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. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
    Much like with Neighbors 2, Mike and Dave’s obvious ace in the hole is its commitment to gender parity.
  2. Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
    The latest entrant in this now-Disney-owned franchise is largely content to further the themes and narrative strategies of J.J. Abrams's predecessor.
  3. 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.
  4. Beauty and the Beast
    Bill Condon's Beauty and the Beast actually delivers a remarkably optimistic balm to a festering, existential wound.
  5. Adult Beginners
    Given its played-out subject matter and hoary coming-to-terms narrative arc, one's ability to enjoy the film hangs on a tolerance for the ever-popular on-screen man-child.
  6. Manos Sucias
    Josef Kubota Wladyka is ultimately unable to reconcile complex dynamics any further than with a glimpse toward their fundamentally destructive effects.
  7. Dior and I
    Bolstered by deft editing that keeps the proceedings moving at a light, graceful clip, this behind-the-runway look at one of fashion's legendary brands has a sleek, efficient stylishness in keeping with its subject.
  8. The Magnificent Seven
    As passably entertaining as the film is, it never surrenders to the abandon of its action, and as such never feels like it shifts out of first gear.
  9. Reality
    Quentin Dupieux has a talent for rendering otherworldly concepts banal in a manner that reflects the stymied desires of his characters.
  10. Antarctic Edge: 70° South
    It appears afraid of alienating viewers by overloading on scientific jargon, and in the process becomes too attracted to ultimately superfluous anecdotes from her subjects.
  11. I'll See You in My Dreams
    Highly polished yet never quite slick, it devolves now and then into cartoonish cutesiness with its broadly drawn minor characters.
  12. The Final Girls
    It lobs a grenade at slasher-movie sadism by making us care about the characters as more than just body-bag fodder.
  13. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    A consummate sampler platter of the bounty of state-of-the-art animation currently available as alternatives established major-studio house styles.
  14. The Vatican Tapes
    Like technological innovation itself, the film seems overwhelmed by the reach of all its techo-cultural parts.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Mia Madre
    The film is a carefully measured and satisfying, albeit occasionally deaf-tone, suite of fleeting, dispersed impressions.
  16. The Secret Life of Pets
    The film's messy pile-up of comic diversions can be exhilarating in the moment—the chaos of an id given free rein.
  17. Every Secret Thing
    It has a problem that's familiar to competently made, sporadically involving crime procedurals: It's just good enough to inspire wishes that it were better.
  18. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
    It does astounding work animating the mind of its young soldier, but it runs into technical difficulties whenever it tries to grasp the bigger picture.
  19. Gerontophilia
    It chooses the delicateness of a fable instead of the narrative recklessness we've come to expect from Bruce La Bruce.
  20. Fifty Shades Freed
    James Foley’s film suggests that any semblance of capitulation on Christian’s part is a win for Ana and women at large, even if that momentary triumph leads to a further sacrifice of Ana’s independence.
  21. Gemma Bovery
    The film dabbles in the French romantic-comedy tradition and simultaneously spoofs it, committing to neither.
  22. Set Fire to the Stars
    At least it doesn't make the biopic mistake of attempting to check off every moment of a man's life over the course of a few hours' worth of running time.
  23. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    It weaves through past and present, memories and reality, analysis and history, like a mercurial mind reminiscing seemingly at random.
  24. Irrational Man
    Woody Allen and Joaquin Phoenix's collaboration on Irrational Man's antihero is the closest the film gets to a saving grace.
  25. American Ultra
    A Bourne movie turned just askew enough to be funny, American Ultra trains a bemused eye on a trope ripe for a ribbing.
  26. We Are Your Friends
    As Zac Efront's Cole tiptoes away from his past, the film keenly observes a character who doesn't know how to secure his future, or his identity.
  27. The Lobster
    The near-surgical precision with which Yorgos Lanthimos approaches the most surreal of conceits turns out to be a double-edged sword.
  28. Barbershop: The Next Cut
    A pop sonata of stand-up comedy routines layered with, if not vitality, then at least honest energy.
  29. By the Sea
    If it stumbles when it seeks our sympathy, it thrives when it's exploiting our fascination with the surface of things, and all that's unknowable underneath.
  30. Amy
    For the most part, the documentary succeeds in conveying a galvanizing sense of what made Winehouse so immediately engaging.
  31. Into the Grizzly Maze
    David Hackl often shoots his bear in fashions that accent its lumbering, powerful grace, even during its death rattle.
  32. (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    Yael Melamede doesn't dwell on each of her subjects' stories beyond the condensed version that's related on screen.
  33. Bone Tomahawk
    One wishes that S. Craig Zahler had more explicitly faced the cultural demons lingering within his premise, attempting to exorcise them.
  34. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    A buoyant tribute, even if the pedigree of the project implies something more paradigm-shifting.
  35. The Japanese Dog
    It may be described as a Yasujirô Ozu drama done in the Romanian style; if only there was more to distinguish it beyond such extra-textual concerns.
  36. Seeds of Time
    First-person accounts from individuals most affected by the drop in agricultural productivity are rarely the focus of the film's vision.
  37. Tale of Tales
    Matteo Garrone returns the fairy tale to its roots in cautionary horror grounded in deep, contradictory, neurotic relationships with gender and patriarchy.
  38. Disorder
    Alice Winocour's film begins as a vivid portrait of a man warily eyeing the tumult of his homecoming.
  39. Mountains May Depart
    It's the first segment that feels the most fleshed out, for how well it presents characters with actual lives as compared to the thinly veiled talking points of the film's second half.
  40. Our Little Sister
    The film's reserve softens some of its more piquant observations about tradition and mortality.
  41. Dheepan
    Jacques Audiard's film struggles to overcome the burden of its over-simplified, moralizing setup.
  42. A Perfect Day
    The film finally seems conspicuously at odds with itself, neither funny nor impassioned enough to pass as an accomplished vision of transnational welfare.
  43. The Little Prince
    As preachy and repetitive as The Little Prince can be, it offers enough moments of poetry to keep it flirting with greatness, or at least goodness.
  44. Yakuza Apocalypse
    The film doesn't add up to much, but it's a diverting tour of Takashi Miike's anything-goes, splatter-paint sensibility.
  45. Charlie's Country
    It finally offers little more than a moderately engaging slice of contemporary aboriginal life that mostly fails to dig beneath the surface of this underrepresented world.
  46. Balls Out
    The film reveals itself as a sports movie actually attuned to the knowledge that victory in an inconsequential game bears no meaning.
  47. A Murder in the Park
    Its wholly complex and provocative social pleas slip too frequently into the seedy realm of journalistic exploitation.
  48. Lila & Eve
    Charles Stone III's film ultimately succeeds as a convincing social plea, but fails as compelling cinema.
  49. Cartel Land
    A stunning work of war reportage nestled within a creaky study of ideological purity.
  50. Chagall-Malevich
    When the appeal of the film's whimsy wears off, the fogginess of its historical perspectives comes to the fore.
  51. Rubble Kings
    It fails to go deep enough, suggesting an appetizer offered as an opening to an ultimately unserved meal.
  52. A Borrowed Identity
    It lacks a formal rigor to match its thematic heft, preferring a digestible naturalism that serves its plot points in plain, uncomplicated sight.
  53. Samba
    Even as Samba struggles to hold onto his identity, the film becomes entangled in an identity crisis of its own.
  54. Stung
    The filmmakers maintain a tone that's mostly ideal for the contemporary equivalent of a drive-in movie: of reverent, parodic irreverence.
  55. Partisan
    Ariel Kleiman fashions an erotic atmosphere of dusty sensuality that complicates our judgement of this world, but he takes shortcuts.
  56. Call Me Lucky
    Bobcat Goldthwait's hand too nervously tempers Crimmins's outré tactics as kooky showmanship bred from unimaginable trauma.
  57. Counting
    The poetic pretenses are compounded by a sledgehammer insistence on elusive and irreducible moments as inherently beautiful.
  58. Final Girl
    The filmmakers never really answer inevitable questions: What's the point of these fussy allusions?
  59. The Second Mother
    Character relations are hinted at and even primed for confrontation, but without payoff or meaningful conclusion.
  60. The Perfect Guy
    It uses convention to its advantage through an intriguing play with casting choices and bizarrely effective allusions to film history.
  61. Spotlight
    By modeling its structure so closely after "All the President's Men," Spotlight only draws closer attention to its lack of scope and ambition.
  62. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution
    It both feeds off of and perpetuates nostalgia for a time when the nation seemed more politically conscious and therefore more capable of creating lasting social change.
  63. Truth
    It can't develop themes because it's too busy disseminating information, and this extends to its main characters.
  64. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    It forays into satirical terrain in order to elide actual dealings with the problems at hand, so that each piece feels alternatively frivolous and weighty.
  65. Ready Player One
    It's a boldly attempted strike against the monolithic corporatization of fan service, and arguably one of the few films that defines dystopia as nothing less than a marketplace of trademarked, cross-promotional intellectual property. In other words, our here and now.
  66. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
    The film plays out like it might be preparing us to let go of its big-name legacy leads.
  67. Miss You Already
    It winningly reflects how to utilize quiet understandings and, yes, very loud laughter.
