Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Southbound
    Southbound is yet another contemporary horror film that belongs to seemingly every era but its own.
  2. Early Man
    The clash between prehistoric pastoralism and technological progress at the center of the film is laden with potential for biting comedy, but Nick Park flattens the conflict into a series of slobs-versus-snobs clichés.
  3. Kevin Hart: What Now?
    At times throughout this concert film, Kevin Hart’s brash honesty about himself can feel liberating.
  4. The Witness
    The film presents Kitty Genovese's identity as an afterthought, turning her living days and nights into incidental details.
  5. Complete Unknown
    Underneath the impersonal formal beauty and good acting is a familiar moral about self-imposed limitations.
  6. Hunt for the Wilderpeople
    It infuses an outdoorsy survival tale and a coming-of-age story of friendship with Taika Waititi's penchant for distaff flakiness.
  7. The Hollars
    The film's ruefully honest tone is periodically drowned out by the blare of stagey coincidences.
  8. 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.
  9. Operation Avalanche
    The film attains a chilly existential quality as Matt Johnson's character discerns the weight of his actions.
  10. Other People
    The film is at its sharpest when Chris Kelly hands scenes over to his main character's family and friends.
  11. Southside with You
    The film may not announce itself as hagiography, but it’s hero-worshipful to its core.
  12. Ava's Possessions
    Jordan Galland confidently perches the film right on the razor’s edge separating absurdist comedy from horror.
  13. F9: The Fast Saga
    At its best, F9 delivers the most spatially coherent, dynamic car scenes in the series to date.
  14. The Mermaid
    It offers a wonderful visual reprieve from the cumbersomely mechanized aesthetic of so much contemporary fantasy.
  15. Baskin
    The film mostly functions as a tour of familiar horror tropes for much of its running time.
  16. Lion
    Lion's faults of structure and pacing might limit its power, but in stretches it still roars.
  17. The Predator
    Even an act of noble sacrifice late in the film has a faintly goofy tone to it, reflective of Shane Black's streak of puckish nihilism. That attitude makes him a perfect fit for this franchise, which lost its thematic viciousness after the anti-imperialist original.
  18. The Trust
    Throughout Alex and Benjamin Brewer's film, Nicolas Cage holds the screen with his distinct timing and expressive force of being.
  19. A Space Program
    The film's larger purpose, be it about the ardor of handmade crafts or artist Tom Sachs's artistic ambitions, never emerges with any consistent focus.
  20. Boris Without Béatrice
    The film offers an oxymoronic parable that’s been utilized countless times by cinema, in loose reiterations of A Christmas Carol: The protagonist must learn humility after learning that the world revolves around him.
  21. Men & Chicken
    An admirably bizarre and beautiful genre mixtape, but Anders Thomas Jensen's empathy for his characters gradually impedes his imagination.
  22. Don't Breathe
    The film's sustainment of its corkscrew tension is so elegant and methodical as to feel dance-like.
  23. Our Kind of Traitor
    It works as both a modern morality play for our globalized world and as an indictment of Europe's ethical bankruptcy.
  24. Art Bastard
    Robert Cenedella exudes humility even as he sounds off against the societal forces that anger him and fuel his work.
  25. Julieta
    Pedro Almodóvar’s object-oriented approach ends up blocking off the deeper emotional access that Alice Munro's stories so effortlessly attain.
  26. Sin Alas
    The film's Cuban specificity comes to seem like an opportunistic locale for reenacting a decidedly art-cinematic legacy.
  27. Tickled
    There's no sustained effort to answer the first question any editor or J-school instructor worth his or her salt would ask: So what?
  28. Hell or High Water
    As with Sicario, the broad strokes of the film's Southwestern stereotypes gradually sharpen into focus as the story pivots to a look at the systemic forces that shape the characters.
  29. Blood Father
    The film shrewdly capitalizes on Mel Gibson's off-screen embarrassments and controversies.
  30. Gimme Danger
    The film reveals the erudition and shrewd self-awareness that Jim Osterberg drew on to become Iggy Pop.
  31. Endless Poetry
    Endless Poetry eventually, like young Alejandro, opens itself up to the world in all of its beauty and complexities.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Meg
    Jaws works as both a horror film and a human drama. The Meg doesn't aspire to the earlier film's pathos (its flagrant callbacks to Jaws draw attention to how grotesquely adolescent it is by comparison), but that's because it's above all else a movie-star vehicle, and it succeeds on that front.
  33. The Land
    Writer-director Steven Caple Jr.'s social-realist tendencies run up against some unconvincing genre elements.
  34. Argentina
    The film stagnates by restricting camera mobility and focusing more on capturing dimensions of the performances in close-up.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Zero Days
    Director Alex Gibney does this vital material a disservice, giving it an air of deflated pomposity.
  36. Cosmos
    Andrzej Zulawski's film experiment ranks somewhere between captivatingly off the wall and utterly exhausting.
  37. Nocturnal Animals
    Nocturnal Animals gets close to a double-barreled satirical thriller commenting on the historic rift between city and country.
  38. Gleason
    It has an irritating habit of depending on our natural reactions, letting the subject matter do the heavy lifting.
  39. The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble
    It resonates as a portrait of artists trying to figure out their own paths toward making valuable contributions to the world.
  40. Phantom Boy
    The filmmakers are thankfully willing to render, with unremitting vigor, how grief can batter the human heart.
  41. The Blackcoat's Daughter
    Oz Perkins exhibits a committed understanding of the cinematic value of silence and of vastly underpopulated compositions.
  42. The Academy of Muses
    It's a shame that the José Luis Guerín film's verbal qualities far outpace its formal attributes.
  43. Viral
    The film slightly reorients our perspective on the familiar tropes of both the teen and apocalyptic genres.
  44. Wicked
    Wicked’s frequent patches of sluggishness are particularly frustrating because so much of the film—especially the songs—is glorious.
  45. Arrival
    The film's searching images counterpoint the hyper-articulate methodology of its characters' sense of imbalance and uncertainty.
  46. Summertime
    Catherine Corsini depicts feminists in lighthearted ways, at once humorously caricatured and sensitively human.
  47. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    The film complements its goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas.
  48. Hooligan Sparrow
    The Nanfu Wang film's noble aims are mirrored in its more frustrating and conventional qualities.
  49. Train to Busan
    When divorced of message-mongering, the film’s scare tactics are among the most distinctive that the zombie canon has ever seen.
  50. Sand Storm
    Elite Zexer weaves an impressively terse narrative of distinctly motivated characters, but the film’s core remains somewhat shapeless due to the routine dramatization.
  51. 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.
  52. 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.
  53. Harry Benson: Shoot First
    While it offers ample opportunity to admire Benson's body of work, it provides few aesthetic delights of its own.
  54. The Commune
    The Thomas Vinterberg film's sentimentality is suspect, laced with an intriguing but vague strain of bitterness.
  55. The Bad Batch
    Ana Lily Amirpour has learned a few lessons from QT about the disreputable joys of blending kitsch and ultraviolence.
  56. Una
    The film gives Una a little more agency, but director Benedict Andrews often invalidates such empowerment.
  57. Strange Weather
    There’s a tough and mysterious film within Strange Weather, though it doesn’t quite escape the strictures of a busy and studiously weird narrative that’s governed by formula screenwriting.
  58. Their Finest
    Intimately focusing on its main character's personal triumphs, its refusing to fall into heavy-handed polemicism.
  59. A Man Called Ove
    It's emotionally manipulative, but its two leads find a core of humanity even in the most calculating plot machinations.
  60. Moonlight
    What tends to right Moonlight, even when Barry Jenkins's filmmaking drifts into indulgence, is the strength of its actors.
  61. 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.
  62. Miss Sloane
    The screenplay's enigmatic nature holds one's interest throughout, even as the film veers into pat moralism.
  63. Fences
    Danzel Washington honors the manna of the play's being: the micro of romantic longing, self-loathing, and nostalgia.
  64. Into the Inferno
    The busy-ness of its conceit grounds Werner Herzog in a documentary procedural form that's surprisingly conventional by his standards.
  65. Voyage of Time: The IMAX Experience
    The film captures our world as systematic yet miraculous, evolving toward more elaborate and resilient forms.
  66. The Apostate
    The Apostate finds humor in unusual images or situations, few resounding with lasting impact.
  67. London Town
    The film evinces a clear-eyed sense of the limits that a capitalistic society places on its working class.
  68. Colossal
    When the film's whirligig plotline goes off-rail in the heady final act, Oscar and Gloria's origin story bends over backward to justify a magical-realist conceit that was more fun without explanation.
  69. Prevenge
    Alice Lowe evinces a knack for locating society’s most awkward pressure points, and a willingness to punch them.
  70. A Woman's Life
    The choice of low-grade, handheld digital images further reduces the film to the clichés of revisionist literary filmmaking.
  71. Tower
    Broadly, filmmaker Keith Maitland's treatment of the UT Tower shooting is both taut and humane.
  72. 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.
  73. 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.
  74. Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead
    Don Coscarelli outdoes the humor of John Hughes in what feels like a more honest version of the gleeful sadism in Home Alone.
  75. My Cousin Rachel
    After a while, the enigmatic nature of Rachel Weisz's character starts to feel less like an enticing mystery than a narrative trick.
  76. Come and Find Me
    Aaron Paul possesses an innate everyman quality that lends itself well to writer-director Zack Whedon's film.
  77. A Kind of Murder
    The film seems more interested in its art design then in fully developing the story's underlying sexual ethics.
  78. 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.
  79. Don't Call Me Son
    Writer-director Anna Muylaert writes themes into excellent, controlled first acts that turn capricious by the third.
  80. Your Name.
    Even at its most outrageously bizarre, Your Name is bound together by a passionately romantic core.
  81. All We Had
    Katie Holmes's feature-length directorical debut is more earnest than remarkable, but with its heart in the right place.
  82. The Zookeeper's Wife
    The film imbues a pessimistic view of the seemingly bottomless depths of human cruelty with sorrowful tragic force.
  83. Robin Hood
    Robin Hood’s shameless silliness only takes it so far, as the film is frequently undermined by Otto Bathurst’s wobbly direction.
  84. The Wall
    The Wall packs a surprisingly savage punch by boiling the exploits of battle down to its essential elements.
  85. 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.
  86. Wheeler
    Ryan Ross's Wheeler is at its strongest as a showcase for Stephen Dorff’s husky, lived-in performance.
  87. 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.
  88. Kedi
    Ceyda Torun’s Kedi is an open, tender-hearted meditation on the relationship between felines and humans.
  89. Despicable Me 3
    If all this wackiness is only occasionally laugh-out-loud funny—the ‘80s references feel particularly played out—it’s nonetheless executed with good-natured breeziness.
  90. Isle of Dogs
    Anderson is clearly a massive talent working, again, in his prime. However uncomfortable, it's crucial to ask what gives him the right to romp around in all these signifiers in service of bespoke whimsy—but then the word for it isn't “right,” but rather privilege.
  91. The Lovers
    Azazel Jacobs’s film takes some shrewd steps to update the comedy of remarriage for the age of the smartphone.
  92. Jeremiah Tower: The Last Magnificent
    Lydia Tenaglia's direction is occasionally flashy and cluttered, but her empathy for Tower is evocative and poignant.
  93. The Beguiled
    The Beguiled serves as proof that what goes for naturalism in Sofia Coppola’s dominion still verges on being decorative to the point of self-parody.
  94. Girls Trip
    Malcolm D. Lee's film at least it goes down easy. Easy like a Sunday-morning hangover.
  95. Red Sparrow
    The way that Dominika is at once completely transparent and at the same time impossible to read is Red Sparrow's most intriguing through line, not least of which for the way that Jennifer Lawrence makes you grasp the canny mental gymnastics that her character has to do in order for everything that she says to be at once truth and obfuscation.
  96. Master
    The film is seemingly terrified of boring us, offering one elaborate montage of catch and release (or of survey and flee) after another.
  97. The Wedding Plan
    Rama Burshtein allows us to form our own impressions based on what she presents to us of the Orthodox faith.
  98. Strike a Pose
    The filmmakers and performers show great maturity in refusing to settle scores or spill secrets.
  99. Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe
    The film hovers between being a straight-up biopic of Zweig and a diagnosis of neoliberalism's recent ceding to neofascist policy and nationalistic fervor.
  100. Detroit
    Kathryn Bigelow hyper-realistically, almost dispassionately, covers her ensemble’s actions in the manner of a somber disaster film.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »