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 6.5 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. Clown in a Cornfield
    Eli Craig’s film works precisely because it plays things straight.
  2. Friendship
    The film plays right into Tim Robinson’s sweet spot of surrealistic and satirical comedy.
  3. Fight or Flight
    Dramatic moments create tonal stutters that prevent the film from becoming the unhinged Looney Tune that it wants to be.
  4. Another Simple Favor
    The first film was divided against itself—half a typically broad Paul Feig comedy, half imitation Gone Girl—and the sequel doesn’t fare much better as a genuine thriller.
  5. When Boys Leave Home
    Its bizarre melding of moral-panic melodrama with the filmmaker’s signature wrong-man theme is fascinating.
  6. Thunderbolts*
    Faced with oblivion, our third- and fourth-string MCU characters choose life, all while the film hammers home that there’s no reason why they should.
  7. The Gullspång Miracle
    The film is a philosophical account of the shaky ground that human existence stands on.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Vulcanizadora
    Joel Potrykus looks without flinching at the ultimate consequences of permanent adolescence.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Bonjour Tristesse
    The film finds a state of grace in that torrential pull between the familiar and the new.
  10. Until Dawn
    The film is far from original, but it successfully translates game logic to the big screen.
  11. Havoc
    If the rest of it had been as driven by such a ferocious sense of purpose as its final act, Havoc would be one of the finest action movies of the decade so far.
  12. On Swift Horses
    It’s difficult to shake that there’s something tragic blaring from the sidelines that the film’s wistful, pitch-perfect Hollywood ending can’t acknowledge.
  13. The Accountant 2
    As The Accountant 2 drags out to over two hours, and its two storylines remain tonally at war with one another, it becomes increasingly clear that, two films in, this series still hasn’t figured out exactly what it wants to be.
  14. Sinners
    Sinners is one of the most distinctive, confident mainstream films of the modern era, but it nonetheless leaves an audience with the tacit reminder of the limits of art to set one free in a system that profits as much off its exploitation as that of manual labor.
  15. The Virgin of the Quarry Lake
    Laura Casabé abstracts the typical emotions of tortured teens, only to then amplify them.
  16. Invention
    Courtney Stephens’s film blends fiction and autobiography to fascinating implications.
  17. Gunslingers
    In the end, Nicolas Cage can only do so much to bring this hastily assembled oater to life.
  18. Direct Action
    We sorely need documentaries like Direct Action that can show not only the real leverage that militant mass movements can exert, but how that power can be redirected from protest to the building of autonomous communities and back again.
  19. The Amateur
    The Amateur is a relaxed and pleasurable throwback to the spy pulp of the 1970s and ’80s, yet told with a (mostly) honest appraisal of the C.I.A.’s ethical failings.
  20. Sacramento
    The film’s strength is that it knows how to keep things moving.
  21. A Minecraft Movie
    There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.
  22. Eric Larue
    While the film features a strong performance from Judy Greer, it’s essentially a patchwork of broad strokes that rarely feel like they’re bringing its world to credible life.
  23. When Fall Is Coming
    The film is a bit too muddled to bring its main character fully into focus, despite Hélène Vincent’s best efforts to do so.
  24. Gazer
    The main character’s condition feels like a dramatically dubious attempt to shroud the somewhat spindly nature of the film’s plot.
  25. Freaky Tales
    For all of its spiritedness, Freaky Tales wants for the sense of invention that defines the films that it references and whose moves it often falls back on borrowing.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Henry Fonda for President
    If Fonda was an avatar of American liberalism’s tolerance and self-scrutiny, the film suggests, so, too, does he represent its complicity in the nation’s sins and its failure to change its course in the direction of justice.
  27. Drowning Dry
    Drowning Dry offers something akin to a cinematic concussion as it begins warping the experience of time.
  28. Warfare
    This is a formidable technical showcase and obsessive forensic recreation whose imposed formal limitations become meaning-making ends in and of themselves.
  29. The Woman in the Yard
    The film is a slow-burning tale of very real traumas suffered by a woman far out of her element and forced to process a tragedy on top of it all.
  30. A Working Man
    David Ayer’s film proceeds as an unambiguous celebration of its hero’s vigilantism.
  31. 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.
  32. Holy Cow
    The rhythms and structure of Holy Cow embody the swirling confusion and contradictions of adolescence itself.
  33. Snow White
    This is a fairly paint-by-numbers exercise in updating a quintessential but unquestionably quaint property for modern consumption.
  34. Locked
    Throughout, the filmmakers’ sympathies are lost in a confusing haze of cynicism.
  35. Ash
    Flying Lotus and his collaborators give Ash enough visual flair to occasionally transcend such limitations as forgettable characters with fuzzy motivations.
  36. The Assessment
    The Assessment works its way through intriguing conundrums about the motivations and qualifications of parenthood, as well as the power dynamics at play between parents and children.
  37. The Electric State
    There's nothing behind its contemptible eyes, no spine to house the fading diode that once contained a soul.
  38. Holland
    The discomfort in watching Holland is not knowing if something is intended or, like the main character, you’re looking for things that aren’t there.
  39. Opus
    The film takes dozens of different anecdotes about cults and celebrities and manages to render them pedestrian, unoriginal, staid.
  40. Drop
    The film knows that when the stakes are sky high, the emotions need to be firmly grounded.
  41. McVeigh
    McVeigh’s ominous atmosphere is omnipresent, clinging to Timothy like a dog to a bone.
  42. An Unfinished Film
    If the frames of Lou’s previous work suggested that reality was something that could be unlocked and unfurled, An Unfinished Film’s presentation of reality as it basically was unfortunately gives the filmmaker, and the audience, little to discover.
  43. Young Hearts
    The film truthfully hints at the sharp whirs behind the smooth façade of everyday life.
  44. Death of a Unicorn
    Death of a Unicorn taps into the anti-capitalist strain in late-20th-century monster movies from Alien to Jurassic Park by tracing a clever through line from the unicorns of antiquity to the present.
  45. The Ballad of Wallis Island
    The Ballad of Wallis Island plays both its drama and comedy in decidedly minor keys, straining neither for grand emotional revelations nor big laughs.
  46. Novocaine
    We’re used to heroes who can take a licking and keep on ticking, but Novocaine takes action-movie invulnerability to brutal comic extremes.
  47. Bob Trevino Likes It
    It has its very powerful moments, but the oddly linear, untroubled journey of its two main characters robs the film of some of its emotional authenticity.
  48. Black Bag
    By the time the film comes to the end of its brisk runtime, it feels like nothing much has actually happened, despite all the narrative convolutions.
  49. Mickey 17
    Though Mickey 17 can feel like a mixtape of Bong’s greatest hits, it may actually be his most refined and articulate anti-capitalistic critique to date.
  50. In the Lost Lands
    The film provides Paul W.S. Anderson with a sturdy canvas for his unique brand of gaudy, campy cool.
  51. Long Day's Journey Into Night
    Ed Harris and Jessica Lange electrifyingly bring so many of their characters’ emotions to the surface, even as they convey that James and Mary are burying so much more beneath it.
  52. You Burn Me
    Matías Piñeiro’s film is an intimate, impressionistic meditation on love and desire, death and memory, silence and expression.
  53. The Surfer
    When The Surfer does break out of the sun-addled fugue state that marks its midsection, it delivers a gonzo finale that lets Nicolas Cage rev himself up into his most manic, meme-able self.
  54. Seven Veils
    The film’s pleasures are ultimately more textural and academic than those of Tár.
  55. The Visitor
    The Visitor ultimately posits a vision of transcendence through anarchy, seeing repression as the enemy of social progress.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    There's Still Tomorrow
    It’s a film about domestic violence that, while clearly intended as an homage to Italian neorealism, finds levity through choreographed musical numbers and moments of light magical realism.
  57. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
    The film’s open affection for the Looney Tunes franchise has a restorative quality.
  58. The Empire
    Notable as it is for evoking a kind of cosmic banality, writer-director Bruno Dumont’s anti-space opera The Empire runs into same the pitfall as many parodies of its kind.
  59. The Rule of Jenny Pen
    The film single-mindedly sees its elderly characters as objects of disgust or receptacles for harm.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Klezmer Project
    As with a traditional documentary, The Klezmer Project is affected by forces outside the filmmakers’ control.
  61. The Blue Trail
    An empowering narrative of one woman who refuses to see age as a ceiling, the film serves as a potent warning for viewers about the marginalization of the elderly.
  62. Compensation
    Compensation deftly uses intimate methods of character identification to encourage the viewer to imbibe the larger history lived through those figures.
  63. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
    This hybridized essay film embodies the complications and contradictions inherent within Black history—complete with all its erasures and variances.
  64. The Ice Tower
    The Ice Tower is, ultimately, an aesthetic and nostalgic exercise.
  65. Kontinental '25
    Radu Jude’s cinema isn’t exactly absurdist, though it exposes the absurdities of a present reeling from the unresolved injustices of yore.
  66. Dreams
    The film exposes the incontestable American art of getting more with blunt obviousness.
  67. Living the Land
    Huo Meng’s patient, nonjudgmental study of these people tacitly reveals the ways, healthy and otherwise, in which they’ve compartmentalized and continue to process the pain of everything from hard labor to political oppression.
  68. The Gorge
    For a solid hour or so, the film is patient and tense, with just the right touches of levity and romance. Until, suddenly, it isn’t.
  69. 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. The Quiet Ones
    The Quiet Ones is a reminder of the simple pleasures of a caper film with ice in its veins.
