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. Shame
    Shame articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction-in a vibrant city rendered dull and anonymous.
  2. Doctor Strange
    Nothing that Marvel Studios has produced can compare to the visual splendor of Scott Derrickson's Doctor Strange.
  3. Watcher
    Watcher gives a feminist twist to a throwback genre, but never does its topicality dilute its gripping suspense.
  4. The Suicide Squad
    Throughout the film, James Gunn renders the half-grim, half-absurdist nature of the Suicide Squad with delightfully bloody abandon.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Agrarian Utopia
    The Northern Thailand pastoral settings are so refreshing and mesmerizing that they alone can provide the movie's raison d'être.
  6. The Heart Machine
    It showcases a genuine fascination with the mind/body split engendered by Skyping, online dating, and constant app usage through a plot that doesn't fuel itself on received wisdom.
  7. Fantasy Life
    Amanda Peet finds layers of shading in what could have been a dull and simplistic role.
  8. The Day After
    As with most Hong Sang-soo films, it engages in intellectual gamesmanship while courting emotional pathos.
  9. Escapes
    A preoccupation with the totemic materiality of cinema runs through Michael Almereyda’s documentary.
  10. When Marnie Was There
    The film at first plays like a refresher and throwback to Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Delivery Service, before revealing itself to be less minimal than minor.
  11. Terri
    Terri, a generously spirited dramedy in the high-school-misfit genre (indie division), finds director Azazel Jacobs taking a calling-card approach to his second feature.
  12. Dormant Beauty
    The film puts too many elements into play, which means it ends up darting hopelessly between a series of underdeveloped storylines.
  13. Obit
    The film ascribes to a conventionally contrapuntal take on the lives of those who spend all day surrounded by death.
  14. Daylight
    Daylight reaches an apex of terror that it never quite tops.
  15. Mother and Son
    Léonor Serraille’s Mother and Son is a lovely film about feminine strength that also refuses to glorify motherhood.
  16. Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    While the trivia value may feel tremendous, only One9's interviews with Nas, his father, Olu Dara, and his brother, Jungle, manage to make the doc legitimately moving--a history lesson in popular culture.
  17. Still Alice
    Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart's artful consideration of familial friction acerbated by disease, and vice versa, nearly saves Still Alice from the banality of its Lifetime-movie execution.
  18. Sound of Noise
    The film is ultimately winning because of its devilish anarchic streak, aiming its arrows at the stuffiness of the traditional musical establishment.
  19. A Space Program
    The film's larger purpose, be it about the ardor of handmade crafts or artist Tom Sachs's artistic ambitions, never emerges with any consistent focus.
  20. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
    It's an exercise in joviality, unflinching in its love for Joan Didion, and unwilling to be much more.
  21. Siddharth
    A well-intentioned story of an impoverished father searching for his missing child is muddled by an ambitious sociological agenda in Richie Mehta's film.
  22. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    The film buzzes with hand-drawn creativity that's precious in both the pop-cultural and material senses.
  23. Manifesto
    The film’s visceral pleasures often work at cross purposes with the cerebral message of the manifestos.
  24. The Silence
    The slightly dour tone is the perfect backdrop for the director to skillfully weave together his varied narrative strands in a surprisingly entertaining medley.
  25. Master of the Universe
    Marc Bauder's documentary quietly detonates the conservative notion that our largest corporations should be allowed to duke it out in metaphorical no-holds-barred cage matches.
  26. Donald Cried
    Finding the drama and humor in everyday situations like these isn't easy, but Avedisian makes it look as natural as swinging on a vine.
  27. The Incredible Jessica James
    Throughout the film, one wishes for a bit more depth regarding Jessica's professional struggles.
  28. In the Intense Now
    Although João Moreira Salles tries to tap into the pleasurable elements inherent to the essayistic as a cinematic form, such as making the merging of intimate and social reality poetically visible, his storylines never quite gel.
  29. The Year of the Everlasting Storm
    These shorts capture everything from how fear of the unknown can rewire relationships to the natural world exerts its pull on us all.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Eileen
    The film is a pulpy phantasmagoria of fear and desire, offering visions of queer ecstasy within the confines of multiple prisons.
  31. The Shrouds
    The film shares with Crimes of the Future an alternately intrigued and critical fascination with the ways technology encroaches on humanity, and a paranoid interest in rooting out underlying conspiracies.
  32. 100 Meters
    To get to the primal thrill of racing, Iwaisawa Kenji uses just about every technique at his disposal.
  33. The Kill Team
    This is a rare War on Terror military exposé, one almost exclusively interested in the hearts and minds of low-ranking soldiers.
  34. Sweet Virginia
    Sweet Virginia doesn’t have much of a point, as its characters are reductive variables in an inevitable equation of carnage.
  35. The Invisible Man
    Through to the end, you can’t get off on the thrill of this film’s craftsmanship without also getting off on the spectacle of more than just Cecilia brought to the brink of destruction. Like its style, The Invisible Man’s cruelty is the point.