  68. A Sinner in Mecca
    What the film lacks in narrative unity and aesthetic splendor it makes up in moral grandeur and ethical purpose.
  69. Wolf Totem
    It becomes difficult to separate the natives from their communist masters in terms of their treatment of their natural surroundings.
  70. The Hallow
    The film never really digs into its suggested themes of gentrification, domestic turmoil, or backwoods folklore, but most of its effectiveness stems from a kitchen-sink approach to genre clichés.
  71. Chevalier
    Athina Rachel Tsangari's obvious skill can't hide the fact that her concept is one-note.
  72. Labyrinth of Lies
    It only scratches the surface of the mass psychological wounds and trauma that the trials unleashed on the Germany psyche.
  73. Maggie's Plan
    As a writer and director, Rebecca Miller is at her best when she finds the shared wavelengths of her lead cast's divergent styles.
  74. Sunset Song
    Terence Davies's sheer talent for creating sensuous images conveniently masks how little of this feeling actually emerges from the plot these images illustrate.
  75. Mr. Right
    It has a bouncy sense of lunacy, wearing its derivative junkiness on its sleeve with surprising lightness of authority.
  76. Lolo
    A curiously unsentimental director of romantic comedies, Julie Delpy sees romance for the work that it primarily is.
  77. Rabin, the Last Day
    Its vantage point too loosely assembles an argument by focusing, almost obsessively, on reassembling a tangible timeline of events.
  78. Becoming Bulletproof
    The trust that Bulletproof's filmmakers have in their cast and their talent is humanely and succinctly illustrated throughout.
  79. Deathgasm
    Director Jason Lei Howden has a flair for punchlines that are funny for reasons that are essentially impossible to describe.
  80. 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.
  81. The Idol
    The film's clichés ultimately contain both too little conviction and too little complication, their inspirational messages more imagined than real.
  82. Xenia
    It leaves room for a few flights of fancy where the lack of verisimilitude feels less like screenplay filler and more like unabashed poetic license.
  83. Asthma
    Asthma inevitably becomes another film about a man airing out his traumas and hitting all the requisite marks on his path to healing.
  84. Incredibles 2
    Everything in Incredibles 2 is inexorably driven toward a big final blowout. That sequence is suitably grand and eye-popping, but haven’t we seen all of this before?
  85. Why Him?
    The film is surprisingly amiable, thanks to the commitment of its lead actors and its refusal to condescend to its characters.
  86. Censored Voices
    By negating more conventional, facts-first priorities, Mor Loushy creates an alternative historiography that's more meant to be felt than learned.
  87. Flowers
    Everyone heals, or doesn't heal, on cue, and the initial pathos of the narrative is dulled by the architecture of its through lines.
  88. The Tainted Veil
    The filmmakers refuse to promote a political agenda of their own in order to let the varied convictions of others foster a necessary dialogue.
  89. Collide
    It's difficult to begrudge a film that has the good sense to put so much stock in Ben Kingsley's hammy theatrics.
  90. Sembene!
    The film unfolds as a kind, politically soft offering of what lies beneath both Sembène's films and the man himself.
  91. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    Out 1 is largely a film of conversation, as its prolonged rehearsal vignettes regularly give way to even lengthier scenes of verbal self-analysis.
  92. Allied
    In the film, Robert Zemeckis brings to bear his pop-epic scope in what's otherwise a claustrophobic story.
  93. Moonwalkers
    The whole isn't greater than the sum of its parts, but the various detours coalesce into an amusing wannabe-cult curio.
  94. Bikes vs Cars
    Director Fredrik Gertten's Bikes vs. Cars is passionate but contradictory, a frustrating combination for a documentary that utilizes admittedly interesting data as a pitch to wean our car-crazed world off excessive driving.
  95. Dementia
    The film doesn't quite earn Jones's performance, but it engenders considerable goodwill for allowing him to give it.
  96. The Ones Below
    Even the film's lapses inform it with a free-associative sense of portent, evoking the stupid things we inexplicably do in our most personal nightmares.
  97. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    The Crimes of Grindelwald gets more comedic and emotional mileage out of Newt’s interactions with his various creatures, particularly the adorable platypus-like one with a nose for gold, than most of its human-centered scenes.
  98. Sully
    It presses the case that the complexity of the human condition distracts us from the pure dignity of a noble act.
  99. Closet Monster
    It's when Stephen Dunn dares to inhabit the how and not the what of queerness that Closet Monster feels authentic and deliciously strange.
  100. Colliding Dreams
    The filmmakers' perspective is firmly aligned with the views of liberal Zionism, as the leftist peace activists are given the most screen time.
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