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. Meeting Gorbachev
    Werner Herzog’s documentary is a rare example of the arch ironist’s capacity to be awed not by nature but by man.
  2. Nine Days
    Writer-director Edson Oda never really puts a unique spin on the familiar story of otherworldly figures peering in on the lives of the living.
  3. Exhibition
    There's considerable talent on display in Exhibition, but it's the kind of thing people mean when they use the term "art film" as a pejorative.
  4. Mike Wallace Is Here
    Much like its subject, Avi Belkin’s documentary knows how to start an argument.
  5. Weathering with You
    Contemporary outrage could’ve potentially counterpointed the film’s increasingly mawkish tendencies.
  6. Infinity Pool
    If David Cronenberg seems almost indifferent to his audience, Brendon Cronenberg is so fixated on freaking people out that he can sometimes neglect to do much else.
  7. The Mouth of the Wolf
    We experience the delay of the fantasy of the happy old couple in their country home in cinematic time as, for most of the film, the only body these lovers have is the spellbinding combination of visual fragments serving as apparitions to their voices.
  8. Presumed Innocent
    Pakula plays to Ford’s strengths, allowing the actor to use his face more than his words to convey the doubt, shame, and self-loathing Rusty experiences. The film may be more outright gripping during the courtroom scenes, but the quieter scenes between Ford and Scacchi leave more lasting impressions.
  9. Piggy
    Throughout, writer-director Carlota Pereda announces herself as a skilled manipulator of audience sympathies.
  10. The Outrun
    With The Outrun’s neat but poignant metaphor work in mind, mental illness and addiction are understood as natural responses to the conditions of a ravaged life.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wreck-It Ralph
    Nothing but broad, pandering indexes tailored to appeal to the arcade wistfulness the film never even bothers to convincingly evoke.
  12. Heavy Trip
    Its story distances heavy metal from any whiff of toxic masculinity by setting Turo and company against homophobes and rakes.
  13. First They Killed My Father
    First They Killed My Father is less interested in global politics than in offering an intensely experiential tapestry of war and invasion as witnessed by a child.
  14. Power
    Throughout Power, Yance Ford draws a startlingly clear line from the origins of modern policing as a slave patrol to its present-day iteration.
  15. ParaNorman
    The tagline for the film reads "You Don't Become a Hero by Being Normal," and the film mostly lives up to that assertion, but only up to a point.
  16. Luce
    On the whole, the film is an unvarnished reflection of the ugliness of American attitudes toward assimilation.
  17. The Rocket
    The particulars of Laos's historical conflicts are sometimes only obliquely confronted, but the torrid past of covered-up wars palpably echoes through the scarred yet majestic landscapes.
  18. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
    In Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, holiday tropes born of life and movies alike are exaggerated, parodied, celebrated, and compressed to suggest how our idea of Christmas is a river of memories real and imagined.
  19. Paul Williams Still Alive
    The film too often undercuts its goals by indulging its director's need for self-affirmation at the expense of the movie's far more compelling central subject.
  20. The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
    The film is far from a technical matter, fiercely promoting Swartz's legacy and challenging us with the same questions its central subject was compelled to ask.
  21. Only the Brave
    Joseph Kosinski's Only the Brave displays a kinship to Howard Hawks’s hard-nosed, old-fashioned pragmatism.
  22. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    The unbalanced appraisal of Vidal's life and work in Nicholas Wrathall's documentary diminishes the effect of the writer's engaging dissension of American political policy.
  23. The Search for General Tso
    Director Ian Cheney doesn't delve too deeply into the possibly unsettling questions the documentary raises about society at large.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
    One of the most striking effects here occurs whenever Herzog and Oppenheimer slow down the film’s often-hectic pace to let viewers ponder the sheer beauty of the imagery, whether that’s painterly rendered details of landscape or the natural splendor of closely observed crystals and minerals.
  25. Dark Money
    Kimberly Reed's approach is too bloodless to make us feel the full weight of the injustices her film identifies.
  26. Radio Unnameable
    While crediting free-form radio pioneer Bob Fass with changing the culture of broadcasting, this documentary remains clear-eyed about the decline of community radio and the New Left.
  27. Violette
    By focusing on the tumultuous friendship between Violette LeDuc and Simone de Beauvoir, Martin Provost creates not so much a dichotomy of femininity as a funhouse mirror of it.
  28. America America
    Filmed with a cast of largely nonprofessional actors, America America immediately strives to impress its audience with the raw reality of its immigrant narrative.
  29. The Outwaters
    With The Outwaters, the found-footage horror film has unexpectedly found its trippy, unmooring, ultraviolent answer to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the free-associative barbarity of A Page of Madness.
  30. Hail, Caesar!
    Joel and Ethan Coen's idiosyncrasies elevate the film above the level of a mere creative exercise.
  31. The Painted Bird
    Václav Marhoul’s film is at its most magnificent when it lingers on the poetry of its images.
  32. When I Saw You
    Like Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, Tarek has a way of using defiance and sarcasm to make himself seem smarter than any ostensible authority figure.
  33. The Mad Women's Ball
    The film capsizes in the absence of a compelling center for Mélanie Laurent to hang her directorial panache.
  34. The Color Purple
    The film knows the words and tunes but, with rare exception, lacks the passion and the perspective to make them truly resonate.
  35. The Lure
    Agnieszka Smoczynska's film is most poignant when it simply stares at its own strangeness.
  36. Mistaken for Strangers
    Adds up little more than an anguished man using the hook of following his famous brother in order to gaze, however critically, at his reflection for 75 minutes.
  37. Earth
    With Earth, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s visual strategy is to wow us with tangibility and data, though he doesn’t give up aesthetic experimentation altogether in this survey of Anthropocene calamities.
  38. Babes
    By turns tender and raucous, Pamela Adlon’s feature-length directorial debut, Babes, spins the uneasy, unwelcome, weirdly cool corporeal realities of pregnancy into heartfelt comic gold.
  39. Safety Not Guaranteed
    More focused on emotion than adventure, it teases out the possibilities and perils of time travel without embroiling itself in the confusion inherent to the subject.
  40. Christine
    It largely fails to animate Christine Chubbuck's inner turmoil, focusing instead on broad, blunt externalities.
  41. Suburban Birds
    The film’s refusal to commit to its passing fancies is a highly intentional and eventually tiresome declaration of Qui Sheng’s arthouse bona fides.
  42. Saturday Church
    Writer-director Damon Cardasis follows a rather didactic approach to his 14-year-old's protagonist's plight in Saturday Church.
  43. Star Trek Into Darkness
    The film is densely plotted, occasionally bordering on the convoluted, but the clarity and inventiveness of the direction keeps the drama and the action constantly percolating.
  44. Dope
    Dope is a mess of styles and mixed signals, a pulp fiction that mostly tend to its loyalties to other cine-odysseys through the streets of Los Angeles.
  45. Queer
    In the end, Luca Guadagnino effectively turns a very complicated literary figure into the kind of blubbering, nostalgic old man you’d expect to see in a student film or a Sundance prizewinner.
  46. The Great Invisible
    It effectively demonstrates how the systemic cause of the Deepwater Horizon explosion was tied as much to society's staggering dependence on fossil fuels as to the oil industry's greed.
  47. Monkey Kingdom
    The cumulative effect is cheerily life-affirming, a bracing infusion of macaque-style joie de vivre.
  48. Bugonia
    The film unearths new depths of existential anxiety engendered by the increasingly tumultuous 2020s.
  49. Master Z: Ip Man Legacy
    The film is a reminder of the potential of these films before they became weighed down by blockbuster-ready excesses.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Brewster McCloud
    What saves the film from curdled, wise-ass whimsy is the control Altman brings to the freewheeling material, to say nothing of the undercurrent of despair that keeps its absurdism bold and beguiling.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Pieta
    Kim Ki-duk's film makes an exaggerated, undeserved show of its cruelty, indignity, and aspirations of importance.
  52. Slow
    Slow steadfastly remains a character-driven piece, homing in on the intricacies of its protagonists’ psychologies and engaging with their subtle emotional shifts as they become more intimate with one another.
