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. The Cakemaker
    The film binds its narrative to fascinating explorations of national identity, sexuality, and, of course, food.
  2. Woman Walks Ahead
    As a character, Catherine Weldon suffers the same fate as Sitting Bull, having been reduced to a signifier of the filmmakers' retroactive political correctness.
  3. Dark River
    While Clio Barnard so masterfully limns her protagonist’s tortured soul, the brother-sister drama at the center of the film remains frustratingly hazy.
  4. Custody
    Custody is concerned with the failure of process to discern human need and perversion, and Xavier Legrand rather ironically follows in the footsteps of bureaucracy by reducing people to statistics.
  5. Love, Cecil
    Lisa Immordino Vreeland's avoidance of a serious analytical bent ends up stifling the documentary.
  6. Sorry to Bother You
    For a spell, Boots Riley's cultural ire is so cool-headed that Sorry to Bother You easily distinguishes itself from Mike Judge's similarly themed Idiocracy, but along the way it, too, settles for swinging for the fences—so much so that the target of its satire is no longer in its crosshairs.
  7. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    The film is enlivened by an acute grasp of the impossibilities that abused Indonesian women face in a society predicated on their continued physical and emotional subjugation to men.
  8. Boundaries
    Christopher Plummer brings a twinkly eyed insouciance to his character, but there's only so many times Jack can make a joke about, say, his adult diapers before it becomes thin and hollow.
  9. Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town
    Christian Papierniak manages to get a tricky tonal balance more or less right, capturing the false sense of superiority that Izzy projects over her environment without allowing the film itself to revel in said superiority.
  10. The King
    The King benefits from a quality that's usually a liability in nonfiction films: Its scattershot structure gets at the truth of pop culture as an ineffable chimera that defines much of the world.
  11. The Catcher Was a Spy
    As the film proceeds, the appeal of its nostalgia wears thin and you may notice that there isn't much beyond the window dressing.
  12. Tag
    As dumb as Tag is on the surface, it offers amity, emotional support, awkward tears, the specter of death, and the spectacle of ass-punching slapstick all rolled up in one somehow cohesive collection of all-good spare parts.
  13. Incredibles 2
    Everything in Incredibles 2 is inexorably driven toward a big final blowout. That sequence is suitably grand and eye-popping, but haven’t we seen all of this before?
  14. SuperFly
    SuperFly is a slicked-up, tricked-out revamp that dispenses with any pretense of verisimilitude in favor of rap-video extravagance and mob-movie bloodshed.
  15. Gabriel and the Mountain
    The film seems to think that the mere recognition of Gabriel as a narcissist sufficiently complicates the character's sense of entitlement.
  16. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    J.A. Bayona's gothic flourishes suggest opioid hallucinations, and they're a welcome escape from the doldrums of the writing, but they seem at odds with the rest of the film.
  17. The Yellow Birds
    You may want for something to hold on to, but Tye Sheridan and Alden Ehrenreich slip through the fingers, both seeming uninterested and restless to move on to other projects.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Year of Spectacular Men
    The film collapses on the crutch of hackneyed narration and constant music cues that formally undermine the ripe banter between Madelyn Deutch and her male co-stars.
  19. Ocean's 8
    With Ocean's 8, Gary Ross serves up a mildly engaging riff on the heist film, but he rarely strays from the established formula of Steven Soderbergh's original Ocean's trilogy.
  20. Hotel Artemis
    Hotel Artemis quickly reveals its future setting as an empty pretext for a banally convoluted and sentimentalized show of emotional rehabilitation.
  21. Araby
    A carefree life on the move is steadily and exquisitely overtaken by melancholy in writer-directors João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa’s Arábia, the portrait of a meandering journey fueled by song, anecdote, and landscape that zeroes in on the pressures of contemporary Brazil almost in passing.
  22. Hereditary
    In writer-director Ari Aster's smugly agitating feature debut, the devil is certainly in the hackneyed details.
  23. Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist
    Lorna Tucker's documentary sustains a tone that oscillates between earnest admiration and wry exasperation.
