Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,769 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: 4,345 out of 7769
  2. Mixed: 1,491 out of 7769
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7769
7769 movie reviews
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  1. Nocturnal Animals
    Nocturnal Animals gets close to a double-barreled satirical thriller commenting on the historic rift between city and country.
  2. Notes on Blindness
    Its fatal mistake is to make up for blindness, instead of embracing it as something other than a liability.
  3. The Love Witch
    The film has an artisanal intensity that prevents it from turning into a smug and predictable exercise in political revision.
  4. The Illinois Parables
    Even more diverse than the film's historical material is its eccentric mash-up of styles and approaches.
  5. Life on the Line
    For a film about such a singular profession, Life on the Line offers surprisingly little insight into linemen's day-to-day labor.
  6. Bleed for This
    Any initial gestures toward acknowledging Vinny Paz's macho egotism are eventually downplayed as the film becomes just another formulaic triumph-over-adversity saga.
  7. Hunter Gatherer
    A deliberately offbeat characterization of mental illness, Hunter Gatherer is ultimately a failed act of empathy.
  8. The Take
    For a film so interested in the public's malleability, The Take isn't particularly good at controlling its own audience.
  9. The Monster
    The film has an eerily WTF arbitrariness that should be the domain of more films in the genre.
  10. Almost Christmas
    The film is most affecting in its simpler moments, particularly those revolving around food.
  11. Incendies
    An enormously effective piece of filmmaking, Incdendies unfolds as a series of eye-opening disclosures which Villeneuve plays as much for (admittedly enthralling) sensation as for any kind of wider-ranging inquiry, a questionable approach given the thorny nature of the material.
  12. Arrival
    The film's searching images counterpoint the hyper-articulate methodology of its characters' sense of imbalance and uncertainty.
  13. Lazy Eye
    Writer-director Tim Kirkman tries to peg depth of character on the character of Dean instead of having him earn it.
  14. Dreamland
    The sense of a film school student doing movie karaoke with his influences is evident throughout Dreamland.
  15. Come and Find Me
    Aaron Paul possesses an innate everyman quality that lends itself well to writer-director Zack Whedon's film.
  16. The Prison in Twelve Landscapes
    The plaintive plain-spokenness of the interviewees, the way they matter-of-factly speak of atrocity, is transcendent and intensely haunting.
  17. Doctor Strange
    Nothing that Marvel Studios has produced can compare to the visual splendor of Scott Derrickson's Doctor Strange.
  18. My Dead Boyfriend
    Slacker that it is, the film never seems willing to put in the necessary work to live up to its potential.
  19. Rainbow Time
    Linas Phillips's contrived sense of follow-through betrays the truthfulness of his initial characterizations.
  20. Trolls
    Trolls is a flashy, pre-fab product, but the animators are given just enough space to create moments of genuine artistry.
  21. Loving
    Loving finds little grooves of humanity to explore in its characters, and in its milieu, in between expected plot beats.
  22. Don't Call Me Son
    Writer-director Anna Muylaert writes themes into excellent, controlled first acts that turn capricious by the third.
  23. Dog Eat Dog
    Paul Schrader's film scrambles for contemporary relevance and finds only nihilistic hollowness.
  24. Hacksaw Ridge
    This is a work of defiantly simplistic, classically structured Hollywood storytelling, and Mel Gibson takes to its hokey plot points with some gusto.
  25. Inferno
    It's impossible to even laugh at Inferno given how Ron Howard reduces the material to a dull spectacle of earnest puzzle-solving.
  26. Portrait of a Garden
    Portrait of a Garden‘s distance from its human subjects forestalls the film’s momentum and strips it of a heart.
  27. Gimme Danger
    The film reveals the erudition and shrewd self-awareness that Jim Osterberg drew on to become Iggy Pop.
  28. Into the Inferno
    The busy-ness of its conceit grounds Werner Herzog in a documentary procedural form that's surprisingly conventional by his standards.
  29. By Sidney Lumet
    Its strength lies in taking a thematic approach to Lumet's work, which prevents a chronological rattling off of one title after another.
  30. The Eagle Huntress
    Aisholpan’s liberation is a harbinger of the growing pressure that the outside world exerts on a once isolated community.
  31. The Edge of Seventeen
    The smartest thing about Kelly Fremon Craig's teen dramedy is its measured take on its protagonist's theatrics.
  32. The Unspoken
    It feels like Sheldon Wilson tossed a bunch of third-hand scares in a blender and set it to puree, resulting in a gray, flavorless sludge.
