Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. In Dubious Battle
    Bits of editorializing dialogue throughout James Franco's In Dubious Battle suggest the resonant film that might’ve been.
  2. Lovesong
    So Yong Kim's film ultimately manages a convincing articulation of friendship between women.
  3. 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.
  4. John Wick: Chapter 2
    John Wick: Chapter 2 remarkably balances its predecessor’s spartan characterizations and plotting with a significant expansion of scale.
  5. A Cure for Wellness
    Most gratifying throughout A Cure for Wellness is the moment-to-moment anticipation of where Gore Verbinski will put his camera next.
  6. Stray Bullets
    What distinguishes Stray Bullets from so many other low-budget crime films is Jack Fessenden's sense of quietness.
  7. The LEGO Batman Movie
    The film is an unbroken chain of one-liners, sight gags, and pop-culture references, and the hit-to-miss ratio is high.
  8. The Island Funeral
    The film rolls political commentary into the template of a “lost highway” horror film by forgoing ironic distancing.
  9. A United Kingdom
    The Amma Asante film's broade sociopolitical overview is balanced by the intimate attention paid to the leads.
  10. Keep Quiet
    The filmmakers astutely reveal how a culture can eat another alive and somehow live with itself.
  11. Kedi
    Ceyda Torun’s Kedi is an open, tender-hearted meditation on the relationship between felines and humans.
  12. Rings
    Rings is unsure as to whether it’s a sequel to the other entries in the series or a contemporary reboot.
  13. The Space Between Us
    The Space Between Us is simply disappointing when it isn’t trying to browbeat its audience into emotional submission.
  14. Eloise
    Robert Legato's film is lifelessly composed of the usual tropes of horror films set in mental asylums.
  15. War on Everyone
    The film is in love with the tropes it ridicules, and it doesn't take long for that love to dwarf any possibility of critique.
  16. The Lure
    Agnieszka Smoczynska's film is most poignant when it simply stares at its own strangeness.
  17. Youth in Oregon
    Joel David Moore's film is too often distracted by irrelevant emotional grandstanding.
  18. Wheeler
    Ryan Ross's Wheeler is at its strongest as a showcase for Stephen Dorff’s husky, lived-in performance.
  19. Don't Knock Twice
    The film's storylines fail to inform or intensify each other in any theme-deepening or character-developing ways.
  20. The Comedian
    Nearly everything in Taylor Hackford's tin-eared comedy is as ersatz as the Robert De Diro character's rage is real.
  21. I Am Not Your Negro
    The film makes no concessions about its dissatisfaction with the whole rotten lot of so-called western democracy.
  22. Dark Night
    Tim Sutton's film often surprises on the micro level, but its broader execution gives reason for pause.
  23. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
    The Resident Evil films are so unconcerned with traditional character and narrative that they suggest either abstract art or the fevered brainstorming of a child at play.
  24. A Dog's Purpose
    Lasse Hallström's gooey film exists only to offer comforting reassurances about dogs' natural servility.
  25. I Am Michael
    Justin Kelly's film is more interested in rushing through the narrative's events than contemplating their environment.
  26. The Daughter
    It too often strains for a tragic gravity that its ultimately melodramatic characters never earn.
  27. Gold
    The film finds no treasure of gleaming originality in its energetically told but crushingly clichéd anti-capitalist parable.
  28. The Salesman
    Asghar Farhadi's film yields a tonal and emotional friction that's simultaneously tragic, transcendent, and comic.
  29. Donald Cried
    Finding the drama and humor in everyday situations like these isn't easy, but Avedisian makes it look as natural as swinging on a vine.
  30. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    Quibbles dissipate in the face of the giddiness of the action, which builds to such a relentless head that even the serious stakes of the film’s motivation give way to a largely pleasant vibe.
  31. Paris 05:59: Théo & Hugo
    Very few films accept the contradicting velocities of gay desire, and present them in such blunt yet graceful fashion, the way Paris 05:59 does.
  32. Split
    Split is personal and outlandish, with questionable themes, riveting plotting, somber storytelling, and elegant construction.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    We Are the Flesh
    The film establishes a hypnotic rhythm through razor-stropped editing and a reverberant sound design that later scenes will disrupt with alarming impunity.
  34. Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire
    Cohen here is ever the model of grace and dignity around his peers, if not exactly entirely at peace with himself.
  35. Starless Dreams
    Mehrdad Oskouei avoids sentimentalizing the girls or tritely lamenting their stolen innocence.
  36. Strike a Pose
    The filmmakers and performers show great maturity in refusing to settle scores or spill secrets.
  37. The Red Turtle
    A pointed simplicity governs Michael Dudok de Wit's The Red Turtle, one that’s traditional of many survival tales.
  38. Detour
    The effect of the film becomes not unlike watching a puzzle solve itself without demanding either the audience’s emotional or intellectual investment.
  39. Antarctica: Ice and Sky
    The documentary advances its cause through an intimately diaristic depiction of hard work done well.
  40. The Bye Bye Man
    Stacy Title’s film ends up succeeding most deftly as an advertisement for on-campus housing.
  41. Monster Trucks
    The film cartoonishly admonishing Big Oil while hypocritically fetishizing the gas-guzzling appetite of a cute and cuddly machine-creature hybrid.
  42. Live by Night
    There's nothing at the center of Live by Night, no foundation of drama to ground the convoluted mash-up of so many genre tropes.
  43. 100 Streets
    Throughout the film's three interconnected stories, Jim O'Hanlon favors the blunt, maudlin manipulations of Crash.
  44. The Crash
    The film may be too preposterous to take seriously, but at least writer-director Aram Rappaport trains his sights on the right enemies.
  45. Claire in Motion
    Throughout, writer-directors Lisa Robinson and Annie J. Howell's film buckles under the weight of its symbolism.
  46. Ma
    Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma has had its subtext dragged kicking and screaming to the surface.
  47. Alone in Berlin
    The film attempts a tone of tragic understatement that registers instead as flat, plodding, and underfelt.
  48. Railroad Tigers
    Despite its energetic, intricately climax, Railroad Tigers is at its most entertaining when merely observing Chan’s smaller movements.
  49. Master
    The film is seemingly terrified of boring us, offering one elaborate montage of catch and release (or of survey and flee) after another.
  50. Arsenal
    It's a misnomer to label the climax of Steven C. Miller's patently sick Arsenal an actual climax.
  51. Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America
    The film is a debater with some interesting points to make but no overall argument to contain them.
  52. The Ardennes
    It predictably lurches toward acts of extreme violence with little interest other than the instant titillation such moments afford.
  53. Passengers
    Monogamy, Passengers seems to suggest, is tantamount to existing in a world where nothing else matters outside of the bond you and your partner share.
  54. A Monster Calls
    A Monster Calls is both governed and straitjacketed by director J.A. Bayona’s competent impersonality.
  55. The Bad Kids
    Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe's documentary raises important questions about the limits of pedagogy.
  56. Assassin's Creed
    The film ends up with both blurry action that often looks digitally faked and a fractious plot that’s stuck over-explaining itself.
  57. The Autopsy of Jane Doe
    This is cinema’s most comprehensive look at the gruesome business of necropsy since Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.
  58. Sing
    In Sing, musical theater is simply an excuse for the filmmakers to deliver an animated version of American Idol.
  59. Silence
    Martin Scorsese crafts a versatile, multifaceted work that encourages serious reflection and contemplation.
  60. Fences
    Danzel Washington honors the manna of the play's being: the micro of romantic longing, self-loathing, and nostalgia.
  61. Collateral Beauty
    David Frankel's film argues that the power of miracles can be manufactured by those who can fund them.
  62. Why Him?
    The film is surprisingly amiable, thanks to the commitment of its lead actors and its refusal to condescend to its characters.
  63. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    Rogue One is less the fetish object that The Force Awakens is because it at least has the ambitions to create its own character dynamics and plot routes rather than coast on existing ones.
  64. The Hollow Point
    Gonzalo López-Gallego's direction isn't confident enough to allow us to ignore The Hollow Point's contrivances.
  65. A Kind of Murder
    The film seems more interested in its art design then in fully developing the story's underlying sexual ethics.
  66. Ghostland: The View of the Ju/’hoansi
    The film’s nagging representational problem stems from its reductive sense of place and portraiture of emotional displacement, which gradually phases out the possibility of thornier revelations.
