Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
For 7,769 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: 4,345 out of 7769
  2. Mixed: 1,491 out of 7769
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7769
7769 movie reviews
view
per page
  1. El Angel
    El Angel‘s greatest accomplishment is in the way it charges the relationships between characters with so much eroticism but never grants us the right to watch desire — other than desire for violence — actually unfold.
  2. The Front Runner
    The film quickly reveals that the only angle it’s interested in is the one that most sympathizes with Gary Hart.
  3. Chef Flynn
    At times, Cameron Yates appears to be too protective of his subjects, which somewhat neuters the drama of the narrative.
  4. Outlaw King
    Outlaw King rattles along at a bracing pace, but the assured bloodshed of the final showdown looms large, casting a weary shadow over the film’s middle section.
  5. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    Fede Álvarez’s film suffers from a compulsion to be capital-C cool, and all of its ostensibly stylish shots are untethered to any semblance of a sustained reality.
  6. Weightless
    The title Weightless is an apt description for this stylish but emotionally inert film.
  7. Of Fathers and Sons
    The film's verité approach risks humanizing Abu Osama, but we eventually gain a complex understanding of the banality of his evil.
  8. The Long Dumb Road
    Director and co-writer Hannah Fidell's film never finds the right mix of meaningful parable and sophomoric romp.
  9. 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.
  10. Distant Constellation
    The film exposes the idea of places as metaphors, mirrors, and symptoms for the people who inhabit them.
  11. Searching for Ingmar Bergman
    Margarethe von Trotta's documentary reminds us of the reasons for Bergman's continued influence on cinema today.
  12. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
    One may wish that the entire film had restaged the entirely of Tchaikovsky's ballet rather than reimagine it as an ultimately lifeless epic fantasy.
  13. The Grief of Others
    This a much leaner film in terms of narrative incident than In the Family, though it paves the way for Patrick Wang to step into new artistic terrain.
  14. They'll Love Me When I'm Dead
    Morgan Neville understands Orson Welles's art to pivot on an ongoing quest to bring about self-destruction so as to contrive to transcend it.
  15. The Other Side of the Wind
    The Other Side of the Wind isn't a novelty item, but a work of anguished art that's worthy of its creator.
  16. 9 Fingers
    Despite all its confoundments, 9 Fingers works as a unified whole thanks to F.J. Ossang's playful sense of humor.
  17. Bodied
    The anti-P.C. scorn that establishes a white boy's nervous entry into rap gradually becomes a sincere, if hilarious, treatise on the impossibility of reducing art to value judgments.
  18. Maria by Callas
    The film is less hagiographic than most documentaries of its kind, which isn't to say that Tom Volf's adoration of his subject is ever in doubt.
  19. Boy Erased
    Good as Lucas Hedges is at acting the tortured teen, Jared is finally too much of a cipher for his story to really hit with the force that it should.
  20. A Bread Factory Part One: For the Sake of Gold
    Wang’s particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles, and here he manages to defend the importance of art, attack the neoliberal devastation of cultural liberalism, and argue for the renewed public commitment to the arts from a wryly comic perspective that eschews sentimentality.
  21. A Bread Factory Part Two: Walk With Me a While
    Patrick Wang's particular skill as a filmmaker is his ability to approach well-worn narrative devices from fresh angles.
  22. Border
    The film’s slow reveal of its fantastical elements, which evoke the erratic, dreamlike strangeness of folk tales, makes them all the more unsettling.
  23. Hunter Killer
    The film is a second-rate airport thriller that makes The Hunt for Red October seem like nonfiction by comparison.
  24. Dovlatov
    According tot he film, truly courageous artists aren't necessarily the ones who tackle the state head-on, but rather the ones who stay true to themselves even when no one likes what they have to say.
  25. Bohemian Rhapsody
    This charitable act of resuscitation for the benefit of Mercury’s admirers is something that the film as a whole ultimately fails to accomplish, as Bohemian Rhapsody mistakenly believes that simply trudging through a workmanlike overview of the Queen frontman’s life will allow it to arrive at something approaching intimacy.
  26. What They Had
    What They Had gracefully coasts on its patient observations of one family’s dynamics, but once the third act hits, Elizabeth Chomko goes about neatly tidying up seemingly every loose end.
  27. Transit
    Christian Petzold’s lean, rigorous filmmaking proves essential as the story begins to run, deliberately, in circles.
  28. Suspiria
    Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria is a funereal pseudo-realist drama about political upheaval and the violence of systems that's at odds with itself.
  29. Shirkers
    Sandi Tan's view of what the original Shirkers represented, and what her new film should be, proves surprisingly expansive.
  30. Life and Nothing More
    Antonio Méndez Esparza crafts a revealing portrait of life as lived under a regime of race and class oppression.
  31. 1985
    Adrian is too flat as a character, his plight too generic, for his tears to count as something other than a sentimental ready-made.
  32. The Price of Everything
    The film understands that money is a defining element of art-making, whether or not we wish to admit it.
  33. Johnny English Strikes Again
    Relying on such arcane gags as prat falls in knight’s armor, fake French accents, and an array of gadget-based explosions, Johnny English Strikes Again seems almost hellbent on aiming for the lowest common denominator at every turn.
  34. The Waldheim Waltz
    Despite Beckermann’s contemplative, even-tempered tone, The Waldheim Waltz gradually builds outrage at the subterranean persistence of fascism in postwar politics.
  35. Caniba
    Throughout Caniba, there’s a singularly disquieting relationship between the filmmakers’ formal experimentation and their subject.
  36. Galveston
    The film is a slow, directionless anti-thriller that never manages to build tension or establish any stakes.
  37. The Guilty
    The Guilty is a taut chamber thriller dominated by the flinty yet highly emotive visage of actor Jakob Cedergren.
  38. On Her Shoulders
    The film is most interested in homing in on the ways Nadia Murad's fragility and self-doubt arise as collateral damage from her fame and steadfast activism.
  39. Apostle
    The film's victims are simply pawns in a super-gory bacchanal, which is aesthetically striking but emotionally dull.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    306 Hollywood
    Elan and Jonathan Bogarín's film blends various tones and visual styles with confidence and infectious exuberance.
  41. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
    The absence here of a joke is meant to be hilarious, or to at least congratulate the audience for willfully submitting to a denial of pleasure. Every element of the film is studiously, painstakingly random.
  42. The Sentence
    Rudy Valdez has no distance from the material, which works simultaneously in the film's favor and, largely, its disfavor.
  43. A Faithful Man
    It reveals itself as neither committed New Wave subversion nor skillful homage, but rather a weak and uninspired imitation.
  44. Barbara
    In Barbara, the process of filmmaking is shown to be a nesting series of shells that allow one to be simultaneously freed and lost.
  45. Sadie
    Sadie remains a clear-eyed portrait of maternal love, teenage turmoil, and the singular type of tight-knit bonds formed, out of necessity in many cases, in low-income communities.
  46. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    In their best films, the Coens mine the depths of loneliness and egotism and frailty and solipsism. But in THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS there's a noticeable lack of deeper insinuation, a lack of curiosity.
  47. MFKZ
    The bulk of MFKZ is composed of chases and shoot-outs that, despite their chaotic energy, drive the plot forward at a plodding pace.
  48. The Oath
    Even while it asks us to recognize ourselves in a world not too distant from our own, The Oath seems to say that the worst part of a full-fledged American dystopia would be the ruined holiday dinners.
  49. 22 July
    That a drop from John Williams’s Jaws score wouldn’t be out of place on this film’s soundtrack goes to show how tactlessly Paul Greengrass milks tragedy for titillation.
  50. Venom
    The final act's full-tilt embrace of action effectively undermines Tom Hardy's flashes of actorly idiosyncrasy.
  51. Heavy Trip
    Its story distances heavy metal from any whiff of toxic masculinity by setting Turo and company against homophobes and rakes.
  52. The Happy Prince
    For every haunting sequence in The Happy Prince, there’s five that redundantly wallow in Oscar Wilde’s misery, which is Rupert Everett’s point, but it becomes wearisome.
  53. Studio 54
    The documentary nurtures our sympathy for Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager without shortchanging their hypocrisies.
  54. Bad Times at the El Royale
    The film begins as a cheeky retro chamber drama before morphing into an often expectation-busting blend of noir and pitch-black comedy.
  55. A Family Tour
    Ying Liang’s film is righteously and vigorously angry about injustices committed by the Chinese government.
  56. The Hate U Give
    The film lays out the complexities of contemporary race relations with a deliberateness that frequently edges over into didacticism.
  57. Over the Limit
    The film is composed of minutely observed moments that Marta Prus has assembled into an affecting narrative.
  58. Loving Pablo
    The film uncomfortably dwells in a murky middle ground where everything is overblown but meant to be taken at face value.
  59. Private Life
    Instead of offering a probing, nuanced view of the burgeoning technologies and sciences involved in this relatively new outgrowth of the OBGYN industry, though, Tamara Jenkins uses her setting as fodder for lame and discomfiting physical comedy.
  60. Hold the Dark
    Hold the Dark's ludicrous seriousness comes to feel like a mask for what's essentially a genre story of murder and mayhem.
  61. The Old Man & the Gun
    David Lowery has a carefree, bordering on insubstantial touch, which gives rise to several rank absurdities.
  62. Her Smell
    A story of filth and fury and, eventually, of placidity and peace, Her Smell is Alex Ross Perry’s most chaotic and unmuffled film — until it isn’t.
  63. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Somehow, Bi Gan’s film is self-aware and fluid as its own viewing experience, yet inextricable from its loud-and-clear influences.
  64. Monsters and Men
    Like many films tackling socially inflammatory material, Monsters and Men is constrained by its politics.
  65. Black '47
    As the historical specificity embedded in the film’s more expansive opening act is abandoned, the more predictable, archetypal trappings of a revenge narrative begin to take hold.
  66. If Beale Street Could Talk
    The film is at its most potent in the scenes where human frailty and the specter of injustice come more elliptically to the surface.
  67. At Eternity's Gate
    This is both a fitting tribute to an artist who rebuffed conventional painting techniques, and a disappointingly self-indulgent exercise, the efforts of a filmmaker whose affinity for abstractions often interfere with the story he’s trying to tell, and distract from the purported subject of the film.
  68. Assassination Nation
    Assassination Nation carelessly affirms the idea that all women should be able to fight back at will, and if they don’t, it’s on them.
  69. Bad Reputation
    The documentary often struggles to extract deeper thoughts from its subject about her wild career as a pioneering rock feminist.
  70. Smallfoot
    There’s something undeniably ballsy about a children’s film that’s so insistent about pushing young viewers to think bigger, to be open to new ideas and question culturally coded notions of good and evil.
  71. All About Nina
    Right out of the gate, the film only sees a kind of blunt irony in this blurring of her public and private selves.
  72. Roma
    Roma is autobiography as autocritique, and in exploring a point of view adjacent to his own, Cuarón appears to have rediscovered his identity as a filmmaker.
  73. Life Itself
    Despite its title, Life Itself doesn’t revel so much in the joys and travails of life as it does in the shameless emotional manipulation stemming from the ham-fisted tendencies of its own maker.
  74. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    The final act of The House with a Clock in Its Walls stumbles between awkward, telegraphed jolts and busy, effects-heavy action, completely losing sight of the trauma and grief that was meant to give the film its emotional core.
  75. Beautiful Boy
    Felix Van Groeningen commendably sustains the story's profound sense of irresolution: abuse-rehab-relapse, abuse-rehab-relapse, abuse-rehab-relapse—an endless cycle of teeth-gritted optimism at best, soul-deadening dashed hopes at worst.
  76. Love, Gilda
    Its success is due to the way it relies on Radner's often elegant words to relay her experience of female stardom.
  77. Garry Winogrand: All Things are Photographable
    Sasha Waters Freyer forges a poignant portrait of an artist attempting to transcend the limitations of his art by refusing to see the process through.
  78. Greta
    Neil Jordan’s deft control of pace and tone elevates Greta past mere gimmickry, resulting in a comic thriller whose goofy humor only compounds its mastery of suspense.
  79. Green Book
    Peter Farrelly manages to respect the severity of the characters’ social context while ensuring that Green Book never steps outside its protagonists’ relationship, a delicate balancing act that credibly makes a feel-good, effervescent comedy out of its thorny subject matter without ever sanitizing it.
  80. Vox Lux
    Vox Lux sets up its main character as a beneficiary of tragedy, opening up a compellingly macabre narrative about how school shootings are becoming so commonplace that they can effectively serve as launchpads for stardom. But that idea goes nowhere, as Vox Lux proceeds to play Celeste's experience in the music industry mostly straight.
  81. The Song of Sway Lake
    Despite Ari Gold’s knack for visual flourishes that capture a sense of place seemingly outside of time, The Song of Sway Lake plays like several disparate melodies overlapping one another.
  82. Fahrenheit 11/9
    Fahrenheit 11/9 represents a sincerely bold attempt to capture the overwhelming civic decay that led to our current political crisis, but Michel Moore’s circus-showman duplicity is as crass and abhorrently self-promoting as that of Donald Trump.
  83. The Children Act
    The Children Act stages the clumsiness of belated domestic confrontations with the very coldness that’s kept its characters from having discussed their emotions for decades and from having had sex for almost a year.
  84. Mid90s
    Jonah Hill constantly falls back on providing vague justification for his characters' behaviors, along with spoonfuls of sentiment to let the more dour moments go down easier.
  85. The Land of Steady Habits
    Nicole Holofcener's The Land of Steady Habits often suggests the film that American Beauty might have been if the latter had been pruned of its smug hysteria.
  86. Lizzie
    The film moves evenly toward a conclusion that feels as inevitable as it does inescapable, while providing a plausible framework for the still-mysterious true crime.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Sisters Brothers
    The Sisters Brothers proffers a sort of Edenic vision, comedic but tinged with sadness, of a latter-day El Dorado that’s worth basking in, if only as a buffer against the inevitability of its fall.
  88. A Simple Favor
    A Simple Favor haphazardly vacillates between suburban satire, goofy comedy, and dark, twisted psychological thriller. Which is to say that the film doesn't evince the seamlessness of presentation of its clearest antecedent: David Fincher's "Gone Girl."
  89. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    Richard E. Grant is captivating on his own, but his rapport with Melissa McCarthy is so effortless that their characters’ conversations offer deeper pleasures than the main plot of the film.
  90. Maya
    The film’s intimacy is as precise as its intellect is vague.
  91. High Life
    The film asks down-and-dirty questions about what really resides beneath thousands of years of human progress, a savage and haunting antidote to the high-minded idealism of movies like Christopher Nolan's Interstellar and Ridley Scott's The Martian.
  92. Mandy
    Panos Cosmatos's film is a profoundly violent and weirdly moving poem of male alienation.
  93. Widows
    For all its flaws, Widows is McQueen’s most fascinating, bracing feature to date, a demonstration of the filmmaker embracing his commercial instincts instead of trying to pass them off as weighty and important.
  94. Peterloo
    Peterloo so simply recounts the details of its subject matter that its culminating horror unsettlingly feels like little more than a cathartic inevitability.
  95. Final Score
    To observe that the Dave Bautista-starring action flick Final Score is yet another Die Hard knockoff may be tiresome, but it's not as if the film gives one much of a choice, as it offers up a ceaseless barrage of scenes lifted from the John McTiernan classic.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Burning
    With Burning, Lee Chang-dong extraordinarily obliterates the bifurcation between life and representation, the thing in itself and the metaphor.
  97. Non-Fiction
    Olivier Assayas drains the film of the playfulness at its margins, leaving only an esoteric lecture in its place.
  98. White Boy Rick
    By treating its main character as exceptional, Yann Demange's film validates the punitive system it seeks to criticize.
  99. Halloween
    For all of the film’s attempts to get back to the sinisterly sidling Michael of the first Halloween, his stealth movements no longer terrify because his fixations are less unthinkingly instinctual, more compulsively mortal.
  100. Monrovia, Indiana
    As always with Frederick Wiseman, it’s the quotidian gestures that haunt one in Monrovia, Indiana.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »