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. Come Sunday
    In the film, Joshua Marston leaches the narrative of nearly all the social texture that infused and empowered “Heretics,” the 2005 episode of the This American Life podcast that inspired this biopic.
  2. An Ordinary Man
    Yes, deep down, even brutal war criminals like the one played by Ben Kingsley are people too.
  3. Krystal
    The gravity of Krystal's situation is undermined at every turn by the filmmakers' excessively broad, comedic strokes.
  4. Borg vs. McEnroe
    Even the depiction of how both men waver during the Wimbledon final — of Borg losing his cool while McEnroe avoids succumbing to petulance — fails to tie into the larger portrait of their rivalry.
  5. Submergence
    Submergence's globetrotting only succeeds at exposing the hollowness of the characters at the film's center.
  6. Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
    The effect of Sophie Fiennes's unmoored approach to her subject is to take us out of normal time and put us on Grace Jones time.
  7. Aardvark
    The film adopts a half-hearted variation on A Beautiful Mind's gimmicky approach to grappling with a man's mental illness.
  8. Good Luck
    Good Luck's political implications—most prominently that the almighty dollar is humanity's enduring slave master—are expertly woven into the hallucinatory aural-visual fabric of the film.
  9. Mary Shelley
    In its final act, the film abandons its fruitful investigation of belief systems in favor of a simplistic articulation of Mary's inspiration.
  10. Where Is Kyra?
    Terror gradually leaks into the narrative, transforming Where Is Kyra? into a haunting non-traditional thriller.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Chappaquiddick
    John Curran creates room for his characters to think and feel and an environment that encourages us to do the same.
  12. You Were Never Really Here
    Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here could be considered artsy exploitation, a film whose formal dexterity belies its debts to its chosen, and quite squalid, genre.
  13. Samson and Delilah
    By examining the relationship between Samson and Delilah through the wrong end of the telescope, Thorton soaks in the arid, unaccommodating surroundings with occasionally oxymoronic lucidity.
  14. A Quiet Place
    The pleasure of A Quiet Place is in John Krasinski's commitment to imagining the resourceful ways in which a family might survive in this kind of world, then bearing witness to the filmmaker's skillfully constructed methods of putting them to the ultimate test, relentlessly breaking down all of the walls the family has erected to keep the monsters out.
  15. Spinning Man
    The film is ultimately tethered to the strictures of a procedural thriller, as it's rife with functional dialogue and plotting as well as forgettable aesthetics, which cumulatively reduce the existential calisthenics to filler.
  16. Sweet Country
    The film is a meticulous examination of how the dehumanization of Australia's native population bred an environment of cyclical violence and mistrust.
  17. Blockers
    Viswanathan, Newton, and Adlon generate a bit of chemistry throughout, but it's undermined by the fundamentally mechanistic nature of Brian and Jim Kehoe's screenplay, which ultimately forces these girls' experiences into neat little scenarios that are constructed every bit as didactically as a workplace training video.
  18. Big Fish & Begonia
    In the sly exchanges between the teenage protagonists and their elders, the film reflects a nation's shifting tides.
  19. Lean on Pete
    As sharply as it delineates an America of spotty, informal economies, the film avoids articulating most of the people who live and work in these spaces.
  20. The Endless
    Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead veer away from the deeper, even meta-cinematic, implications of their plotting.
  21. Personal Problems (1980)
    Bill Gunn and Ishmael Reed collapse conventional notions of reality, providing simultaneous glimpses into the minds of dozens of characters, lingering on scenes and informing them with confessional intensity.
  22. Love After Love
    In every scene, the film's cutting is dictated by the turbulent pace of the characters' inner lives.
  23. Ava
    The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.
  24. Ava
    The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.
  25. Ready Player One
    It's a boldly attempted strike against the monolithic corporatization of fan service, and arguably one of the few films that defines dystopia as nothing less than a marketplace of trademarked, cross-promotional intellectual property. In other words, our here and now.
  26. Cocote
    Nelson Carlo de Los Santos's first fiction feature is a dazzling collage of styles and approaches in which every scene feels different from the one that came before.
  27. Gemini
    With Gemini, Aaron Katz does his cover of the Los Angeles-set murder mystery, homing in on the genre's evocative loneliness.
  28. First Match
    After a certain point, Olivia Newman's film treats the womanhood of its main character as an afterthought.
  29. All I Wish
    Writer-director Susan Walter's film seems almost determined to disprove the causality of social phenomena.
  30. Milla
    Valérie Massadian's Milla begins with a stylistic bait-and-switch that neatly summarizes the film's overall sense of formal balance.
  31. The Last Movie Star
    The film is a collection of old-fogey clichés, with a narrative that mixes a career retrospective with a road trip.
  32. Outside In
    Lynn Shelton's film firmly resists supplying its main characters with easy, you-can-have-it-all answers.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Beirut
    Brad Anderson's Beirut doesn't quite make foreign espionage look fun, but it shows how it might appeal to the sort of masochist who's also an adrenaline addict.
  34. Sherlock Gnomes
    Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary characters feel as if they've been air-dropped into a universe where they don't belong.
  35. Midnight Sun
    Throughout, the film's tone vacillates jarringly between corny, broad humor and unrestrained treacle.
  36. Makala
    Emmanuel Gras resists pitying or sentimentalizing his main subject, or exalting him merely for his resilience in the face of such a harsh, uncaring reality.
  37. Paul, Apostle of Christ
    The film's simple, redundant, but valuable moral lesson to its audience finds comfortable enough expression in an aesthetic that's banal but impressively consistent.
  38. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Steven S. DeKnight's film lacks for Guillermo del Toro's visual acumen, but it makes up for that with an energetic sense of chaos throughout its front-and-center skirmishes, and in the end hedges closer to the nightmarish intensity of such inspirational texts as Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion.
  39. Roxanne Roxanne
    One presumes that Michael Lerner's sense of emphasis is meant to humanize Shanté, defining her apart from the fame she achieved, but this stratagem backfires as Roxanne Roxanne mires itself in scenes of speechifying domestic strife.
  40. MATANGI/MAYA/M.I.A.
    Stephen Loveridge fully understands that even the trifurcated title of his film may not be entirely equipped at capturing the extent of M.I.A.'s many-faceted identity.
  41. Beauty and the Dogs
    The film savors its obviousness and cruelty as badges of honor, reducing itself to a technical polemic.
  42. Final Portrait
    As seen through James Lord’s eyes, the dramas and passions on display throughout the film come off as melodramas and grotesqueries.
  43. Back to Burgundy
    Cédric Klapisch correlates wine’s complex arrangement of flavors to the complexity of memory itself, which, it should be said, is the most nuanced of the filmmaker’s wine metaphors.
  44. The Workshop
    Matthieu Lucci deftly carries the weight of all the symptoms that The Workshop loads upon Antoine, a resonant character whose inscrutability is at once dangerous, sympathetic, and eerily apt.
  45. Tomb Raider
    This isn’t an adaptation of a video game so much as an adaptation of a video game’s tutorial level.
  46. 12 Days
    With a tender and respectful gaze, 12 DAYS (@distribfilmsus) sheds light on the relationship between the French state and the mentally ill.
  47. Flower
    Flower is a sentimental work of faux nihilism, pandering to children who’re just discovering alienation.
  48. Allure
    Evan Rachel Wood and Julia Sarah Stone have a natural chemistry together that brings a feverish and unsettling intensity to their characters' tumultuous relationship, but there's no reprieve from the dour tone of the film.
  49. Journey's End
    Director Saul Dibb has infused his adaptation of R.C. Sherriff's play with a striking sense of urgency.
  50. Josie
    Complicating Sophie Turner's character would have allowed the film to feel as if it had more on its mind than pulling the rug out from under us.
  51. Dear Dictator
    The potential comic absurdities of the premise are squandered as soon as the film settles into a tepid coming-of-age tale.
  52. Keep the Change
    With a surprisingly compassionate eye, the film susses out the comic and tragic elements borne from the daily struggle of living with autism.
  53. Gringo
    The circuitous narrative of Nash Edgerton's Gringo is such that it never allows for a character or storyline to develop in a particularly efficient way, as every few minutes an abrupt twist or turn sets things off in a new and unexpected direction.
  54. The Strangers: Prey at Night
    Opening with the pulsing synth lines of Kim Wilde's “Kids in America,” Johannes Roberts's film announces itself as a looser, bouncier, more self-consciously frivolous effort than its now decade-old predecessor.
  55. The Outsider
    The film is subsumed by the unshakable sense that Jared Leto is intended to make Martin Zandvliet's take on the yakuza underworld more palatable for American audiences.
  56. Claire's Camera
    Hong Sang-soo's film is governed by a narrative circle that suggests relief as well as entrapment.
  57. A Wrinkle in Time
    The film may involve the instant movement among unfathomable distances and the shattered limits of space and time, but it’s only Storm Reid's character who feels multidimensional.
  58. Leaning Into the Wind
    The film has a wandering, lonely purity. We feel as if we've been allowed to fleetingly swim through Andy Goldsworthy's psyche.
  59. The Death of Stalin
    Armando Iannucci satirizes the manner in which political power is accorded to those who can mask cutthroat ambition behind an outward projection of bland inoffensiveness.
  60. The Forgiven
    Roland Joffé's film is largely successful in its attempt to grapple with the terrible truths of apartheid and its legacy.
  61. Thoroughbreds
    Cory Finley's screenplay is full of sharp, exactingly timed exchanges whose rat-a-tat rhythms exert a spellbinding pull, even if the dialogue at times comes off as artificial and mannered.
  62. Death Wish
    At a time when Americans are constantly bombarded with reports of unpunished police brutality, the film suggests that the true problem with justice in our country is that law enforcement isn't violent enough.
  63. Infinite Football
    Corneliu Porumboiu resists spelling anything out but the bare essentials, instead continuing his project of inviting viewers to closely parse the acerbic day-to-day banalities of post-Ceausescu Romania.
  64. Souvenir
    Huppert is such a master of her craft that even the silliest sequences give way to tour-de-force moments.
  65. Hondros
    Chris Hondros sought to reconcile peerless beauty with unfathomable atrocity, and Greg Campbell’s film follows suit.
  66. Oh Lucy!
    Atsuko Hirayanagi's feature-length directorial debut offers a surprising take on the tricky art of communication.
  67. Mohawk
    Ted Geoghegan's Mohawk is a survival-of-the-fittest film that's charged with a thunderous urgency.
  68. Love, Simon
    Greg Berlanti's charmingly heartfelt film is a remarkably successful attempt to give shape to the experience of the closet by drawing an incredibly intimate portrait of a teenage boy about to leave it behind.
  69. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
    In directly requesting the audience's trust, Travis Wilkerson initiates a not-particularly-inviting proposition for the viewer, and specifically the white American viewer.
  70. Submission
    This tentative questioning of the sometimes unscrupulous methods and deleterious consequences of political correctness is further undermined by Ted's insipid character and general indifference to his fate.
  71. Werewolf
    The film achieves a strange irony, as its formal abstractions serve to heighten our emotional connection to the characters.
  72. The Vanishing Of Sidney Hall
    The seesaw of effect of oscillating between extolling Sidney’s genius and lingering on his anguish begins to feel like a child slowly burning an ant with a magnifying glass, occasionally taking breaks to truly savor the harm he or she is committing.
  73. Foxtrot
    Icy absurdism and sorrowful ironies abound throughout Samuel Maoz's Foxtrot, whose laughs stick in your throat like the silent screams of its Job-like protagonist.
  74. 7 Days in Entebbe
    The conflation of historical complexities makes for cheap pathos throughout, complete with weeping mothers and the seemingly endless dredging up of the terrorists' obvious moral equivalence.
  75. Every Day
    Throughout, the film raises metaphysical issues of physical and psychological autonomy only to gloss over them.
  76. Mute
    Mute is so slow and arbitrarily over-plotted that it's difficult to believe that Jones also directed the spry and enjoyable Moon and Source Code.