  24. En el Séptimo Día (On the Seventh Day)
    On the Seventh Day brings a certain levity to wrenching matters of daily survival by thoroughly humanizing its characters, thus preventing them from feeling as if they're being written as stand-ins for thematic ideas.
  25. The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    The documentary provides little sense of intimacy with its subject, but it gives an in-depth look at the master chef's uniquely obsessive work habits.
  26. Hearts Beat Loud
    The steadiness with which Haley's film progresses through its dramatic beats is rather like its familiar-sounding indie pop, moving rhythmically toward a predictable climax whose emotional intensity feels unearned.
  27. Won't You Be My Neighbor?
    It captures the strength of Fred Rogers's convictions even as his gentleness and sincerity fell further out of favor.
  28. Nancy
    There's vanity in its boutique art-film brand of hopelessness, which derives from a fetishizing of "keeping it real."
  29. 211
    The film relegates Nicolas Cage to a supporting player and crowds him with considerably less charismatic performers.
  30. Adrift
    Director Baltasar Kormákur's film is a simple, acutely observed love story that also happens to be a rousingly stripped-down tale of survival.
  31. Breath
    This isn't a film about surfing so much as one about riding a wave that must eventually break and recede.
  32. American Animals
    As he showed in "The Imposter," writer-director Bart Layton knows how to spin a compelling yarn.
  33. A Kid Like Jake
    Though the film makes the important point that even the most liberal parents' acceptance of a child's difference may be repression by another name, it fails to excite sufficient sympathy for its broadly drawn principal characters.
  34. Rodin
    Jacques Doillon's shrewd ellipses emphasize time as a great and uniting humbler and thief, allowing stray moments to suddenly crystallize unexpressed yearnings.
  35. Upgrade
    Upgrade is most effective when mining the comical and bizarre love-hate chemistry between Grey and Stem and pairing that singular conflict with batshit-crazy action, but the film’s follow-through is clunky and unfulfilling.
  36. Ash Is Purest White
    It’s a quixotic and profound statement on the spatial and temporal dissonances that inform life in 21st-century China.
  37. Summer 1993
    The film's screenplay is impressive for how crucial plot points emerge as backdrops to the explicit purpose of a scene.
  38. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    The film's tagline goes “Talk to the girl. Save the world,” but at no point does Earth's fate hang in the balance, and talking to Elle Fanning's Zan is no great challenge for anyone.
  39. The Misandrists
    The sexual outbursts in the film are tempered with a tenderness that one hardly associates with Bruce LaBruce's career.
  40. In Darkness
    Anthony Bryne's high-flown style only serves to highlight the film's icky way of exploiting real-world tragedy for kicks.
  41. Pope Francis - A Man of His Word
    It often plays like a toothless PR video designed to rehabilitate the Catholic Church's reputation in the wake of its global pedophilia scandal.
  42. That Summer
    The makers of this rescued-footage documentary ultimately understand the power of its subjects' personalities.
  43. BlacKkKlansman
    Spike Lee styles the film as a popular entertainment, forgoing the theatrical satire typical of his late-period state-of-the-nation joints, like Bamboozled and Chi-Raq, and settling into the accessible rhythms of the contemporary sitcom.
  44. Book Club
    It’s been said that casting is 90% of directing, and it seems to be 90% of the writing in Bill Holderman's film.
  45. The House That Jack Built
    The film becomes an even broader consideration of individual fascinations and follies, of ways of responding to art without the boundaries of morality and reason.
  46. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    The imprint of Star Wars on everyday American life now feels so despotic that it's too much to ask a film like Solo to be moving or thrilling as a piece of cinema.
  47. On Chesil Beach
    The film’s imaginative daring springs from its willingness to render repression sexy, even if it will prove to be the seed of a young couple’s dissolution.
  48. Deadpool 2
    Deadpool 2 muddies the distinction between parodying comic-book-movie conventions and perfunctorily adhering to them.
  49. Sollers Point
    Sollers Point is a moving and elusive blend of naturalism and melodrama, less a character study than an analysis of a community.
  50. 3 Faces
    Whenever Panahi's architecturally rigorous study of the self, society, and artistic communion threatens to get too self-conscious or loaded, the filmmaker tends to leaven the tension with humor and gentle irreverence.
  51. Dark Crimes
    There’s a lot of sexual violence in the film, but it scans as unimaginatively repulsive, as well as blatantly misogynistic.
  52. First Reformed
    After more than 20 features, Paul Schrader has been reborn with First Reformed, an unhurried, furious, deeply agonized look at faith and skepticism that’s as reverent as it is blasphemous.
  53. Cold War
    The film is most exhilarating as a breathless vessel for mood, one that just so happens to conduct itself within reconstructed period settings that are as obsessively detailed as the reverently curated soundtrack.
  54. Breaking In
    James McTeigue's Breaking In is the sort of incompetently constructed thriller that gives B movies a bad name.
  55. Life of the Party
    Novelty and Melissa McCarthy’s comedic chops only carry Life of the Party to midterms, and it soon becomes apparent that it’s a star vehicle without any engine.
  56. The Escape
    It deals with a very ordinary emergency with deftness of touch, and the power of a singular performance.
  57. Filmworker
    Tony Zierra interviews Leon Vitali at length, and he’s a commanding camera object with an obvious wellspring of longing and pain.
  58. Everybody Knows
    Asghar Farhadi falls back on the expository dialogue and dubious perspectival shifts that he frequently resorts to as a means of wrapping up knotty narratives.
  59. The Day After
    As with most Hong Sang-soo films, it engages in intellectual gamesmanship while courting emotional pathos.
  60. 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.
  61. Beast
    The narrative has a gambit that steers Beast into the terrain of a horror film, offsetting the sentimentality of the audience-flattering romance.
  62. Terminal
    Terminal's actors are awkward and stiff in trying to project hard-boiled cool, and all while delivering lines that sound as if they had been passed multiple times through an online translation tool.
  63. The Seagull
    The film is content to present Anton Chekhov's ideas rather than grapple with their provocative and complex subtexts.
  64. Revenge
    Fetishism, parody, and various registers of violence propel a livewire thriller that mines the free-floating hostility existing between genders.
  65. Lu Over the Wall
    Throughout, director Masaaki Yuasa’s imagination runs so wild that it becomes impossible to resist.
  66. Overboard
    All of the broad physical humor in the world can't distract from the fact that the film is an endorsement of psychological exploitation.
  67. The 12th Man
    At 130 minutes, it isn't a short film, and its most intriguing elements, much like Baalsrud's rations, are in short supply.
  68. Angels Wear White
    In her understandable fury, Vivian Qu almost valorizes suffering, embracing it as a substantial signifier of identity.
  69. Racer and the Jailbird
    The film comes to concern a selfless martyr before morphing, most absurdly, into a disease-of-the-week tearjerker.
  70. Ray Meets Helen
    After 15 years away from the cinema, Alan Rudolph reminds one of the suggestive potency of his films.
  71. The Guardians
    The film captures the pictorial beauty of old-fashioned farm life, but director Xavier Beauvois is careful not to romanticize hard labor for its own sake.
  72. RBG
    The film rarely presents a clear analysis of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's victories, reducing her work to empty slogans.
    • 39 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Zoe
    Drake Doremus's compositions seem to be motivated by the idea that there’s no more profound image than sunlight reflecting off one-half of a character’s face.
  74. Tully
    In Marlo, Diablo Cody has created her most complicated character to date. Would that her writing displayed similar richness and empathy in painting the film's supporting characters.
  75. The Desert Bride
    As two-handers go, the film has a moderately compelling pair of performances at its center, with Claudio Rissi’s take on a fun-loving road warrior providing an amusing, if obvious, counterpoint to Paulina García’s reserved homebody.
  76. Mrs. Hyde
    Although the film never allows itself to be quite so freewheeling as Bozon’s earlier work, and pales as a result, one of its pleasures is how giddily it suggests its characters finding release from the bureaucratic rigmarole in minor though often inane ways.
  77. The Gospel According to André
    While many documentaries about notable figures feel the unfortunate need to legitimate their subjects with hyperbolic praise from recognizable sources, the film immediately runs the gamut in a manner that would be worthy of a mockumentary were it not completely serious.
