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. Harvest
    The film is a handsomely mounted production in which much of the filth feels stage-managed.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Stranger Eyes
    Lee Kang-sheng’s performance is the emotional and physical lodestone of a film about the fraught ambiguities of seeing through a one-way mirror.
  3. Homeroom
    Despite the film’s narrow scope, it’s hard to not be impressed by the political and civic engagement of its teen subjects.
  4. Una Noche
    Una Noche tugged at my heartstrings, but the film's almost phantasmagoric fixation on sex can feel crass and dehumanizing.
  5. Spring Blossom
    Throughout her directorial debut, Suzanne Lindon paints a concise and truthful portrait of her protagonist’s feelings of estrangement.
  6. Queen and Country
    The film lacks an ability to construct significant instances of character drama as symbolic of larger concerns pertaining to nationalist dilemmas.
  7. The Howling
    From the very first scene, The Howling plays around with the notion of vulnerability as a role-playing exercise, a pseudo-sex game.
    • 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.
  9. Chuck
    Like its protagonist, Philippe Falardeau's film gets lost in a haze of incidental cacophony.
  10. Chavela
    The film's hopscotching-in-time structure, informed by specific remembrances of Chavela Vargas's life, is refreshingly unconventional.
  11. The Childhood of a Leader
    Brady Corbet reaches for a dreary self-importance akin to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.
  12. Alice in Wonderland
    This lack of force-fed moralizing, coupled with its diffuse plot and hazily psychedelic imagery, makes it hardly surprising that the film’s revival came about when it developed a cult following.
  13. Why Don't You Play in Hell?
    Refusing to mourn anything, displaying a Futurist-style disdain for the past, Sion Sono imagines a world in which static adherence to old ideas leads directly to doom.
  14. Richard Jewell
    Ironically, Clint Eastwood is as condescending of Jewell as the bureaucrats he despises.
  15. The Night House
    The film upends the clichés that practically define the ghost story in surprising and intriguing ways.
  16. American Animals
    As he showed in "The Imposter," writer-director Bart Layton knows how to spin a compelling yarn.
  17. Meet the Fokkens
    Few recent studies of commercialized sex have been character profiles, so Rob Schröder and Gabrielle Provaas's documentary is an unusual and welcome polemic.
  18. The Long Riders
    The Long Riders takes more than a few cues from John Ford, favoring laconic characters whose projected confidence masks an inability to vocalize basic desires.
  19. Leave the World Behind
    In the end, Leave the World Behind is content to blandly shrug in the direction of an amorphous calamity, reaching for a profundity that it fails to achieve.
  20. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    The film's lampooning of a business built on pure surface extends to its riotous original songs.
  21. Take This Waltz
    Take This Waltz is full of chance encounters, some less likely than a lobby with nine hundred windows or a bed where the moon has been sweating.
  22. Everybody Knows
    Asghar Farhadi falls back on the expository dialogue and dubious perspectival shifts that he frequently resorts to as a means of wrapping up knotty narratives.
  23. 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.
  24. The Third Murder
    In The Third Murder, as in his other films, Hirokazu Kore-eda informs tragedy with a distinctive kind of qualified humor that's realistic of how people process atrocity.
  25. Hustle
    Hustle doesn’t really seem to know who its characters are, much less how they fit into the complicated web of sports, media, and finance that defines the NBA.
  26. Land Ho!
    That the filmmakers consistently catch the nuances of character that bind the two men to each other, rather than simply tracing the pros and cons of their dispositions, is what gives the film its melancholic yet vibrant resonance.
  27. Songs My Brothers Taught Me
    The film is more taken by its own formal composition than enunciating the musical edification promised by its title.
  28. 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.
  29. Imperium
    It demonstrates both the fatal proximity and deceptive distance that can exist between the words and deeds of extremists.
  30. Language Lessons
    Had the film trusted its self-imposed minimalism a little more, it might have been a lot more successful as a character study.
  31. Europa Report
    After a while, it's hard to escape the fact that the audience is watching a potential monster movie in which most of the fun stuff — i.e. the monster—has been pared away.
  32. The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie
    The film’s open affection for the Looney Tunes franchise has a restorative quality.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Police Story 2 (1988)
    Though ostensibly sub-Hitchcockian wrong-man mysteries, with a liberal serving of cop-drama clichés rounding out the narrative framework, the films are better enjoyed as purely cinematic catalogues of set pieces and sight gags, spectacles of breathless physical excess.
  34. Fort Bliss
    The complicated psychological realities of army personnel require a tougher directorial treatment than the maudlin melodrama presented here.
  35. Avengers: Infinity War
    Infinity War is all manic monotony. It's passably numbing in the moment. And despite the hard-luck finish—something an obligatory post-credits sequence goes a long way toward neutering—it's instantly forgettable.
  36. A Vigilante
    It conspicuously tries to distance itself from the revenge film’s propensity toward florid excess.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Maps to the Stars
    If the research that Cronenberg and Wagner engaged in for Maps to the Stars oftentimes appears more entomological than sociological, there's nonetheless a plaintive chord of melancholy that plays throughout the film.
  38. Two Pianos
    Arnaud Desplechin’s film only flirts with questions about the sacrifices made for art.
  39. Sorcerer
    Rather than a fleeting image of violence, however, Friedkin’s cyclical, almost Kafkaesque insistence that politics revolves around now globalized, corporate power delegating hired guns to do under-the-table bidding across national boundaries announces itself through the soundscape, with Tangerine Dream’s electronic basslines substituting for bloodshed. No one escapes the suffocating corrosion of Sorcerer’s polysemous diegesis—not even Friedkin himself, as audiences and industry would have it.
  40. Girl Model
    The documentary makes you wonder about every beautiful woman who's ever stared out from a publication, poster, or billboard, looking sophisticated and self-assured.
  41. F1: The Movie
    F1 succeeds for many of the same reasons that Top Gun: Maverick does: for elevating familiar material with old-school filmmaking swagger.
  42. John Wick
    The film is thematically thin, and it has a tendency to embrace the action genre's more obnoxious elements, but there's a proudly no-nonsense air to its nonsensicality.
  43. The Way, Way Back
    Praises the electric carelessness of teenage angst while depicting it as if it were ultimately no more exciting, though no less pleasant, than an hour in the wave pool.
  44. The Americanization of Emily
    Though a bit overstuffed with long-winded speeches, Chayefsky’s scabrously funny script brims with snappy, crackling dialogue.
  45. The Desert Bride
    As two-handers go, the film has a moderately compelling pair of performances at its center, with Claudio Rissi’s take on a fun-loving road warrior providing an amusing, if obvious, counterpoint to Paulina García’s reserved homebody.
  46. Sometimes I Think About Dying
    The film is an imperfect but affecting portrait of social isolation that captures both the pain and the warmth that comes with finally letting others in.
  47. Chef
    Jon Favreau's film comes off as flippant in its view of independent labor as a universally liberating experience for an artist and businessman.
  48. Detropia
    Seems to be looking for answers, but the ones it finds are too close to the surface to be satisfying.
  49. MS Slavic 7
    In its balance of a wispy narrative and long, quiet episodes of textual close reading, the film feels incomplete in a productive way.
  50. House of Wax
    It’s Price that gives House of Wax its characteristic balance of elegance and lurid theatricality.
  51. Missing Link
    As in Laika’s other efforts, the humor in the film is more wry than gut-busting, but Chris Butler has developed some truly inventive comic characters.
  52. Dream Horse
    After watching this Welsh racehorse drama, even those of us who’d struggle to pronounce the word may find ourselves feeling a bit of hwyl.
  53. Tales from the Golden Age
    The first four of the film's 1980s-set episodes are shorter in length and more anecdotal in nature than the last two and deal primarily with the pageantry and inflexible customs behind the regime with a perspective at once amused and bemused.
  54. The Lesson
    The film ultimately understands poverty as a profound and often irreversible desolation of terra firma.
  55. Journey to the West
    Stephen Chow's distinctive vision is evident in the seemingly boundless imagination of his scenarios, and in the film's sincere spiritual concerns and generosity toward misfits and outsiders.
  56. My King
    Maïwenn fashions a bracing film about co-dependency, capturing the erotic contours of subservience and flattery.
  57. The Harvest
    Director John McNaughton, once an agile orchestrator of seemingly incompatible tones, has retained his talent for teasing insinuation.
  58. Stations of the Cross
    Stations of the Cross acknowledges that putting theoretical behaviors and mindsets into practice can have unwieldy consequences if context and intent are wholly ignored.
  59. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
    Like the film that constrains him, a prequel to Planet of the Apes, perhaps James Franco understands his performance as something that will one day evolve into something far greater.
  60. The Innocent
    The innocent, it turns out, isn’t a single character but the person inside us all, playing at the version of ourselves we’d rather be.
  61. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    Chiwetel Ejiofor announces himself as a sensitive, shrewdly restrained filmmaker with his quietly assured directorial debut.
  62. Enola Holmes
    Even when the plot occasionally falters, Enola’s continuous invitations to complicity renew the film’s momentum.
  63. My Friend Dahmer
    The film wants to treat Jeffrey Dahmer like a character, but it invariably frames him like a specimen.
  64. Bethlehem
    In the end, the film's misstep isn't some failure at being sufficiently morally gray. In being the thriller that it is, it smudges the palette beyond recognition.
  65. 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.
  66. Come True
    The film offers a glimpse of a world where screens are pores in the boundary between dreams and waking life.
  67. Omen
    The patchwork structure of Omen is suited to the complexity a setting where characters switch between French, Swahili, and English depending on who they want to keep in the dark. Yet it’s difficult to shake that there are too many threads for a film of this length to do them justice.
  68. A Quiet Place: Day One
    Like most of this series’s best action, the big bombastic noise is often a distraction from something far more intimate, and in Day One’s case, something far more existentially beautiful.