  33. Creepy
    In terms of formal orchestration, Creepy is as sublime as any prior Kiyoshi Kurosawa film.
  34. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    The visual blandness of Edward Zwick’s style and the simplistic, easily solved case is better suited for television.
  35. 31
    It collapses into repetition and unintended self-parody, as it's devoid of the subtext and empathetic audacity.
  36. Keeping Up with the Joneses
    By the time the film limps toward its Marrakech-set epilogue epilogue, its experiment in social osmosis is as much a failure as its B-sitcom-grade yuks.
  37. King Cobra
    It’s difficult to find a reason for the film's existence beyond a spoiled platform for James Franco's ersatz boldness.
  38. Autumn Lights
    The film is like a landlocked Bergman chamber drama divested of any ambivalence regarding human relationships.
  39. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    The film complements its goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas.
  40. 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.
  41. Before the Flood
    The documentary's focus on elite solutionism effectively erases the role of popular agitation in formulating social change.
  42. American Pastoral
    Ewan McGregor’s inert adaption smooths out the Philip Roth novel's eruptions of self-loathing and doubt.
  43. In a Valley of Violence
    The film communicates a sporadic sense of violation—of pastiche unpredictably giving way to a raw and primordially intimate emotional realm.
  44. The Whole Truth
    The filmmakers are so disengaged from the psyches of its characters that The Whole Truth ultimately plays as little more than the cinematic equivalent of a trashy airport novel that will grip you in the moment before it dissolves from memory immediately afterward.
  45. The Lost City of Z
    The Lost City of Z links every weathered look that Percy Fawcett throws to the heart of his spiritual yearning.
  46. 20th Century Women
    Mike Mills’s 20th Century Women incurs sorrow at the prospect of saying goodbye to its characters.
  47. Kevin Hart: What Now?
    At times throughout this concert film, Kevin Hart’s brash honesty about himself can feel liberating.
  48. The Handmaiden
    With The Handmaiden, Park Chan-wook has made a gigantic leap as an artist, but he retreats to lurid cartoonishness just as he’s earned your trust.
  49. Little Sister
    The film's attempt at political insight and portrayal of social malaise are meant to give it the illusion of depth.
  50. The Accountant
    The film juggles a “follow the money” procedural with corporate espionage thriller, producing two competing tones that never reconcile into one fluid narrative.
  51. Miss Hokusai
    It condenses everyday interactions, memories, and dreams into a potent mix of all the major ingredients of a well-lived life.
  52. Christine
    It largely fails to animate Christine Chubbuck's inner turmoil, focusing instead on broad, blunt externalities.
  53. Jack Goes Home
    The film veers almost at random from ghost story to family drama to erotic thriller to black comedy.
  54. Tower
    Broadly, filmmaker Keith Maitland's treatment of the UT Tower shooting is both taut and humane.
  55. Aquarius
    Aquarius is a critique of a daydream that has the imaginative daring to live that very dream anyway.
  56. Yourself and Yours
    Yourself and Yours‘s commitment to its various extreme ambiguities is a crucial facet of the film’s success.
  57. Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
    Unimaginatively directed and indifferently shot, the film never establishes a distinctive voice for itself.
  58. The Son of Joseph
    The insistence of Green’s gaze throughout the film encourages us to look beyond the mechanisms of speech and behavior at the more uncanny movements of the conscience.
  59. My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea
    The film buzzes with hand-drawn creativity that's precious in both the pop-cultural and material senses.
  60. Phantasm IV: Oblivion
    The freewheeling atmosphere of dread more than make up for the incoherence, but Phantasm IV: Oblivion at times feels like an expensive, 35mm home movie made by some kids in their backyard.
  61. The Great Gilly Hopkins
    Glenn Close's face teems with a flawlessly controlled gravitas that’s completely at odds with the film’s ordinariness.
  62. Theo Who Lived
    Theo Who Lived is fascinating, and Theo Padnos is an exacting storyteller, but the film pushes through one story point to the next, occasionally prizing velocity over texture.
  63. The Girl on the Train
    It forgoes its promise of twisty adult thrills in favor of a grimly deadpan lecture about messy truths and false perceptions.
  64. Homeland: Iraq Year Zero
    Throughout his nearly six-hour documentary, Abbas Fahdel is content with showing only the outer surface of people's lives.
