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. Wild
    Director Jean-Marc Vallée has created a film out of Cheryl Strayed's beloved 2012 memoir that never quite matches the blunt audacity of its simple title.
  2. Point Break
    In its philosophical and criminal investigations (largely imported from Kathryn Bigelow's original), the film moves in dozens of illogical directions, but not without achieving a patina of earnest credibility.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Point Break
    In terms of Hollywood history, Bigelow's film is the perfect document of its time.
  4. Girlhood
    Girlhood is so keyed to the minutiae of its teenage protagonists' lives, it's as if the film can't stop itself from behaving like they do.
  5. Mommy
    When Xavier Dolan's tremendous empathy for the abandoned, medicated, and economically stressed is given full visual flight, it's easy to get lost in the rush.
  6. Jimmy's Hall
    Ken Loach's staging is so calm and sober that it turns his story into an expertly photographed yet weirdly remote rebellion tale.
  7. Bird People
    Pascale Ferran's film isn't daring enough to fully embrace the narrative fragmentation that it sporadically assumes.
  8. In the Name of My Daughter
    This adaptation is to concerned with narrative fidelity and formal objectivity to pierce the veil of power dynamics that largely comprises the film's concerns.
  9. Sausage Party
    Though the filmmakers may not believe in a higher power, they still maintain a faith in raunchiness as an id-blasting form of liberation from rigid norms, spiritual, sexual, or otherwise.
  10. Dormant Beauty
    The film puts too many elements into play, which means it ends up darting hopelessly between a series of underdeveloped storylines.
  11. Ivory Tower
    The documentary is more interested in covering all its bases than making sure it fully has its foot on each base.
  12. Jimi: All Is by My Side
    Opting for scenes that tend to be fragmented, flawed snippets from a much bigger story, the film exudes a bizarre confidence in not trying to encapsulate the singer's whole life in 120 minutes.
  13. Life's a Breeze
    A rigidly predetermined film that runs on the fumes of hackneyed plot points, squandering at nearly every turn a humanistic study of a family's struggle to maintain a tenable bond with one another.
  14. Frontera
    By turns abrasive and stately, sermonic and impartial, plot-heavy and meandering, often within seconds of each other.
  15. Witching and Bitching
    Álex de la Iglesia has a real flair for wild action sequences that remain exhilaratingly coherent and sensical.
  16. The Amazing Catfish
    The familiar premise is done with enough intelligence and heartfelt conviction that it rises above its potentially cliché trappings.
  17. Honeymoon
    It waffles between dramatizing youthful self-absorption and succumbing to it, and this tonal instability comes to effectively mirror the domestic discord that's revealed to be its real subject.
  18. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    Its dedication to the transgressive power of frivolity remains the franchise's greatest weapon.
  19. Joy
    David O. Russell proposes that there may be no real barrier between the caustic worldview he wears and the sense of childlike wonder he sells.
  20. Straight Outta Compton
    It's most towering accomplishment are its set pieces, which manage to be brash, exhilarating, and even occasionally moving.
  21. The Good Lie
    This is a Hollywood-delivered chronicle of the immigrant experience that earns its justification through good will and tact.
  22. Bridge of Spies
    The film has a streamlined efficiency, but it feels like the work of a master who wants to please rather than probe.
  23. Me and You
    Not even Bernardo Bertolucci's choice of a lead actor with visible facial acne scars, in a welcome gesture toward authenticity, is enough to overcome the gaping hole of psychological nuance at the center of the film.
  24. Cannibal
    It keeps us at a remove that becomes telling of the filmmaker's reticence to explore whatever feelings of isolation and yearning may inform his main character's grisly compulsion.
  25. Pump
    The doc does a good job of avoiding partisan caterwauling, limiting its argument to a clear thesis and well-articulated supporting statements.
  26. A Letter to Momo
    It offers a realistic portrayal of Momo's emotional state, but this comes at the expense of a deeper exploration into both the story's lush supernatural landscape and its inhabitants.
  27. Housebound
    You grow to feel as if you're arbitrarily changing the channel back and forth from a diverting horror film to a promising odd-couple comedy.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Strange Little Cat
    As pleasant and effortless as Ramon Zürcher makes his formal persnicketiness and Akermanian aesthetic rigor seem, his film feels lightweight.
  29. The Almost Man
    The script is perspicacious in making Henrik's bad choices understandable enough emotionally, but also nudges the audience toward wishing the man would wise up.
  30. May in the Summer
    Cherien Dabis is least successful at connecting her character May's marital crisis to the rumblings of her repressed heritage.
  31. The Dog
    It's informed with a subtle but disquieting subtext that insists on the pitfalls of allowing ideology to steer you away from common sense.
  32. Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle
    While the film’s perception of the politics of the jungle is often profound, the same cannot be said of its take on the human world.
  33. We Are Mari Pepa
    The film finally works because of its multitudinous interests in adolescent shell-shock, where paralysis and uncertainty can only be momentarily assuaged through gendered outrage.