  69. Crime 101
    Like Mike’s modus operandi as a criminal, the film goes through all the pro forma motions.
  70. Red Obsession
    Offers the ins and outs of the world of wine as an implicit metaphor for art appreciation, from both aesthetic and financial standpoints.
  71. It Came from Outer Space
    Inspired by an outline by Ray Bradbury and modified for the screen by Harry Essex, It Came From Outer Space remains the granddaddy of the ’50s atomic-scare pictures.
  72. No Time to Die
    This Bond’s overall arc from modishly merciless killing machine to aging assassin with the familial feels comes off as a treacly sop to psychological complexity.
  73. Out of Darkness
    Shot in the Scottish Highlands, Out of Darkness draws on the eerie atmosphere of a place that still feels ancient and steeped in mystery.
  74. Dear Diary
    As an auteur film, Nanni Moretti’s Caro Diario inhabits a kind of beyond, because instead of presenting a world filtered through his subjective lens, the filmmaker allows the viewer inside his very subjectivity.
  75. Ne Zha 2
    Jiaozi’s film is a sprawling, hyperkinetic exercise in mythological storytelling.
  76. The Double
    Whatever the film's interest may be in the marginalized, writer-director Richard Ayoade never alludes to what would even be worth fighting for in this nightmarish industrial landscape.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Face to Face
    Face to Face feels scattershot and incomplete, never adequately establishing connections between characters, motivations for significant actions, or even the simple causalities of time and space.
  78. Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter
    It settles firmly into the perspective of a lost soul who finds solace in the swaddling security of fantasy.
  79. Rafiki
    The film's slotting of two African women into a familiar romantic structure represents a radical and important upending of contemporary Kenyan sexual mores.
  80. Night on Earth
    Jarmusch playfully blurs the line between driver/passenger, servant/customer, and native/immigrant, presenting these divisions as virtually meaningless social constructs which merely breed unnecessary contempt.
  81. The Last House on the Left
    It’s the ultimate Vietnam allegory, except there’s no room for peace here, just war.
  82. Just Mercy
    In a time when awareness and acknowledgement of racial bias and extrajudicial measures by law enforcement in America is at its most widespread, such scenes feel condescendingly pitched to an unconverted audience of the imagination.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Place Beyond the Pines
    The film never reaches a climax because it's always in one, distilling the lives of its characters to their tensest moments.
  84. Fabian: Going to the Dogs
    Its characters are suffused with a paradoxical kind of fear that can only happen in a dream, the dread before an immense catastrophe that’s unavoidable because it’s already happened.
  85. Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
    Andrew Rossi's documentary allows The New York Times a kind of nail-biting self-portraiture as it peers off the precipice of (hopefully) a 2.0 rebirth.
  86. The Five Devils
    The film is a thorny exploration of how individuals’ personal ordeals can quickly merge into an impenetrable thicket of irreparable relationships.
  87. Beatriz at Dinner
    Despite its gestures toward nuance, the very broadness of the dichotomies in the film prove to be its undoing.
  88. The Shining
    It’s the experience more so than the actual content of The Shining that radiates cold, anti-humanly indifferent terror.
  89. Superman
    This film finally admits that Superman has been a mainstay for nearly a century precisely because he stands for things outside of faddish trends.
  90. Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent
    Lydia Tenaglia's direction is occasionally flashy and cluttered, but her empathy for Tower is evocative and poignant.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Inequality for All
    Robert Reich's message to America, much like director Jacob Kornbluth's uncomplicated film, is so simple and straightforward (you might even say obvious) that, without nitpicking, it can appear flawless.
  92. Ghost Stories
    In setting their play to film, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman decide where we look. Any magician would be jealous of that power. But it puts everything at a remove, trapping you in your own head.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    One Life
    As much as Daniel Craig's narration can feel tacked-on, it's really secondary to the film's expert camerawork.
  94. Santoalla
    Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer get close to their subjects only to retreat when things get truly dangerous.
  95. 12 O'Clock Boys
    It constantly divides itself between fulfilling the conventions of the informational talking-heads documentary and aiming for a more poetically impressionistic quality.
  96. People Places Things
    The film introduces a promising romantic pentagon, only to let it float away unfulfilled into studiously benign coming-of-age clouds.
  97. The New Black
    It does little to break free of the conventional talking-head documentary format, but thoughtful in how it prizes dialogue over acrimony and one-sided rhetoric.
  98. Before I Wake
    Before I Wake's images have a pleasing straightforwardness that parallels the openness of the young protagonist's longing for love.
  99. Bikes vs Cars
    Director Fredrik Gertten's Bikes vs. Cars is passionate but contradictory, a frustrating combination for a documentary that utilizes admittedly interesting data as a pitch to wean our car-crazed world off excessive driving.
  100. Hondros
    Chris Hondros sought to reconcile peerless beauty with unfathomable atrocity, and Greg Campbell’s film follows suit.
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