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 Incredible Jessica James
    Throughout the film, one wishes for a bit more depth regarding Jessica's professional struggles.
  2. Novitiate
    The film's meditative and excessive sides never quite cohere, giving the impression of watching two distinct films that are jostling against each other, rather than united in a single story.
  3. 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.
  4. Pop Aye
    It too quickly opts out of its Scenes from a Marriage-like potential for what amounts to an augmented take on The Straight Story.
  5. Thoroughbreds
    Cory Finley's screenplay is full of sharp, exactingly timed exchanges whose rat-a-tat rhythms exert a spellbinding pull, even if the dialogue at times comes off as artificial and mannered.
  6. Trophy
    It goes a long way toward complicating our moral assumptions about trophy hunting, as well as a host of other wildlife issues, including conservation, poaching, rhino farms, and the proper balance between man and nature.
  7. Brigsby Bear
    The film has such a goofy sense of humor and affection for its premise that its uneven narrative is sometimes only as frustrating as a little static on an old VHS.
  8. In This Corner of the World
    Sunao Katabuchi displays a vivid, shattering awareness of how domestic routines can spiritually ground one during a time of demoralizing chaos.
  9. Super Dark Times
    The transformation of a teen into a serial killer isn't credible compared to the portrait of idle suburban adolescence.
  10. Stray Bullets
    What distinguishes Stray Bullets from so many other low-budget crime films is Jack Fessenden's sense of quietness.
  11. The Other Side of Hope
    The Other Side of Hope fulfills the vague sense of its aspirational title as a film limited in scope and led only by the guidance of its maker's skeptical positivity.
  12. Junction 48
    At its best, the film demonstrates that no art is more political than that which depicts the lived experience of the oppressed with accuracy, empathy, and moral clarity.
  13. First They Killed My Father
    First They Killed My Father is less interested in global politics than in offering an intensely experiential tapestry of war and invasion as witnessed by a child.
  14. Okja
    In Okja, a transporting protest fantasy becomes another shrill dust-up in the waging of the culture wars.
  15. Who's Crazy? (1966)
    Thomas White's is a bizarre, undisciplined romp through snowbound Belgian vistas and '60s signifiers alike.
  16. Canners
    Canners plays a bit too infatuated with its subjects and for reasons not wholly clear by the film's end.
  17. Past Life
    Its improbable story gives breath to the burden of fate on those living with a past unreconciled.
  18. First Man
    Damien Chazelle is clearly in awe of the collective efforts it took to propel Neil Armstrong to the moon, but he remains ambivalent about whether it was all ultimately worth such immense sacrifice.
  19. The Transfiguration
    The film is at its strongest when navigating the story's uneasy relationship to its genre.
  20. I, Olga Hepnarová
    The filmmakers take few measures to engender sympathy for Olga, but their prismatic take on her life, while novel, precludes making any resonant statements about homosexuality, emotional health, or humankind’s capacity for evil.
  21. The Wound
    Though the film settles into a familiar coming-of-age trajectory, it's always enlivened by John Trengove's intimate, inquiring eye.
  22. Burden
    The film dispenses with sensationalism, engaging with Chris Burden's most notorious work on its own terms.
  23. The Nightingale
    The violence of Jennifer Kent’s film doesn’t seem to build upon its themes so much as repeat them.
  24. Death Note
    Whereas the more grounded scenes of Death Note anchor a startlingly bloody fantasy of power run amok, the scenes that fixate on super powers and code-busting seldom manage to rise above the realm of serviceable YA fiction.
  25. Band Aid
    At its most honest, the film wrestles with the reluctance or unwillingness of women to fulfill ostensibly requisite roles.
  26. All This Panic
    There's plenty of life in this honest, impressionistic portrait of a cohort of 21st-century American girls.
  27. God Knows Where I Am
    Though the film excels at subjectivity and interiority, it tends to falter in conveying more rudimentary information.
  28. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    In the film's best scenes, Jeff Grace displays a delicate understanding of various modes of male fragility.
  29. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World
    This is history that Americans should know, and the filmmaker approach Rumble as an introductory survey course.
  30. The Killing of a Sacred Deer
    The characters' emotional vacancy feels like another auteurist tic to which Yorgos Lanthimos is dauntlessly committed.
  31. Lucky
    John Carroll Lynch's Lucky is an impeccably acted yet sentimental film that’s bashful about said sentimentality.
  32. The Post
    No American film since Zodiac has exhibited such a love for the way information travels than The Post, but it's nonetheless steeped in self-congratulation.
  33. Chavela
    The film's hopscotching-in-time structure, informed by specific remembrances of Chavela Vargas's life, is refreshingly unconventional.
  34. The Exception
    David Leveaux's film cannily incorporates elements of spycraft and sheer trash into a familiar formula.
  35. The House of Tomorrow
    The impressionistic tenor of the unabashedly energetic final sequences is so wondrous that you may wish that writer-director Peter Livolsi had utilized it as The House of Tomorrow's guiding principle.
  36. The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson
    It brims with empathy and righteous outrage at the treatment of trans people, but with only a vague organizational structure, it ultimately feels scattershot, passionately covering a number of important issues without quite unifying them into a coherent whole.
  37. The Hunter's Prayer
    The Hunter’s Prayer packs its brisk 85 minutes with an impressive array of car chases, gun fights, hand-to-hand combat, and foot pursuits, all cut with a precision and an economy that heightens the impact of every hit.
  38. Elián
    It has the decency to recognize that only Elián González has the right to define his sense of truth for himself.
  39. Tully
    In Marlo, Diablo Cody has created her most complicated character to date. Would that her writing displayed similar richness and empathy in painting the film's supporting characters.
  40. Captive State
    The film might have better performed if it consisted of more than a smattering of good but relatively isolated ideas.
  41. Brimstone & Glory
    Through its energy and inherent beauty, Brimstone & Glory hits concurrent notes of peril and bliss, but even at a scant 67 minutes it can seem a bit aimless and scattershot.
  42. Gaslight
    Gaslight is an expertly directed and evenly paced slow burn (and Dame May Whitty is a stitch, though underused, as a nosy neighbor lady), but its lack of a sound moral and psychological center renders it totally transitory and forgettable.
  43. Buena Vista Social Club: Adios
    Adios may deepen our understanding of these musicians and their world, but it never quite stands on its own.
  44. Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
    Steve James is clearly positioning the film as a rallying cry, and its weaknesses as art might bolster its strength as reformatory theater.
  45. You Were Never Really Here
    Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here could be considered artsy exploitation, a film whose formal dexterity belies its debts to its chosen, and quite squalid, genre.
  46. Double Lover
    Though Double Lover has a slight oneiric quality from the start, it grows increasingly delirious, the plot threads knotting in convoluted patterns and the overall mood more and more ridiculous.
  47. Wonderstruck
    Todd Haynes's Wonderstruck is a coming-of-age tale as curiosity cabinet, a flowchart of narrative fragments that steadily build to a high-concept finale as ludicrous as it is emotionally audacious.
  48. Lost in Paris
    Lost in Paris abounds in whimsy that, for the most part, isn't irritatingly precious—a feat that's harder to pull off than it appears.
  49. Filmworker
    Tony Zierra interviews Leon Vitali at length, and he’s a commanding camera object with an obvious wellspring of longing and pain.
  50. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    It's true that the disorientation produced in the collision of Igorrr's frenetic style-mashing and Dumont's unadorned long-take aesthetic ensures that the film feels remarkably distinct from prior cinematic adaptations of Joan of Arc's life, but it's also hard not to wonder how this particular story might have played without the farfetched musical conceit grafted atop it.
  51. The Villainess
    When one finally puts together the pieces of the film’s scattered narrative puzzle, The Villainess doesn’t add up to all that much beyond a slick march toward an act of bloody revenge.