  34. Mr. X
    For a life beyond mere DVD supplementary material, the film could use a dose of rigor to balance out its steady stream of congratulatory pit stops.
  35. Godzilla: King of the Monsters
    The film is frustrating in the end for reaffirming the traditional blockbuster’s allegiance to human perseverance.
  36. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    Temperamentally, Guy Ritchie aligns more with the lithe, James Bond-like Solo: detached, above-it-all, eternally cool under pressure.
  37. Expedition to the End of the World
    A visual pleasure, and refreshingly free of message or structure, but it leaves an aftertaste similar to that of an awkward party spent among intellectuals.
  38. To Be Takei
    Jennifer M. Kroot plays things a bit too straight and safe by giving into basic emotional and thematic possibilities of each period in Takei's prolific early life and subsequent Hollywood career.
  39. The Croods: A New Age
    The film is brightly colored, inventively designed, and constantly flirting with the outright psychedelic, but it's so packed full of incident that it rarely gives its jokes the space to land.
  40. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    Thomas Allen Harris's documentary consistently takes agency away from the art itself with a litany of talking heads.
  41. 99 Homes
    Ramin Bahrani's talent for orchestrating sequences of tightly wound tension is in full bloom here, as is his complementary knack for quieter grace notes.
  42. Gringo Trails
    Pegi Vail beautifully edited film somehow addresses a lot, but ultimately says nothing at all.
  43. The Pact 2
    Camilla Luddington refuses to predictably foreground her character's escalating fear, allowing us instead to see that fear as being at war with her inquisitive intelligence.
  44. Magical Universe
    To varying degrees of success, it attempts to prominently display Al Carbee's creations, yet keeps undermining his art in favor of investigating his skewed relationship to everyday realities.
  45. The Humbling
    Philip Roth's original ending is cranked up to 11, flattening the more interesting contours of Al Pacino's performance into a martyr's desperate plea for an audience's love.
  46. Good Kill
    Like other Niccol films, Good Kill is about an essential innocent who dreams of release from a highly structured, classist, and hypocritical environment.
  47. 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.
  48. Goodnight Mommy
    In the third act, the film devolves into an extremely unsettling series of sadistic tortures, the kind of stuff that would appeal largely to fans of Funny Games.
  49. Madame Bovary
    Sophie Barthes neglects to thoroughly conceive of Emma's plight, instead making only sporadic gestures to it.
  50. Beloved Sisters
    It blossoms into a breezily utopian depiction of a ménage á trois whose entirely matter-of-fact presentation sets up an intriguing dissonance with the prim period setting.
  51. Deadpool
    The whiplash contrasts between snideness and sincerity is deeply rooted in the main character's psychology.
  52. Fishing Without Nets
    Though this setup is perhaps infused with too much piety, cheating audience empathy toward the main character, it nonetheless generates a compelling air of social fatalism.
  53. Jack and the Cuckoo-Clock Heart
    The film is at once enabled and hindered by its utter strangeness, an intrinsic quality surely exacerbated in its English-language release.
  54. Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border
    The film, although it positions itself in dialogue with contemporary debates about the border, eschews a clearly delineated historical narrative.
  55. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    Sword of Destiny has an appealingly inventive, unruly genre party streak running down its figurative back.
  56. Black Sea
    As much as the film is primarily a genre workout for director Kevin McDonald, the script makes room for a tough-minded, psychologically corrosive depiction of vengeance.
  57. Diplomacy
    The film isn't really fooling anyone into feeling doom-laden suspense (Paris, after all, is still standing), but the principal performers sell the momentousness of the drama.
  58. Watchers of the Sky
    This is, to put it mildly, a lot of information for one documentary, which inevitably devolves to resemble not so much an anthology as a slideshow of genocide's greatest hits.
  59. Summer of Blood
    Onur Tukel is able to offer a reasonably fresh spin on familiar vampire-movie tropes, giving pitiless misanthropy pedal-to-the-metal comic wit.
  60. Happy Valley
    Once the media caravan departs, the doc meanders, torn between its obligation to reportage and its interest in a town riven by America's thirst for justice.
  61. The Last Witch Hunter
    It has enough ingredients for a reasonably entertaining fantasy adventure—except, that is, for an interesting lead character with an emotionally compelling hook.
  62. Logan
    It recognizes that the thinly veiled secret of Wolverine’s loner act is that he’s always been a cog of some kind.
  63. Wonder Woman
    Wonder Woman is a strong, at times even rousing, application of the superhero film formula, but it ultimately can’t transcend the constraints of the genre.
  64. The Flash
    Nothing Batman or Supergirl do in The Flash to save the world is more effective than what Barry Allen does to save it with a hug and a can of tomatoes.
  65. Shazam!
    Shazam! sees DC combining the golden-age optimism espoused by Wonder Woman and the jubilant, self-aware silliness of Aquaman into a satisfying whole.
