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. The Last Christeros
    The film forsakes most of the underdog sentimentality found in traditional genre treatments of noble sacrifice.
  2. 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.
  3. Homme Less
    Thomas Wirthensohn frequently sinks into dully positing Mark Reay as something close to the pinnacle of human integrity.
  4. The King of Staten Island
    Throughout, Judd Apatow dramatizes the ideal of community with an almost Eastwoodian sense of rapture.
  5. Blackboard Jungle
    Poitier’s acting is scalding hot. If The Blackboard Jungle is worth anything, it’s for bearing witness to a major star in the making.
  6. Sovereign
    Christian Swegal’s feature-length directorial debut is like staring into a national wound.
  7. The Ides of March
    Clooney's films as director often begin with a familiar point A and conclude at a less-familiar point B, deriving much of their interest from the circuitous path required to navigate the shift.
  8. Shortcomings
    Shortcomings is a mostly comedic but fitfully insightful examination of a character type familiar to indie cinema: the solipsistic guy who fills the gap left by emotional underdevelopment with intense opinions delivered at bad times.
  9. Tesla
    A profound sense of restlessness and loneliness haunts Michael Almereyda’s film, which reinvigorates the biopic genre.
  10. The Great Hack
    It seems so invested in a rehabilitation of Brittany Kaiser’s image that the filmmakers’ own motives end up being its most interesting subject.
  11. The Perks of Being a Wallflower
    A risible, somewhat revolting piece of pop martyrdom, made for and isolated to the damaged middle class.
  12. In the Aisles
    By subverting the impulse to indulge a winning romance between its two bright European stars, In the Aisles insists on the dignity of its appealing but rather thin characters.
  13. The History of Future Folk
    Ridiculousness played with a straight face, the film is endearing even if it's never quite hilarious.
  14. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    However faithfully the film transposes the plot and themes of the source material, it struggles to capture the spirit, ironing out D.H. Lawrence’s modernity-skeptical modernism and losing sight of his poetic vision.
  15. Tom at the Farm
    Its allegory for internalized homophobia, a gay man's perilous attraction to straightness itself, seems in this case deeply persona.
  16. The Circle
    The film refuses to tease us with suspense, overwhelm us with sentimentality, or defy us with nuance.
  17. London River
    Rachid Bouchareb casts his account of the horrifying aftermath of tragedy on an intimate scale, allowing the halting words and frightened faces of his two leads to tell us as much as we need to know about the uncertainties of those faced with tracking down their lost loved ones.
  18. Buena Vista Social Club: Adios
    Adios may deepen our understanding of these musicians and their world, but it never quite stands on its own.
  19. A Master Builder
    Jonathan Demme makes loving sport of the trust his actors have clearly placed in him, erecting for them a monument to the joys and terrors of walking an emotional high wire.
  20. Garbo: The Spy
    Using a whirlwind of archival footage, maps, and split screens, Edmon Roch conveys Juan Pujol Garcia's reign as Europe's premiere spy in a constantly fluid fashion, aesthetically mimicking his crafty and cagey nature.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Sapphires
    Wayne Blair isn't interested in historical complexity or subtext, just the seamless flow of Hollywood-style storytelling that lazily connects one musical number to the next.
  22. The Green Prince
    The proceedings have such a rigidly determined structure, amplified by chapter titles, that the power and conviction in their recountings deteriorate into a placid series of back-and-forths.
  23. The Myth of the American Sleepover
    Throughout this American Graffiti-like Circadian shuffle, we can sense these characters coming to grips with human realities that they dare not vocalize.
  24. More Than the Rainbow
    The film's segments move seamlessly from one topic to the next with the unselfconscious ease of a good dinner party.
  25. Unforgivable
    The layered, character-driven drama may subvert expectations of a sunny Venetian noir, but observes its five principal characters with a probing, egalitarian eye.
