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. Bitch
    Initially offbeat, Bitch awkwardly pivots toward a more inspirational story of regret and reconciliation.
  2. As You Are
    The outline of Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s As You Are is certainly well-worn, but this coming-of-age film nonetheless stands out for its nuanced sense of detail and the sympathy it extends to its main characters.
  3. Flesh and Blood
    Mark Webber's stripped-down approach renders the messy, unglamorous lives at the film's center with dignity.
  4. Mayhem
    Like so many shoot-‘em-up video games that repeatedly break for cutscenes, the film too often diffuses its tense energy by whipping up context.
  5. Princess Cyd
    Stephen Cone's Princess Cyd is distinguished by a dramatic complexity that would seem to run counter to its remarkably even-tempered tone.
  6. A Gray State
    Erik Nelson's film straddles a fine and admirable line between lurid sensationalism and sober humanism.
  7. A Bad Moms Christmas
    The pressures of Christmas prove too great to fight off and the need for feel-good holiday cheer inevitably veers the film toward half-hearted, sentimental drama that seems purely obligatory to its seasonal milieu.
  8. Dream Boat
    If the global reunion that the cruise ship presents here is such a panacea, why is there so much moping?
  9. 1945
    The fractured rhythm of 1945 and the desolate aesthetic are engrossing, but Ferenc Török's film doesn't linger.
  10. Thor: Ragnarok
    Thor: Ragnarok is the flamboyantly roller-disco entry in an already uncomplicatedly cartoonish side franchise.
  11. Blade of the Immortal
    Takashi Miike's film is a work of robust genre craftsmanship that's informed with a sly sense of self-interrogation.
  12. LBJ
    By pairing down Lyndon Baines Johnson’s multifarious life and career to this one piece of legislation, the film fails to do justice to both the man and the fraught times he so fundamentally influenced.
  13. 11/8/16
    Too often, the documentary’s highly calibrated curation reduces its subjects to mere demographic representations.
  14. Gilbert
    Gilbert exposes a wealth of unsuspected pain and tenderness beneath Gottfried's often thorny exterior.
  15. My Friend Dahmer
    The film wants to treat Jeffrey Dahmer like a character, but it invariably frames him like a specimen.
  16. Thank You for Your Service
    The film is admirably frank in its depiction of lingering trauma but too often struggles to capture its more ineffable qualities.
  17. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
    It's an exercise in joviality, unflinching in its love for Joan Didion, and unwilling to be much more.
  18. Novitiate
    The film's meditative and excessive sides never quite cohere, giving the impression of watching two distinct films that are jostling against each other, rather than united in a single story.
  19. God's Own Country
    Writer-director Francis Lee captures not only what masculinity does and how it comes undone, but the complex apparatus that keeps it into place: the family’s surveillance, the silence, the shame.
  20. The Work
    In its visceral purity, Jairus McLeary's film drags male toxicity up into the light, offering it as a cure for itself.
  21. The Divine Order
    The film's performances and narrative flounder to strike the right balance between comedy and drama.
  22. Amityville: The Awakening
    Franck Khalfoun's Amityville: The Awakening is an elegant entry in a lame series of horror films.
  23. All I See Is You
    The longer things drag out, All I See Is You becomes every bit as amorphous as its protagonist's vision.
  24. Suburbicon
    Suburbicon sees a bunch of candidly left-leaning movie stars doing their best to out-awful each other.
  25. The Snowman
    The Snowman is missing so much basic connective tissue as to be rendered almost completely inexplicable.
  26. Only the Brave
    Joseph Kosinski's Only the Brave displays a kinship to Howard Hawks’s hard-nosed, old-fashioned pragmatism.
  27. 1922
    Zak Hilditch's 1922 informs Steven King's pulp feminism with primordial, biblically ugly force.
  28. Tragedy Girls
    The film's central theme, about where attention-starved narcissism leads when taken to extremes, isn't quite sufficient to sustain an entire feature.
  29. Dealt
    Richard Turner is a charismatic subject who demands more than a conventionally entertaining documentary.
  30. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    The characters' emotional vacancy feels like another auteurist tic to which Yorgos Lanthimos is dauntlessly committed.
  31. Liberation Day
    Throughout, the documentary wavers between a sincere investigation of the avant-garde music group Laibach and self-satire.
  32. One of Us
    It's incisive in its condemnation of the oppression innate in the social structure of Brooklyn's Hasidic communities.
  33. Leatherface
    Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury's anonymous work here could've been overseen by any hipster looking to make a mark at Platinum Dunes.
  34. Kills on Wheels
    Writer-director Attila Till is content to indulge a complication-free mix of bloodshed and pathos.
  35. Jungle
    Greg McLean and screenwriter Justin Monjo faithfully hit the key plot points of Yossi Ghinsberg's 1993 book Back from Tuichi but fail to sell the severity of the threats Yossi confronts.
  36. Wonder Wheel
    The tone throughout vacillates wildly from silly comedy to classic Hollywood melodrama, and all of it feels as artificial and unsatisfying as the cotton candy twirling in a vending cart.
  37. The Foreigner
    Even overlooking its fictionalized account of an inexplicable political resurgence, the film falters in its needlessly convoluted plotting.
  38. Marshall
    Marshall arguably intends for societal 20/20 hindsight to provide the bulk of perspective throughout.
  39. 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene
    78/52 comes to life when riffing on the psychosexual perversity of Psycho, which changed cinema's relationship with sex and violence.
  40. 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.
  41. Happy Death Day
    Happy Death Day twists the inherent repetitiveness of slashers to its advantage by exaggerating it to an impossible degree.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Professor Marston & the Wonder Women
    Throughout, internal conflict becomes external, and the passions and irrationalities of human emotion are condensed into explanatory dialogue.
  43. Sylvio
    Sylvio's banal depictions of everyday loneliness through the diurnal tedium of an anthropomorphic animal brings to mind BoJack Horseman, but without the caustic navel-gazing and self-destruction or the mordant pop-culture musings.
  44. M.F.A.
    Natalia Leite's ambition and accompanying uncertainty give the film its unruly and resonant energy.
  45. Breathe
    The film is an easily digestible replica of the truth, bathed in honeyed cinematography and sentimentalized adulation.
  46. The Departure
    The Departure presents patterns in suicidal people while according them humanity, which isn’t a small accomplishment.
  47. Lady Bird
    A uniquely American comedy, Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird is testy, humane, and firmly rooted in its time and place.
  48. Wonderstruck
    Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck is a coming-of-age tale as curiosity cabinet, a flowchart of narrative fragments that steadily build to a high-concept finale as ludicrous as it is emotionally audacious.
  49. Blade Runner 2049
    Denis Villeneuve’s film is designed to reward the audience for recognizing references in the midst of an action pursuit, and, after an hour or so of the clipped and earnest signifying, one may find themselves nostalgic for Ridley Scott’s unforced indifference to the issue.
  50. My Little Pony: The Movie
    Visually plain and ploddingly paced, My Little Pony: The Movie suggests four episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic smushed together with a Sia music video tacked on at the end.
  51. The Mountain Between Us
    Hany Abu-Assad’s film is notable for the way it fixates on its characters’ rush toward survival, homing in on the intimacy that they achieve without ever suggesting that there’s any actual romance in their future.
  52. Dina
    We come to understand the camera’s distance from its subjects as an act of respect that allows the complex, funny, and indomitable personalities to shine through.
  53. Paradise
    Andrei Konchalovsky's film is more than an exercise, as pitiless moments accumulate with enraged relentlessness.
  54. Walking Out
    Walking Out is modest in scope, its concerns limited to man’s attempts to live both morally and harmoniously with nature.
  55. Call Me by Your Name
    Call Me by Your Name is a fairly straightforward coming-of-age story that's at its finest in moments when the relationships take on larger meanings than their literal context implies, and Luca Guadagnino finds evocative aesthetic expressions for them.
  56. Brawl in Cell Block 99
    Brawl in Cell Block 99 rarely drags, even when delivering exposition, and the economy of the storytelling is as efficiently brutal as the eventual skull-crackings.
  57. Una
    The film gives Una a little more agency, but director Benedict Andrews often invalidates such empowerment.
  58. Chavela
    The film's hopscotching-in-time structure, informed by specific remembrances of Chavela Vargas's life, is refreshingly unconventional.
  59. Assholes
    It begins as a clever pseudo-mumblecore provocation with shades of Bruce LaBruce only to quickly turn into indefensible nonsense.
  60. Darkest Hour
    The film reinforces only the most simplistic and patriotic vision of Churchill, its closed-off view of the man reminiscent of the many tracking shots that wind through the underground tunnels of the U.K.‘s war command, constantly peeking into rooms with classified meetings as doors are abruptly closed to keep them secret
  61. The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)
    Noah Baumbach has made a cunning and frequently hilarious film about exhuming the past and finding no diamond in the rough.
  62. Goodbye Christopher Robin
    A sweet ode to childhood innocence turning sour upon its introduction to the public is an intriguing notion, but Simon Curtis incomprehensibly crams the events of Christopher’s early childhood stardom, his difficulty coping with the ubiquity of his namesake’s legacy, and his ultimate defiance of his father into less than one-third of the film.
  63. The Square
    While Ruben Östlund’s mastery of visually amplifying social unease is still very much intact, he’s partially undone here by his own thematic ambition, which, in scene after exquisitely staged scene, threatens to put too fine a point on otherwise thrillingly indeterminate situational comedy.
  64. Last Flag Flying
    Last Flag Flying is colored by how time reshapes our sense of self, embracing some memories while occluding others, and the film ingeniously folds the viewer into a similar state of reflection and uncertainty about previous eras of false optimism about national values.
  65. American Made
    Doug Liman may effectively maintain a madcap energy through to the end, but unlike Adam McKay or Martin Scorsese, he isn't all that interested in explicating the complex inner workings of vast criminal enterprises.
  66. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    Mark Felt is a kind of hagiography, and it leans toward whitewashing its subject's legacy, which extends even to the man's illegal break-ins and wire-tapping of the leftist activist group the Weather Underground.
  67. Gerald's Game
    Mike Flanagan is an un-ironic humanist, which is rare in the horror genre. And this admirable quality trips the filmmaker up in the second half of Gerald's Game, which pivots on Jessie learning to stand up to diseased masculinity.
  68. 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.
  69. Super Dark Times
    The transformation of a teen into a serial killer isn't credible compared to the portrait of idle suburban adolescence.
  70. Lucky
    John Carroll Lynch's Lucky is an impeccably acted yet sentimental film that’s bashful about said sentimentality.
  71. Thelma
    Thelma's transition into a paranormal thriller doesn’t complicate its initially potent character study.
  72. Loving Vincent
    Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's film is driven by an off-putting and oxymoronic fusion of reverence and egotism.
  73. Stronger
    David Gordon Green zeroes in on the intricacies of Jeff Bauman and Erin Hurley's dysfunctional relationship, offering up an unassuming portrait of wounded love and solitude reminiscent in its sense of detail of the filmmaker's early work, like All the Real Girls.
  74. Gaga: Five Foot Two
    Far from seeming like a strategic element created to define Lady Gaga's reinvention, the documentary instead feels like a natural outgrowth of it.
  75. Woodshock
    It becomes the obnoxious equivalent of trying to have a serious conversation with people who are high out of their minds.
  76. Friend Request
    The viewer anticipates satire from such a sociologically loaded premise, but director Simon Verhoeven and co-writers Matthew Ballen and Philip Koch predictably utilize Facebook for the purpose of superficially spit-shining another wanly Americanized J-horror retread.
  77. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    The film’s cumulative effect is utter exhaustion, the cinematic equivalent of chasing a toddler through a toy store.
  78. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    The hollow grandeur of the film's action only gives the proceedings a glib undertone that also undermines the rare occasions of earnestness that the heroes exhibit toward fallen comrades.
  79. First They Killed My Father
    First They Killed My Father is less interested in global politics than in offering an intensely experiential tapestry of war and invasion as witnessed by a child.
  80. Faces Places
    Agnès Varda and JR's film develops into something approaching a manifesto for the possibility of shared happiness.
  81. Last Rampage
    Although Last Rampage's overarching narrative travels a well-tread road, it strikes a number of potent grace notes along the way.
  82. The Force
    Though initially compelling, Peter Nick's documentary is fundamentally without a clear perspective on its subject.
  83. Victoria and Abdul
    By privileging the white characters in its narrative, Victoria & Abdul exposes itself as insidiously hypocritical.
  84. Bobbi Jene
    Elvira Lind's film is closer to an advertisement for Bobbi Jene Smith than a film about the contemporary dancer.
  85. Thirst Street
    It’s a testament to Nathan Silver’s keen sense of observation that we don’t want the film to turn decisively into thriller terrain.
  86. The Disaster Artist
    James Franco's The Disaster Artist perfectly conveys the surreal hell of what the production of Tommy Wiseau's The Room must have been like.
  87. mother!
    If Black Swan was filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's fevered valentine to the artist's self-abnegating drive toward greatness, then Mother!, his loudest and most comprehensive work to date, is either a critique of or a doubling down on that impulse.
  88. The Future Perfect
    The Future Perfect has the texture of a novella that keeps reworking the same idea in successively intricate ways.
  89. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
    The film is the finest balance yet of Martin McDonagh's bleak sense of humor and offbeat moral sincerity.
  90. Dayveon
    Shot in 4:3 with sliver-thin depth of field and a lush palette of swampy greens, Amman Abbasi's film is largely predicated on the idea of imparting a hyperreal sensuality to a region not often depicted on the big screen.
  91. Battle of the Sexes
    Battle of the Sexes sacrifices some of its innate appeal by making ham out of the supposed relics of a less enlightened era.
  92. Brad's Status
    The film is less contemptuous of Brad than compassionate: brutally honest about his faults, yet ultimately understanding of them.
  93. Indivisible
    Edoardo de Angelis's coming-of-age portrait is poignant when fixated on the intricacies of a complicated sisterhood.
  94. Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards
    Michael Roberts's documentary is an unabashed exercise in deifying its subject matter with superlatives and hyperbole from the mouths of talking heads, which ultimately results in the cheapening of the artist.
  95. Red Trees
    The banality of Marina Willer’s voiceover only goes to prove the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words.
  96. Rat Film
    Inherent to director Theo Anthony's misappropriation of the essay form is a conflicting account of precisely which history his documentary seeks to investigate.
  97. Downsizing
    Alexander Payne's defenders might call his often acidic touch Swiftian, though it comes off more toothlessly noncommittal.
  98. Molly's Game
    There's a blank space at the core of Molly's Game that the protagonist cannot fill, unable as she is to represent anything beyond her esoteric narrative of unorthodox self-actualization.
  99. EX LIBRIS: The New York Public Library
    Frederick Wiseman is a portraitist of ideals, of the insidious inspirations and nightmares that enable and undermine them, and, implicitly, of the political waves that have yet to balance this duality of first-world life.
  100. The Florida Project
    Sean Baker spends much of The Florida Project charging in vigorously nimble fashion up and down the stairs of the Magic Castle, in and out of its rooms, investing the minutia of the down-and-out lives within this little ecosystem with a bittersweet energy and significance.
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