  66. Braddock America
    It's mercifully free of the ruin-porn shots that turn so many contemporary films about struggling cities into self-consciously arty exercises in the romanticization of decay.
  67. Private Peaceful
    By modestly embracing its inherent minimalism and finding the emotions underlying even the most schematic of scenarios, the film taps into something unmistakably human.
  68. Thor: Ragnarok
    Thor: Ragnarok is the flamboyantly roller-disco entry in an already uncomplicatedly cartoonish side franchise.
  69. Zero Motivation
    Zero Motivation is refreshingly casual in the depiction of its female-centric environment, but the freshness of its performances is often compromised by a directorial impulse to reduce the female experience to spiteful girl fights, virginal malaise, and bunk-bed antagonism.
  70. Penance
    The film is ultimately, and disappointingly, revealed to be a contraption that's less concerned with mental portraiture than with getting all of its expository ducks in a row.
  71. Before I Disappear
    Even at its most compelling, it remains inconsistent and superfluous, a lesson that sometimes a movie can feel more fully formed in 19 minutes rather than 90.
  72. Late Phases
    Adrián García Bogliano ends up merely toying with the death-steeped concerns of his characters, and taking the furious and bitter perspective that powers the narrative's ponderous dramatic core for granted.
  73. Predestination
    The film effectively underlines the one undertaking that time-travel fantasies can never truly allow: escape from ourselves.
  74. Danny Collins
    The chemistry between Pacino and his cast mates gives this lightly amusing contrivance surprising emotional resonance.
  75. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness
    The documentary is hesitant to show the great work that resulted from Hayao Miyazaki's "grand hobby," never including clips from the classics referred to throughout.
  76. Match
    Patrick Stewart's performance is practically an argument for Belber to jettison everything else and take the actor on the road as a one-man spoken-word act.
  77. Time Out of Mind
    The film isn't preachy, but its indie-movie artiness sometimes get in the way of its noble mission, making us think more about the techniques being used than the effects they're meant to create.
  78. The Visit
    When the trademark Shyamalan twist finally arrives, it doesn't synthesize anything other than the director's devotion to his signature gimmick.
  79. The Search for General Tso
    Director Ian Cheney doesn't delve too deeply into the possibly unsettling questions the documentary raises about society at large.
  80. The Great Wall
    This is an often beautiful film, unmistakably the work of a great director but also a clearly compromised one.
  81. Star Trek Beyond
    Stark Trek Beyond emphasizes the inter-personal dynamics of the USS Enterprise, and functions best as an extended team-building exercise.
  82. Farewell, Herr Schwarz
    The sobering quality that informs both the documentary's aesthetic and content largely suppresses any spontaneity or much-needed moments of levity.
  83. Still Life
    Its fixation on life's quotidian aspects gives way to a less imaginative focus on an inevitable and overly familiar romance.
  84. All the Wilderness
    The images gorgeously embody both the fear and the beauty of James's exploratory experiments with socialization.
  85. 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.
  86. The End of the Tour
    It does well in using dialogue to shape its escalating tête-à-tête, but the filmmaking is too fuzzy to expand on those ideas.
  87. Ghostbusters
    When it's good, this new Ghostbusters is funny, driven, sometimes even a bit scary.
  88. Mississippi Grind
    Ryan Boden and Anna Fleck convey an engagingly low-key atmosphere, pervasive with wayward souls haunted by poor choices.
  89. Best of Enemies
    Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville reinforce the very circumstances they outwardly condemn.
  90. Cop Car
    The narrative derives much of its tension from the unsentimental ambivalence Jon Watts displays toward the story's two pre-teen boys.
  91. The Hunting Ground
    Kirby Dick's films don't go far enough in explaining how a culture of rape can pervade in vastly different institutions, but they're ruthless about holding them accountable.
  92. 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.
  93. Brooklyn
    The allure of the road not taken and Saoirse Ronan's performance exert a powerful pull.
  94. 5 to 7
    Ironically, the Victor Levin film's mildness turns out to be its most engaging quality.
  95. Mad As Hell
    The doc is too enamored with Cenk Uygur and his convictions that it hews more closely to being a conventional and one-sided biographical portrait.
  96. Diary of a Chambermaid
    The lack of ambiguity reflects Benoît Jacquot's treatment of the text, which is devoid of either formal obsessiveness or a contemporary hook.
  97. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    The film's expected rehash of recent pop-culture totems is accompanied by a novel attention to millennial-centric debates about entitlement and identity politics.
  98. Alex of Venice
    Chris Messina is eventually a little too indifferent to the machinations of the plot, but the film, however inescapably sentimental, is a romantic daydream that casts a lovely spell.
  99. Backcountry
    After a surprising development, the film grows slack and sentimental, reverting to the survival-movie platitude about hardship making you a better human.
  100. She's Lost Control
    Anja Marquardt feels the need to puff up her film with relatively artificial conflict that generally comes off as sops to screenwriting conventions.
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