  26. Cut Throat City
    Cut Throat City is still an ambitious and volatile film, an atmospheric survey of the thankless world of the rich and the damned.
  27. Long Shot
    As it proceeds toward its telegraphed rom-com ending, the film becomes just more empty rhetoric, an ineffectual reiteration.
  28. Crystal Fairy & The Magical Cactus
    There's so much baggage involved in the kind of dilettantish games Jamie and Crystal are playing that it's a shame that the film never fully engages with these enticing issues.
  29. Freaky
    Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.
  30. The Legend of Ochi
    A simplicity of spirit guides writer-director Isaiah Saxon’s fable-like feature debut.
  31. Girl Asleep
    From the overtly vibrant colors to the caricaturesque dimensions of the performances, the film's aesthetic promises a great allegorical message that never arrives.
  32. Furious 7
    The film lays bare that the franchise's most radical asset is also its most conservative: an overriding emphasis on, above all else, the on-screen family.
  33. Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
    The film poignantly reveals that the secret history of Hollywood is really an alternate history of America.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Aquí y Allá (Here and There)
    It's a confident vision, but its aversion to sentiment has the intended but unfortunate effect of making the characters' disconnects our own.
  35. The Wanting Mare
    It’s as if Nicholas Ashe Bateman is commenting on a distinctly American suburban malaise, using a fictional place, digitally made, to get at a real, painful truth about being stuck in a place you didn’t choose, amid circumstances you didn’t create.
  36. Upgrade
    Upgrade is most effective when mining the comical and bizarre love-hate chemistry between Grey and Stem and pairing that singular conflict with batshit-crazy action, but the film’s follow-through is clunky and unfulfilling.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Rose
    Long takes are used frequently, whether in a seven-minute exchange between Rose and Huston in bed or a staggering high-angle shot that frames Rose in front of a football field while using a payphone, before craning down to capture her in close-up. These visual cues, along with Midler’s presence, give the film an immediacy and dynamism.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Green Wave
    Unlike Waltz with Bashir, it only seems to be using animation in an effort to make blog diaries by twentysomethings appear cinematic.
  39. 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.
  40. The Surfer
    When The Surfer does break out of the sun-addled fugue state that marks its midsection, it delivers a gonzo finale that lets Nicolas Cage rev himself up into his most manic, meme-able self.
  41. Misunderstood
    The film is only slightly dependent on the self-pity that informed Asia Argento's last effort, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, but it feels similarly airless.
  42. Ma
    Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma has had its subtext dragged kicking and screaming to the surface.
  43. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
    The film at one point offers the finest sustained act of emotional storytelling to grace a Marvel Studios production.
  44. Farewell, My Queen
    Control is the operative element in Benoît Jacquot's work, with the main caveat being that when someone has it, someone else does not.
  45. The Connection
    The film feels utterly infatuated by the cop/crook dividing line long-since drawn, if not flogged, by Michael Mann.
  46. The Life of Chuck
    Mike Flanagan’s film doesn’t escape the mires of unpersuasive pop psychology.
  47. Pianomania
    Stefan Knüpfer's subtle charisma feels more suited to a beefily human New Yorker article than a documentary film.
  48. Carol Channing: Larger Than Life
    A bubbly 90-year-old mascot from the golden days of the American musical, this doc's subject is certainly larger than the conventional testimonial treatment she's given.
  49. Jealousy
    Like an astutely aching ballad, the film—aptly scored with sweet, strumming beats by Jean-Louis Aubert—is pleased to ambiguously infer the interior logic of its irresolute characters without pigeonholing their motivations.
  50. Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
    The film is disarming for its sincerity, unalloyed in its positive thinking but unafraid of showing the gruesome details of alcoholism and denial to back up its bromides.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Somewhere Between
    For what often feels like an obligatory "Where Are They Now?" DVD extra, the documentary is surprisingly affecting.
  52. Rosewater
    It shrugs off the bigger questions about Iranian politics its first half appears to raise, falling back instead on a gestalt of the eternal, Kafkaesque regime, wherever the viewer may find it.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Arachnophobia
    Arachnophobia isn’t great filmmaking, appearing to be kept in check by vaguely resembling Spielbergian entertainment without rising to its altitudes. But it’s a pleasant, acutely nostalgic elicitation of the VHS era and the woozy, preadolescent excitement of awaiting the next cranked-out Spielberg Xerox picture.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Damsels in Distress
    The clash of styles in Damsels in Distress is bewildering and then disarming.
  55. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning
    The film is a showcase for preposterous (and mostly practical) action and an unabashed sentimentality that Ethan feels for the makeshift family of spies he’s assembled over the course of the series.
  56. A Wolf at the Door
    It finds its strength in painting a portrait of Brazilian heterosexual gender relations as an always-volatile symbiosis between feminine hysteria and ruthless machismo.
  57. The Gospel According to André
    While many documentaries about notable figures feel the unfortunate need to legitimate their subjects with hyperbolic praise from recognizable sources, the film immediately runs the gamut in a manner that would be worthy of a mockumentary were it not completely serious.
  58. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    Though its lugubrious and plodding narrative spins its wheels ahead of someone coming along to fill T’Challa’s shoes, Wakanda Forever does stand out for its depictions of grief.
  59. Chevalier
    Chevalier doesn’t match the revolutionary spirit of Joseph Bologne’s life, but there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be taken from seeing a towering figure, long forgotten by history, returned to his rightful place at center stage.
  60. Desert Hearts
    It advocates risk and consciousness as the only means to overcome the cold, repressive hand of so-called normative thought.
  61. Legend of the Mountain (1979)
    Every pan and snap zoom and dissolve is exact, every whorl of smoke and wind-thrown swath of leaves pulled from a dream and placed methodically before our eyes.
  62. The Peanuts Movie
    Failure hovers over the film as much as it did in Schulz's comic strip, infusing even its most ebullient set pieces and designs with a sense of melancholy.
  63. Convento
    Convento is an unusual experimental film that conjures the free-floating aura of a dream, only without the stylized, hyper-symbolic imagery that we generally associate with films attempting to convey dream states.
  64. The Creeping Garden
    It's something unique for both a genre exercise and a documentary: a science-fiction film that doesn't contain an ounce of fiction.
  65. Sometimes Always Never
    The film unites its seemingly disparate strands of somber drama and deadpan comedy into a surprisingly cohesive whole.
  66. 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.
  67. The Way I See It
    The final product feels like it would have been most appropriate as a video presentation for the Democratic National Convention.
  68. Hipsters
    An over-the-top Russian musical about hipsters set in 1950s Moscow, where getting a non-pastel-colored tie is a mafia-mediated operation and a saxophone is considered a concealed weapon? Yes, please.
  69. Meanwhile on Earth
    The overbearing plot of the film sadly obscures the humanity of its characters.
  70. No Man of God
    As an exploration of the misogyny that drove Bundy’s crimes, Amber Sealey’s film mostly falls short of its potential.
  71. Nancy
    There's vanity in its boutique art-film brand of hopelessness, which derives from a fetishizing of "keeping it real."
  72. Outrage
    It's a brilliant reversal that, while seemingly far less inspired than most of the director's efforts, leaves us with a film that's just as iconoclastic.
  73. R
    If the trajectory of R foreshadows tragedy early and often (what prison film doesn't?), the filmmakers manage to infuse quiet moments of reflection and panic into each man's traumatic experience.
  74. Fathom
    Throughout, there are moments when you may feel as if Drew Xantholoulos could push harder on the film’s philosophical implications.
  75. The Final Year
    For liberals, The Final Year might become a kind of metaphorical marriage video that’s watched by divorcees who yearn of that initial hint of paradise.
  76. Price Check
    The script is teeming with informed jargon about the business of supermarket pricing, and with actors like Posey as its vessel, the dialogue rings with an unlikely blend of fascination and farce.
