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. Truth
    It can't develop themes because it's too busy disseminating information, and this extends to its main characters.
  2. Disorder
    Alice Winocour's film begins as a vivid portrait of a man warily eyeing the tumult of his homecoming.
  3. Shepard & Dark
    Treva Wurmfeld's documentary addresses, and acutely analyzes, the way friendship can bend, and occasionally snap, over time.
  4. Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You
    The doc finds pathos in an amiable, fluid construction that chronologically charts the career (and political) ambitions of TV producer Norman Lear.
  5. Landline
    Heroin is to Landline what abortion is to Robespierre's Obvious Child: a dangerous little variable planted to strategically unsettle the pervading cutesiness.
  6. Delhi Belly
    In spite of its conspicuously crude sense of humor, Delhi Belly is much more family-minded and innocent than it would like its young target audience to believe.
  7. The Reagan Show
    The documentary is an insightful portrait of the former American president and the world that he shaped.
  8. The Road Movie
    The film is a doodle, but in its offhanded way, it effectively attests to the resolute nature of the Russian character.
  9. Rolling Thunder
    Essentially a liberal vigilante film that’s rife with all the contradictions that description implies, Rolling Thunder has a pared, weirdly principled grace that still packs a punch.
  10. The Gospel of Eureka
    The documentary is uniquely attuned to the fickle whims of history, politics, and biographical circumstance.
  11. Dead Ringer
    The film, meekly directed far across the soundstage by former actor Paul Henreid, is a potboiler filled with oh-so-convenient plot twists and purely incidental characterizations.
  12. Perpetrator
    Perpetrator cycles through characters and settings at a considerable clip, never stopping long enough to flesh them out beyond an outline.
  13. Pieces of a Woman
    When the film’s actors are given space to etch their characters’ feelings, they turn in strikingly naturalistic performances.
  14. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Throughout, Josephine Decker effortlessly keys her intimate and eccentric style to her main character’s complicated inner turmoil.
  15. Carlito's Way
    Though the story in Carlito’s Way is treated in a fatalistic sense, the moment-to-moment, frame-to-frame experience is anything but rigid and stodgy from over-determination. It sings, dances, punches, slinks, embeds. It moves like the luxurious tracking shots that punctuate the film.
  16. Byzantium
    Forlorn depictions of love and death may dignify Neil Jordan's film, but narrative withholding ultimately drives a stake into its unmistakable heart.
  17. Slack Bay
    Bruno Dumont's formalism is presently charged with a spark of simultaneously controlled and spontaneous mystery.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    White Noise
    The film rarely articulates the book's ideas with any real sense of the outside world without resorting to the easy exaggerations that Don DeLillo peddled in the name of satire, which, while maybe fresh back in 1985, ring completely hollow today.
  19. Pelican Dreams
    The film is spare, empathic, and deeply introspective, and its imagery, such as a pelican fascinated by its own reflection, is so sublime in its kookiness as to be worthy of Werner Herzog.
  20. Roofman
    The real Jeffrey Manchester may in fact have been polite, but Derek Cianfrance’s film doesn’t convince you that it needed to be as well.
  21. Wish Me Away
    The film is ultimately too concerned with courting the singer's fans to deliver anything more than a theatrical release of a very special episode of VH1's Behind the Music.
  22. Maelstrom
    Maelström earns its haunting, unpredictable ending, never exaggerating Evian’s moral dilemma. Still, without non-stop techno or the existential overtones of a Kieślowski morality tale, Maelström is just another Winter Sleepers.
  23. Littlerock
    Confronting the concept of alienness in a California desert town, this modest tapestry finds equivalent dignity in history-conscious travelers and natives weighed down by roots or inertia.
  24. The Snowtown Murders
    Whatever one ends up thinking about The Snowtown Murders, it's difficult to deny that it's a deeply impressive work.
  25. Sidewalk Stories
    Charles Lane’s 1989 indie Sidewalk Stories doesn’t just hark back to The Kid; it formally revives the Chaplin classic in the street theater of Dinkins-era Greenwich Village.
  26. Dumb Money
    The film’s status as a corporate entertainment product (among the film’s producers is the Winklevoss twins) also presents an internal discord in and of itself, particularly with the script incessantly preaching financial equality for all.
  27. The Good Dinosaur
    The main character is a collection of insecurities that have been calculatedly assembled so as to teach children the usual lessons about bravery, loyalty, and self-sufficiency.
  28. The Border
    The Border is marvelously detailed. The script, by Deric Washburn, Walon Green, David Freeman, is peppered with lively obscenities and slights that communicate the debauched cynicism of this world.
  29. Skinamarink
    Skinamarink is confidently made, and certain upside-down images are especially creepy, but its spell is broken by its sheer, ungodly slowness, which springs from a paucity of ideas.
  30. Breaking
    Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps 892 build tension primarily from character instead of incident.
  31. The Revolutionary Optimists
    The filmmakers display a genuine reverence for their subjects, evident even in the intimate but never intrusive photography.
  32. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone
    There are no new explanations here, just a better packaged version of what Anno already delivered, which makes You Are (Not) Alone very attractive but fundamentally pointless.
  33. Pavarotti
    Throughout, the too-brief depictions of Luciano Pavarotti’s flaws are conspicuously shrouded in a veil of hagiography.
  34. Master
    Mariama Diallo’s film never seems to fully buy into its horror trappings and ends up treating its characters as avatars for multiple grievances.
  35. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
    A once-precious franchise's weakest installment, which forgets these adventures' magic was never conjured by bells and whistles.
  36. Another Earth
    The hanging specter of a phantom planet puts a lot of pressure on Another Earth, a resolutely small parable of grief that often feels menaced by its big-idea concept.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Let the Bullets Fly
    Let the Bullets Fly is an intentionally overheated and very funny comedy about how the best-laid plans tend to fall apart in spectacular fashion.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Mosquita y Mari
    Most of what transpires between the two girls feels as internal as something you only keep to yourself.
  39. E-Team
    There's edifying information in the documentary, but it's tainted by forced dramatic tactics.
  40. Mid90s
    Jonah Hill constantly falls back on providing vague justification for his characters' behaviors, along with spoonfuls of sentiment to let the more dour moments go down easier.
  41. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow
    The extreme largesse of Anselm Kiefer's project, his radical certainties and devotion, all call for a more intrusive probing.
  42. The Amazing Spider-Man
    No mutation is necessary to clearly see that Marvel's "reboot" of their signature franchise is an unimaginative remake of Sam Raimi's 2002 Spider-Man.
  43. God Knows Where I Am
    Though the film excels at subjectivity and interiority, it tends to falter in conveying more rudimentary information.
  44. Private Desert
    Aly Muritiba’s film is always telling the viewer that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters.
  45. Premium Rush
    Proves how invigorating genre filmmaking can be in the hands of a savvy, perpetually inventive director.
  46. Catfight
    Onur Tukel attempts to connect Ashley and Veronica’s barbarity to the broader callousness of American life, but the satire is too blunt to really stick.
  47. The Convert
    All of the time spent on Thomas Munro’s various campaigns for reconciliation and harmony between two Māori tribes hampers the film, which would have been better served had it expounded on the grander conflicts that it only superficially acknowledges.
  48. Bad Reputation
    The documentary often struggles to extract deeper thoughts from its subject about her wild career as a pioneering rock feminist.
  49. Tommaso
    Abel Ferrara’s film is about that precise feeling of living with an itch unscratched.
  50. Marshall
    Marshall arguably intends for societal 20/20 hindsight to provide the bulk of perspective throughout.
  51. Thirteen Lives
    Avoiding excessively heightened melodrama, Thirteen Lives doesn’t substitute it with much that one couldn’t already find in the copious amount of available coverage of the real-life incident.
  52. We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
    The doc's straightforward and chronological structure is its own worst enemy.
  53. The Survival of Kindness
    An epic adventure in the guise of an arthouse flick, The Survival of Kindness makes up in visual power and moral clarity what it lacks in subtext.
  54. Dracula Has Risen from the Grave
    Director Francis films the scenes that center around the vampire with yellow-brown gels around the frames’ edges, giving the impression that they too are from Dracula’s omniscient view. They give Dracula Has Risen From the Grave a musty, jaundiced sensuality (like finding Great Aunt Mildred’s mothball stank-ridden garter belt hidden in the back of her Victorian closet) that characterizes Hammer’s blending of gothic tradition with modern prurience.
  55. Mothering Sunday
    For all of the film’s somberness, its depiction of an era of rigid class divisions and incalculable loss still comes through the hazy, soft-focus goggles of nostalgia.
  56. Moebius
    A kind of silent opera in which the actors' precise facial emoting and a muscular editing rhythm create a melodrama by turns horrific and hilarious.
  57. Shadow in the Cloud
    Roseanne Liang leverages the absolute implausibility of the film’s later scenes into something brisk and exciting right to the very end.
  58. Island of Lemurs: Madagascar
    What results is a lopsided, put-upon narrative of survival where humans, and not the animals themselves, are the ones to be celebrated.
  59. Cold Fish
    A hybrid of the millionth send-up of the repressed/impotent Japanese patriarch and the "bad buddy comedy" that Barry Levinson held up as exhausted and bankrupt with 2004's "Envy."
  60. The One I Love
    The film gets too caught up in the semi-farcical comings and goings of the two Sophies and Ethans to explore any of the issues it raises about relationships very deeply.
  61. Young Ahmed
    The Dardennes maintain a distance from Ahmed as a way of celebrating their refusal to reduce him to any easy psychological bullet points.
  62. Husbands
    One of Cassavetes’s greatest and most daring films.
  63. Harriet
    Portraying Tubman above all else as a vessel for a higher power ironically only makes her appear less tangible.
  64. The Return
    The Return may render its mythological figures lifelike through flesh and blood, but nowhere inside that viscera lies a beating heart.
  65. Guidance
    The unapologetic lack of political correctness never goes beyond a one-dimensional and tentative provocation.