  67. Solace
    It joylessly coopts the hoariest stylistic tics and narrative tropes from your run-of-the-mill 1990s thriller.
  68. Hidden Figures
    The central characters' dogged refusal to cede their places on a team that keeps trying to reject them is a moving display of heroism.
  69. The Founder
    Michael Keaton's powerful performance in The Founder is marooned in a wishy-washy story.
  70. Frank & Lola
    The film occasionally benefits from the weird energy shared between Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots.
  71. Office Christmas Party
    Josh Gordon and Will Speck's Office Christmas Party generally smacks of trying too hard to earn its laughs.
  72. The Brand New Testament
    At first, the film’s dark humor is amusing, only for it to wear off once an actual plot kicks into motion.
  73. On the Map
    It captures how sports can bring wholly disparate people together to accomplish feats that change the destiny of nations.
  74. La La Land
    Every element of La La Land is bound up in a referentiality that largely precludes the outpourings of emotion we come to musicals for.
  75. Harry Benson: Shoot First
    While it offers ample opportunity to admire Benson's body of work, it provides few aesthetic delights of its own.
  76. Burn Country
    For a film that warns against believing in a mirage, Burn Country seems all too comfortable perpetuating one.
  77. All We Had
    Katie Holmes's feature-length directorical debut is more earnest than remarkable, but with its heart in the right place.
  78. Old Stone
    Johnny Ma's Old Stone is a lean, nasty entry in a subgenre that could be termed the bureaucratic noir.
  79. Pet
    The screenplay quickly loses this moral clarity as the plot twists pile up and the power balances shift.
  80. Videophilia (and Other Viral Syndromes)
    What the film embodies, unfortunately, the listlessness of its slacker characters.
  81. Lost and Beautiful
    When he's not busy lamenting a bygone past, Marcello more broadly and usefully reminds us of a world beyond our own and a time beyond the present, all of which can be easy to forget in a country as full of political and economic turmoil as present-day Italy.
  82. Patriots Day
    As long as Patriots Day is concerned with recreating the sense of ambient chaos among sparring investigators and an anxious community, it’s immersive and thrilling.
  83. Man Down
    Dito Montiel's silly plot machinations waste a solid performance from Shia LaBeouf.
  84. Jackie
    Pablo Larraín's film bluntly hammers home the notion that history is framed by perception rather than reality.
  85. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    It believes that the avenue to proving humanity is through banalizing gestures of quotidian significance.
  86. Two Trains Runnin'
    Sam Pollard's documentary teeters on reaching a higher plane of meaning simply through the efficiency of its information.
  87. Bobby Sands: 66 Days
    Brendan J. Byrne's documentary about Bobby Sands colors its familiar formal lines with welcome intelligence.
  88. The Eyes of My Mother
    Though the film strives to be audacious and galvanizing, it's easily shaken off as an exercise in stunted necrophilia erotica.
  89. Lion
    Lion's faults of structure and pacing might limit its power, but in stretches it still roars.
  90. Moana
    Compared to your average Disney princesses, Moana is neither selfishly rebellious nor simplistically innocent.
  91. Seasons
    Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud's Seasons is a nature documentary that reveals itself as a story of tragic usurpation.
  92. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    In many ways, Toshirô Mifune the man remains just as mysterious after watching Steven Okazaki's film as he was before.
  93. Allied
    In the film, Robert Zemeckis brings to bear his pop-epic scope in what's otherwise a claustrophobic story.
  94. Baden Baden
    The film plays like it's been methodically configured to snuff out an even marginal indulgence of its characters' emotions.
  95. Always Shine
    The film undermines the unity of its characterizations, redirecting into garish phantasmagoria.
  96. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    The film exists resolutely outside of salience and doggedly within the comfort of escapism.
  97. Miss Sloane
    The screenplay's enigmatic nature holds one's interest throughout, even as the film veers into pat moralism.
  98. Rules Don't Apply
    Warren Beatty's portrayal of Howard Hughes has the overly polished feel of an anecdote that's been told too often.
  99. Bad Santa 2
    Both a potent rendering of and cure for the holiday blues, Bad Santa 2 shows that even the most hopeless situations can be remedied and that just about anyone is capable of redemption
  100. Ne Me Quitte Pas
    The entirety of the film seems increasingly constructed around ill-begotten attempts at dark humor.
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