Slant Magazine's Scores

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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
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  1. Dead Souls
    The anguish expressed and experiences described by the survivors certainly can overlap with each other, and even become repetitive, but it’s ultimately this unification of perspective that gives Dead Souls its authority—and that allows it to become an incisive reappropriation of collectivist solidarity.
  2. A Star Is Born
    Bradley Cooper understands that a message is only as resonant as its messenger, so he surrounds himself with collaborators, old and new, who can sell even the hoariest cliché.
  3. The Predator
    Even an act of noble sacrifice late in the film has a faintly goofy tone to it, reflective of Shane Black's streak of puckish nihilism. That attitude makes him a perfect fit for this franchise, which lost its thematic viciousness after the anti-imperialist original.
  4. Wildlife
    Wildlife is at once loquacious and laconic, a film in which simple words hold unspoken and unequivocal power, and the space between banal utterances become chasms.
  5. Peppermint
    Pierre Morel's first feature film set in the United States is brainless propaganda for the MAGA market.
  6. The Favourite
    The Favourite, notably the first of Yorgos Lanthimos’s films to be written by others, is more narratively coherent and conventional than The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara’s florid screenplay still affords the Greek Weird Wave auteur ample opportunity to assert his idiosyncratic worldview.
  7. Blaze
    With Blaze, a fractured story of country music singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, director Ethan Hawke admirably battles the clichés of the musical biopic.
  8. The Nun
    The Nun is the cinematic equivalent of a Conjuring-inspired maze at Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios.
  9. Hotel by the River
    A story of a poet, Hotel by the River comes to resemble a poetry collection itself, abounding in emotional currents and grace notes that are bracingly allowed to hang, free of reductive explication.
  10. Colette
    It's the film's concerted emphasis on Colette's ambivalent nature and desires that reveals her to be an artist just ahead of her time, fighting against, yet seduced by, her present.
  11. Bisbee '17
    The film's epic canvas invigorates Robert Greene, who fuses a procedural documentary, in the key of Frederick Wiseman’s films, with tableaux that wouldn’t be out of place in a horror western.
  12. 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.
  13. Kusama - Infinity
    Despite the exuberance of the works featured, which are promptly flattened by the film's commitment to a traditional documentary blueprint, Yayoi Kusama's resilience still commands our attention.
  14. Climax
    Gaspar Noé's camera captures every freak-out, recrimination, stolen kiss, and betrayal in what is a miracle of synchronicity.
  15. 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.
  16. I Am Not a Witch
    It finds that rare nexus of the comic and the tragic, underlining the absurdity of a terrible situation without demeaning those who have been harmed by it.
  17. Asako I & II
    Like Happy Hour, Asako I & II is a parable of the grace — and, yes, happiness — that spring from resignation.
  18. First Man
    Damien Chazelle is clearly in awe of the collective efforts it took to propel Neil Armstrong to the moon, but he remains ambivalent about whether it was all ultimately worth such immense sacrifice.
    • 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.
  20. Ray & Liz
    Ray & Liz generates pathos through its detailed attention to its characters' attempts to find permanence and meaning in a fundamentally unstable reality.
  21. Shoplifters
    In Shoplifters, Kore-eda dramatizes the insidious and relativistic ordinariness of poverty.
  22. The Little Stranger
    Perhaps the film's failure to surprise in the end is a result of leaning too heavily on a toolbox not yet translated into the language of cinematic form.
  23. Destination Wedding
    The way Destination Wedding uses misanthropy to augment screwball tropes ends up being its undoing.
  24. Kin
    Jonathan and Josh Baker's Kin, a feature that comprises little more than an extended introduction to its characters, resembles a TV pilot that's been released into theaters as a standalone property.
  25. Hale County This Morning, This Evening
    Hale County dwells on the beauty of the everyday as it recognizes the fragility of individual lives.
  26. Let the Corpses Tan
    Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani get so lost in their catalogue of fetishes that they lose grasp of the snap and tension that drive even a mediocre heist narrative.
  27. Reprisal
    Reprisal is at pains to profess its faith in the symbols of law and order, but it cannot fully repress its almost erotic longing for the unfettered violence of the terrorist.
  28. Operation Finale
    The film never manages to reconcile the enormity of the Holocaust with how ordinary a bureaucrat Eichmann was.
  29. The Happytime Murders
    The film aims only to shock, refusing to deliver anything in an intriguingly post-ironic way in the process.
  30. The Bookshop
    The Bookshop is steadfast in avoiding drama at all costs.
  31. Support the Girls
    The film celebrates the unrecognized willpower and perseverance that undergirds low-wage service work in this country.
  32. What Keeps You Alive
    If Hannah Emily Anderson's performance was as fully imagined as Brittany Allen's, then What Keeps You Alive might have attained the emotional dimensions of a robust psychodrama.
  33. Papillon
    This remake proffers the sort of cinematic nowhere place that's all too common of an increasingly corporate, globalized cinema.
  34. John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection
    The documentary's labored juxtapositions create fission, the feel of a director scrambling to dictate the game.