  66. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
    By the time the demands of big-budget spectacle take over in the final act, a film that initially stands out from the pack in imagining a different perspective of the world ends up looking all too disappointingly like everything else in the current mega-budget cinema landscape.
  67. Blood Father
    The film shrewdly capitalizes on Mel Gibson's off-screen embarrassments and controversies.
  68. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    The film exists resolutely outside of salience and doggedly within the comfort of escapism.
  69. Black Butterflies
    A reasonably sensitive and occasionally insightful look into the mind and psyche of an impassioned and deeply troubled artist.
  70. The Seventh Fire
    The documentary renders poverty a mysterious entity instead of a curable malady of systemic exclusion.
  71. Beloved Sisters
    It blossoms into a breezily utopian depiction of a ménage á trois whose entirely matter-of-fact presentation sets up an intriguing dissonance with the prim period setting.
  72. Elio
    The film’s best trait is the one that permeates every truly great first-contact story—not just the hope that our first meeting with the strangest of strangers is benevolent, or that the universe is too vast to determine they all wish good or ill on us, but that connecting with humanity still has value.
  73. Mountainhead
    If there’s a moral here, it might be that the only thing worse than a competitive billionaire is a bored one.
  74. Pepe
    As an anguished cry against colonialism, Pepe works best when illustrating the micro ways in which culture is erased by capital interests.
  75. Mission: Impossible III
    Shallow to its core and as propulsive as a runaway locomotive, it's the most blatantly summer movie-ish of the Mission Impossibles. And also, surprisingly, the most viscerally entertaining.
  76. Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
    This is a confident work that smashingly updates the Southern gothic for contemporary generations.
  77. Soylent Green
    The film strikes a poignant chord with its chilling portrayal of a state-sponsored euthanasia program that utilizes movie-watching as a narcotic designed to help the sick and elderly die peacefully.
  78. The Return of the Living Dead
    Suffice to say, this small offering from the horror genre is a hoot to watch, with never a dull moment.
  79. Breathing
    Can a film be faulted for being too sympathetic toward its characters, for limning a milieu with extraneous humanism?
  80. Suspended Time
    Olivier Assayas’s film is a gently smart and warm-spirited look at love as the core term of human existence.
  81. Deadpool 2
    Deadpool 2 muddies the distinction between parodying comic-book-movie conventions and perfunctorily adhering to them.
  82. The Way Back
    The film makes the path to basketball glory and the road to personal redemption seem oddly effortless.
  83. Puzzle
    The film buoyed by Kelly Macdonald, who's a master of understated vulnerability, but she can't steer it out of the doldrums.
  84. I Care a Lot
    Throughout, J Blakeson crafts sharp, curt dialogue that makes a fashion statement out of contempt.
  85. The Infiltrator
    Its clunky incidents of exposition leave us with no real understanding of what anyone is thinking or feeling.
  86. Pitch Perfect
    Jason Moore's film is more or less successful in inverse proportion to the degree that it plays its material by the book.
  87. Mary Poppins Returns
    For all of its slavish devotion to Mary Poppins, the sequel doesn't even seem to recognize its greatest attribute: its star.
  88. The Idol
    The film's clichés ultimately contain both too little conviction and too little complication, their inspirational messages more imagined than real.
  89. The Fairy
    Re-employing the tools of Jacques Tati and Jerry Lewis, this pleasant fable reclaims artful slapstick with a bliss that's hard to deny.
  90. Félix And Meira
    Maxime Giroux's sharp filmmaking instincts aren't always supported by similarly acute dramatic instincts.
  91. You're Next
    Adam Wingard's You're Next brazenly merges the home-invasion thriller with the dysfunctional family dramedy.
  92. The Toxic Avenger
    Pulled awkwardly in so many directions, this Toxic Avenger all but comes apart at the seams.
  93. In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis
    The film unfolds at an excessive remove from its subject matter, and it becomes less an incisive thesis about the pope than an occasion for Gianfranco Rosi to flex his stylistic muscles.
  94. Hope Springs
    A decidedly adult drama about love and sex, wherein the comedy is largely incidental.
  95. Distant Constellation
    The film exposes the idea of places as metaphors, mirrors, and symptoms for the people who inhabit them.
  96. The Missouri Breaks
    A beautiful, gleefully weird vanity project that never quite coheres.
  97. Dario Argento Panico
    It’s Argento who consistently makes the most compelling and incisive on-screen presence throughout Simone Scafidi’s documentary.
  98. Miss Stevens
    It provides materials for discussion without directing the viewer toward a particular solution or easy answer.
  99. The SpongeBob Movie: Search for Squarepants
    If the film’s breathless pacing and rapid-fire jokes run out of steam just a tad as SpongeBob’s stay in the underworld extends, Search for SquarePants is still charming, spirited, and ludicrous enough to prove that it’s not quite time to tell this series to walk the plank.
  100. Prince
    It revives hope for a pop-art cinema that's capable of treating characters like actual human beings rather than pawns on a chess board.
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