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 Last Family
    The film tends to literalize its theme of unfulfilled desire by having characters explicitly lament their lost pasts.
  2. Inferno
    Dario Argento undervalues his material, but his set pieces are glorious enough that the film’s plot contrivances can be forgiven.
  3. Europa
    Von Trier and his three cinematographers fashioned a handmade, retro pastiche with a small, dried-out heart.
  4. 21 Jump Street
    Like many almost-great comedies, 21 Jump Street is frontloaded with the best go-for-broke gags and lines.
  5. Greener Grass
    In the film’s world, there can be no real resistance, as the suburbs have already won.
  6. Hard Times
    Hard Times feels most like a brilliant prerequisite to the cinema of Michael Mann, a focused neo-western where the last man standing is the one truest to himself.
  7. Selah and The Spades
    Through its exploration of Selah’s complexities, as well as the bravado and posturing that comes with being a credible drug dealer, Selah and the Spades locates a larger truth about the presentation of self and maintaining one’s image.
  8. Diciannove
    In line with his protagonist’s ever-shifting whims, a spirit of restless reinvention characterizes director Giovanni Tortorici’s aesthetic approach.
  9. The Old Oak
    If Ken Loach has always erred on making his political views impossible to misconstrue, he also knows how to keep his dramas from spiraling too far outside of plausibility.
  10. Whirlybird
    At its best, Matt Yoka’s documentary vividly captures how personal demons shape creative output.
  11. Teen Titans Go! To the Movies
    Peter Rida Michail and Aaron Horvath's Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is a spastic, Mad magazine-style parody of comic-book movies for the age of superhero overload.
  12. Romantics Anonymous
    A typically anodyne rom-com given a certain poignant piquancy by the paralyzing shyness of its romantic leads.
  13. The Drop
    With its optimistic ending, the film muddies its previous statements regarding the danger of unthinkingly hanging on to totems of the past.
  14. The Monster
    The film has an eerily WTF arbitrariness that should be the domain of more films in the genre.
  15. Fahrenheit 11/9
    Fahrenheit 11/9 represents a sincerely bold attempt to capture the overwhelming civic decay that led to our current political crisis, but Michel Moore’s circus-showman duplicity is as crass and abhorrently self-promoting as that of Donald Trump.
  16. Happiest Season
    The film translates the often difficult realities of a specific kind of marginalized love into a story with broad appeal.
  17. Get Duked!
    A taut genre exercise that delivers enough surprises and cleverly timed bits of humor for its sometimes familiar, uneven narrative beats to play an original tune.
  18. Above and Beyond
    It may channel the loose, adrenaline-fueled lives of pilots, but the film's inconsistent, often impassive study of this intriguing real-life adventure feels half-told.
  19. LaRoy, Texas
    While it never quite reaches the hilarious heights or existential depths of the Coens’ finest work, it does offer similarly enjoyable mixture of the macabre and the absurd.
  20. The Outfit
    The Outfit is a dapper, twist-filled crime story that relies more on dialogue than gunplay to move the action.
  21. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    Rather than thoughtfully reflect on post-collegiate ennui and disillusionment, the film settles for erecting a monument to its main character’s awesomeness.
  22. Song of Lahore
    The final note of optimism is consistent with the documentary's overall tone and interest in perseverance.
  23. Man Up
    Lake Bell and Simon Pegg's star wattage isn't enough to distract from the sense that their characters are almost exclusively defined by their single-ness.
  24. 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.
  25. Sacramento
    The film’s strength is that it knows how to keep things moving.
  26. 22 July
    That a drop from John Williams’s Jaws score wouldn’t be out of place on this film’s soundtrack goes to show how tactlessly Paul Greengrass milks tragedy for titillation.
  27. Hitler's Children
    The film drains its subjects of the shame forced on them by Nazi ancestors and yet has difficulty arriving at an effective, constructive thesis.
  28. Carry-On
    The star of the show here is Collet-Serra. Nothing here reinvents the genre wheel, but the way that the stakes and scope of Carry-On keep escalating even as the focus remains resolutely intimate and paranoid showcases a refreshingly old-school grasp of thriller mechanics.
  29. Do Not Resist
    Director Craig Atkinson's documentary explicates its points with blunt but persuasive efficiency.
  30. Sightseers
    This sardonic depiction of Britain, as a land where a thin veneer of strained politesse and fussy specificity of tastes masks a throbbing heart of darkness, makes for Ben Wheatley's best film yet.
  31. The Pink Cloud
    After a while, writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s boldly mundane take on forced isolation gives way to a regular sort of mundanity.
  32. Uncertain Terms
    Appropriately, the images in the film, the most fluidly beautiful and resonant of Nathan Silver's career thus far, suggest flashes of memory relived from the vantage point of the future.
  33. Compliance
    It seems as if Craig Zobel wants to implicate the audience in these proceedings, but he doesn't have a very clear idea how to go about it.
  34. A Boy and His Dog
    The film is riddled with an unmistakably misogynistic bent, and can’t be bothered to supply one single likable soul.