  52. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    It boasts such confident performances and choreography that it feels as much like a final draft of the 2008 film as a continuation of it.
  53. The Rider
    It manifests a mounting sense of disillusionment, suggesting that the rodeo lifestyle many characters so unreservedly romanticize often leads to physical and psychological ruin.
  54. A Ciambra
    First the film inhabits the eye of a storm—which is to say, the storm of Italy’s wretched peripheries—before submitting to the more ersatz cinematic will of filling Pio’s life with beginnings, middles, and ends.
  55. Dolores
    Peter Bratt's documentary sharply trumpets Dolores Huerta's life and centrality in the turbulent history of social justice since the '60s.
  56. Night School
    One may wonder if Night School's most revealing material has been left on the cutting room floor, so as to offer the sort of uplift that inadvertently marginalizes the very inequalities that drive the film.
  57. Tag
    As dumb as Tag is on the surface, it offers amity, emotional support, awkward tears, the specter of death, and the spectacle of ass-punching slapstick all rolled up in one somehow cohesive collection of all-good spare parts.
  58. Bronx Gothic
    By design, the film is intensely preachy. And this preachiness serves a therapeutic purpose, offering jolting possibilities for empathy.
  59. Happy Death Day
    Happy Death Day twists the inherent repetitiveness of slashers to its advantage by exaggerating it to an impossible degree.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
    Each mini-movie has the same tally of moments of greatness, grossness, and dullness, giving Tales from the Darkside: The Movie an even-handed feel.
  61. Altered States
    The most interesting dimension of Altered States has to be the way Russell sexualizes Eddie’s relationship with godly figures, most notably symbols of Jesus, crucifixion, and his father.
  62. Robin Hood: Men in Tights
    It should be said that this negligible absence of Brooks’s boundary hopping wit and untamed performances doesn’t quite render Men in Tights unwatchable. There’s an appropriate, albeit languid merriment to the proceedings kept alive by a few choice cameos (Dick van Patten, Dom DeLouise, Brooks himself) and a handful of gags that land on their feet.
  63. Santoalla
    Andrew Becker and Daniel Mehrer get close to their subjects only to retreat when things get truly dangerous.
  64. Top Gun: Maverick
    The film fully surrenders to the grandiose fun that’s marked the best of Tom Cruise’s recent star vehicles and reaffirms Joseph Kosinski as a blockbuster craftsman par excellence.
  65. Footnotes
    The ending cheapens its main character and weakens the film's firm commitment to the importance of workplace organizing.
  66. Barracuda
    It's anchored by a pair of dynamic, intuitive performances which mine the psychological complexities of an understandably troubled relationship.
  67. Amnesia
    Amnesia ultimately delivers rich insights about its main characters’ relationship to their backgrounds.
  68. Bushwick
    Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott's Bushwick is a genre film with a refreshing sense of political infrastructure.
  69. The Nile Hilton Incident
    The film may not reimagine our sense of how the ties that bind bad men are rewritten in times of war, but it nonetheless gives a casually electric sense of how hardscrabble lives persist in such times.
  70. Peter Rabbit
    Peter Rabbit plays like a country cousin to Paul King's Paddington films, similarly balancing slapstick, absurdism, and a touch of gross-out humor, though without King's transcendently oddball sensibility.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Up in Smoke
    That’s the trouble at the center of the benign but tepid ganja-classic Up in Smoke: Its toking Abbott-and-Costello duo are so content to simply drift away in clouds of smoke that the audience is often left behind looking for the jokes.
  72. Wonder Woman 1984
    The film shows a preference for forgiveness over vengeance, which feels like an okay way to end this particular year.
  73. Game Night
    The film establishes coherent characters and drops them into a twisty mystery plot that’s tightly crafted enough to generate some real narrative momentum while never getting too bogged down in its own plot that it forgets to be funny.
  74. The Karate Kid
    The Karate Kid might have been more endurable, maybe even endearing, if its runtime had been trimmed of a solid 30 minutes.
  75. Annihilation
    Annihilation gets momentum from the deeper it pushes into the uncertainties of ecology and the self.
  76. The Death of Stalin
    Armando Iannucci satirizes the manner in which political power is accorded to those who can mask cutthroat ambition behind an outward projection of bland inoffensiveness.
  77. After Love
    The film too often puts too much trust in dialogue, as Marie and Boris's predicament is sometimes perfectly conveyed by the actors' facial expressions and body language.
  78. Cocoon
    The film has something for everyone but, in effect, offers nothing of substance to anyone. The interplay between Ameche, Cronyn, and Brimley allow for some lively, even touching scenes in a product—and make no mistake, a product is exactly what it is—that is, at best, adequate.
  79. Walking Out
    Walking Out is modest in scope, its concerns limited to man’s attempts to live both morally and harmoniously with nature.
  80. Jesús
    Fernando Guzzoni's Jesus is at its best when it steers clear of pat moralizing and simply yokes its moody sense of atmosphere to the aimlessness of the story’s young characters.
  81. Everybody Knows
    Asghar Farhadi falls back on the expository dialogue and dubious perspectival shifts that he frequently resorts to as a means of wrapping up knotty narratives.
  82. Nobody's Watching
    Julia Solomonoff's film ripples with a palpable sense of the sheer distance between the down and out actor at its center and his goals.
  83. Indivisible
    Edoardo de Angelis's coming-of-age portrait is poignant when fixated on the intricacies of a complicated sisterhood.
  84. Red Trees
    The banality of Marina Willer’s voiceover only goes to prove the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words.
  85. Beast
    The narrative has a gambit that steers Beast into the terrain of a horror film, offsetting the sentimentality of the audience-flattering romance.
  86. Custody
    Custody is concerned with the failure of process to discern human need and perversion, and Xavier Legrand rather ironically follows in the footsteps of bureaucracy by reducing people to statistics.
  87. I, Tonya
    The film’s habit of courting and then insulting the viewer is a conscious nod to the cycles of abuse that mark Tonya Harding’s story, but the filmmakers’ attempts to implicate their audience are I, Tonya's broken shoelace, too pat and glib to be convincing.
  88. The Insult
    Ziad Doueiri's film is well acted and staged with periodic liveliness, but its earnestness grows wearying.
  89. Lean on Pete
    As sharply as it delineates an America of spotty, informal economies, the film avoids articulating most of the people who live and work in these spaces.
  90. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum
    The action choreography is as brutal as you expect, though the repetition in style from the first two films makes the effect less surprising.
  91. Gilbert
    Gilbert exposes a wealth of unsuspected pain and tenderness beneath Gottfried's often thorny exterior.
  92. Mary and The Witch's Flower
    This is a film about the adolescent pangs to belong that also mines its tale of magic and malevolence for an imaginative allegory about the excesses of scientific inquiry.
  93. Kills on Wheels
    Writer-director Attila Till is content to indulge a complication-free mix of bloodshed and pathos.
  94. Boy Erased
    Good as Lucas Hedges is at acting the tortured teen, Jared is finally too much of a cipher for his story to really hit with the force that it should.
  95. Long Shot
    As it proceeds toward its telegraphed rom-com ending, the film becomes just more empty rhetoric, an ineffectual reiteration.
  96. The Departure
    The Departure presents patterns in suicidal people while according them humanity, which isn’t a small accomplishment.
  97. M.F.A.
    Natalia Leite's ambition and accompanying uncertainty give the film its unruly and resonant energy.
  98. The Ritual
    Eventually, the filmmakers reveal the secrets they'd previously withheld, spoiling the film's sustained mystique.
  99. Liberation Day
    Throughout, the documentary wavers between a sincere investigation of the avant-garde music group Laibach and self-satire.
  100. Ghost Stories
    In setting their play to film, Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman decide where we look. Any magician would be jealous of that power. But it puts everything at a remove, trapping you in your own head.
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