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. My Psychedelic Love Story
    In Morris’s best films, such as The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, there’s a sense that the director is truly simpatico with his subjects. In My Psychedelic Love Story, though, Morris lets a fading never-quite-legend blather her way into a trap.
  2. Tahrir: Liberation Square
    A direct-cinema document of the Cairo protests that toppled Mubarak, Stefano Savona's film doesn't pretend that Egypt's resolution has yet won a lasting victory.
  3. A Life in Dirty Movies
    Wiktor Ericsson emphasizes one of the strongest and most distinctive features of Joseph Sarno's aesthetic: his concentration on female pleasure.
  4. The Unknown Known
    Viewers' tolerance for Errol Morris's apparent sheepishness will hinge on their prior appreciation of the filmmaker's investigative acumen.
  5. I Am Greta
    Even though it’s about a person who speaks with courage about the urgency of the global crisis, I Am Greta itself doesn’t possess enough of that urgency.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Nov 9, 2020
  6. Kill Me Please
    Anita Rocha da Silveira’s slasher-film plot is simply a tease, as there are no scares here, and the filmmaker’s attempt at genre hybridization never coheres conceptually.
  7. Operation Avalanche
    The film attains a chilly existential quality as Matt Johnson's character discerns the weight of his actions.
  8. Fire in Babylon
    Perhaps because the Caribbean serves as its main setting, Fire in Babylon simply can't help but take it easy.
  9. Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel
    The film captures Vreeland's perhaps unwitting philosophical integrity just as much as it drowns us in the exuberance of her work.
  10. This Is Not Berlin
    Hari Sama never quite manages to seamlessly sync the film’s anti-bourgeois political commitments to its soap-operatic register.
  11. The Dry
    The particulars of the central mystery are mundane, to the point where the film itself doesn’t spend too much time digging into them.
  12. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    The conclusion suggests the film exists to affirm the preconceived desires and perceptions of its makers.
  13. Kill It and Leave This Town
    Mariusz Wilczyński’s animation style strikes an unlikely balance between the childlike and the proficient.
  14. 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.
  15. La Grazia
    The relative restraint of La Grazia makes its baroque flourishes stand out all the more.
  16. Green Book
    Peter Farrelly manages to respect the severity of the characters’ social context while ensuring that Green Book never steps outside its protagonists’ relationship, a delicate balancing act that credibly makes a feel-good, effervescent comedy out of its thorny subject matter without ever sanitizing it.
  17. The Animal Kingdom
    The soft-pedaled approach to its narrative strands gives the film the feel of an extended TV pilot.
  18. White Reindeer
    What's dark and weird about Zach Clark's film is also what's tangible, authentic, and wise about it.
  19. The Mole Agent
    That Maite Alberdi’s camera itself is present in The Mole Agent as a quasi-ethical concern suits the way Sergio, as he shuffles through the home’s hallways, gradually comes to be uncomfortable with his own surveillance.
  20. Of an Age
    The ambivalence with which the film treats its main character’s revelation proves rich with complication and offers a new intervention into a genre we thought we’d fully internalized.
  21. Late Shift
    For all its empathy, Late Shift upholds the dubious virtue of self-sacrifice that underpins the Protestant work ethic.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Alps
    Both a companion piece to and in many ways a reversal of "Dogtooth," it builds on that film's surreally terse style and notions of communication and identity without diluting its singularity or concentration.
  23. Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me
    A rock-doc that mythologizes the tragicomic flame out of power pop's seminal band, and the fan-made afterlife that brought them long-delayed success.
  24. The Competition
    Claire Simon knows that the best way to capture the anxiousness of a moment is to leave it unembellished.
  25. Boy Erased
    Good as Lucas Hedges is at acting the tortured teen, Jared is finally too much of a cipher for his story to really hit with the force that it should.
  26. The Changeover
    It’s this carefully managed equilibrium between the inherent preposterousness of its mystical milieu and the convincing emotional reality of Laura’s journey that ultimately makes The Changeover, for all its muddled mythos, a lively and engaging excursion into an unusually naturalistic world of magic.
  27. The Avengers
    While The Avengers exhibits exemplary craftsmanship, Joss Whedon hasn't made a great film.
  28. The Matchmaker
    The film ultimately fails to treat history as anything but a string of melodramatic reference points for moody characters haplessly trying to find love.
  29. Venus in Fur
    After years of respectable filmmaking, it's refreshing to witness a reinvigorated Roman Polanski willing to once again delve deep into seedy psychodrama.
  30. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
    The greatest gift offered by the film is an empowering world that looks less like invention and more like real life.
    • 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.
  32. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    Anthony Powell's vision as a filmmaker is frustratingly limited to an information-style presentation that doubles as an enthusiastic advert for the transcendental qualities of the terrain.
  33. The In-Laws
    The In-Laws never makes deeper, sustained sense of its premise and seems content to revel in the more basic pleasure of seeing Falk and Arkin interact with one another.
  34. Oh Lucy!
    Atsuko Hirayanagi's feature-length directorial debut offers a surprising take on the tricky art of communication.
  35. Hide Your Smiling Faces
    Daniel Patrick Carbone's pensive style, so dotted with ethnographic detail, is interested in revealing a world in flux, but his fixation on death is so incessant that it situates the film as a morose fetish object.
  36. Dark River
    While Clio Barnard so masterfully limns her protagonist’s tortured soul, the brother-sister drama at the center of the film remains frustratingly hazy.
  37. The Times of Bill Cunningham
    The film undermines Cunningham’s egalitarianism by linking him directly with the kind of elite snobbery and wealth fixation he abhorred.
  38. Moka
    Frédéric Mermoud's film makes an elaborate pretense of honoring the traditions of the observational procedural.
  39. Zero Motivation
    Zero Motivation is refreshingly casual in the depiction of its female-centric environment, but the freshness of its performances is often compromised by a directorial impulse to reduce the female experience to spiteful girl fights, virginal malaise, and bunk-bed antagonism.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Piano Lesson
    This film feels at times like the earnest result of a group of artists paying tribute to a great playwright rather than a fully realized work of its own.
  41. Take Me Somewhere Nice
    From beneath defensive layers of distanced comic despair emerges a sincere story about a young woman’s emotional reconciliation with her troubled place of origin.
  42. Gook
    Justin Chon fumbles the take on how his characters' anger fits into the greater landscape of a L.A. during the aftermath of the Rodney King beating.
  43. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet
    The film works best when it focuses viewer attention most acutely on the story, deflecting it away from the director's manipulations.
  44. Young Hearts
    The film truthfully hints at the sharp whirs behind the smooth façade of everyday life.
  45. Rumours
    The film is winningly defined by its peculiar admixture of national pride and self-deprecation.
  46. The Seduction of Mimi
    The Seduction of Mimi is socio-political discourse, Italian style: Sex speaks louder than words on any given subject.
  47. What Will People Say
    The film flirts with miserablism, but it counterbalances the direness of its main character's situation with moments of levity.
  48. How to Make Money Selling Drugs
    The film employs a flashy text-and-graphics aesthetic that immediately brings to mind the satirical undercurrent of a Grand Theft Auto video game.
  49. The Trip to Greece
    The series’s ambient preoccupation with death is foregrounded more than ever before with this film’s main dramatic subplot.
  50. Gabriel and the Mountain
    The film seems to think that the mere recognition of Gabriel as a narcissist sufficiently complicates the character's sense of entitlement.
  51. Moffie
    Oliver Hermanus’s film is a rumination on the consequences of apartheid on those who benefit from it most.
  52. Chronicle
    Offers up little more than a tired morality play about the dangers of power, rehashing stale insights about the narcissism of the documentary impulse.
  53. Arthur Christmas
    A yuletide fable that boasts Aardman Animation's peerless mix of whip-smart comedy and cheery heart.
  54. The Other Dream Team
    Made with considerable reverence, but it doesn't quite manage to tow a tricky tonal line that's required when working with such sensitive and complicated material.
  55. Into the Woods
    This PG-rated romp is, refreshingly, less notable for its happily-ever-afters than its oh-no-they-didn'ts.
  56. Chronic
    A dour and withholding character study, Michel Franco's film invites more questions than it’s willing to answer.
  57. The Outlaw Josey Wales
    The remnants of war are fractious and far-flung in Clint Eastwood's impressive revisionist western.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Experiment in Terror
    Credit the film’s modest virtues to Edwards’s undeniable verve as a visual stylist. Still, with a running time slightly over two hours, Experiment in Terror is a bit too protracted to count as an unqualified success.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Messiah of Evil
    Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz’s eerily brooding Messiah of Evil remains an undervalued gem of American gothic filmmaking.
  60. What They Had
    What They Had gracefully coasts on its patient observations of one family’s dynamics, but once the third act hits, Elizabeth Chomko goes about neatly tidying up seemingly every loose end.
  61. Blue Jay
    Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson have extraordinary chemistry, painting a cumulative portrait of the fragility and rareness of being truly in sync with a partner.
  62. I Used to Be Darker
    The songs performed here function as the creative end point of emotional trauma, revealing pain gradually transfigured into art.
  63. Captain Underpants: The First Epic Movie
    The film is packed with mirthful pranksterism, a vigorous anti-authoritarian streak, and literal potty humor.
  64. Predestination
    The film effectively underlines the one undertaking that time-travel fantasies can never truly allow: escape from ourselves.
  65. Gremlins 2: The New Batch
    It’s a giddy, diabolical, and terminally underappreciated sequel to the film that made Joe Dante’s career.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Everyday Sunshine: The Story of Fishbone
    As thorough as the filmmakers are in providing a political context for Fishbone, they're often reduced to tunnel vision in an attempt to lift the unheralded band to its rightful place in music history.
  67. Asako I & II
    Like Happy Hour, Asako I & II is a parable of the grace — and, yes, happiness — that spring from resignation.
  68. Feast of the Epiphany
    Its sensitivity to how something as seemingly ordinary as food can have an immense emotional impact is consistently and unobtrusively profound.
  69. Chicken with Plums
    A fable about the damage done when a young couple is forced to part, Chicken with Plums is deeply melancholic, yet so full of humor and humanity that it pulses with life even while tracing the trajectory of a slow suicide.