  77. Wild Canaries
    Lawrence Michael Levine's film occupies a sweet spot between the self-aware and taut.
  78. Sublet
    Eytan Fox’s film is a low-key observance of two men finding the beauty in each other’s mysteries and contradictions.
  79. Seasons
    Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud's Seasons is a nature documentary that reveals itself as a story of tragic usurpation.
  80. Love Life
    Because we’re tasked with inferring so much about the characters, especially their pasts, so much of the film’s romance is unconvincing.
  81. When Evening Falls on Bucharest or Metabolism
    At once a microcosmic expression of frustration and another of auto-critique, When Evening Falls devilishly recalls and riffs on seemingly shapeless conversations between its very small ensemble of characters without succumbing to soporific navel-gazing.
  82. 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.
  83. Smile 2
    Parker Finn, like his entity, is interested in getting his bony fingers into those sticky tender parts we’d rather hide away, slurping our pain like ambrosia and confronting us with the fact that more often than not, the enemy staring back is you.
  84. Oxygen
    At its best, Oxygen successfully approximates the feel of an escape room.
  85. ChaO
    The narrative is nonsense, but it’s at least an arch and sweet kind of nonsense as it jumps through its fairy-tale hoops on the way to the next splash of artful color and manically doodled creativity.
  86. Barbershop: The Next Cut
    A pop sonata of stand-up comedy routines layered with, if not vitality, then at least honest energy.
  87. The Book of Life
    Jorge R. Gutierrez subsumes the film's darker themes in a relentlessly busy farrago of predictable kids'-movie tropes and annoying attempts at hipness.
  88. Save Yourselves!
    The film fails to use its millennial characters to investigate contemporary attitudes about the possibility of world annihilation.
  89. The Wrecking Crew
    Overall, the documentary comes off as a solipsistic, uncritical look at an incredible moment in the history of American music.
  90. The Final Member
    A potential barroom joke blossoms into a surprisingly poignant portrait of three aging men wrestling with how to shed their mortal coil.
  91. The Future
    Of all the vaguely philosophical, calculatedly left-of-center dialogue that peppers Miranda July's The Future, no line is more telling than the writer/director/star's late-film declaration, in the guise of her character Sophie, that "I'm saying okay to nothing."
  92. Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams
    The focus on Ferragamo’s craft, and the very structure of manufacture, is exciting, but the narrative’s tendency to embody the opposite of his innovativeness feels lazy and contradictory.
  93. Cinderella
    The filmmakers cut the film to emphasize the story's familiar plot points, rather than highlight any instances of personal visual artistry.
  94. Mr. Holmes
    Bill Condon ignores the delights and hardships of becoming an artist in lieu of simply presenting the long-touted liberating effects of art.
  95. Web Junkie
    Without a frame of footage nor a single interview presented from outside the camp, the documentary shows a capitalist nightmare that accords its victims zero wiggle room.
  96. Ruby Sparks
    Succeeds as a satirical fantasy about writerly self-involvement, but it's worth celebrating as a testament to self-made greatness, particularly in regard to the efforts of writer/star Zoe Kazan.
  97. You Will Be My Son
    For all of the director's willingness to explore his characters' unexpected depths, he's still hamstrung by his perpetually tasteful cinema-of-quality aesthetic.
  98. A Simple Favor
    A Simple Favor haphazardly vacillates between suburban satire, goofy comedy, and dark, twisted psychological thriller. Which is to say that the film doesn't evince the seamlessness of presentation of its clearest antecedent: David Fincher's "Gone Girl."
  99. Gabriel
    The film wants to reveal the anguish of mental illness and infiltrate the mind of its protagonist through constant affirmation of his pain.
  100. Kill List
    It's a road movie of sorts, like the Steve Coogan/Bob Brydon comedy The Trip, only with fewer expert impressions and more inept executions, but lovely scenery just the same.
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