  78. Avengers: Infinity War
    Infinity War is all manic monotony. It's passably numbing in the moment. And despite the hard-luck finish—something an obligatory post-credits sequence goes a long way toward neutering—it's instantly forgettable.
  79. Backstabbing for Beginners
    It fills the screen with a series of explicative conversations set in offices, hotels, and cars throughout which people don’t so much talk to each other as indirectly to the audience.
  80. Cargo
    Cargo makes the mistake of benching its menace, banishing the undead to blurred shots on the horizon, while doggedly pursuing its theme.
  81. Nana
    The film flattens Maryla's personal story into hazy generalities about tolerance and the value of remembrance.
  82. In the Last Days of the City
    By diagramming a vastly complicated metropolis like Cairo from an unabashedly first-person perspective, In the Last Days of the City interrogates middle-class privilege in a time of crisis as a series of either-ors: leaving for Europe or staying in Cairo, hiding at home or protesting in the streets, filming blindly or seeking retrenchment in broad certainty.
  83. Duck Butter
    The setup of a 24-hour relationship that bypasses the getting-to-know-you phase speaks to the nature of expedited modern dating culture, but despite its attempts at intimacy, Duck Butter is difficult to fall in love with.
  84. The House of Tomorrow
    The impressionistic tenor of the unabashedly energetic final sequences is so wondrous that you may wish that writer-director Peter Livolsi had utilized it as The House of Tomorrow's guiding principle.
  85. Traffik
    Deon Taylor seems uncomfortable with the escalating relentlessness of a siege film, eventually splitting Traffik off into a variety of other tangents and genres, diluting the potent subtext at the film's center.
  86. I Feel Pretty
    Rather than pointing the finger at society for inducing insecurity in women, I Feel Pretty suggests the onus is on women to change their attitudes.
  87. Pass Over
    Pass Over spins African-American hardship into existential myth, suggesting along the way such plays as Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit.
  88. Super Troopers 2
    Given the sheer amount of comic material here, some of the jokes are bound to fall flat, but the hit-to-miss ratio is depressingly low.
  89. The Devil and Father Amorth
    The Devil and Father Amorth is a flimsy stunt, but in his blunt, slapdash way, William Friedkin locates the intersection existing between religion and pop culture—a fusion that insidiously steers political currents.
  90. Ghost Stories
    In setting their play to film, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman decide where we look. Any magician would be jealous of that power. But it puts everything at a remove, trapping you in your own head.
  91. This Is Our Land
    Throughout the film, Lucas Belvaux sidelines the emotional textures that might complicate all his sermonizing.
  92. Little Pink House
    Courtney Moorehead Balaker's film is mostly a sobering dramatization of a true and controversial story in recent Connecticut history.
  93. Godard Mon Amour
    Michel Hazanavicius co-opts Jean-Luc Godard's personal life for cheap prestige-picture sentiment.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Broken Tower
    It’s tonally flat and a little too impressed with its own elliptical construction. Yet there’s something about Franco’s desire to escape the straitjacket of the biopic’s pat psychologizing and greatest-hits structure that makes his film feel at least honest in its missteps.
  95. Rampage
    Unlike 2014’s Godzilla, which benefited from director Gareth Edwards’s patience with the Jaws-style slow burn, RAMPAGE is all noise without crescendo.
  96. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    Director Jeff Wadlow's Truth or Dare is a startlingly mean-spirited but otherwise dimwitted horror film.
  97. Disobedience
    In the end, Disobedience is less about the subjugation of the self to the group than the courage to embrace uncertainty if one were to break out of the prison of a world one has been born into.
  98. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    It's true that the disorientation produced in the collision of Igorrr's frenetic style-mashing and Dumont's unadorned long-take aesthetic ensures that the film feels remarkably distinct from prior cinematic adaptations of Joan of Arc's life, but it's also hard not to wonder how this particular story might have played without the farfetched musical conceit grafted atop it.
  99. Hitler's Hollywood
    Rüdiger Suchsland’s film is a master class in the relationship between image production and ideology writ large.
  100. Marrowbone
    An incessant deluge of subplots drowns what could have been a sparse and beautiful ghost story.
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