  77. Every Day
    Throughout, the film raises metaphysical issues of physical and psychological autonomy only to gloss over them, probably because addressing them could too quickly shut down the romance.
  78. Game Night
    The film establishes coherent characters and drops them into a twisty mystery plot that’s tightly crafted enough to generate some real narrative momentum while never getting too bogged down in its own plot that it forgets to be funny.
  79. Annihilation
    Annihilation gets momentum from the deeper it pushes into the uncertainties of ecology and the self.
  80. Half Magic
    The film displays a sprightly tone and blissful sense of liberation in charting the exploits of characters seeking to live by their own feminine-centric rules.
  81. Unsane
    Even Unsane's most ridiculous moments coast on the sheer energy of Steven Soderbergh's aesthetic gamesmanship.
  82. November
    Rainer Sarnet is as invested in telling a convoluted story that feels rooted in millennia-old folklore as he is in unabashedly experimenting with form and style for the sake of visual pleasure alone.
  83. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    The film is disarming for its sincerity, unalloyed in its positive thinking but unafraid of showing the gruesome details of alcoholism and denial to back up its bromides.
  84. El Mar La Mar
    The film's approach to exploring the Sonoran Desert and topic of immigration often veers toward the avant-garde.
  85. Beast of Burden
    The film’s flashbacks, which are either too clipped or excessively scored, effectively step on the actors’ toes.
  86. The Young Karl Marx
    The film is ironically gripped by the sort of ideological "vagueness" that Krk Marx dismisses throughout.
  87. Isle of Dogs
    Anderson is clearly a massive talent working, again, in his prime. However uncomfortable, it's crucial to ask what gives him the right to romp around in all these signifiers in service of bespoke whimsy—but then the word for it isn't “right,” but rather privilege.
  88. Red Sparrow
    The way that Dominika is at once completely transparent and at the same time impossible to read is Red Sparrow's most intriguing through line, not least of which for the way that Jennifer Lawrence makes you grasp the canny mental gymnastics that her character has to do in order for everything that she says to be at once truth and obfuscation.
  89. Loveless
    One feels in the film's punishing bleakness a yearning for transcendence.
  90. Tehran Taboo
    The film is full of astute, and poetically staged, critiques of the parallel worlds resulting from Iran's police state.
  91. The Party
    It captures the qualities of live theater that are rarely transmitted to film, of being immediate, alive, and spontaneous, as if the viewer is just a stone's throw away from the characters.
  92. Looking Glass
    There's no follow-through or follow-up on how the main character's voyeurism informs his burgeoning sexual perversions.
  93. Early Man
    The clash between prehistoric pastoralism and technological progress at the center of the film is laden with potential for biting comedy, but Nick Park flattens the conflict into a series of slobs-versus-snobs clichés.
  94. Double Lover
    Though Double Lover has a slight oneiric quality from the start, it grows increasingly delirious, the plot threads knotting in convoluted patterns and the overall mood more and more ridiculous.
  95. The Boy Downstairs
    Endeavoring to give us a post-mumblecore spin on Annie Hall, writer-director Sophie Brooks seemingly fails to understand what made Woody Allen's film so appealing: its rich, multi-faceted characterizations.
  96. Nostalgia
    Mark Pellington's Nostalgia is less a living, breathing film than a presentation of sentiments revolving around a pat question: Are the objects of our lives merely detritus, or are they vital to our identities?
  97. The 15:17 to Paris
    One misses the prismatic structure of the 15:17 to Paris book, which fuses multiple points of view and which is reduced by Dorothy Blyskal's script to cut-and-pasted bromides.
  98. Fifty Shades Freed
    James Foley’s film suggests that any semblance of capitulation on Christian’s part is a win for Ana and women at large, even if that momentary triumph leads to a further sacrifice of Ana’s independence.
  99. Black Panther
    Michel B. Jordan plays Erik Killmonger with such moving, occasionally gut-wrenching commitment that it nearly mitigates the goofiness of his moniker and the superficiality of the film in toto.
  100. Permission
    Brian Crano is as skittish as his protagonists are about the particular contours of their dilemma. To put it bluntly, Permission is a sex film without the sex.
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