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. Entanglement
    Ben doesn't deserve our sympathy, in part for how noxiously the film has imagined the female characters who surround him.
  2. Peter Rabbit
    Peter Rabbit plays like a country cousin to Paul King's Paddington films, similarly balancing slapstick, absurdism, and a touch of gross-out humor, though without King's transcendently oddball sensibility.
  3. The Ritual
    Eventually, the filmmakers reveal the secrets they'd previously withheld, spoiling the film's sustained mystique.
  4. Golden Exits
    Alex Ross Perry's characters are shrewd enough to recognize the irrational contours of their lives, which they diagnose and chew over in some of the most inventive, twisty, and richly ironic dialogue in modern American cinema.
  5. The Female Brain
    The Female Brain never seems quite sure whether it wants to probe the depths of its title subject or just make us laugh. And given the shallowness of its quasi-scientific blather and the tepidness of its comedy, it ultimately does neither.
  6. Basmati Blues
    Danny Baron's film awkwardly melds Bollywood romcom tropes with a half-hearted critique of the GMO industry.
  7. 24 Frames
    Movement and progress are the organizing principles throughout Abbas Kiarostami's final, posthumously released film.
  8. Bilal: A New Breed of Hero
    The animation feels like the result of the cold calculus of an algorithm rather than a human director with a personal vision.
  9. 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.
  10. On Body and Soul
    On Body and Soul's fusion of romance, comedy, ultraviolence, and political commentary has the logic of a lucid dream.
  11. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    Every pan and snap zoom and dissolve is exact, every whorl of smoke and wind-thrown swath of leaves pulled from a dream and placed methodically before our eyes.
  12. A Fantastic Woman
    Superficial when it means to be elliptical and regressive in its attempts to promote pride and tolerance, Sebastián Lelio’s film is beautiful but vacant, the type of melodrama that reminds us that they shouldn’t always make them like they used to.
  13. The Cage Fighter
    The Cage Fighter isn't sentimental about the notion of an aging sports hero who needs one more day in the proverbial sun, recognizing that desire as macho folly.
  14. Braven
    Lin Oeding’s action thriller thrives on both the beauty of its natural, snowbound surroundings and the brutal instincts of man.
  15. The Last Family
    The film tends to literalize its theme of unfulfilled desire by having characters explicitly lament their lost pasts.
  16. 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.
  17. West of the Jordan River
    Amos Gitai regularly takes incidents and anecdotes out of context, making it difficult for viewers who lack intimate knowledge of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to follow the proceedings.
  18. Have a Nice Day
    The film's pale-hued, Flash-like animation is abundant in detailed backgrounds that make the characters stand out like placards, allowing for Jian's critique of modern China to land with maximum force.
  19. The Competition
    The will-they-won't-they of the film is a non-starter, and as such the film's climax is stripped of suspense and even the most basic of dramatic payoffs.
  20. Please Stand By
    Dakota Fanning's Wendy is less a truly thought-through character than a compendium of quirks.
  21. The Clapper
    Though it pretends to stick up for all the schmucks in the world, the film is really just laughing along with the assholes.
  22. Like Me
    Like Me is exhilarating because of Robert Mockler’s willingness to deviate from his satire so as to surprise himself with seemingly spontaneous emotional textures and tangents.
  23. Pow Wow
    Its tension between ethnographic ensemble study and thesis-oriented docu-essay is irreconcilable.
  24. Den of Thieves
    Den of Thieves displays a reverence for the taut and moody tension-building tactics of Michael Mann's Heat, but without a single compelling character or backstory to speak of, it's unable to bring even a modicum of emotional resonance to action.
  25. Forever My Girl
    Forever My Girl makes one wonder if Bethany Ashton Wolf actually thinks this is what true love is like.
  26. 12 Strong
    As Nicolai Fuglsig doesn't allow any complicated thoughts about war, colonization, and mortality to hover around his characters, 12 Strong inevitably proceeds as a jaunty imperial adventure through the wilds of northern Afghanistan.
  27. Maze Runner: The Death Cure
    Emotional complication is what this film, so abundant in last-minute getaways, fake-outs, and half-hearted nods to the franchise's greatest hits, needed so as to elevate it out of its programmatic torpor.
  28. Mom and Dad
    Writer-director Brian Taylor's Mom and Dad invests a hoary conceit with disturbing and hilarious lunacy.
  29. The Final Year
    For liberals, The Final Year might become a kind of metaphorical marriage video that’s watched by divorcees who yearn of that initial hint of paradise.
  30. Beuys
    The film fails to seriously address Joseph Beuys voluntarily joining the Hitler Youth and serving with the Luftwaffe.
  31. Mary and The Witch's Flower
    This is a film about the adolescent pangs to belong that also mines its tale of magic and malevolence for an imaginative allegory about the excesses of scientific inquiry.
  32. The Road Movie
    The film is a doodle, but in its offhanded way, it effectively attests to the resolute nature of the Russian character.
  33. The Leisure Seeker
    No matter how likable Sutherland and Mirren are, they're still stuck in little more than an upbeat wish-fulfillment fantasy.
  34. Proud Mary
    Babak Najafi’s Proud Mary is a so-so action melodrama with an insulting whiff of generic blaxploitation stylistics.
  35. The Commuter
    The final optimism of the film's worldview lands with a conviction that's rare in contemporary Hollywood cinema—a resilience that's strong enough for Liam Neeson to ride out on.
  36. Bitter Money
    Wang Bing's documentaries are angry, raw testaments to the human spirit in the face of social injustice. In this regard, his latest, the harrowing, soulful Bitter Money, is fortunately no exception.
  37. Paddington 2
    A wilder, weirder, funnier, more heartfelt and eye-popping, and, above all, more fully realized representation of director Paul King’s eccentric sensibility.
  38. Saturday Church
    Writer-director Damon Cardasis follows a rather didactic approach to his 14-year-old's protagonist's plight in Saturday Church.
  39. My Art
    Laurie Simmons isn’t so much creating art as a means to explore cinema’s effect on identity as she is conducting an act of indulgence.
  40. Vazante
    Daniela Thomas seems stymied by her own images, unable to extract the turmoil and violence suggested by her story for fear of upsetting the austere surface harmony of her visuals.
  41. The Insult
    Ziad Doueiri's film is well acted and staged with periodic liveliness, but its earnestness grows wearying.
  42. Inside
    At best competently mounted and at worst a case study in watering down chaos for an American market.
  43. Humor Me
    Sam Hoffman respects his characters and evinces curiosity about their lives—and these qualities aren't to be taken for granted. But he isn't willing to disrupt his familiar and tightly structured plot.
  44. Insidious: The Last Key
    The fourth film in the Insidious franchise, directed by Adam Robitel, is lazy and sometimes even loathsome.
  45. The Strange Ones
    The film's mixture of sensationalism and self-conscious artiness is experimentally disingenuous at best.
  46. Blame
    In attempting to grapple with issues of bullying, mental health, burgeoning sexuality, and pedophilia, the film bites off more than it can chew.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In Between
    In Between is most affecting when its characters are at their least guarded, but as Nour, Salma, and Laila are hurt by those closest to them, Hamoud's film pulls back toward more formulaic expressions of conflict.
  48. Django
    The film's most crucial shortcoming lies in its failure to illuminate both the inner life of its subject and his artistic genius.
  49. Before I Wake
    Before I Wake's images have a pleasing straightforwardness that parallels the openness of the young protagonist's longing for love.
  50. Anatomy of a Male Ballet Dancer
    Lost, or at least merely glossed over, throughout this hagiographic documentary portrait is the miraculous story of an effeminate Brazilian boy who was actually allowed to blossom through dance and who, because of such permission, has managed to survive his queer childhood a little more unscathed.
  51. Father Figures
    Father Figures, which finished shooting more than two years ago before spending endless months without a release date, is both meandering and bloated, suggesting the Frankensteinian result of brutal test screenings.
  52. All the Money in the World
    As released, All the Money in the World is by and large a conspicuously manufactured thriller that moves between manipulative psych-outs.
  53. Happy End
    Happy End reveals itself as something vacuous and cold, a bizarrely seductive pseudo-thriller lacking a thoroughly worked-out payoff.
  54. Bright
    A welter of dissonant intentions, the film fails to seamlessly intertwine its elements of realism and fantasy.
  55. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    The film shows no interest in the inner workings of a relationship that’s defined by unusual circumstances.
  56. The Greatest Showman
    The Greatest Showman‘s spectacle is overshadowed by its archaic and misguided notions of American exceptionalism.
  57. Pitch Perfect 3
    Women deserve a better vehicle for demonstrating the power of female solidarity than this empty money grab.
  58. In the Fade
    In the Fade is executed with precision, particularly the third act, in which the film morphs into a tense yet unconvincing revenge thriller.
  59. Hostiles
    Scott Cooper's film moves at a funereal pace, implicitly celebrating its sluggishness as a mark of integrity.
  60. The Ballad of Lefty Brown
    For what it's worth, Jared Moshe seems genuinely interested in the role of unflagging decency in a sullied world.
  61. Crooked House
    Gilles Paquet-Brenner's film is ultimately a genre item that operates on alternately prestigious and campy autopilot.
  62. Ferdinand
    Any potential subtext of Munro Leaf's children's book has been bleached out in the marketplace-oriented Ferdinand.
  63. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    The latest entrant in this now-Disney-owned franchise is largely content to further the themes and narrative strategies of J.J. Abrams's predecessor.
  64. Miss Kiet's Children
    Childhood in Peter Lataster and Petra Lataster-Czisch's documentary is the terrain of contradiction and ambiguity.
  65. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    The film is unable to reconcile a desire to ridicule its own artifice with constant attempts to foster genuine empathy and dramatic tension.
  66. Birdboy: The Forgotten Children
    Alberto Vázquez and Pedro Rivero's film is a phantasmagoria of impressionistic horror, at once despairing, beautiful, haunting, and surreal.
  67. The Pirates of Somalia
    Writer-director Bryan Buckley's film is ultimately more interested in the journalist than his story.
  68. Phantom Thread
    Phantom Thread arrives at a place of qualified peace that cauterizes the emotional wounds of Paul Thomas Anderson's cinema.
  69. The Post
    No American film since Zodiac has exhibited such a love for the way information travels than The Post, but it's nonetheless steeped in self-congratulation.
  70. November Criminals
    The film advances that old Hollywood trope: Blacks can't get justice unless whites are willing to get it for them.
  71. I, Tonya
    The film’s habit of courting and then insulting the viewer is a conscious nod to the cycles of abuse that mark Tonya Harding’s story, but the filmmakers’ attempts to implicate their audience are I, Tonya's broken shoelace, too pat and glib to be convincing.
  72. My Happy Family
    It casually lays out the domestic space where the story’s events takes place with acutely detailed cultural specificity.
  73. The Shape of Water
    The Shape of Water has been made with a level of craftsmanship that should be the envy of most filmmakers, but the impudent, unruly streak that so often gives Guillermo del Toro’s films their pulse has been airbrushed away.
  74. 24 Hours to Live
    Brian Smrz never contrasts the film’s violence with stillness, allowing the audience to enjoy a sense of foreboding escalation.
  75. Shadowman
    This is a gruesome art-world fairy tale unafraid to face the bitter details of its hero's tumultuous life.
  76. Voyeur
    It's hard to come away from the film feeling anything but disdain and a twinge of embarrassment toward Gay Talese.
  77. The Dancer
    Like Loïe Fuller's serpentine dance, the film is structured on repetition: spinning and spinning but never actually taking us nowhere.
  78. Naples '44
    It’s far too scattershot, bouncing from one topic to the next with the carelessness of someone flipping through a book and reading from a random page.
  79. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
    The unvaried register of the filmmaking leads the narrative to feel aimless and dramatically inert.
  80. The Man Who Invented Christmas
    Since “humbug” is already spoken for by Ebenezer Scrooge, “opportunistic” would be the most apt word for The Man Who Invented Christmas.
  81. Antiporno
    Sion Sono, allergic to subtlety, is terrified that we won't notice his detonation of Nikkatsu's sexploitation traditions.
  82. Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
    The film curiously steers toward surmising Hedy Lamarr's psychological state as it pertained to love and pleasure.
  83. Brimstone & Glory
    Through its energy and inherent beauty, Brimstone & Glory hits concurrent notes of peril and bliss, but even at a scant 67 minutes it can seem a bit aimless and scattershot.
  84. Coco
    The film brings Pixar's customary emotional directness to a festive, reverent, and wide-ranging pastiche of Mexican culture.
  85. The Star
    Director Timothy Reckart's The Star turns the greatest story ever told into just another kids' movie.
  86. Wonder
    The film has an almost pathological need to ensure that everything turns out well for every single character, while at the same time eliding any truly difficult issues.
  87. Justice League
    When the film's tone slides so firmly back into the murk, it's hard not to see DC's notion of heroism as borderline nihilistic.
  88. Wet Woman in the Wind
    Akihiko Shiota's sketch-like scenes have an eccentric and volatile intensity, as the filmmaker stages subtly theoretical moments that still allow for spontaneity.
  89. The Breadwinner
    Cross-dressing in the story is merely a tool for survival, but such border-crossing is inevitably rife with unintended consequences beyond narrative ones.
  90. Sweet Virginia
    Sweet Virginia doesn’t have much of a point, as its characters are reductive variables in an inevitable equation of carnage.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Song of Granite
    It's funny that the film spends so much time caught up in Joe Heaney's feelings of displacement, because it produces a similar sensation in viewers by forgoing the work of narrative and character development in favor of a stark, elliptical style that becomes tiresome.
  92. American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein
    As Ridgen and Rossier take pains to point out, a man so rigorously committed to putting an end to oppression ought not be so easily dismissed, even if coming to grips with such a challenging figure may be finally as difficult as getting to the bottom of the Arab-Israeli conflict itself.
  93. Big Sonia
    Cinema has rarely mined the consequences of being a child of a Holocaust survivor and Big Sonia adeptly explores how, in many cases, losing much of one's family led many survivors to put undue pressures on their future children.
  94. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
    The film is about the idea of Andy Kaufman, about how artists channel their influences and keep the dead alive.
  95. Daddy's Home 2
    The film portrays parenting as the death of manhood, a final surrender to the castrating effects of domesticity.
  96. I Love You, Daddy
    It’s as exhilaratingly honest and unshackled a work as many have come to expect from this auteur of cringe comedy, one that foresees, absorbs, and responds to all possible bile that might be directed its way, knowing full well of the muck it dredges up.
  97. Porto
    It grapples with emotional enigma of infatuation, and the question of how such a mighty force can also be so fleeting.
  98. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    Throughout the film, a promising character study is smothered beneath lazy genre machinations.
  99. Murder on the Orient Express
    Once the film gets to the Orient Express, it's as if Kenneth Branagh is always itching to get off of it, even having Hercule Poirot at one point look over a list of names while standing atop the train for no discernible reason, except perhaps to enjoy the way the sun peeks out between two distant mountain peaks.
  100. A Bride for Rip Van Winkle
    The film is an interminable saga full of soap-operatic plot twists involving quickly broken marriages, sexual assault, a secret porn career, terminal illness, and a quasi lesbian love affair.
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