Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Sworn Virgin
    Given its nearly episodic structure, formal choices, and similar thematic inquiries, Sworn Virgin suggests an unofficial remake of Vivre Sa Vie.
  2. L'Immensità
    By turns wry and tragic, but never glib or mawkish, this is a visually rich and evocative drama about navigating the often treacherous path to adulthood.
  3. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    It resonates as a portrait of artists trying to figure out their own paths toward making valuable contributions to the world.
  4. Fort Tilden
    It elegantly evolves from an absurdist comedy into a remarkably wounded and uprooted story of friends who're beginning to tire of their shared social cocoons.
  5. Prisoners
    Possibly year's most immaculate-looking drivel, a prismatically shot whodunit abundant in red herrings, but lacking in moral contemplation.
  6. The Last Circus
    Subscribes to the belief that moderation is a four-letter word, flying about with an abandon that begets exhilaration as well as exhausting messiness.
  7. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
    The film ends on a note of courage, and a call-to-action that we "remember," naturally, but we can't completely buy it: What Freidrichs has accomplished is a portrait of unknowability.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Exit Elena
    Nathan Silver's film is a quiet and affecting micro-budgeted drama, its condensed frame evoking the claustrophobic feeling of the household it examines.
  9. Bird People
    Pascale Ferran's film isn't daring enough to fully embrace the narrative fragmentation that it sporadically assumes.
  10. A Murder in the Park
    Its wholly complex and provocative social pleas slip too frequently into the seedy realm of journalistic exploitation.
  11. Our Last Tango
    Throughout the documentary, the question of truth is equated to the essence of the tango.
  12. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    Wang Bing intends to give back to the inmates the opportunity for individual expression that society has robbed them of.
  13. My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To
    Jonathan Cuartas’s film vividly diagnose a sickness of insularity endemic to middle-class America.
  14. The Whaler Boy
    The film is a vivid rumination on the fuzzy border between fantasy and reality.
  15. Best Wishes to All
    The film is comic yet vicious and cynically bleak in its portraiture of Japan’s silent plague.
  16. Inside
    Charles Williams’s feature-length directorial debut, Inside, centers on a trio of dangerous men who are forced into each other’s orbit, leading to an outcome that’s both violently chaotic and tragically predictable.
  17. Theater Camp
    The film feels like sitting through extended acting exercises where everyone is giving it 110% every take.
  18. Where's My Roy Cohn?
    This sharp, to-the-point portrait of the crook, fixer, and right-wing pitbull resists the urge to darkly glamorize him.
  19. The Walk
    In order to make the walk, and in order for it to matter to him, Philippe Petit has to comprehend it as real and impossible. Zemeckis teaches us the same lesson.
  20. Veni Vidi Vici
    The film’s humor is a clenched-fist assault on runaway greed and systemic corruption.
  21. Dior and I
    Bolstered by deft editing that keeps the proceedings moving at a light, graceful clip, this behind-the-runway look at one of fashion's legendary brands has a sleek, efficient stylishness in keeping with its subject.
  22. Plan 75
    Because so much of Hayakawa’s film is given over to depictions of the procedures, formalities, and impersonal administration that define Plan 75, even the tiniest spark of feeling comes as a relief.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Companion
    The film trenchantly satirizes 21st-century romance while delivering the gory genre goods.
  24. A Complete Unknown
    The bevy of documentaries, narrative films, and books about Bob Dylan’s breakout, ascent, and impact on the 1960s pop zeitgeist could fill a library, which makes this oversimplified retread of the same topic all the more tedious and superfluous.
  25. Long Way North
    Even if Long Way North's narrative makes for a bland frame, there’s no denying the beauty of the picture it holds.
  26. Maidentrip
    A coming-of-age journey of self-realization, made immensely more involving by virtue of being seen through its subject's first-person perspective.
  27. Manon of the Spring
    This tonal shift transforms Manon of the Spring from a caustic morality play into something more reflective, an elegy to a way of life whose residents did not fully appreciate until they themselves had helped to end it.
  28. The Bikeriders
    The sheer exuberance of the story and the stylistic brio of Jeff Nichols’s direction often compensate for the film’s lack of authenticity.
  29. The Broken Circle Breakdown
    Felix Van Groeningen's film owes more than a debt to the unwieldy narrative schematics of Susanne Bier's narratives.
  30. 1900
    Bernardo Bertolucci’s film is a living, fluid organism that spans the distances between several poles of extremity.
  31. Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet
    Jesse Vile's film, despite its best intentions, is merely a serviceable extension of his own fandom.
  32. Passione
    Expressionistic rather than analytical, Passione, John Turturro's cinematic ode to the music of Naples, Italy, unfolds as a compendium of tuneful performances bracketed with the barest of contextualization.
  33. Portrait of Wally
    The conclusion is a testament to the fact that authentic justice is probably only attainable by accident.
