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. The Quake
    When the devastating quake finally strikes, it creates a truly suspenseful scenario of vertiginous falls and last-minute saves.
  2. Sisters
    Though Sisters is an undeniably tight homage to Hitchcock from an obviously indebted De Palma, I am still inclined to place it at least a tier below the likes of Dressed to Kill and Body Double.
  3. Lethal Weapon 2
    But while the story may not be especially memorable, Jeffrey Boam’s brisk screenplay and Donner’s workmanlike direction keep things moving enough to gather enough momentum in preparation for Gibson’s third-act, tear-down-the-house rampage.
  4. I Am Divine
    Though it may boil down to your average procession-of-talking-heads template, it's still enlivened by the raucous words from the band of outsiders who supported and launched Divine into the limelight.
  5. Studio 54
    The documentary nurtures our sympathy for Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager without shortchanging their hypocrisies.
  6. Mother of Flies
    Despite the affinity the Adams clan has displayed for spooky, goopy imagery in the past, Mother of Flies finds them reluctant to fully exercise those talents for fear of tipping their hand.
  7. Wuthering Heights
    In whittling down Emily Brontë's romance to its most earthly aspects, Andrea Arnold stylizes herself into an unavoidable corner.
  8. Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
    The film curiously steers toward surmising Hedy Lamarr's psychological state as it pertained to love and pleasure.
  9. Merchants of Doubt
    An issues documentary that scores its points through a seductive combination of clearly stated arguments and pithy humor.
  10. Martin Margiela: In His Own Words
    Reiner Holzemer’s adulation of his subject feels most credible because he spends a lot of time focusing on the clothes.
  11. Ted K
    Tony Stone’s avoidance of emotional manipulation in dramatizing Ted Kaczynski’s terror campaign is admirable, but only up to a point.
  12. The Lady in the Van
    The film's annoying glibness is neatly summarized by the line: "In life, going downhill is an uphill job."
  13. The Bellboy
    The Bellboy clearly sets a standard of self-involvement and examination in Lewis’s work that is so successfully hermetic that it scarcely needs the approval of the audience.
  14. Rampart
    Not only does its incredibly loose aesthetic challenge the traditionally controlled and slick conventions of the cop genre, it adds a certain visceral haziness that compliments Brown's own professional and personal immorality.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Painting (Le Tableau)
    Its aesthetic employs expressionism, realism, and cubism, but the morality plays are layered on as thickly and haphazardly as a toddler's finger painting.
  16. The Poseidon Adventure
    A nightmarishly schematic fantasia of guiltless discomfort.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Student
    If Santiago Mitre doesn't transcend the issues of the writer's film with quite the grace of A Separation, he nonetheless manages to make good use of a fine cast.
  18. 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.
  19. Alone
    John Hyams’s film refutes the frenetic clichés of so modern American thrillers.
  20. Late Night
    The film lacks for the more lacerating, freely parodic energy of The Larry Sanders Show and 30 Rock.
  21. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story
    Weird accordingly (or is it accordion-gly?) takes everything to new heights of glorious ridiculousness.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Duellists
    The Duellists explores its own unique thematic terrain and limns its characters’ psychology with a perspicacity that’s all its own.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    City Slickers
    Equally self-reflective and enjoyable is the score by Marc Shaiman and Thomas Richard Sharp that cuts a sweeping western theme into the waltz and college-sports tunes that color the film’s animated title sequence and then throughout its more comic set pieces—not even cutting out entirely during Crystal and company’s rendition of the Bonanza theme song. Rather, like the film itself, it beautifully accents Crystal’s high notes.
  24. Knife + Heart
    The film quickly settles into a holding pattern of repetitive porno-movie hijinks and increasingly listless murder scenes.
  25. I Don't Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman
    The documentary is an attempt to capture something of Akerman's infectious spirit and thirst for worldly experience, as both an artist and a human being.
  26. 1922
    Zak Hilditch's 1922 informs Steven King's pulp feminism with primordial, biblically ugly force.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last One for the Road
    The Last One for the Road gives itself over to an aimlessness that doesn’t so much reflect the characters’ lives as it does the script’s lack of commitment to interiority.
  28. The Boys in the Band
    This new Boys in the Band is a Matryoshka doll of period piecery, a flashback of a flashback of a flashback.
  29. Life of Riley
    Alain Resnais's overpoweringly beautiful final film dares to push through the ghosts that inhabit the present, standing between the pessimism of an ill-spent past and the optimism of an undefined future.
  30. 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.
  31. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
    Jia Zhang-ke’s film is a quietly reflective, intermittently rambling rumination on an explosively momentous period in Chinese history.
  32. Remembering Every Night
    The film is a gentle evocation of contemporary Japanese life in its pleasures and frustrations.
  33. All About Nina
    Right out of the gate, the film only sees a kind of blunt irony in this blurring of her public and private selves.
  34. The Old Guard
    Though it smartly prioritizes the bond of relationships over action, the film is in the end only somewhat convincing on both counts.
  35. Only the River Flows
    The craft brought to bear on Only the River Flows is captivating, but when it comes to matters of story, it cultivates a frustrating air of disinterest.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    !Women Art Revolution
    Unlike Pamela Tanner Boll's truly inquisitive "Who Does She Think She Is?", which delves deeply and personally into the lives of a handful of working artist moms, Hershman Leeson introduces us only superficially to her dozens of pioneering friends.
  37. Contagion
    A germophobe's worst nightmare, Contagion touches on all the dramas big and small, mostly big, we've come to associate with catastrophes such as this, and does so as if it were hurriedly going down and adapting a list of bullet points, never lingering on any one drama in a particularly meaningful fashion.
  38. Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
    The film pulls back the veil on Kurt Vonnegut to show how a gloomy dissatisfaction brooded underneath his quippy surface personality.
  39. The Ugly Stepsister
    Emilie Blichfeldt knows the exact point of queasiness to which she can push an audience and gradually tests how much further she can move that mark with each successive scene.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Faults
    The film obliquely addresses its narrative mysteries through the conversational cracks of two people in enforced proximity.
  41. The Nile Hilton Incident
    The film may not reimagine our sense of how the ties that bind bad men are rewritten in times of war, but it nonetheless gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in such times.
  42. Color Out of Space
    The film is a vivid depiction of how a confrontation with the unknown can so easily shatter the fragile bonds that hold us together.
  43. The Peanut Butter Falcon
    The film’s improvisational feel helps to ground a fable-esque narrative in a discernible reality.
  44. Madonna: Truth or Dare
    In essence, Truth or Dare is less of a concert film than an elaborately constructed exegesis on pop mythmaking and the construction of identity.
  45. 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.
  46. Epicentro
    It alternates political ponderings with a loose and discursive subtext in which Hubert Sauper explores the idea of Cuba as an island paradise.
  47. Berlin Syndrome
    Until its hasty climax, Cate Shortland's film is rewardingly patient and psychologically cogent.
  48. The Day Shall Come
    The film is an aimless, albeit sometimes funny, chronicle of absurd behavior and government ineptitude.
  49. Materialists
    As its second half begins to focus more on Lucy’s dating dilemma, and how she’s forced to confront her firmly established beliefs and rules about dating, the film hews increasingly close to the narrative expectations of the traditional rom-com.
  50. Portrait of a Garden
    Portrait of a Garden‘s distance from its human subjects forestalls the film’s momentum and strips it of a heart.
  51. War Pony
    The filmmakers never effectively detail the characters’ relation to the various cultural, psychological, or historical intricacies of their milieu.
  52. No Sleep Till
    Uncertainty extends to the film’s mood, which fluctuates between dreamy ennui and slowly escalating dread.
  53. The Phoenician Scheme
    The raw emotion underlying The Phoenician Scheme peeks out at unexpected times.
  54. Louder Than Bombs
    Louder Than Bombs is a parable that takes depression seriously as a condition and a state of being.
  55. Scarred Hearts
    Despite the film's bleak premise, writer-director Radu Jude finds dark humor within the certainty of death.
  56. 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.
  57. Paulina
    It's unsettling and disconcerting in its complex examination of the gray area that lies between the morals we conceptually hold and the actions we’re willing to perform to affirm those beliefs in the world.
  58. Sicilian Ghost Story
    The film is determinedly unclassifiable, blurring genres with a fervor that grows tedious.
  59. Happy Christmas
    Joe Swanberg's films have grown into a reliable relief from the competitive, dehumanizing freneticism of much of American culture, marked by an affirming and understated sense of decency.
  60. Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie
    Inflammatory talk-show host Morton Downey Jr. sparked, delighted, and quickly faded like a firecracker--not unlike the erratic, quick-fire presentation of his persona in this documentary.
  61. The Threesome
    The film effortlessly melds its sadcom properties with more predictable rom-com traditions.
  62. Relay
    Set to the rhythms of a pulsing, ultramodern New York milieu, the film, at its best, wrings real tension and excitement out of the simple exchanging of clandestine messages and sensitive information.
  63. Violation
    Violation impressively pushes against the typically straightforward trajectory of the rape-revenge film.
  64. Gods of Mexico
    If Gods of Mexico harkens back to certain traditions of visual representation, Helmut Donsantos’s counterintuitive recombination of what would seem to be mutually exclusive inspirations, each with its own temporal framework, allows him to offer for our contemplation a vision uniquely his own.
  65. Mohawk
    Ted Geoghegan's Mohawk is a survival-of-the-fittest film that's charged with a thunderous urgency.
  66. Boy
    Less concerned with rendering the specifics of its setting (a small Maori town on the New Zealand coast) than in calling on bouts of whimsy and superficial cultural signifiers to approximate the headspace of its central characters.
  67. Handling the Undead
    For how committed it is to convincing the audience of the profundity of a rudimentary point, the film’s measured pacing comes to feel like a kind of torture.
  68. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
    Some pleasingly odd visuals and a sustained off-kilter mood will likely please many animation fans who haven’t had any exposure to the source material, but Pierre Foldes’s film ultimately fails to create any clear identity of its own.
  69. Kicks
    It's less notable for its originality than for how dynamically it blends a few styles that ultimately prove incompatible.
  70. The Mermaid
    It offers a wonderful visual reprieve from the cumbersomely mechanized aesthetic of so much contemporary fantasy.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    In Another Country
    Hong Sang-soo hits the beach once again in his latest project, another austerely amusing study of hopeless neurotics making a mockery of leisure.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brave
    Pixar's latest ultimately offers nothing more than a caricature of a well-worn conceit.
  73. The Last Time I Saw Macao
    The essayistic remembrances provide the filmmakers with a brilliant exit strategy when the noir business has nowhere to go but in circles.
  74. Viva
    The drag in the film rejects the U.S.-centric obsession with "realness" and the acrobatics that come with it.
  75. The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
    The film is an object lesson in what can result when a work of art subordinates itself to a message.
  76. Redoubt
    Matthew Barney re-instills nature with some of the mystic aura that modernity, with its technologies and techniques of knowledge, has robbed it of.
  77. Censor
    Censor unfortunately pulls back from its social interrogation just when it’s working up a head of steam.
  78. Palo Alto
    It presents little that wasn't already done better in "Myth of the American Sleepover," an equally evocative tale of longing that was far more successful at matching teen tropes with atmospheric naturalism.
  79. Sex
    The film’s microcosm of dysfunction is convincing for how it depicts an ongoing, even never-ending, struggle to define oneself.
  80. Body Double
    Body Double, while not his finest, is the best candidate as De Palma’s signature film. It’s a wicked, feature-length double entendre from a Doublemint era. Take it at face value, take it for its prurience or take it for all it’s worth. Hell, try taking on all three at once.
  81. Here Comes Mr. Jordan
    Death is a many-splendored thing in Here Comes Mr. Jordan, which treats the possibility of an afterlife not with somber religious symbolism, but a keen sense that a human being’s mortal end must be understood for its corporeal difficulties.
  82. Lion
    Lion's faults of structure and pacing might limit its power, but in stretches it still roars.
  83. Amour Fou
    Jessica Hausner is less interested in historical revisionism than mining this real-life tragedy for its existential thrust.
  84. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    The film's refusal to produce a campy critique feels more like the product of lack of imagination than a purposeful repudiation.
  85. Rocketman
    As a musical, Dexter Fletcher’s film is just fun enough to (mostly) distract us from its superficiality.
  86. Eating Raoul
    A delirious rejoinder to the post-sexual revolution counter-culture wars, director Paul Bartel’s script crosses the let’s-get-down-to-social-brass-tacks satire of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which was respectfully vindictive of Los Angeles’s middle-class hedonism, with the straight-faced über-misanthropy of Kind Hearts and Coronets.
  87. Head Games
    While Steve James's documentary is persuasive on an informational level, it doesn't do enough to explore the human side of its subject matter.
  88. Hannah Arendt
    The film's most striking quality, and it's not insignificant, is director Margarethe von Trotta's refusal to fossilize the controversies she dramatizes.
  89. Fatima
    The film appears to have been devised to pander to the presumptions of Western, liberal viewers.
  90. The Little Hours
    For all its hip ludicrousness, The Little Hours has a point: to almost earnestly riff on how atheism has taken hold of 21st-century America, by rooting our nation’s moors in a time of great austerity, sexism, classism, and persecution.
  91. Diamond Island
    The filmmaker brings enough original aesthetic touches to the table, as well as a fresh cultural perspective to the broader socioeconomic issues he broaches, that Diamond Island rarely feels derivative.
  92. Meantime
    Leigh captures the restless, maddening, emasculating, demoralizing stench of poverty and unemployment with an acuity and piquancy that’s nearly unrivaled in cinema.
  93. Evil Dead Rise
    Lee Cronin serves up considerable gore with monotonous, po-faced earnestness.
  94. It
    It cashes in on trendy retroism instead of utilizing the perspective of, to borrow from Joni Mitchell, seeing clowns from both sides now.
  95. Funny Games
    Haneke's admonishments are disturbing only in the sense that they're never self-critical, and while watching one of his films, there's always a sense that he thinks he's above his characters, his audience, and scrutiny.
  96. Digging for Fire
    Reminiscent of Woody Allen's great, under-sung Manhattan Murder Mystery, it utilizes a pulp conceit as a shorthand for the regrets that bubble up in a marriage.
  97. Tuesday
    This is a film of tremendous emotion, spirit, and paradoxically restraint and ambition.
  98. White Building
    The film’s depiction of life impacted by urban transformation conjures a palpable aura of entrapment and helplessness.
  99. The Sleeping Beauty
    Judging from The Sleeping Beauty, and the previous "Bluebeard," the provocations stop with the choice of the material, as the tone and style of these films are jarringly well-behaved.
  100. The Vigil
    Keith Thomas’s film hums with uncanny dread, milking the close juxtaposition of living and dead for all its worth.
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