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. Nobody's Watching
    Julia Solomonoff's film ripples with a palpable sense of the sheer distance between the down and out actor at its center and his goals.
  2. BPM (Beats Per Minute)
    In between raids, in between the meetings with ACT UP members and those who hold the keys to their possible survival, BPM is at its most intimate when observing the exchange of war stories.
  3. It
    It cashes in on trendy retroism instead of utilizing the perspective of, to borrow from Joni Mitchell, seeing clowns from both sides now.
  4. School Life
    School Life is unfortunately committed to keeping its subjects, especially Headfort’s students, at arm’s length.
  5. Rebel in the Rye
    The whole affair suggests dramatic Tetris, and it leeches the artist and his process of any mystery.
  6. Trophy
    It goes a long way toward complicating our moral assumptions about trophy hunting, as well as a host of other wildlife issues, including conservation, poaching, rhino farms, and the proper balance between man and nature.
  7. Spettacolo
    Though some of Spettacolo's tension is superficial, the stuff of any let’s-put-on-a-show narrative, its latent anxieties are myriad and profoundly resonant.
  8. Rememory
    The film successfully argues that it’s through sensory details that we access the deeper aspects of our lives.
  9. The Limehouse Golem
    Initially colorful, the script’s lurid and overripe dialogue eventually grinds the film to a halt.
  10. The Good Catholic
    Despite The Good Catholic‘s interesting macro approach compared to other films of its ilk, it’s far less successful on a micro level.
  11. Strong Island
    Yance Ford’s film builds into an emotionally, intellectually, and aesthetically complex work of essay and memoir.
  12. The Teacher
    There's a Tarkovskian layer of social despair in the web of corruption joining the child and the adult, the bedroom and the nation.
  13. Dolores
    Peter Bratt's documentary sharply trumpets Dolores Huerta's life and centrality in the turbulent history of social justice since the '60s.
  14. Viceroy's House
    The only thing that offsets the film's self-negating revisionism are the scenes involving Gillian Anderson vicereine.
  15. The Layover
    William H. Macy's The Layover was clearly conceived and written by men who have no interest in approaching female friendships with any degree of complexity, curiosity, or respect.
  16. Unlocked
    With its dull mixture of indifferently staged exposition and action, it suggests a primitive side-scrolling video game.
  17. I Do... Until I Don't
    It’s hard to tell who’s being lampooned and who’s being treated with sincerity at any given point.
  18. Goon: Last of the Enforcers
    Jay Baruchel's Goon: Last of the Enforcers faces an uphill climb that's inherent to retreads, as it's almost impossible for the film to honor its predecessor without lapsing into contrived and preordained formula.
  19. Temple
    The film is only in the business of supplying the sort of fear that hinges entirely on the shock of the exotic.
  20. 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.
  21. Jesús
    Fernando Guzzoni's Jesus is at its best when it steers clear of pat moralizing and simply yokes its moody sense of atmosphere to the aimlessness of the story’s young characters.
  22. Polina
    Even its sensitive and gorgeous choreographies can't fully offer respite from the hollow narrative.
  23. Bushwick
    Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott's Bushwick is a genre film with a refreshing sense of political infrastructure.
  24. Death Note
    Whereas the more grounded scenes of Death Note anchor a startlingly bloody fantasy of power run amok, the scenes that fixate on super powers and code-busting seldom manage to rise above the realm of serviceable YA fiction.
  25. Leap!
    The film’s careful attention to detail in the animation is continuously undermined by a formulaic plot and anxious pandering to contemporary sensibilities.
  26. Whitney: Can I Be Me
    It's no surprise that Nick Broomfield finds little use for the moments of unabashed triumphalism in Houston's life, as he's doggedly fixated on the humiliating swan dive.
  27. Lemon
    Self-absorption is Janicza Bravo’s focus, though—as in other smug and mock-ironic comedies—it’s a topic that’s less examined than indulged.
  28. Logan Lucky
    Logan Lucky is both a Robin Hood fantasy and a uniquely Soderberghian lark, an ensemble comedy that’s simultaneously effervescent and cerebral.
  29. The Hitman's Bodyguard
    Because it so consistently fails to meld its comic sensibilities and love stories with its generic action premise into a seamless whole, The Hitman's Bodyguard sometimes just appears to be parodying the sort of mess it ends up being.
  30. Marjorie Prime
    Mapping the intersection between history and emotion, Michael Almereyda finds himself in Alain Resnais terrain.
  31. What Happened to Monday
    Tommy Wirkola’s film squanders an evocative premise in favor of rote gun-fu carnage.
  32. 6 Days
    6 Days boils down the intricate relationship between Iran and the West into a tense standoff of conflicting ideals where the values and perspectives of only one side really matter.
  33. 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.
  34. Crown Heights
    The film plays like a human-interest story in which all of the humanity has been gutted in favor of deadening narrative efficiency.
  35. The Queen of Spain
    Fernando Trueba fails to probe the political implications of The Queen of Spain's period milieu, which is particularly confounding given the filmmaker’s evident anti-fascist sympathies.
  36. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    Though it may clear the low bar set by the first film, The Nut Job 2 still suffers from many of the same problems.
  37. The Glass Castle
    As in Destin Daniel Cretton’s previous feature, Short Term 12, the oscillations between sociological horror and misty-eyed sentimentality call attention to how meticulously the film arranges its emotional punches.
  38. Annabelle: Creation
    Like Lights out, David F. Sandberg's previous film, Annabelle: Creation is a haunted-house horror story that plays on our primeval fear of the dark.
  39. Naked
    Right from the very beginning of Rob’s cruel cycle that sees him repeatedly returning to the floor of that elevator every time the church bells at his wedding begin to ring, Naked besmirches the reasons that Groundhog Day's Möbius-strip construction worked.
  40. In This Corner of the World
    Sunao Katabuchi displays a vivid, shattering awareness of how domestic routines can spiritually ground one during a time of demoralizing chaos.
  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. After Love
    The film too often puts too much trust in dialogue, as Marie and Boris's predicament is sometimes perfectly conveyed by the actors' facial expressions and body language.
  43. The Trip to Spain
    The premise of Michael Winterbottom's series has devolved from moderately diverting to actively stifling.
  44. Pilgrimage
    The film remains too uncompromisingly black and white as a character study and a story of the conflicts of faith.
  45. Machines
    Rahul Jain’s film conveys with revelatory force the mechanization of people in an industrialized milieu.
  46. Planetarium
    Given all its clumsily executed genre detours and tonal fluctuations, Rebecca Zlutowski’s film suggests an amateur juggling act.
  47. Nocturama
    Bertrand Bonello constructs a clear-eyed sense of how technology keeps getting closer and closer to replacing human consciousness.
  48. Whose Streets?
    The film’s rhythmic editing contextualizes Ferguson’s streets for their relevance to a black populace’s want for stability and peace.
  49. The Only Living Boy in New York
    As the film spirals outward from its central relationship to delve into other characters’ hidden pasts, the story becomes too unwieldy and fragmented for the audience to develop a comprehensive understanding of Callum Turner's Thomas or his personal evolution.
  50. Ingrid Goes West
    Ingrid Goes West recalls Fear and Single White Female — two films right in the sweet spot of mid-'90s nostalgia that Ingrid's peers love to recall — but is more indebted to Alexander Payne's social comedies, which dwell in the backwash of the American dream.
  51. Step
    By fitting Cori, Tayla, and Blessin's lives into a predetermined narrative arc, Step reduces the girls to plucky, up-by-the-bootstraps archetypes.
  52. The Dark Tower
    The decade-long effort to bring the Dark Tower books to the screen looks like a cheap, unauthorized cash-in.
  53. Kidnap
    Ultimately, Kidnap is an efficient vehicle for the delivery of some lean action that's frequently weakened by a scarcely whip-smart script.
  54. 4 Days in France
    There’s something liberating about such a steady creative hand that rejects justifying the twists and turns of a storyline, which becomes in 4 Days in France something akin to cruising itself.
  55. Icarus
    A routinely assembled mélange of provocative material consistently undone by its maker's perplexing need to foist himself into the center of every conversation.
  56. Fun Mom Dinner
    The film is lazily content to simply put its female characters through the potty-mouthed, gross-out comedy ringer.
  57. Columbus
    The seeming miracle of Columbus is its mixture of formal precision with a philosophical grasp of human mystery.
  58. Good Time
    The Safdies play with time like it’s an accordion, stretching out notes of bliss and anxiety while compressing the daily lives of their characters in order to convey the constant state of hustle and stresses necessitated by being poor and hungry for drugs, cash, or a bite to eat in New York City.
  59. Wind River
    When Taylor Sheridan is left to his own devices, his work seems more abrupt and shallow, no more so than when he resolves all of this film's lingering questions in one unremittingly nasty sideswipe of a flashback.
  60. Detroit
    Kathryn Bigelow hyper-realistically, almost dispassionately, covers her ensemble’s actions in the manner of a somber disaster film.
  61. Strange Weather
    There’s a tough and mysterious film within Strange Weather, though it doesn’t quite escape the strictures of a busy and studiously weird narrative that’s governed by formula screenwriting.
  62. Atomic Blonde
    The tediously forestalled twists suck away time from what should be the film's focus—its action—and leaves only two scenes worthy of celebration.
  63. The Last Face
    The Last Face's shameful exploitation of Africans doesn’t stop with the mere privileging of its two wealthy white doctors and their trivial personal struggles within the narrative.
  64. The Incredible Jessica James
    Throughout the film, one wishes for a bit more depth regarding Jessica's professional struggles.
  65. I Dream in Another Language
    Just as the director seems to be settling in to tackle some heady ideas, the screenplay’s stale narrative complications instead overtake the film.
  66. From the Land of the Moon
    The film is so humorless and in love with its own obviousness that it grows laughable.
  67. Brigsby Bear
    The film has such a goofy sense of humor and affection for its premise that its uneven narrative is sometimes only as frustrating as a little static on an old VHS.
  68. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
    This is history that Americans should know, and the filmmaker approach Rumble as an introductory survey course.
  69. Escapes
    A preoccupation with the totemic materiality of cinema runs through Michael Almereyda’s documentary.
  70. Girls Trip
    Malcolm D. Lee's film at least it goes down easy. Easy like a Sunday-morning hangover.
  71. First Kill
    Lacking any vibrancy, wit, or formal rigor, First Kill is not only as bland and leaden as its über-generic title suggests, it's downright sloppy to boot.
  72. Mister Universo
    The film eventually replaces the captivating smallness of everyday life with an inconsequential drama.
  73. The Girl Without Hands
    The film creates a deeply rooted sense of realism that contrasts the austere, surreal illustrations.
  74. The Midwife
    If not for its performances, the film would belong in the category of Hallmark Channel tearjerkers.
  75. Dunkirk
    In devoting so much time to the dull, counterproductive mechanics of the action assembly, Dunkirk dispenses with nearly all other elements of drama.
  76. Our Beloved Month of August
    Gomes contemplates the many human dimensions wavering under the surface of this town, whether it’s the mythologies crowding a town’s gossip session or the tall tales flooding rants at a local bar. This is a collective voice of character rather than a dry document of reality.
  77. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    The difference between the film and its equally expensive contemporaries is Luc Besson's playful, childlike naïveté.
  78. Landline
    Heroin is to Landline what abortion is to Robespierre's Obvious Child: a dangerous little variable planted to strategically unsettle the pervading cutesiness.
  79. The Untamed
    Each brief glimpse of the creature’s fleshy, slithering mass imbues the character drama with an aching sexual desire and, as the violent potential of the entity becomes clear, a mounting sense of dread.
  80. Amnesia
    Amnesia ultimately delivers rich insights about its main characters’ relationship to their backgrounds.
  81. Wish Upon
    The only wish that ends up satisfyingly granted is, in Wish Upon's final and utterly predictable tableau, the audience's.
  82. To the Bone
    One of the film’s great qualities is its casualness and willingness to be simply human and to not let sociological politics dominate.
  83. The Wrong Light
    The divide between meaningful journalism and ethical filmmaking seldom seems as wide as it does in The Wrong Light.
  84. The Persian Connection
    Daniel Y-Li Grove adeptly creates an icy, über-hip atmosphere of sleek clubs, pulsating synths, and woozy opium trips, a style which has the unfortunate effect of draining much of the cultural specificity from his story.
  85. Footnotes
    The ending cheapens its main character and weakens the film's firm commitment to the importance of workplace organizing.
  86. False Confessions
    The film is a trim farce with no blood flowing under its skin, as it’s all construction, setup, and payoff.
  87. Chasing Coral
    What makes it play as more than just another activist doc is its focus on the power of images as a way to inspire change.
  88. Bronx Gothic
    By design, the film is intensely preachy. And this preachiness serves a therapeutic purpose, offering jolting possibilities for empathy.
  89. Blind
    At one point, the film makes a bold but foolish move by getting in the ring with Tolstoy, analogizing itself to Anna Karenina in a self-seriously laughable attempt to pass its schmaltzy and contrived romance narrative off for something significantly grander.
  90. Spider-Man: Homecoming
    By partially demonstrating what a newer, fresher superhero movie might look like, Homecoming ultimately underlines its own genre-defined limitations.
  91. Endless Poetry
    Endless Poetry eventually, like young Alejandro, opens itself up to the world in all of its beauty and complexities.
  92. The Confessions
    Director Roberto Andò takes the form of a classical whodunit and bludgeons it with naïve indignation and sanctimony.
  93. Santoalla
    Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer get close to their subjects only to retreat when things get truly dangerous.
  94. City of Ghosts
    The director’s apparently frank and intimate relationships with the RBSS’s heroic journalists help sustain City of Ghosts‘s undeniable urgency, which culminates in a final image of appropriate, irresolvable anguish.
  95. Austin Found
    The conspicuous means by which Will Raee stacks the deck against Leanne, the real victim of this story, is matched only by a moral grandstanding that seeks to condemn rather than understand the character’s decisions.
  96. A Ghost Story
    An empty exercise in imitative long-take aestheticism, A Ghost Story fills its distractingly round-cornered frame with endless repetitions on a visual gag.
  97. The House
    The House's limp comedic pieces are only sporadically enlivened by a game cast.
  98. 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.
  99. Despicable Me 3
    If all this wackiness is only occasionally laugh-out-loud funny—the ‘80s references feel particularly played out—it’s nonetheless executed with good-natured breeziness.
  100. The Ornithologist
    The film revels in a hushed and lucid expressionist naturalism that’s reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.
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