  34. Art Bastard
    Robert Cenedella exudes humility even as he sounds off against the societal forces that anger him and fuel his work.
  35. All These Sleepless Nights
    Director Michal Marczak's film finds a unique vitality in its densely constructed environment.
  36. Gabrielle
    Writer-director Louise Archambault's neatly affirmative denouement is at odds with the more uncertain reality occurring at the edges of the film's drama.
  37. Resurrection
    The film is one of the more intrinsically frightening evocations of a traumatized mind since Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me.
  38. Final Portrait
    As seen through James Lord’s eyes, the dramas and passions on display throughout the film come off as melodramas and grotesqueries.
  39. Her Smell
    A story of filth and fury and, eventually, of placidity and peace, Her Smell is Alex Ross Perry’s most chaotic and unmuffled film — until it isn’t.
  40. The Nice Guys
    Shane Black's The Nice Guys doesn't want for great exchanges, and even disposable conversations brim with acidic wit.
  41. The Little Prince
    As preachy and repetitive as The Little Prince can be, it offers enough moments of poetry to keep it flirting with greatness, or at least goodness.
  42. A Ciambra
    First the film inhabits the eye of a storm—which is to say, the storm of Italy’s wretched peripheries—before submitting to the more ersatz cinematic will of filling Pio’s life with beginnings, middles, and ends.
  43. A Traveler's Needs
    Hong Sang-soo’s films have tricky narrative juxtapositions and symbols that often render potentially mundane moments transcendent.
  44. Cutter's Way
    One of the final triumphs of the New Hollywood era, Cutter’s Way belongs on the shelf of fans of both Cassavetian hyperreal melodrama and Pakula-esque political thrillers.
  45. Spring
    It bridges the cautionary elements of a horror film with the wish-fulfilling platitudes of a touristy romance.
  46. More Than Honey
    Markus Imhoof's film reveals itself as a curious, audacious mix of personal essay film and nature documentary.
  47. Hedda
    Tessa Thompson's presence is captivating, as she relishes in exploring her character's gleeful and occasionally anxious villainy.
  48. Nakom
    Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman's film immediately announces itself as a modest triumph of world-building.
  49. The Friend
    Hardly a false note is sounded throughout The Friend, but it operates within such a limited emotional range that it drifts into monotonic plainsong.
  50. Colossal
    When the film's whirligig plotline goes off-rail in the heady final act, Oscar and Gloria's origin story bends over backward to justify a magical-realist conceit that was more fun without explanation.
  51. Bad Lieutenant
    It is boldly NC-17, but unlike most exploitation cinema, Ferrara can’t seem to help himself from making the film a personal, frightened psychic diary, a pitiful shriek for help, and a powerful statement about how even the damned can achieve a moment of fleeting grace.
  52. The Revisionaries
    Scott Thurman captures not only the fear and anti-intellectual resentment and insecurity that govern the dictations of the far right, but also the rampant unchecked egotism.
  53. Emilia Pérez
    If a musical is supposed to communicate things that can’t be conveyed through normal dialogue, Emilia Pérez’s biggest problem is that it falls prey to redundancy, regurgitating the same ideas about identity, desire, violence, and redemption, betraying how little it has to say in the first place.
  54. Sword of Trust
    Marc Maron’s commanding aura of regret gives the film, despite its missed opportunities, an emotional center.
  55. Monkey Man
    Monkey Man is in no rush to get where it’s going and Dev Patel puts a lot of trust in his audience to stick with him to see where it arrives.
  56. Herself
    Phyllida Lloyd’s film cannot escape its own somewhat mundane self-set contours.
  57. 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.
  58. Test
    Adept as both timely character study and epochal drama, Test wonderfully manages fully formed humanism without sentimentality.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Mia Madre
    The film is a carefully measured and satisfying, albeit occasionally deaf-tone, suite of fleeting, dispersed impressions.
  60. Sun Children
    The film tends toward the dramatically monotonous, but its unwavering sense of purpose ensures that it’s also compellingly human.
  61. Infested
    If Infested had given us a little more reason to invest in its human specimens than in the blunt mechanics of its genre trappings, then maybe some of the commentary would have clung to us like the webs do to the spiders’ victims.
  62. John Lewis: Good Trouble
    The film is well-outfitted with telling, thematically rich shards of historical information.
  63. Turn Me On, Dammit!
    Nothing here is wrong, but beyond pointing out that sexually charged teenage girls are likely to be misunderstood in an oppressive small town, there's nothing that's especially insightful here either.
  64. Paddleton
    The film largely plays its scenario with a straight and gooey face, coaxing its actors to indulge their worst tendencies.
  65. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
    Despite one or two moments of Venture Brothers-worthy fancy, the film is as by-the-numbers as any this series has ever offered.
  66. Hunter Gatherer
    A deliberately offbeat characterization of mental illness, Hunter Gatherer is ultimately a failed act of empathy.