  53. Author: The JT LeRoy Story
    Jeff Feuerzeig isn't skeptical enough of Laura Albert's explanations and rationalizations.
  54. Possessor Uncut
    Though Possessor favors nihilist spectacle to existentialism, Brandon Cronenberg is more interested in exploring emotional dislocation than Christopher Nolan.
  55. Bellflower
    Evan Glodell's debut has the sweetness of a lullaby reverie and the blazing ferocity of a monster-car nightmare, a first-comes-elation, then-comes-madness structure that resembles that of "Blue Valentine," another tale focused on the commencement, and then collapse, of an affair.
  56. Blade of the Immortal
    Takashi Miike's film is a work of robust genre craftsmanship that's informed with a sly sense of self-interrogation.
  57. The African Desperate
    That The African Desperate is a send-up of art school is beyond doubt, but what’s less clear is just how far the satire goes.
  58. Who by Fire
    One of Who by Fire’s greatest assets is Philippe Lesage’s willingness to shift the tenor of the film to fit the wildly divergent narrative concerns of any given sequence.
  59. The Beta Test
    Underneath the film’s seeming casualness is an astute portrait of alcoholism, as well as a knowing glimpse of how micro tensions affect macro power plays, from pissing contests between men to sexual violations.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Evil Dead II
    Sam Raimi’s sequel/remake is full-on gore slapstick, more Tex Avery than Dario Argento.
  61. 50/50
    The movie is far more successful in its execution of the young-man-meets-mortality element, warranting its existence by bringing some well-considered verisimilitude to what feels like rare movie territory.
  62. Boom for Real: The Late Teenage Years of Jean-Michel Basquiat
    The film seems far more interested in celebrating a short-lived era of artistic invention than interrogating it.
  63. Super 8
    J.J. Abrams's latest puts a modern spin on classical material, though here reinvention isn't the goal so much as slavish duplication embellished with muscular CG effects.
  64. War Horse
    What ultimately hobbles War Horse is a two-pronged attack, with Spielberg's soft-sell producing an unfortunately dramatic flatness in almost every scene, while an 11th-hour scramble for picture-book catharsis doesn't seem to work either.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    East of Eden
    Even viewers who acknowledge Kazan’s lack of visual imagination usually concede that nobody got better performances out of actors, but this last vestige of his reputation is in real need of examination.
  66. The Untamed
    Each brief glimpse of the creature’s fleshy, slithering mass imbues the character drama with an aching sexual desire and, as the violent potential of the entity becomes clear, a mounting sense of dread.
  67. The Eagle Huntress
    Aisholpan’s liberation is a harbinger of the growing pressure that the outside world exerts on a once isolated community.
  68. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    For all the film’s invention, for all its trickiness, it doesn’t really move.
  69. Censored Voices
    By negating more conventional, facts-first priorities, Mor Loushy creates an alternative historiography that's more meant to be felt than learned.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Guns of Navarone
    Gregory Peck, as Mallory, gives a wonderfully unperturbed performance, outdone only by the versatile coldness and comedy of Anthony Quinn. David Niven is the subservient but stylish chemist Miller, rounding out a film that ranks among the best war movies—for mayhem, fighting and a simple, sanctimonious story about heroism when it’s war at all costs.
  71. Memory House
    Memory House, much like Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Donnelles’s recent Bacarau, makes no secret of its disgust for neocolonialism, capitalism, or fascism, though it’s more skeptical of violent resistance even when exercised in self-defense.
  72. The Killers
    The Killers redux packs one lasting, significant, retrospective jolt of perversity that far eclipses any possible artistic intentions on the part of its creators though: the sight of future American President Ronald Reagan playing a baddie in his last film role before entering politics.
  73. Beauty Is Embarrassing
    Neil Berkeley's documentary is as puckish as its subject, so steeped in artist Wayne White's creative juices that it makes you want to go straight home and start making things.
  74. Brothers Hypnotic
    There are grudges held amid all the good will, an intention of the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble to do things on their terms, and those terms stem directly from their upbringing.
  75. Old Stone
    Johnny Ma's Old Stone is a lean, nasty entry in a subgenre that could be termed the bureaucratic noir.
  76. Canners
    Canners plays a bit too infatuated with its subjects and for reasons not wholly clear by the film's end.
  77. Candyman
    Candyman doesn’t merely note the connection between fear and remembrance, it also interrogates it from every possible angle.
  78. Redux Redux
    Easy as it may be to imagine a more artful, restrained, and introspective version of Redux Redux, the one we got is satisfying enough that you may want to take it out for another spin.
  79. Golden Exits
    Alex Ross Perry's characters are shrewd enough to recognize the irrational contours of their lives, which they diagnose and chew over in some of the most inventive, twisty, and richly ironic dialogue in modern American cinema.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    First Position
    The documentary twists out its six narrative threads with measured compassion and even-handedness.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    The overreliance on wisecracks and employing, and then mocking, clichés make it seem as if Honor Among Thieves is outright embarrassed by its source material and wants you to know it.
  82. The Final Master
    The film is a seemingly endless series of convoluted double-dealing, backstabbing, and factional realignment.
  83. Gimme Danger
    The film reveals the erudition and shrewd self-awareness that Jim Osterberg drew on to become Iggy Pop.
  84. El Conde
    The film never really leans into the farcical possibilities of its premise nor its earnest appraisal of Augusto Pinochet’s legacy.
  85. Arco
    Arco is a children’s adventure set in world that’s literally on fire, which makes the moments of childlike wonder and connection all the more endearing and vital.
  86. LifeHack
    LifeHack is consistently intriguing for the conflicting emotions with which it looks back on its chosen moment in tech and time, characterized by cutthroat scamming and cynicism, as well as empowerment and camaraderie for the young and quick-witted.
  87. Slow West
    A pageantry of pseudo-art poses, a self-consciously cool reorientation of the western as silly symphony.
  88. A Compassionate Spy
    The suggestion that Ted Hall’s actions were that of simple and pure heroism leaves Steve James’s documentary in tension with the more nuanced view that Hall seemed to have of himself.
  89. Post Mortem
    Pablo Larraín employs ultra-widescreen cinematography for constricting close-ups and inhospitably alienating compositions that generate a nasty chill, the director keeping the army's brutality off screen to amplify a sense of oppressive malevolence.
  90. Your Sister's Sister
    For long stretches in its first two acts, Lynn Shelton's film is distinguished by a disarming sense of freedom and spontaneity.
  91. Midsommar
    A deeply unnerving film about the indissoluble, somehow archaic bond between self and family—one more psychologically robust than Aster’s similarly themed Hereditary. And it’s also very funny.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Un Flic (re-release)
    As far as swan songs go, Jean-Pierre Melville's Un Flic is a fascinatingly garbled tune that teems with formal inconsistencies and yet still manages to carry a pained melody.
  93. I Love Boosters
    Arrhythmic, unfocused, and forgetting to breathe, this overstuffed film feels like a circus act, a well-dressed elephant on a unicycle juggling a dozen balls. It’s an impressive feat of dexterity, if not grace.
  94. It's All So Quiet
    There's literally no way to miss the memo that It's All So Quiet is about dealing with the encroachment of death, as it's there in every scene.
  95. Koyaanisqatsi
    Koyaanisqatsi is enraged with modern societal convention, but still expresses awe of the spontaneous, incidental poetry that can exist despite invisible oppression.
  96. The Dark and the Wicked
    This supernatural fable elevates the subtext of Bryan Bertino’s earlier work to the level of text.
  97. Society of the Snow
    J.A. Bayona rarely lets his images speak for themselves, which is frustrating given his obvious gift for poetic, almost surreal succinctness.
  98. Summertime
    Catherine Corsini depicts feminists in lighthearted ways, at once humorously caricatured and sensitively human.
  99. Die My Love
    To dismantle the mythologies of maternity, Lynne Ramsay's tool of choice is the sledgehammer rather than the scalpel.
  100. Is This Thing On?
    This is a finely observed and good-natured piece of work that carries some of the creative angst of Bradley Cooper’s other films but without the need to convince us of its main character’s genius.
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