  36. The Batman
    The film stands apart for thoughtfully suggesting that Batman might actually one day make Gotham a better place, and not merely a safer one
  37. Arctic
    The film has a raw immediacy that can only be achieved when most cinematic excesses have been eliminated.
  38. The Falling
    The film all leads to a melodramatic climax that wraps up the main character's explosive acting out in a too-neat package.
  39. Undefeated
    What sets Undefeated apart from the usual underdog sports story is how the filmmakers emphasize the importance of mentorship as something separate from on-the-field interactions between coach and player.
  40. Sylvio
    Sylvio's banal depictions of everyday loneliness through the diurnal tedium of an anthropomorphic animal brings to mind BoJack Horseman, but without the caustic navel-gazing and self-destruction or the mordant pop-culture musings.
  41. Smashed
    Smashed touches on the awkward perversity that often comes from seemingly pure emotions and intentions, and turns a noticeable, if slightly analytical, eye toward the selfish hurt and narcissistic projections inflicted by the perceived moral hierarchy against recovering addicts.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Dead & Buried
    With eerie atmosphere to spare, and an emphasis on communal terrors and long-buried secrets, this surprisingly wistful film hews closer to folk horror, suggesting Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man by way of Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s Messiah of Evil.
  43. Tyrel
    Sebastián Silva never indulges platitude, and so the qualified hope of the film’s ending isn’t merely affirming but also miraculous.
  44. Doin' It in the Park: Pick-Up Basketball, NYC
    Perhaps the first important film about street hoops, even if the overall product struggles from a lack of focus.
  45. Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
    Between their wildly different bodies of work, a shared appeal emerges: to stop, look, listen, and consider not just what's in front of you, but also where it came from and where it might be going.
  46. Jess and Moss
    A strange and intoxicating indie constructed as a series of vignettes that capture two children grappling with the overlap of trauma and nostalgia.
  47. Robe of Gems
    A Bolañesque waking nightmare, the film insists that we come to terms with it rather than straightforwardly enjoy it.
  48. Will You Dance with Me?
    Derek Jarman's footage speaks to the freedoms afforded by the combination of a darkened dance floor and like-minded people.
  49. Sick of Myself
    Kristoffer Borgli is unduly proud of himself for concocting his unlikable protagonists, and he marinates in their repulsive self-absorption.
  50. Mogul Mowgli
    The film’s poignancy derives from its profound understanding of its main character’s identity crisis.
  51. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    Not everyone's life is compelling enough to warrant the documentary treatment, but whether this truism applies to master puppeteer and current Sesame Street producer Kevin Clash is a question that Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, Constance Marks's fawning portrait of the Muppet- master fails to answer.
  52. Thirst Street
    It’s a testament to Nathan Silver’s keen sense of observation that we don’t want the film to turn decisively into thriller terrain.
  53. The Imitation Game
    Given the liberties the film takes, it's surprising that it refuses to penetrate Alan Turing's carnality and allow Benedict Cumberbatch to truly wrestle with the torment of the man's sexuality.
  54. Leap Year
    Leap Year is a story of survival, and its poised aesthetic is remarkably keyed to its main character's shell-like behavior.
  55. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    The politics of the film are consistently muddled by director Rodrigo Plá's conspicuous formal choices.
  56. 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.
  57. Beetlejuice
    McDowall deftly keeps one foot in the here and the other in the hereafter, which allows Burton a unique opportunity to juggle two sets of funhouse effects.
  58. Robinson in Ruins
    Robinson's very name ties him to explorers like Crusoe and Walden, but he is also something like JLG's whispering leftist prankster who butted into 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her to intermittently spout rhetoric over images of freeways and construction sites.
  59. The Raid 2
    It's all showy viscera, no ballet, and wan attempts at the gravity of something like Drug War, with implicit statements made about the deadening nature of violence or the moral equivalency of state-sanctioned and criminal force, don't come close to cohering.
  60. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    On the screen, Shang-Chi is rotely defined by the same “gifted kid” impostor syndrome as so many other self-doubting MCU heroes before him.
  61. Luca
    Pixar’s most intimate and laidback effort since Ratatouille feels like a throwback to one of Mark Twain’s rollicking picaresque sagas.
  62. Prey
    Prey proves to be an apropos title, as the film is cowed by John McTiernan’s original Predator.
  63. Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song
    Over 40 years after its release, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song still retains its shock value, but even more so, it remains distinct as a work that cannot be squarely placed within a singular category.
  64. Seconds
    A beautiful x-ray of middle-aged existential crisis, Seconds is arguably a second-tier John Frankenheimer funhouse of paranoia, but the same might be said of any film that isn’t The Manchurian Candidate.
  65. Lenny Cooke
    While it verges on exploitation of the gentle giant at its core, it's also an effective bit of human drama, competently, and sometimes movingly, telling a story that deserves to be told.
  66. 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.
  67. The Menu
    For as potent as the film’s shocks can be in the moment, it’s difficult to shake off that the screenplay lacks for the breadth of variety that’s necessary to make more than just a restaurant’s tasting menu take flight.
  68. Seeking Mavis Beacon
    The film proves itself incapable of or unwilling to follow through on its ideas to an ultimate conclusion.
  69. One Lucky Elephant
    A uniquely passive reminder of the dangers of showering exotic creatures with anthropomorphic affection.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Big Lebowski
    There are few films that genuinely get better with each successive viewing. The Big Lebowski is one of them. This is owed not only to its near-infinite quotability, which itself grows with time, given how much of the film’s humor is self-referential, but also because its tangled plot requires a substantial amount of unraveling before it can be fully understood and appreciated.
  71. Catch the Fair One
    The solemnity of Josef Kubota Wladyka’s film is at odds with the gratuitousness of its violence.
  72. Heretic
    Heretic intriguingly plays with our expectations of who the heroes and villains are in this scenario.
  73. Pete's Dragon
    It abandons its subtlety en route to becoming a moralistic screed about the preservation of the nuclear family.
  74. My Brother the Devil
    With My Brother the Devil, writer-director Sally El Hosaini tells a story both operatic in its implications and quotidian in its sensory, day-to-day details.
  75. Prevenge
    Alice Lowe evinces a knack for locating society’s most awkward pressure points, and a willingness to punch them.
  76. Gebo and the Shadow
    It defines Manoel de Oliveira's late period, during which his movies have continued to shrink in size and scope while remaining thematically expansive.
  77. Ema
    In the film, the literal union of bodies is the only logical means of conveying the reestablishment of emotional bonds.
  78. The Long Walk
    This ferocious adaptation of Stephen King’s 1979 novella as a passion play about class solidarity.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Koch
    Neil Barsky is aware of how a great and terribly troubling person can reside in the same body, but his occasional eagerness to appoint himself as his subject's latest press agent is dubious.
  80. King Georges
    Erika Frankel’s documentary is finally revealed to be a story of prolonged adjustment to retirement, and a poignant illustration of sublimated redemption.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    This Is Martin Bonner
    At its best, with its quiet, ominous pace in the early going and its economical distribution of information throughout, the film is reminiscent of Todd Haynes's Safe.
  82. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    There’s no attempt to hide that the film is pure fan service, a greatest-hits mashup of Spider-Man’s cinematic legacy.
  83. 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.
  84. Battle for Brooklyn
    Battle for Brooklyn brings up larger quandaries about urban development which it doesn't begin to address.
  85. Mozart's Sister
    Mozart's Sister is too often just one more rehashing of the "Aw, didn't women have it tough then" thematic that never forces the viewer to acknowledge that maybe they haven't got it as great as we'd like to think today.
  86. War Game
    By setting up such a potentially cataclysmic scenario and not convincingly illustrating how it could be resolved or stopped from occurring in the first place, War Game undercuts the very reason it was made.
  87. Proxima
    The film falls back on a reductive rumination on the balance between maternal obligation and career aspiration.
  88. Nocturama
    Bertrand Bonello constructs a clear-eyed sense of how technology keeps getting closer and closer to replacing human consciousness.
  89. Freeland
    At their best, writer-director Mario Furloni and Kate McLean evince a masterful grasp of storytelling that’s subtle and rich in innuendo.
  90. Men Go to Battle
    It's too texturally exacting in its recreation of a transitory moment in U.S. history to register as a failure.
  91. Memory
    The film reveals itself as a prototypical yet surprisingly tender love story between two damaged people re-learning how to move through a world that’s unable to adequately support them.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Bestiaire
    Bestiaire argues persuasively without words, making a case without explicating one at all.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    11 Flowers
    Because of its choice in subjectivity, and despite the film's historical context, 11 Flowers firmly elevates the experience of the personal over the political.
  94. Red Island
    Red Island is at once lackadaisical and urgent, relaxed but with a clear eye for how swiftly everything will end for the characters at its center.
  95. Edge of Tomorrow
    Tom Cruise's participation transmutes, as it always does, everything around him, turning the movie's series of false starts, dead ends, and hard lessons into a working metaphor for his own career.
  96. Three
    The film shows how much Johnnie To still experiments with his form, especially as he continues to transition to digital cinema.
  97. Wonderstruck
    Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck is a coming-of-age tale as curiosity cabinet, a flowchart of narrative fragments that steadily build to a high-concept finale as ludicrous as it is emotionally audacious.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    An Affair to Remember
    A remake by Leo McCarey of his own 1939 classic Love Affair, the film progresses as a graceful switch from romantic comedy to weepie melodrama, reflecting the director’s deep-rooted belief in the intricate bond between laughter and tears.
  99. Blue Note Records: Beyond the Notes
    The documentary proves that the history and mythology of American jazz is as intoxicating as the music itself.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Rapt
    It presents itself in a sleek suit and tie, carrying itself from the moment it enters the room with a steadfast gait that suggests there's no dotted line it can't get us to agree to sign.
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