  71. Ex-Husbands
    The film is full of little moments that speak clearly to the particularities of father-son bonds.
  72. Lurker
    The artist and audience member are coequal—and codependent—in this perceptive drama about a parasocial relationship that enters the realm of reality.
  73. Reflection in a Dead Diamond
    Right out of the gate, the filmmakers’ filtering of a James Bond-esque espionage tale through a grindhouse sensibility exists in such a state of emphatic stimulation that each shot feels punctuated with an exclamation point.
  74. The Monkey
    The mayhem that the monkey doles out makes The Monkey closer in spirit to Evil Dead than Final Destination, as the film is less a Rube Goldberg contraption of overdesigned chaos than it is a Looney Tunes-esque spectacle of quick and dirty violence that hits like a punchline.
  75. Blue Moon
    Blue Moon, like Lorenz Hart in his day, trusts that audiences want to engage with subjects that matter through deliberate dialogue.
  76. Captain America: Brave New World
    As the film explodes into numerous subplots that rapidly move far apart from one another, it necessitates constant leaps between characters and locations that only further disrupt the narrative flow of the proceedings.
  77. Notes on Displacement
    It presents all the complex and seemingly contradictory emotions of a forced life on the road.
  78. Rounding
    A few scenes show glimmers of promise for what Alex Thompson can achieve when he’s more in his wheelhouse. It’s a shame that the horror and tension that make up the bulk of Rounding are so clearly outside of it.
  79. Love Hurts
    The film is startlingly earnest in its affection for Ke Huy Quan and making him play both to and against type.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Fishing Place
    Rob Tregenza is always questioning what can be accomplished with the simple building blocks of cinema.
  81. Bring Them Down
    Bring Them Down uncovers an organic affinity between the genre mainstay of vengeance taking on a life of its own and the force exerted by paternal tradition.
  82. 2000 Meters to Andriivka
    The interjections of quotidian reflection give a fullness and emotional resonance to a film that can, at times, be borderline oppressive in its depiction of war’s brutality.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Parthenope
    The film’s succession of symbolically loaded vignettes is less meaningful than intended.
  84. Armand
    By the time we’re watching whole conversations be drowned out by noise of pounding rain, the abstract tendencies of Armand begin to feel like an act of unintentional self-sabotage
  85. Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)
    Sly Lives! pays appropriate credit to its subject’s greatness by not devolving into pity even after depicting Stone at his lowest points.
  86. Last Days
    Instead of delving into what lay behind John Allen Chau’s recklessness, the film scatters itself across multiple plot angles that confuse more than clarify.
  87. The Perfect Neighbor
    Geeta Gandbhir’s trenchant documentary takes incendiary material and aims it at a larger target.
  88. Peter Hujar's Day
    The film attests not only to the breadth of Sachs’s artistry but also to Hujar’s devotion to exploring the relationship between high and low culture.
  89. Twinless
    The film is a bizarrely moving and darkly comic story about feeling like you’ve lost something you never had.
  90. Heart Eyes
    Heart Eyes is a slasher movie first, and a gnarly one at that, with some imaginative, seat-shiftingly gruesome kills, and some particularly ominous set pieces.
  91. Plainclothes
    Sexy, scary, and occasionally clumsy, Carmen Emmi’s feature-length directorial debut, Plainclothes, is an anxious and unabashed gay drama about social repression and its impacts.
  92. Zodiac Killer Project
    Zodiac Killer Project is a wicked embodiment of Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the media itself being the message.
  93. Predators
    Always exhibiting a deftness of touch and willingness to continue probing a cultural taboo that’s now, more than ever, a delicate and charged topic, Obit also challenges our preconceptions of a much-maligned group.
  94. Kiss of the Spider Woman
    For a musical so dedicated to celebrating and critiquing the transformative potential of cinematic fantasy, Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman brings relatively little of the kind of overwhelming star power that can truly transport audiences.
  95. You're Cordially Invited
    By the time You’re Cordially Invited finds the correct mode to operate in, it’s about five minutes before the end credits roll.
  96. The Wedding Banquet
    The humor lands as if it’s coming not from the writers but through the characters by its grounding in the details of their lives.
  97. OBEX
    Albert Birney knows that fantasy is a potent force, that it can lead you deep into the worst parts of yourself, or, with the right influences, lead you back to life.
  98. Bubble & Squeak
    Evan Twohy’s attempt to smuggle some sincerity into this largely absurdist tale shows that he isn’t especially committed to coherence.
  99. Rebuilding
    If there’s any sense of motion in the film, which is largely defined by its patient camerawork and editing, it’s in Dusty’s gradual recognition of and response to the emotions that accompany his corporal yearning to remain in place.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Companion
    The film trenchantly satirizes 21st-century romance while delivering the gory genre goods.
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