Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. On the Silver Globe (1988)
    It becomes a bleak comic spit into the face of organized religion, organized society, and even organized narrative.
  2. Indignation
    James Schamus's screenplay is rich with culturally specific details that deepen these forking moral predicaments.
  3. The Land
    Writer-director Steven Caple Jr.'s social-realist tendencies run up against some unconvincing genre elements.
  4. Gleason
    It has an irritating habit of depending on our natural reactions, letting the subject matter do the heavy lifting.
  5. Viral
    The film slightly reorients our perspective on the familiar tropes of both the teen and apocalyptic genres.
  6. Hieronymus Bosch, Touched by the Devil
    It highlights how the ownership of art serves as a marker of capital for distinguishing one institution over another.
  7. Equity
    The film ultimately succeeds in offering a fresh female-centered perspective on its genre material.
  8. Tallulah
    Relevant facts about each character are dutifully punched out, in earnest speeches or actions that are often wildly overdrawn.
  9. Lights Out
    Few horror films are as insistent about the trauma mental illness inflicts on families as Lights Out, and still fewer are so insensitive about it.
  10. Star Trek Beyond
    Stark Trek Beyond emphasizes the inter-personal dynamics of the USS Enterprise, and functions best as an extended team-building exercise.
  11. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    There's something to be said for a summer movie that offers up Chris Colfer as an unapologetic misogynist hairdresser.
  12. For the Plasma
    The film, whose disparate narrative threads unsurprisingly never connect, drowns in weirdness for its own sake.
  13. The Childhood of a Leader
    Brady Corbet reaches for a dreary self-importance akin to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.
  14. Summertime
    Catherine Corsini depicts feminists in lighthearted ways, at once humorously caricatured and sensitively human.
  15. Ice Age: Collision Course
    If Ice Age: Collision Course gleefully fails at being a history lesson, at least it offers an energetic recess from reality.
  16. 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.
  17. The Seventh Fire
    The documentary renders poverty a mysterious entity instead of a curable malady of systemic exclusion.
  18. Don't Think Twice
    It displays an intimate chemical understanding of the exhausting and unrelentingly impotent agony of failure.
  19. Sea Fog
    The film fails to lift off from this sturdy aesthetic launching pad; it never allows the characters, however stock, to evolve in their respective dealings with one another, which is the primary source of tension and escalation for a thriller set in a confined place.
  20. Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party
    The film is an incoherent and aesthetically barren harangue masquerading as a revisionist history lesson.
  21. Captain Fantastic
    The film is premised on a radical act that it buries beneath a grueling avalanche of quirk.
  22. Demon
    Demon offers a tidal wave of unrelieved longing and regret, with a devilish streak of absurdism.
  23. Phantom Boy
    The filmmakers are thankfully willing to render, with unremitting vigor, how grief can batter the human heart.
  24. