youth and the urgency of figuring things out before it’s too late.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Neither Heaven Nor Earth
    While he may indulge in the occasional programmatic jump scare, writer-director Clément Cogitore ultimately heaves his debut feature closer to the realm of psychological terror, understanding that there's nothing more frightening or darker than the human mind.
  32. Bros
    Bros is ultimately let down by its pat perspectives on modern romance and social justice.
  33. The Dish & the Spoon
    Doesn't waste a moment on recognizable reality, consumed as it is with checking off various items from its list of clichés.
  34. Ammonite
    Francis Lee’s compulsion to make Mary Anning stand in for something broader than herself keeps tripping up the film.
  35. Skate Kitchen
    The film is empathetic toward and clear-eyed about its young characters, even if the drama it constructs around them tends toward the superficial.
  36. It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley
    The film is a resonant depiction of the gaping holes left by Jeff Buckley’s untimely death.
  37. Iron Crows
    A maddeningly blunt and syrupy rendering of a piquant socio-economic configuration, Park Bong-Nam's Iron Crows is ultimately third-world documentary filmmaking at its most exploitatively surface-groping.
  38. The Last Stop in Yuma County
    There are little moments of blackhearted comedy among the bloodshed, but through it all, The Last Stop in Yuma County makes sure that those gunshots resonate.
  39. The Insult
    Ziad Doueiri's film is well acted and staged with periodic liveliness, but its earnestness grows wearying.
  40. Fremont
    The film has the ethereal feel of a half-remembered, mostly pleasant dream.
  41. Where Is Kyra?
    Terror gradually leaks into the narrative, transforming Where Is Kyra? into a haunting non-traditional thriller.
  42. Zodiac Killer Project
    Zodiac Killer Project is a wicked embodiment of Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the media itself being the message.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Magic Mike
    It's as if Soderbergh expects the film to mostly resolve itself, rounded out by the asses-in-the-seats appeal of the material, rote thematic underpinning, and ample charms of the cast.
  44. Straight Outta Compton
    It's most towering accomplishment are its set pieces, which manage to be brash, exhilarating, and even occasionally moving.
  45. Tale of Tales
    Matteo Garrone returns the fairy tale to its roots in cautionary horror grounded in deep, contradictory, neurotic relationships with gender and patriarchy.
  46. Juror #2
    Juror #2 casts a morally inquiring side-eye at the American legal system, questioning whether it’s reasonable to convict anyone on the basis of something so fallible as memory.
  47. Captain Fantastic
    The film is premised on a radical act that it buries beneath a grueling avalanche of quirk.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Scarecrow
    Scarecrow embraces sprawl of both the narrative and geographical variety with freewheeling abandon.
  49. Joy of Man's Desiring
    A chronicle the act of labor as both a universal function of life and a spectacle in itself.
  50. Call Her Applebroog
    It implies that not even the concentrated self-scrutiny required to make art like Ida Applebroog's is enough to make sense of ourselves to ourselves.
  51. Wildfire
    The structure of Wildfire’s narrative doesn’t emerge out of a simplistic progression from strife to reconciliation, as writer-director Cathy Brady has her characters follow a realistically erratic trajectory.
  52. Family Portrait
    If the edge of Kerr’s scalpel is blunted somewhat by the sheer number of other films that show the “dark underbelly of suburbia,” Family Portrait stands out for its profound mistrust, not just of images but of the sense of sight altogether.
  53. All the Money in the World
    As released, All the Money in the World is by and large a conspicuously manufactured thriller that moves between manipulative psych-outs.
  54. One Week and a Day
    The film is a comedy that depicts the difficult period of transition from mourning back into normal life.
  55. Still Mine
    As far as films about couples dealing with the female partner losing her mind go, Still Mine is pretty pedestrian.
  56. Nanny
    Writer-director Nikyatu Jusu’s film ultimately proposes that survival is the greatest form of resistance.
  57. The Island President
    The film successfully positions its point of view with the developing countries that suffer the most immediate consequences of global warming rather than the developed countries most responsible for climate change and from whose citizenry Jon Shenk's prospective audience is likely to be drawn.
  58. Our Nixon
    Our Nixon never completely overcomes the disappointment of its recovered video, but it nevertheless offers a compelling portrait of Nixon and those close to him, one that captures how willfully blind they often were to their excesses, and how paranoid they were about apparent threats to them and America as a whole.
  59. The Cabin in the Woods
    The Cabin in the Woods, regardless of its many genealogical links to prior Whedon creations, is an ideal Hollywood film in the Age of Pixar: spectacle for spectacle's sake, but infiltrated by intelligent commentary and an atmosphere of generosity and inclusion.
  60. Friendship
    The film plays right into Tim Robinson’s sweet spot of surrealistic and satirical comedy.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    It's Alive
    By turns frightening and heartbreaking, an aspect particularly reflected in John P. Ryan’s tormented performance as the baby’s father, the film is not only perhaps one of Cohen’s best films but one of the finest American horror films of the last 30 years.
  62. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    The film is inspirational only in the sense that it may inspire an uptick in Amazon searches for running gear.
  63. Sea of Shadows
    Richard Ladkani’s Sea of Shadows, which bristles with drama and a panicky sense of righteous anger, uses the potential extinction of one little-known species of whale to symbolize a far larger and potentially globe-spanning problem.
  64. Alléluia
    Both Lola Dueñas and Laurent Lucas are impressively committed to their roles, but the film's script is elusive to a fault.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    JFK
    JFK still retains a primal power; no number of derivative, headache-inducing CSI episodes can blunt the impact of Stone's aggressive visuals, and the film's plea for accountability and honesty in government is as vital now as ever.
  66. Promising Young Woman
    The film’s empowerment fantasy of a woman who steamrolls male egos is as stylish and fun as its portrait of gender relations is dire.
  67. Shut Up and Play the Hits
    James Murphy never says that his music will sound different after LCD Soundsystem disbands, so why fearfully anticipate a change that we don't even know is coming?
  68. The Wedding Plan
    Rama Burshtein allows us to form our own impressions based on what she presents to us of the Orthodox faith.
  69. Red Moon Tide
    Lois Patiño’s Red Moon Tide is a work of unmistakable horror, one predicated on such ineffable dread that the impact of climate change becomes a sort of Lovecraftian force.
  70. Love, Simon
    Greg Berlanti's charmingly heartfelt film is a remarkably successful attempt to give shape to the experience of the closet by drawing an incredibly intimate portrait of a teenage boy about to leave it behind.
  71. Diplomacy
    The film isn't really fooling anyone into feeling doom-laden suspense (Paris, after all, is still standing), but the principal performers sell the momentousness of the drama.
  72. Crime After Crime
    It not only makes for riveting cinematic drama (all the more impressive given that it relies so heavily on recounted words rather than illustrated actions), but for first-rate muckraking.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Smithereens
    Much more than a punk artifact, Smithereens is a landmark that showcases how the urge of self-creation and the seduction of reveling in self-destruction dance side by side.
  74. In the House
    It's buoyant and titillates, striking that distinctly Ozonian balance between the beautiful and the sinister, but it doesn't resonate.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Hal
    Just before the documentary slips into hero worship, Amy Scott pries beneath the calm surface of her bearded and bespectacled subject to reveal the silent rage that fueled his work.
  76. A Face in the Crowd
    Strong performances and a fiery aggressive tone keep things moving, but A Face in the Crowd is dated and not particularly deep.
  77. City of Gold
    The film affectively defends food critic Jonathan Gold's assertion that it's ultimately cooking that makes us human.
  78. Rejoice and Shout
    One is left wondering what exactly the now moldy "anything is possible" sentiments of our 44th president have to do with a music whose history and cultural meaning we've just spent the last two hours not learning nearly enough about.
  79. In Bloom
    The foreclosure of possibilities provided by the use of the long take assists in the indictment of chauvinism and patriarchal brutality that underpin, directly and indirectly, many moments in the film.
  80. All That Jazz
    All That Jazz may be Fosse’s finest cinematic achievement.
  81. M3GAN
    There’s enough sardonic humor to keep the proceedings edgy enough, but it’s hard not to wish that the filmmakers would’ve taken a cue from their eponymous villain and really pushed things past the boundaries of good taste.
  82. Always Shine
    The film undermines the unity of its characterizations, redirecting into garish phantasmagoria.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    King Jack
    Harsh punishments are dished out in a way that jolts the material away from coming-of-age cliché.
  84. Mickey 17
    Though Mickey 17 can feel like a mixtape of Bong’s greatest hits, it may actually be his most refined and articulate anti-capitalistic critique to date.
  85. Blow the Man Down
    Without Margo Martindale, the film would be a sharp and tightly constructed nautical noir. With her, it becomes a memorable one.
  86. Happy End
    Happy End reveals itself as something vacuous and cold, a bizarrely seductive pseudo-thriller lacking a thoroughly worked-out payoff.
  87. His House
    Throughout, Remi Weekes forcefully, resonantly ties the film’s terror to the inner turmoil of his characters.
  88. Burden
    The film dispenses with sensationalism, engaging with Chris Burden's most notorious work on its own terms.
  89. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    A work of arduous assemblage that values information over affect and zip over conviction in its ramshackle historicizing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
  90. On the Silver Globe (1988)
    It becomes a bleak comic spit into the face of organized religion, organized society, and even organized narrative.
  91. Princess Cyd
    Stephen Cone's Princess Cyd is distinguished by a dramatic complexity that would seem to run counter to its remarkably even-tempered tone.
  92. Big Fish & Begonia
    In the sly exchanges between the teenage protagonists and their elders, the film reflects a nation's shifting tides.
  93. Bone Tomahawk
    One wishes that S. Craig Zahler had more explicitly faced the cultural demons lingering within his premise, attempting to exorcise them.
  94. Risk
    Laura Poitras doesn't indulge in score-settling cheap shots, but seriously grapples with her contradictory subject.
  95. Farewell, Herr Schwarz
    The sobering quality that informs both the documentary's aesthetic and content largely suppresses any spontaneity or much-needed moments of levity.
  96. Let Them All Talk
    Steven Soderbergh’s signature formal gamesmanship enlivens what could have been a stodgy scenario.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zipper: Coney Island's Last Wild Ride
    Amy Nicholson's documentary feels warm and fuzzy about its subject, but at the same time depersonalized.
  98. Phantasm
    What makes Phantasm special is the way it captures a boy's life in 1978. [Remastered]
  99. 7 Boxes
    The film is ripe with powerful subtext, specifically how greed, celebrity, and technology help to form a misguided sense of opportunity that keeps the working class downtrodden.
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