  65. Toni Erdmann
    By its end, Maren Ade's Toni Erdmann is a work of laser-guided social critique and a comedy.
  66. London Town
    The film evinces a clear-eyed sense of the limits that a capitalistic society places on its working class.
  67. 37
    There's a fundamental lack of dramatic exigency in writer-director Puk Grasten's storytelling.
  68. Newtown
    Its enervated address of both mental-health treatment and gun laws receives few constructive articulations beyond a single scene.
  69. Manchester by the Sea
    Kenneth Lonergan's film gradually comes to its sense of exquisitely calibrated, hardened intimacy.
  70. The Greasy Strangler
    It aims for John Waters-style transgression without evincing half of Waters’s wit and affection for eccentric lifestyles.
  71. Blue Jay
    Mark Duplass and Sarah Paulson have extraordinary chemistry, painting a cumulative portrait of the fragility and rareness of being truly in sync with a partner.
  72. The Birth of a Nation
    Nate Parker strains to control the strange and stirring complications of his subject's visionary apocalypticism.
  73. Being 17
    André Téchiné does justice to the closeness between repulsion and desire, difference and sameness, heterosexuality and homosexuality.
  74. 13th
    As with Selma, filmmaker Ava DuVernay has fashioned a work of pummeling and clear-eyed intelligence.
  75. Masterminds
    Jared Hess's film turns out to be a succession of failed jokes punctuated by a few cathartic laughs.
  76. Julieta
    Pedro Almodóvar’s object-oriented approach ends up blocking off the deeper emotional access that Alice Munro's stories so effortlessly attain.
  77. 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.
  78. Certain Women
    The threat of feeling slighted links every small and large ripple of drama in Kelly Reichardt's film.
  79. I, Daniel Blake
    It's pock-marked by the conservative dramatic conventions and broad political gestures that have marred much of Ken Loach's recent output.
  80. Tharlo
    In the logic of the film, for the camera to move at all would feel like a betrayal of its contemplative hunger.
  81. Denial
    Denial shows that people’s misfortunes need not preclude them from living virtuous lives founded on basic human decency.
  82. Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience
    The film captures our world as systematic yet miraculous, evolving toward more elaborate and resilient forms.
  83. Long Way North
    Even if Long Way North's narrative makes for a bland frame, there’s no denying the beauty of the picture it holds.
  84. American Honey
    This is a patchwork dystopia of white poverty whose facets are both difficult to deny and to prove exist precisely as depicted.
  85. A Man Called Ove
    It's emotionally manipulative, but its two leads find a core of humanity even in the most calculating plot machinations.
  86. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    Tim Burton's direction reminds us of the distinct, peculiar coyness that was always at the heart of his best films.
  87. Neruda
    Pablo Larraín has captured Pablo Neruda in all of his pomposity, pretense, courage, and undeniable genius.
  88. Moonlight
    What tends to right Moonlight, even when Barry Jenkins's filmmaking drifts into indulgence, is the strength of its actors.
  89. Staying Vertical
    The film changes gears whenever one is lulled into believing that it has finally settled into a recognizable narrative pattern.
  90. Graduation
    Cristian Mungiu's film is more than just a cry of despair toward the hopelessness of life in modern-day Romania.
  91. Do Not Resist
    Director Craig Atkinson's documentary explicates its points with blunt but persuasive efficiency.
  92. Danny Says
    It ends on a muted whimper of a note that one doesn't expect given that the film's subject is such an immensely entertaining raconteur.
  93. Things to Come
    The film is further confirmation of Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicately devastating ear and touch as a filmmaker.
  94. Paterson
    Paterson's sunny aesthetic and disposition marks a stylistic departure for writer-director Jim Jarmusch.
  95. Desierto
    Any perceptive dialogue or contemporary socio-political subtext is pummeled by Jonás Cuarón’s preference for empty genre thrills.
  96. Queen of Katwe
    The film is a mere fulfillment of familiar tropes, but it approaches sports movie's conventions with a light, funk-inflected touch.
  97. Storks
    Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world that Storks doesn't take many cues from Pixar's tear-jerking playbook.
  98. Fire at Sea
    Fire at Sea initiates a narrative that probes the fundamental gap between wanting to help and actually being able to do so.
  99. The Unknown Girl
    This is a left-footed and clumsily insistent work, exposing the worst aspects inherent to the Dardennes' style.
  100. The Lovers and the Despot
    The haphazard blending of fact and clips from disparate films unrelated to Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee's ordeal confuses an already intricate tale.
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