  67. Sin Alas
    The film's Cuban specificity comes to seem like an opportunistic locale for reenacting a decidedly art-cinematic legacy.
  68. Sleep Tight
    The states get higher with every breadcrumb Luis Tosar's creep lays down, and the film derives sometimes remarkable corkscrew tension from watching him being backed into a corner.
  69. The Brand New Testament
    At first, the film’s dark humor is amusing, only for it to wear off once an actual plot kicks into motion.
  70. Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision
    For all of its evident toil in recreating historically accurate environments and researching the precise conditions in varying regions, it has little force as a work of cinema.
  71. Bugs
    It begins as a gleeful deadpan comedy and ends up as an exasperated cri de cœur against our current system of industrialized food production and distribution.
  72. Of Fathers and Sons
    The film's verité approach risks humanizing Abu Osama, but we eventually gain a complex understanding of the banality of his evil.
  73. 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.
  74. Together Together
    Ed Helms and Patti Harrison’s wonderful rapport helps to keep the film grounded in the recognizably real.
  75. Sun Don't Shine
    Amy Seimetz's intoxicating slice of genre revisionism earns its "neo" prefix, envisioning a brightly sinister world where desperation is the new normal.
  76. Far from the Tree
    The very act of having kids and demanding perfect conformity from them is never questioned by the film.
  77. The Skin I Live In
    This is a beautiful vision, but in telling too many flowery secrets, it's also one that unnecessarily keeps its queerness in the closet.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Tall Target
    As in Reign of Terror, Anthony Mann fashions a noir mini-masterpiece out of incongruous period reconstruction.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
    It captures a kind of essential form of self-expression (and pleasure) that exceeds categorization, creating a shared experience between the musicians, the filmmakers, and the viewer that feels sublime.
  80. The Italian Job
    The Italian Job isn’t the first movie to take car chases into strange and new environments, but it sure is creative.
  81. Who You Think I Am
    Unlike the novel, the film ultimately trades its main character’s account of her own suffering for her therapist’s pathologizing assessment.
  82. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    Walter Salles reinforces the impression of Jia's own art as emerging fluidly from the vagaries of his own life and socioeconomic position.
  83. Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice
    BenDavid Grabinski’s film is less of a crime drama than a punch-drunk comedy of errors.
  84. Post Tenebras Lux
    Carlos Reygadas's latest, an almost impossibly intellectual film, keeps us at a remove that's as striking as that which separates its main character from the lower classes.
  85. Sunshine Superman
    It depicts counterculture where those stranded outside the barriers of conventional society seek to push past natural boundaries to intermingle with the metaphysical in midair.
  86. Nenette and Boni
    A sibling drama of unsentimental urban grit and swooning lyricism, Nénette and Boni meditates on the myriad permutations of love and sensuality, from familial longings to food fetishes.
  87. Tragic Jungle
    It operates in an ambiguous register, suggesting that a woman is working in unison with nature to dole out revenge for their exploitation.
  88. 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.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dead Don't Hurt
    Ultimately, the didacticism of Viggo Mortensen’s film lets it down.
  90. Meet the Patels
    In this picaresque documentary, the lightly comic musings of a likeable, somewhat nerdy Indian-American actor go surprisingly deep.
  91. A Man Called Ove
    It's emotionally manipulative, but its two leads find a core of humanity even in the most calculating plot machinations.
  92. On the Job
    A nose-to-the-ground crime thriller that also doubles as a wide-ranging portrait of official corruption in the Philippines, On the Job has little trouble delivering the genre goods.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Informant
    It creates a useful distance between Brandon Darby and his stories that allow for us to assess them individually, reinforcing the film's suggestion that the truth is elusive.
  94. Tel Aviv on Fire
    Playfully biting as it can be, Tel Aviv on Fire tends to falter when it loses sight of the target of its satire.
  95. Stop the Pounding Heart
    Roberto Minervini has created a moving portrait of feminism born out of hard work and intuitiveness, but he never belittles or condescends to the faithful.
  96. The Offence
    Few genre films come as close to entering the abyss as Sidney Lumet’s The Offence, which effectively plays out as one elongated interrogation both of a single witness and the tortured psyche of Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery).
  97. Nightmare Alley
    Guillermo del Toro's remake of Nightmare Alley is less a living and breathing movie than a fossilized riff on the idea of a movie, particularly the American noir.
  98. Belladonna of Sadness (1973)
    Eiichi Yamamoto's cult anime strikes a perfect balance between midnight-movie enchantment and arthouse sophistication.
  99. Rotting in the Sun
    At once an excoriating satire of the performativity of homosexuality within a social media-addled community as well as a seemingly earnest lament for the total loss of collectivity, the film minces neither words nor bodily appendages.
  100. Teddy Bear
    From its title to its closing caress, Mads Matthiesen's film skates perilously close to the cliff's edge of mawkish sentiment.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »