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. The Promise
    The Promise simply turns this historical tragedy into mere background noise for a flimsy romantic triangle.
  2. Sand Castle
    Unwittingly perhaps, the film reveals itself as a microcosm of America's foreign policy in the Middle East.
  3. The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki
    This is a sports tale in which the character building has almost nothing to do with the sport.
  4. Fast Five
    From unique to generic, it's a gear-shift that may prolong the franchise's life (a mid-credits coda confirms that a sixth installment is on its way), but, in the process, also renders it redundant.
  5. Free Fire
    Ben Wheatley's film reduces the modus operandi of the action movie down to its starkest elements.
  6. A Quiet Passion
    A Quiet Passion's accomplishment is in fleshing out the stark context behind Emily Dickinson's ethereal words.
  7. The Fate of the Furious
    The film finally tips the franchise over from modestly thoughtful stupidity into tedious, loud inanity.
  8. Born in China
    The film is neatly organized around not only the changing of the seasons, but a Disney-branded "circle of life" ethos.
  9. Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer
    Writer-director Joseph Cedar charts Norman's rise-and-fall arc with the attention to detail of a procedural.
  10. Little Boxes
    The film's default mode is to lazily skewer suburbanites as cartoonishly privileged yuppies.
  11. Mimosas
    Mimosas confounds its surface narrative with intimations of more layered meanings to come through a jockeying of story threads.
  12. Heal the Living
    The film allows the sorrows of losing a life and the joys of saving it to remain congruent.
  13. Glory
    The film's rough-hewn naturalism belies an exquisite sense of pace and a sneaky breed of gallows humor.
  14. Going in Style
    No one in Going in Style seems to really know what the hell they’re doing or why. And even though that goes double for the filmmakers, at least no one succumbs to taking any of it seriously.
  15. Gifted
    The grace notes are crowded out by the screenplay’s plot machinations and emotional manipulations.
  16. Queen of the Desert
    Throughout Queen of the Desert's narrative, there's no sense of danger, of texture, or even of a rudimentary idea of what's truly driving Gertrude Bell.
  17. All These Sleepless Nights
    Director Michal Marczak's film finds a unique vitality in its densely constructed environment.
  18. Aftermath
    The film evokes nothing more strongly than a live-action adaptation of a Crate and Barrel catalog.
  19. i hate myself :)
    Few documentarians give themselves to their work as literally as Joanna Arnow.
  20. Your Name.
    Even at its most outrageously bizarre, Your Name is bound together by a passionately romantic core.
  21. Win It All
    There's an artisanal scruffiness to Win It All that testifies to Joe Swanberg’s quiet fluidity as a filmmaker.
  22. The Transfiguration
    The film is at its strongest when navigating the story's uneasy relationship to its genre.
  23. Their Finest
    Intimately focusing on its main character's personal triumphs, its refusing to fall into heavy-handed polemicism.
  24. The Ticket
    The Ticket abandons the potentially complex web of drama it initially sets up and moves toward a limp, shallow critique of superficiality itself.
  25. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    It's content to be the sort of film parents can throw on an iPad to ensure 90 minutes' worth of relative peace and quiet away from their antic children.
  26. SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock
    Throughout, the content and tenor of certain stories told by Mick Rock ambitiously inform the film’s style.
  27. Salt and Fire
    Salt and Fire is a doodle, suggesting an assemblage of ecological riffs and fantasias that Werner Herzog may have entertained while making Into the Inferno.
  28. Mine
    The film has absolutely no interest in the dilemmas or after-effects of war and occupation.
  29. Colossal
    When the film's whirligig plotline goes off-rail in the heady final act, Oscar and Gloria's origin story bends over backward to justify a magical-realist conceit that was more fun without explanation.
  30. The Assignment
    Walter Hill and Michelle Rodriguez seem to share Frank’s confusion over the precise difference between cosmetic and biological reality.
  31. Ghost in the Shell
    The primary pleasure of the film resides in its awareness of the impossibilities of unity, whether physical or cultural, within a rapidly transforming global milieu.
  32. Life
    Life, an incredibly square and familiar studio product, baits and switches on two disappointing propositions, moving swiftly from something expectedly cliché to something dismayingly derivative.
  33. The Boss Baby
    Every Republican regime gets the ludicrous devious-baby saga it deserves.
  34. Carrie Pilby
    The film is essentially an exercise in forcing a female genius back into her proper place of dependence on both the father figure and the Prince Charming.
  35. The Blackcoat's Daughter
    Oz Perkins exhibits a committed understanding of the cinematic value of silence and of vastly underpopulated compositions.
  36. The Death of Louis XIV
    Catalan prankster Albert Serra's film ultimately emerges as a compact, improbably riveting viewing experience.
  37. God Knows Where I Am
    Though the film excels at subjectivity and interiority, it tends to falter in conveying more rudimentary information.
  38. The Zookeeper's Wife
    The film imbues a pessimistic view of the seemingly bottomless depths of human cruelty with sorrowful tragic force.
  39. All This Panic
    There's plenty of life in this honest, impressionistic portrait of a cohort of 21st-century American girls.
  40. Cézanne et Moi
    The film barely even scratches the surface of the animating force of Cézanne and Zola's lives: their art.
  41. Live Cargo
    The faces in Logan Sandler's film, like the landscapes of the paradise setting, only convey an empty sort of ambiguity.
  42. David Lynch: The Art Life
    Throughout the documentary, the undisguised regret and longing of David Lynch's reminiscences are often startling.
  43. Karl Marx City
    Petra Epperlein's personal ties to the subject matter provides the documentary with a necessary anchor point.
  44. Saban's Power Rangers
    Power Rangers is so concerned with launching a mature teen-targeted franchise that it often forgets to have some fun.
  45. Prevenge
    Alice Lowe evinces a knack for locating society’s most awkward pressure points, and a willingness to punch them.
  46. Wilson
    Wilson lurches jarringly from poignant melancholy to cartoonish slapstick, unable to settle on a consistent tone.
  47. I, Olga Hepnarová
    The filmmakers take few measures to engender sympathy for Olga, but their prismatic take on her life, while novel, precludes making any resonant statements about homosexuality, emotional health, or humankind’s capacity for evil.
  48. A Woman, a Part
    The film’s depiction of friendship seldom pushes past insights predicated on a fundamental tension between characters.
  49. I Called Him Morgan
    Director Kasper Collins imbues this documentary with an ambiguous, unsettlingly empathetic emotional force.
  50. Song to Song
    The film is about floating along on currents of uncertain desire and excitement, overthinking your own indulgence in these whims, and then sometime later on down the road, through no clear constellation of reasons, recognizing that a real human connection was squandered in the haze of all that self-exploration.
  51. Lady Macbeth
    It isn't until its final moments that Lady Macbeth turns into the kind of meaningless, mean-spirited, and proudly irredeemable non-character study that likens it to, say, last year's emptily foreboding Childhood of a Leader.
  52. T2 Trainspotting
    The heart of T2 lies in the relationship between Renton and Sick Boy, but their rocky reunion is another victim both to the wheel-spinning innate in Hodge’s script and Boyle’s relative lack of fresh ideas.
  53. By the Time It Gets Dark
    Anocha Suwichakornpong earnestly and ambitiously attempts to redefine cinema’s conventional grasp of consciousness.
  54. Beach Rats
    Beach Rats is most compelling when it puts a self-aware focus on Harris Dickinson’s sculpted male figure.
  55. After the Storm
    The stock character types that Hirokazu Kore-eda employs across the board are pretty much open books from the start.
  56. The Wound
    Though the film settles into a familiar coming-of-age trajectory, it's always enlivened by John Trengove's intimate, inquiring eye.
  57. Frantz
    The pacing is so humorless and funereal that it squelches the possibility of heat or conflict arising between the characters.
  58. The Belko Experiment
    The film's characters are stock types without enough satirical texture to fulfill their function in the narrative.
  59. Menashe
    Striking throughout are the seemingly caught-on-the-wing moments that subtly enrichen the film’s characterizations.
  60. The Sense of an Ending
    Ritesh Batra's film is a tale of white nostalgia that should have found its footing on dramatic grounds.
  61. Kong: Skull Island
    Every creature here that's intended to burrow themselves into the audience’s nightmares are less wonders of imagination than of size.
  62. My Scientology Movie
    The only element that significantly differentiates this documentary from its peers is Louis Theroux's good-natured cheekiness.
  63. The Ottoman Lieutenant
    More conspicuous than its rote melodrama is the way the film elides the concurrent genocide of ethnic Armenians by Ottoman forces.
  64. Brimstone
    Its bid for social correctness does nothing to make the juvenile and numbing fixation on brutality any more palatable.
  65. White Sun
    Deepak Rauniyar may be more skilled dramatist than inspired image-maker, but his admirably balanced and humane social and political perspective is bracing nevertheless.
  66. Canners
    Canners plays a bit too infatuated with its subjects and for reasons not wholly clear by the film's end.
  67. Actor Martinez
    Mike Ott and Nathan Silver's film has a ghostly, tremulous quality that eats under the skin.
  68. Who's Crazy? (1966)
    Thomas White's is a bizarre, undisciplined romp through snowbound Belgian vistas and '60s signifiers alike.
  69. The Other Half
    The film's emotional resonance is consistently stifled by excessively gloomy aesthetic and stylistic tics.
  70. Patti Cake$
    The obstacles and opportunities that Patti encounters are often rote, but her struggles and triumphs are detailed with a gravity that honors and elucidates her feelings.
  71. Raw
    Throughout Raw, Julia Ducournau exhibits a clinical pitilessness that’s reminiscent of the body-horror films of David Cronenberg.
  72. Suntan
    Argyris Papadimitropoulos struggles to lift his material out of a downbeat mode of cringe comedy.
  73. Beauty and the Beast
    Bill Condon's Beauty and the Beast actually delivers a remarkably optimistic balm to a festering, existential wound.
  74. Wolves
    Bart Freundlich alternates somewhat arbitrarily between his various plots, leaving a lot of loose ends in the process.
  75. The Institute
    The Institute seems constantly on the verge of dipping into spoof, though of what exactly is difficult to say.
  76. Table 19
    Each of Table 19‘s faint glimmers of grace are overwhelmed by elements of general spatial and narrative incompetence.
  77. Catfight
    Onur Tukel attempts to connect Ashley and Veronica’s barbarity to the broader callousness of American life, but the satire is too blunt to really stick.
  78. Kiki
    When compared to the high-stakes dramas at the center of Paris Is Burning, where sex workers dreamed of becoming supermodels, Kiki feels rather tame.
  79. Junction 48
    At its best, the film demonstrates that no art is more political than that which depicts the lived experience of the oppressed with accuracy, empathy, and moral clarity.
  80. Contemporary Color
    The Rosses share David Byrne’s interest in the minutiae of habitats and the comforting enclosure they provide along with the discomfiting constriction of anonymity.
  81. Apprentice
    Writer-director Boo Junfeng casually reinvigorates the prison drama, boiling its elements down to their primal essence.
  82. The Last Word
    Its main character's transformation isn't significant enough to justify her complete redemption in the eyes of those around her.
  83. Before I Fall
    All the film has to show for its efforts are tired platitudes about the value of altruism and living each day as it if were the last.
  84. Nakom
    Kelly Daniela Norris and T.W. Pittman's film immediately announces itself as a modest triumph of world-building.
  85. The Human Surge
    The film’s default state is an ambient inertia that gestures vaguely in multiple directions without concerning itself with the hard work of constructing an argument, a convincing milieu, or even a compelling mood.
  86. Collide
    It's difficult to begrudge a film that has the good sense to put so much stock in Ben Kingsley's hammy theatrics.
  87. Les Hautes Solitudes (1974)
    Trading on the already-resonant associations engendered by a famous face, Garrel's film responds by forging a new, deeper connection between an actress and her public, resulting in that rare moment of cinematic alchemy where the line between fact and fiction has not only blurred, but ceased to matter entirely.
  88. Get Out
    Throughout Get Out, Jordan Peele incisively probes the connection between liberal racism and good old-fashioned white supremacy.
  89. Bitter Harvest
    The film is an awkward mix of swashbuckling love story and polemic, painted in very broad strokes.
  90. Paraguay Remembered
    Like most great essay films, Paraguay Remembered is driven by associations not just with art works with which it shares a kinship, but a stream-of-conscious relationship between word and image.
  91. My Life as a Zucchini
    The film circumvents bleakness with a thoroughgoing commitment to understanding and intimacy.
  92. The Girl with All the Gifts
    The film wants to have its flesh and eat it too, but even more damning is how little meat is on its bones to begin with.
  93. Logan
    It recognizes that the thinly veiled secret of Wolverine’s loner act is that he’s always been a cog of some kind.
  94. The Great Wall
    This is an often beautiful film, unmistakably the work of a great director but also a clearly compromised one.
  95. Fist Fight
    Over-stuffed and under-conceived, Fist Fight is a clumsy mélange of clashing comedic perspectives.
  96. XX
    These shorts follow female protagonists as they wrestle with exclusion and implicit social standards that may or may not extend to their male counterparts.
  97. Land of Mine
    Land of Mine's fitful jolts of suspense can't compensate for the story's wholly familiar trajectory.
  98. In Dubious Battle
    Bits of editorializing dialogue throughout James Franco's In Dubious Battle suggest the resonant film that might’ve been.
  99. Lovesong
    So Yong Kim's film ultimately manages a convincing articulation of friendship between women.
  100. Fifty Shades Darker
    Fifty Shades Darker takes the Dark Knight approach to franchise maintenance, taking pains to assure you that its protagonists are serious about their passions.
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