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. Never Look Away
    Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film prioritizes the sentimental over the true, the tidy moral over the messy reality.
  2. Neighbors
    The promo materials implore viewers to vote either #TeamFrat or #TeamFamily on Twitter, though the audience is way more likely to be split between #TeamPecEfron and #TeamByrneBoobsplosion.
  3. Noah
    Once the money shots of Darren Aronofsky's version recede, it becomes ever more clear that his intention is to tackle the capriciousness of Old Testament logic. And, ultimately, to assent to it.
  4. Crimes of the Future
    David Cronenberg stares upon humanity’s need to evolve toward some kind of survival with a serene, godlike assurance.
  5. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    Despite this clever setup, Tom Gormican’s film isn’t the self-reflexive skewering of Hollywood that one might expect.
  6. The Nightmare
    As in Rodney Ascher's previous film, Room 237, the subject of obsession is complemented by a despairing attempt to process it, corral it, and somehow conquer it.
  7. The Real Thing
    The film reveals Kôji Fukada to be playing a patient, very resonant long game, underscoring the struggle to wrest oneself out of social vices.
  8. Black Widow
    In its final moments, Black Widow gives its heroine the humanity she never quite gained in her appearances in prior Marvel films, and it’s a shame that this slight but crucial wrinkle to the familiar morality of so many superhero stories ultimately feels more like a twist than a springboard for a new, more morally enlightened era of the MCU.
  9. In the Basement
    Cinema hasn't been this close to the dusty cogs of desire's machinery and unapologetic about pleasure since Pasolini.
  10. The Other Story
    Through this endless string of undercooked subplots, Avi Nesher’s film continually trips over itself.
  11. Dick Tracy
    A highly impressive effort.
  12. Z for Zachariah
    The film squanders the promise of its scrutiny into how people recalibrate their sense of morality in times of crisis.
  13. Problemista
    The film doesn’t lock on a target long enough for it to work up a head of steam as satire about the art world and how it thrives on nepotism, let alone one about the frustrations of the immigration process.
  14. Go Down Death
    The end result is a bit like a beautiful diorama, in which the people share a common purpose with the furniture: to fill space and look nice.
  15. American Woman
    Sienna Miller lends credibility to a character that in other hands might seem like a caricature of the white underclass.
  16. Eureka
    The genre trappings are familiar, but this isn’t any old horse opera.
  17. The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye
    The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye tries so hard to keep up with the quirkiness and theatricality of its subjects that it ends up canceling them out.
  18. Vazante
    Daniela Thomas seems stymied by her own images, unable to extract the turmoil and violence suggested by her story for fear of upsetting the austere surface harmony of her visuals.
  19. Rustin
    Organizing is thankless work, and even though the film, like others in its lineage, functions as an ode to the unsung workers for the revolution, it only turns that tedium to spectacle, rarely willing to truly think about organizing as, well, boring.
  20. Opera
    Opera is a violent aria of memory, bad luck, the artistic drive and the horror of the stare.
  21. I Was at Home, But
    Angela Schanalec’s film configures itself most potently in hindsight as a punch to the gut.
  22. Monsters and Men
    Like many films tackling socially inflammatory material, Monsters and Men is constrained by its politics.
  23. S#x Acts
    In its refusal to bring an easy understanding to its main character's behavior, it comes dangerously close to presenting her as a willing perpetrator in her own victimhood.
  24. Bluebird
    Unable to reconcile plot with poetry, Bluebird is knitted-together by its sense of place and lived-in performances, yet unraveled by anemic false melodrama and overbearing music.
  25. The Divine Order
    The film's performances and narrative flounder to strike the right balance between comedy and drama.
  26. Last Days in the Desert
    It's never made clear how witnessing a family deal with their specific issues affects Jesus's own perspective on his destiny.
  27. Band Aid
    At its most honest, the film wrestles with the reluctance or unwillingness of women to fulfill ostensibly requisite roles.
  28. The Captain
    In one fashion, Robert Schwentke proves to be too complicit with his protagonist, regarding evil and human banality as stimulation.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Bottle Rocket
    Anderson has a great deal of empathy for his charming band of fuck-ups, but the characters are thinly drawn, and Anderson's attempts to lend the story emotional weight, like giving Anthony a ludicrously one-dimensional love interest in South American housekeeper Inez (Lumi Cavazos), largely fall flat.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    American Promise
    The documentary's lack of a cohesive thesis may frustrate at times, but its power lies in its exposition of the mundane.
  31. V/H/S/Halloween
    Every segment passes the basic scary-movie smell test of showing you something that you haven’t seen before, and that includes a truly depraved death involving a large quantity of gumballs.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Dead Man's Wire
    If Dead Man’s Wire adds up to less than the sum of its vicarious jolts and sardonic jabs, it’s perhaps a result of Gus Van Sant’s style fading into the background.
  33. Concrete Cowboy
    The film is stirring when it really dives into specificity.
  34. Avatar: The Way of Water
    For all the genuine thrills provided by its pioneering pageantry, Way of Water ultimately leaves you with a soul-nagging query: What price entertainment?
  35. The New Rijksmuseum
    It most potently strikes the tone of an elegy, pensively observing that beneath the bickering in museum boardrooms lies a massive treasure trove of art history that's being kept from the public's eye.
  36. Lord of the Flies
    Brook renders savagery with the despairing eye of a humanist, and with the irresolvable ambivalence of an artist.
  37. Deadstream
    The film doesn’t quite live up to its promising premise and handful of clever camera gimmicks.
  38. Other People
    The film is at its sharpest when Chris Kelly hands scenes over to his main character's family and friends.
  39. Kung Fu Panda 2
    Exquisite looking but substantially hollow.
  40. Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?
    Queen of the Sun is honey pornography with an activist heart.
  41. Robot and Frank
    Christopher D. Ford's film is nothing more than a Lifetime movie dolled up in cheap Philip K. Dick drag.
  42. Vox Lux
    Vox Lux sets up its main character as a beneficiary of tragedy, opening up a compellingly macabre narrative about how school shootings are becoming so commonplace that they can effectively serve as launchpads for stardom. But that idea goes nowhere, as Vox Lux proceeds to play Celeste's experience in the music industry mostly straight.
  43. Future Weather
    The film is ultimately enjoyable despite its faults, at least partially because it represents an earnest, honest attempt to empathize with struggling American working-class women.
  44. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Phantom of the Paradise
    This is De Palma pouring the new wine of his formal inventiveness and anti-authoritarian irreverence into the old bottles of archetypal myths, and it remains a supremely entertaining anomaly within his filmography, yet entirely emblematic of his filmmaking sensibilities.
  46. Nocturnal Animals
    Nocturnal Animals gets close to a double-barreled satirical thriller commenting on the historic rift between city and country.
  47. Night Call
    Michiel Blanchart’s film often feels like a patchwork of half-developed ideas, each more loosely and tenuously woven into the whole than the last.
  48. Framing John DeLorean
    John DeLorean has a biography that could have been reverse engineered from a Hollywood epic about the rise and fall of an auto-industry mogul.
  49. The Well Digger's Daughter
    Ultimately comes off as curiously anecdotal, lacking the dramatic dynamism that could give Marcel Pagnol's tale new life.
  50. Elevate
    Long on hopefulness but short on sobering realities, Elevate proves a compelling if superficial look at the arduous path traveled by Senegalese teens hoping to make it to America for a higher education and an NBA career.
  51. 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.
  52. This Is the End
    It's disheartening that, despite some half-hearted overtures toward shifting the comedy paradigm, the filmmakers make little attempt to expand their comedic palette.
  53. My Old School
    The film is a perfectly entertaining retelling of an offbeat tale, but it’s also superficial and borderline exploitative.
  54. Hellaware
    Michael M. Bilandic deftly captures the arrogance and despair of New York artists in their efforts to succeed in a decadent world that forces them to produce inherently epigonic work.
  55. The Wall
    We may find out how Gedeck's character reacts to her isolation, but we're never privy to her actual feelings, largely because in a film about a sudden onset of solitude, Pölsler is far too afraid of silence.
  56. Cuties
    Maïmouna Doucouré has a remarkable grasp of the irrationality and volatility of middle-school social dynamics.
  57. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Director Chuck Workman's simply compiles Welles's greatest moments, offering little in the way of an authorial point of view.
  58. Halloween
    For all of the film’s attempts to get back to the sinisterly sidling Michael of the first Halloween, his stealth movements no longer terrify because his fixations are less unthinkingly instinctual, more compulsively mortal.
  59. Kite
    Far more concerned with indulging a slightly less glossy Slumdog Millionaire-like aesthetic than dealing with the frayed relationships of its characters.
  60. Stuck Between Stations
    Brady Kiernan's Stuck Between Stations has sweetness to it, but it's a sweetness borrowed from innumerable other films and constantly corrupted by biased politics and crass emotional digressions.
  61. The Iran Job
    Though there's something refreshing, and disturbingly familiar, about Kevin Sheppard's spontaneity, he's certainly not the most interesting thing about the film.
  62. Alive Inside
    The doc is heartwarming, but it doesn't delve deeply into the backstories that inform the ailing patients' connection to the music that stirs their memories.
  63. The Stanford Prison Experiment
    The formalism fashions effective textural shortcuts to behavioral understanding that the remarkable cast fills in with chilling, convincing finesse.
  64. The Little Stranger
    Perhaps the film's failure to surprise in the end is a result of leaning too heavily on a toolbox not yet translated into the language of cinematic form.
  65. The Armstrong Lie
    The film can't entirely avoid the feeling of a less-productive score-settling hit piece, as if Alex Gibney was making this film merely to stick it to the subject that screwed him big time.
  66. The Ambassador
    Bothing is pointedly outlandish in Mads Brügger's latest, a fact that represents its triumphs and burdens.
  67. Meadowland
    Both Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson understand the greatest pain of loss to be rooted in its searing inexpressibility.
  68. The Wolf of Snow Hollow
    Writer-director Jim Cummings reinvigorates an oft-told tale with personal, thorny preoccupations.
  69. Sansón and Me
    Sansón and Me has a way of frustratingly pulling focus away from its ostensible subject.
  70. A Private Life
    The film’s brisk pace does partly compensate for the essential banality of the central investigation.
  71. The Family Fang
    There's real texture and emotional heft to the central relationship between the siblings, but that's thanks more to the actors than the script.
  72. The Last Duel
    Ridley Scott’s medieval saga insightfully revels in the complexities of its competing storylines.
  73. Abendland
    The documentary discipline can't escape its own inherent intermediateness, or its own penchant for deception.
  74. Rosenwald
    Director Aviva Kempner profile of Julius Rosenwald suggests a 60 Minutes segment stretched to feature length.
  75. Alice Sweet Alice
    Alice, Sweet Alice conflates the angst of adolescent sexual development with the fury of Catholic retribution, suggesting at times an analog version of David Fincher’s Se7en.
  76. Invention
    Courtney Stephens’s film blends fiction and autobiography to fascinating implications.
  77. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
    There is, of course, Gene Wilder as Wonka, the reason most people think they like this movie, and he’s a wonderful actor quite capable of hitting Dahl’s ambivalences (and he has a lovely entrance), but Stuart’s clunky stop-and-start pace and sketchy tone give him nowhere to go.
  78. Juliet, Naked
    The film is loaded with inconsequential detours and questionable and inconsistent character psychology as it stumbles awkwardly to its foregone conclusion.
  79. Jay Kelly
    As Noah Baumbach sells the sappiness in Jay Kelly with the same sincerity of his convictions as in his more acerbic works, the film holds together as a lightweight delight.
  80. PG: Psycho Goreman
    This tongue-in-cheek gorefest gives the impression of an only semi-coherent joke on the audience.
  81. Björk: Biophilia Live
    You can't help but be impressed by how much it represents a natural, even defensive evolutionary step on its creator's part.
  82. Les Cowboys
    Never content to suffice as a mediocre thriller, Les Cowboys is a wellspring of embarrassment for all parties involved.
  83. Haywire
    If anything, Haywire is most closely linked to last year's "Contagion," a kindred effort in style, theme, and value-marring detachment.
  84. Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation
    Throughout, the era-defining yet problem-plagued music festival astounds in large part for all the disasters that didn’t occur.
  85. The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
    While 52 remains something of a mystery, The Loneliest Whale renders him less of a metaphor.
  86. Fresh
    Fresh is pitched as a kind of genre corrective, except its tone-deaf cheekiness only results in a feeling of dreary regression.
  87. Kink
    More than just a thorough examination of hardcore pornography, Christina Voros's doc is also a sort of chronicle of the filmmaking process.
  88. As You Are
    The outline of Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s As You Are is certainly well-worn, but this coming-of-age film nonetheless stands out for its nuanced sense of detail and the sympathy it extends to its main characters.
  89. Perfect Blue
    Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue is a prescient vision of a modern world defined by media oversaturation and social media validation.
  90. Silent Running
    While the drones are still cuter than Ewoks, Lowell remains a cloying representation of a ‘70s acid freak shoving his save-the-trees mantra down your throat.
  91. Annette
    The musical format proves a natural fit for Leos Carax’s love of the visual fantasies created by the cinema’s most basic means of illusion.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Chappaquiddick
    John Curran creates room for his characters to think and feel and an environment that encourages us to do the same.
  93. A Late Quartet
    A muted soap opera masquerading as erudite ensemble piece, Yaron Zilberman's A Late Quartet jettisons character plausibility in favor of pop psychology and leaden instrument analogies.
  94. Korengal
    The result is an alternately gripping and dully meandering patchwork of these soldiers' stay in the Korengal that pointedly shuns big-picture philosophizing.
  95. A Faithful Man
    It reveals itself as neither committed New Wave subversion nor skillful homage, but rather a weak and uninspired imitation.
  96. Sanctuary
    This is a theatrical story told in a purposefully and self-consciously theatrical manner.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment
    While very informative, it doesn't work as an introduction to kibbutzim because it requires the viewer to have some prior knowledge of the history of Israel.
  98. Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League's New York
    Nina Rosenblum's love letter never attains that essence of ambiguity that makes the best nonfiction films live on after the credits fade.
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