  70. Lover for a Day
    The film is yet another of Phillippe Garrel's densely anecdotal studies of romantic fidelity.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tenet
    Every time that Tenet stops to speak, it only emphasizes a hollowness within: how enamored it is of its own cleverness.
  72. The Amazing Catfish
    The familiar premise is done with enough intelligence and heartfelt conviction that it rises above its potentially cliché trappings.
  73. Opening Night
    Opening Night hits closest to home in its long, haunting, tension-fueled riffs between Cassavetes and Rowlands, playing lovers on stage and former lovers off stage.
  74. Climax
    Gaspar Noé's camera captures every freak-out, recrimination, stolen kiss, and betrayal in what is a miracle of synchronicity.
  75. The Towering Inferno
    In nearly every reasonable sense it’s the far more accomplished of the two famed Allen disaster epics.
  76. Wendell & Wild
    Henry Selick’s flair for phantasmagorical sights is on full display, though Wendell & Wild’s excessively CGI-enhanced look is a far cry from the grounded tactility of much of his prior work.
  77. Bastards
    Conditioning the audience to find dread in every seemingly innocent gesture, the film turns even the simplest touch between family members into something tinged with menace.
  78. The Reports on Sarah and Saleem
    We never spend enough time with the characters to believe the urgency, and lushness, of their cravings.
  79. The Birth of a Nation
    Nate Parker strains to control the strange and stirring complications of his subject's visionary apocalypticism.
  80. Tears of Gaza
    There's no coddling the audience in Vibeke Løkkeberg's verité heave of disgust as the full consequences on the Palestinian people of Operation Cast Lead are made sickeningly clear.
  81. The Death of Dick Long
    Daniel Scheinert’s film finds a very human vulnerability lurking beneath the strange and oafish behaviors of its male characters.
  82. Cannibal
    It keeps us at a remove that becomes telling of the filmmaker's reticence to explore whatever feelings of isolation and yearning may inform his main character's grisly compulsion.
  83. Young Man with a Horn
    The non-musical performances are shallow: Douglas is forceful but one-note, Day is as square and wholesome as a glass of milk, and Bacall purrs along in the same faux-bad girl performance she’s given for the past 60 years. But I suppose that’s fitting for a morality play this black and white, where wild jazz, liquor, and loose women cause the downfall of man.
  84. Huda's Salon
    Formally, Huda’s Salon is nothing if not effective, sustaining the unrelenting tension of its opening scene for the duration of its runtime.
  85. Femme
    Femme fascinatingly taps into the radical possibilities of the sartorial as narrative device, exploring the tabooed nuances of queer subjectivity and muddying the lines between gay and trans in the way that lived experience tends to do.
  86. Spider-Man: Far from Home
    Jon Watts deftly weaves the epic and the mundane aspects of Spider-Man’s existence throughout the film.
  87. Tell Me Who I Am
    By focusing so narrowly on the Lewis brothers’ relationship with their mother, the film inadvertently minimizes the scope of their abuse.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sparrows Dance
    Writer-director Noah Buschel interestingly mirrors the monotony of his main character's routine in his claustrophobic aesthetic.
  89. Out in the Dark
    Instead of looking for depth or verisimilar romance, director Michael Mayer turns his characters into mere cogs in a pseudo-suspenseful thriller.
  90. The Seven Five
    It relays a story of police corruption that's transparently designed as a pitch for a feature-film adaptation.
  91. The Challenge
    Here the organic and the frivolously material aren't oppositions or rivals, but partners in a spectacle for men's eyes only.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Ginger & Rosa
    With Ginger & Rosa, Sally Potter manages to avoid nearly every pratfall of such period pieces, focusing on extreme alienation rather than enlightenment, and wringing a powerful and jaundiced coming-of-age story from the decade's less trod corners.
  93. The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden
    The material and resources are certainly substantial, but the filmmakers clumsily weave separate stories together without detailing anything beyond a tangential relation.
  94. Patriots Day
    As long as Patriots Day is concerned with recreating the sense of ambient chaos among sparring investigators and an anxious community, it’s immersive and thrilling.
  95. Depraved
    Larry Fessenden diagnoses the rot of our era through the shifting personalities and power dynamics of solipsistic men.
  96. The Armor of Light
    It doesn't trust the inherently complex material to speak for itself or care to consider its consequences beyond instances of manufactured, gut-wrenching immediacy.
  97. The Sentence
    Rudy Valdez has no distance from the material, which works simultaneously in the film's favor and, largely, its disfavor.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    25th Hour
    With all of its oversights and indulgences, 25th Hour is still a persuasive, undeniably fascinating film—watching Lee throw everything on his mind into the fray, no matter how irreconcilable with the story, makes for an interesting experience.
  99. The Fault in Our Stars
    It takes few chances, frequently using sass as a smokescreen, hiding what's unoriginal and cheaply sentimental about this story behind a veil of witticisms about oblivion and "cancer perks."
    • 69 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Welcome to Me
    The film rejects a fawning (or even particularly detailed) account of mental illness in favor of a plunge into the deep end of a bottomless ego.
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