  35. Mile 22
    When Mark Wahlberg's Silva isn't wielding run-on sentences as military-grade weapons, he barks out derivative commands and asinine statements that make him sound like a 13-year-old playing Call of Duty.
  36. Alpha
    It reduces the domestication of wolves to a series of simplistic interactions that don’t exactly convey the difficulties of a wild animal overcoming millennia of instinct.
  37. Minding the Gap
    Zack and Keire's stunts are action scenes that are imbued with the gravity of the participants' youth, revelry, and need to prove themselves.
  38. Juliet, Naked
    The film is loaded with inconsequential detours and questionable and inconsistent character psychology as it stumbles awkwardly to its foregone conclusion.
  39. Cielo
    Alison McAlpine's documentary lacks urgency beyond its persistent pondering of the sky's eternal mysteries.
  40. The Wife
    Glenn Close's perennial look of astonishment and resilience commands the action to the point of turning every other screen element into a gratuitous prop.
  41. We the Animals
    In We the Animals, director Jeremiah Zagar sustains a tone of wounded nostalgia, fashioning a formalism that appears to exist simultaneously in the past and present.
  42. Crazy Rich Asians
    The filmmakers’ ability to seamlessly explore rapidly shifting Chinese cultural norms within the context of the classic trope of a mother who’s hostile toward her son’s partner is the film’s most impressive feat.
  43. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
    It all feels cheap and looks cheap, a far cry from what S. Craig Zahler can do when overseeing both a film's words as well as its images.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Meg
    Jaws works as both a horror film and a human drama. The Meg doesn't aspire to the earlier film's pathos (its flagrant callbacks to Jaws draw attention to how grotesquely adolescent it is by comparison), but that's because it's above all else a movie-star vehicle, and it succeeds on that front.
  45. Dog Days
    Aside from the occasional idiosyncratic comic beat, Dog Days remains committed to coloring within the lines of established tropes in the animal-centric family film.
  46. A Prayer Before Dawn
    A Prayer Before Dawn is concerned above all with ensuring that we share its main character's sense of dislocation and entrapment.
  47. Elizabeth Harvest
    Sebastian Gutierrez's film creates an incestuous atmosphere that's reminiscent of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
  48. 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.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Christopher Robin
    Unlike the red balloon that Winnie the Pooh follows through much of the running time, Marc Forster's film lacks lightness.
  50. The Darkest Minds
    The Darkest Minds never communicates the overwhelming horror of a society whose children are either dead or in the process of being exterminated, or the hopelessness of kids discovering that every potential benefactor may have ulterior motives.
  51. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    The film's refusal to produce a campy critique feels more like the product of lack of imagination than a purposeful repudiation.
  52. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    There's an appealingly shaggy buddy comedy hidden somewhere inside of The Spy Who Dumped Me, but good luck finding it amid all the desperate poop jokes, lifeless action sequences, and lazy plot mechanics.
  53. Gavagai
    Rob Tregenza's film is rooted in the communion as well as the sensorial challenges of savoring art.
  54. Searching
    As nimble as Aneesh Chaganty is in presenting his main character's multi-faceted interaction with technology in the first hour, the film suddenly morphs into a generic and manipulative missing-person thriller.
  55. No Date, No Signature
    Vahid Jalilvand's film is so worked out that you know that every nuance is pointed and intentional.
  56. Never Goin' Back
    Writer-director Augustine Frizzell's film is funny and surprisingly tender, if at times frustratingly uneven.
  57. Nico, 1988
    The unflashy, austere visual style of the film is but a veneer over writer-director Susanna Nicchiarelli's deceptively radical treatment of the musical biopic.
  58. Good Manners
    The film is a rebellion of surfaces that never quite reaches, or emanates from, the underpinning roots of its fable.
  59. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
    The film poignantly reveals that the secret history of Hollywood is really an alternate history of America.
  60. The Captain
    In one fashion, Robert Schwentke proves to be too complicit with his protagonist, regarding evil and human banality as stimulation.
  61. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    Peter Rida Michail and Aaron Horvath's Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is a spastic, Mad magazine-style parody of comic-book movies for the age of superhero overload.
  62. Hot Summer Nights
    Like the teenagers at its center, Hot Summer Nights tries too hard to look cooler than it ever could be.
  63. Far from the Tree
    The very act of having kids and demanding perfect conformity from them is never questioned by the film.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Equalizer 2
    Order and righteousness being the product of one great man, The Equalizer 2 is symptomatic of a confused time when people are collectively looking for invulnerable superheroes who don't so much as speak truth to injustice as beat the hell out of it, and its cathartic pleasures leave a bad taste.
  65. Scarred Hearts
    Despite the film's bleak premise, writer-director Radu Jude finds dark humor within the certainty of death.
  66. Generation Wealth
    Into a broad-strokes picture of a culture in crisis, Lauren Greenfield attempts to incorporate autobiographical elements, which results in some awkward narrative pivots and jarringly clunky voiceover.
  67. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    It boasts such confident performances and choreography that it feels as much like a final draft of the 2008 film as a continuation of it.
  68. The Third Murder
    In The Third Murder, as in his other films, Hirokazu Kore-eda informs tragedy with a distinctive kind of qualified humor that's realistic of how people process atrocity.
  69. Blindspotting
    The film takes aim at myriad targets and bluntly satirizing them in disparate styles that never mesh into a cohesive whole.
  70. Damascus Cover
    The film trots out thinly conceived villains and a murky plot twists that leave crucial details needlessly shrouded in mystery.
  71. Unfriended: Dark Web
    The film is preposterously conceived, but writer-director Stephen Susco so tightly, excitingly executes it that you hardly notice.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Eighth Grade
    Throughout, we're invited to chuckle at the ironies of Kayla's hobbies and activities, but underlying such scenes is a strain of eeriness, as if the film were offering up a post-human spin on Pretty in Pink.
  73. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    As in Rogue Nation, Fallout‘s action scenes are cleanly composed and easy to follow, and so abundant as to become monotonous.
  74. Milford Graves Full Mantis
    Jake Meginsky's documentary is insular, precious, and too pleased with its unwillingness to reach out to the unconverted.
  75. Skyscraper
    Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is the true Tower of Babel, the movie star who with each film gets closer to God and whose films always come tumbling down around him.
  76. Puzzle
    The film buoyed by Kelly Macdonald, who's a master of understated vulnerability, but she can't steer it out of the doldrums.
  77. McQueen
    As Ian Bonhôte's documentary reveals, Alexander McQueen's suicide was perhaps the all-too-predictable ending to a history of violence.
  78. The Night Eats the World
    Dominique Rocher reinvigorates the zombie film only to succumb to the strictures of the coming-of-age romance.
  79. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    There are only so many monster-centric jokes to be made before they become toothless, and only so many ways to preach tolerance before it sounds more like blunt moralizing.
  80. Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti
    Gauguin represents for the film no less an ideal Romantic subject than the Polynesians represented for the painter himself: penniless, chronically ill, and living in self-imposed isolation—the very embodiment of the suffering artist.
  81. Shock and Awe
    Rob Reiner's film rests on broad, sweeping proclamations about the importance of factual reporting.
  82. Path of Blood
    The film in effect positions young jihadis less as fervid, bloodthirsty psychopaths and more as dumb kids at summer camp.
  83. Siberia
    The film has the tone and look of a direct-to-video feature, and some shots of Keanu Reeves are so waxen that the actor almost looks rotoscoped.
  84. What Will People Say
    The film flirts with miserablism, but it counterbalances the direness of its main character's situation with moments of levity.
  85. Dark Money
    Kimberly Reed's approach is too bloodless to make us feel the full weight of the injustices her film identifies.
  86. A Skin So Soft
    The pleasure of Denis Côté's film radiates not so much from its storytelling as it does from the meditative force of its formal construction. Read our review.
  87. Whitney
    For most of Kevin Macdonald's film, Whitney Houston seems a guttering flame in a public crosswind, with only fleeting celebration given to the wildfire of her success.
  88. Leave No Trace
    In Leave No Trace, director Debra Granik continues to refine a style of tranquil intensity. The film's images have a rapt and pared-down power, with emphases that are never quite where you expect them to be.
  89. The First Purge
    Especially early on, Gerard McMurray often rejects the exhibitionist slaughter that James DeMonaco established as the Purge series’s modus operandi in favor of violence that’s rawer and realer.
  90. The Citizen
    It adheres too rigidly to news-cycle replications of barbaric governmental acts, and without putting them into greater perspective.
  91. Under the Tree
    Under the Tree boasts the lurid determinism of many acclaimed European films that spit-shine genre-film tropes with chilly compositions and fashionable hopelessness.
  92. Madeline's Madeline
    True to the implications of its title, the devotional insularity of Madeline's Madeline is suffocating, which is appropriate for a film about a mentally imbalanced teenage artist but suffocating nonetheless.
  93. Moss
    Daniel Peddle's film emphasizes, for better and worse, the crushing monotony of living in insolated parts of the Deep South.
  94. Relaxer
    Joel Potrykus's droll world is defined by feats of man-child pettiness, by lazy guys who turn the banalities of daily life into meaningless trials of integrity.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    Day of the Soldado's strained credulity in the last act has an undercurrent of kooky exhilaration, as the plot takes leaps that feel as reckless as they are refreshing in such a doleful film of terminal prognoses.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Bleeding Steel
    A film so brazen in its desire to reach a wide audience that it plays like a compilation of disparate action set pieces, each shamelessly stolen from successful Hollywood franchises.
  97. Fireworks
    Akiyuki Shinbo and Nobuyuki Takeuchi's time-travel device mostly just exists to complicate what is, at heart, a trite and sexist love story.
  98. Uncle Drew
    Uncle Drew, the old-school streetballer played by NBA all-star Kyrie Irving, is a cheerfully scruffy creation, and so is the film that bears his name.
  99. Ant-Man and the Wasp
    Ebulliently funny, visually inventive, and above all passionately committed to the idea that heroism isn't a burden but an uplifting realization of our best qualities.
  100. Ideal Home
    The broad strokes of the performances make the film's occasional lurches into sentimentality seem especially jarring.
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