  35. Star Trek Beyond
    Stark Trek Beyond emphasizes the inter-personal dynamics of the USS Enterprise, and functions best as an extended team-building exercise.
  36. A Sinner in Mecca
    What the film lacks in narrative unity and aesthetic splendor it makes up in moral grandeur and ethical purpose.
  37. The Origin of Evil
    The Origin of Evil recalls Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness for how its prolonged, soft-peddled skewering of the wealthy seems convinced of its Buñuelian irreverence.
  38. 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.
  39. Gloria
    Cassavetes and Rowlands lend a screwball energy to this thriller, ably playing conflicting moods of suspense and silliness off each other to complicate an otherwise straightforward genre film.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bullhead
    What Bullhead ultimately lacks isn't balls but insight and empathy.
  41. The Night
    It’s at the juncture between horror and philosophical surrealism that Kourosh Ahari’s film is at its most provocative.
  42. First Match
    After a certain point, Olivia Newman's film treats the womanhood of its main character as an afterthought.
  43. Mutt
    That Feña suffers so that other trans people won’t have to may be edifying to some, but it also reduces Mutt to an Afterschool Special.
  44. Like Crazy
    Outside of Felicity Jones's work, the film, directed and co-written by Drake Doremus, usually feels like it's soullessly connecting dots, a far cry from the Before Sunrise-style substance its Yank-meets-Euro chattiness might suggest.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Terms and Conditions May Apply
    If The Social Network didn't make you want to quit Facebook in 2010, the brave new world outlined here should, despite the fact that your data won't actually be erased.
  46. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    Jin Mo-young fetishizes his subjects' wholly modest behaviors as cute manifestations of a pure form of human interaction.
  47. Equity
    The film ultimately succeeds in offering a fresh female-centered perspective on its genre material.
  48. Art and Craft
    The filmmakers profile the prolific Mark Landis with a non-judgmental straightforwardness that allows the sheer brazenness of his scams to generate both shock and amusement.
  49. The Hunger Games
    The Hunger Games is more notable for the holes it doesn't fall into than the great heights it reaches.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Horror Express
    The best that can be said for Horror Express is that it doesn’t take itself at all seriously, and it isn’t too proud to steal outright what other films politely borrow.
  51. I Used to Go Here
    The film is almost sadistically driven to turn a woman’s trip down memory lane into fodder for cringe humor.
  52. I Confess
    I Confess ultimately reveals itself to be one of Hitchcock’s most successful examinations of the tension between public image and private turmoil.
  53. Step Up To The Plate
    Paul Lacoste's almost purely observational approach allows him to come about as close to documenting the process of creation as anyone ever has.
  54. Family Romance, LLC
    We are never quite sure of the extent to which situations and dialogues have been scripted and, as such, it’s as though Herzog were more witness than author, more passerby than gawker, simply registering Japan being Japan.
  55. Addiction Incorporated
    The most dramatic material, such as Victor DeNoble's much-applauded congressional testimony, more or less traffics common knowledge without bothering to provide fresh emotional context.
  56. Crazy, Stupid, Love
    This schizophrenic conception of Gosling's character is indicative of the film's largely dichotomous view of romantic relationships.
  57. Deepwater Horizon
    The film should have been a cautionary tale, but in Peter Berg's hands, it's a hollow account of the resilience of the human spirit.
  58. Lamb
    Though eerie and quietly deadpan, the film circles its grab bag of themes for so long that it also becomes tedious.
  59. Fighting with My Family
    While it pays lip service to the fascinating theatrical norms of pro wrestling, the film ends up expending most of its energy on its search for barriers that Paige can break through.
  60. Mr. Jones
    The film is an unnervingly beautiful tribute to the lives lost during the Holodomor, and to the people who have seen the world for what it is, instead of the dream of it they’re instructed to believe.
  61. End of Watch
    End of Watch is pure frat-boy fantasy, the video game to Southland's great American novel.
  62. Dovlatov
    According tot he film, truly courageous artists aren't necessarily the ones who tackle the state head-on, but rather the ones who stay true to themselves even when no one likes what they have to say.
  63. Creature from the Black Lagoon
    A much more antic, exploitative experience than the Frankenstein/Wolfman/Mummy/Dracula pictures it stands alongside, Creature from the Black Lagoon perfectly typifies the transition from older, more European horror styles into bloodthirsty schlock and ever-cheaper thrills.
  64. Smile
    Everything Smile is doing is familiar enough at this point to be considered old-fangled, but the striking precision of its craft sloughs away any sensations of déjà vu.
  65. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    Too often, the film teases big, wild comedic set pieces that end up deflating almost instantly.
  66. The Adventures of Tintin
    Fast on its feet, using 3D and motion-capture animation to kick its comedy-adventure into a superhuman gear, Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin is a wittily kineticized adaptation of the internationally loved comic books.
  67. The Conjuring
    Though The Conjuring claims to be based on a true story, in truth it's based on every horror film that's come before it.
  68. The Meddler
    Writer-director Lorene Scafaria's film is an unconvincing character study that plays like a painfully unfunny sitcom.
  69. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
    The documentary is enjoyable, but one suspects that its subject may have found it soft.
  70. Ask Dr. Ruth
    At its best, the film is a testament to how Ruth Westheimer’s practiced decency was literally a saving grace during the Reagan era.
  71. The Kindergarten Teacher
    The film's denouement is at once shocking and organic because it echoes a well-paced but nasty children's fable.
  72. A Place at the Table
    More difficult to convey are the web of moral and political issues that surround the hunger crisis, and A Place at the Table proves its worth most by how it treats this wider set of problems.
  73. Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    Oshii’s attention to detail is ravishing and his distractions of time and space evoke what it must be like to be trapped within the confines of M.C. Escher’s “Sky and Water.” Pity then that Innocence is so impenetrable, both aesthetically and philosophically.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Song of Granite
    It's funny that the film spends so much time caught up in Joe Heaney's feelings of displacement, because it produces a similar sensation in viewers by forgoing the work of narrative and character development in favor of a stark, elliptical style that becomes tiresome.
  75. They Call It Myanmar: Lifting the Curtain
    The images and interviews Robert H. Lieberman and his crew have managed to capture are eye-opening enough to justify the dangerous effort.
  76. Unclenching the Fists
    Unclenching the Fists is a tale of how the desolation of a nation inhabits and engraves a woman’s body.
  77. Here
    While everything here is mostly unspoken, and the film itself hints at a broader set of concerns than simply two lost souls meeting on foreign ground, Here too often feels like a jumble of ideas that don't quite cohere.
  78. Sembene!
    The film unfolds as a kind, politically soft offering of what lies beneath both Sembène's films and the man himself.
  79. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?
    The film is beautiful and occasionally quite moving, but its subject matter deserves more than art-house irresolution.
  80. Paul Goodman Changed My Life
    This bio-documentary of a New Left godfather presents a formidable character simpatico with today's zeitgeist in his championing of "spontaneous uprising."
  81. The Homesman
    If there's any ambiguity to be found in the film's prolonged last gasps, which reach for tragedy, but only sow more epistemic confusion, it's of a mawkish and unpalatable variety.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    And Then We Danced
    Levan Akin offers up a swooning gay romance as the centerpiece from which all of his other ideas radiate.
  83. We Need to Talk About Kevin
    The purpose of Lynne Ramsay's hodgepodge approach is to distract us from the flimsiness of a story that suggests a snide art-house take on "The Omen."
  84. Omni Loop
    The film retreads ideas familiar from time-loop stories without offering anything especially new.
  85. 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.
  86. Watermark
    By keeping explanatory talking-heads interviews to a minimum, the filmmakers put their trust in the audience to draw their own conclusions based on what they present to us.
  87. Early Man
    The clash between prehistoric pastoralism and technological progress at the center of the film is laden with potential for biting comedy, but Nick Park flattens the conflict into a series of slobs-versus-snobs clichés.
  88. The East
    It showcases the evolving interests and talents of Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling, but expands them and channels them into a more traditional thriller framework.
  89. In a Violent Nature
    Think of Chris Nash’s film as Béla Tarr doing an unholy doc-fiction hybrid about Crystal Lake.
  90. Black Mass
    Like any crime saga without a more potent thematic hook, the film's relentlessly insular script dwells on themes of loyalty and fraternity.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Wave
    It sketches an imperiled family worth caring about, but any goodwill is soon weathered by wave after wave of contrivance following the initial town-leveling event.
  92. Fire in the Blood
    It produces a collection of one-dimensional facts strung together with an utmost respect for chronology and documentary-making's most stale conventions.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    My Name Is Nobody
    Part elegy for the Old West, part in-jokey celebration of the spaghetti western’s popular ascendance over classical Hollywood models, My Name Is Nobody plays like a deeply schizoid production, albeit an amiable enough one that manages several brilliant passages.
  94. The Hateful Eight
    The premise of the film is simple, but it's a simplicity that can only attract complications, as simple plans are apt to do, in an atmosphere of foreboding and the macabre.
  95. If You Don't, I Will
    The actors play off one another beautifully, but the film bottoms out just as it's getting warmed up.
  96. The Blackcoat's Daughter
    Oz Perkins exhibits a committed understanding of the cinematic value of silence and of vastly underpopulated compositions.
  97. Barbara
    In Barbara, the process of filmmaking is shown to be a nesting series of shells that allow one to be simultaneously freed and lost.
  98. Deerskin
    In Deerskin, Quentin Dupieux mines the absurdism that is his signature with newfound forcefulness.
  99. The Sterile Cuckoo
    Alan J. Pakula’s directorial debut takes a done-to-death story template and revitalizes it with intelligence, maturity, and tenderness.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Murder by Decree
    It’s a heady brew of highly improbable extraction that would go on to inspire Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell.
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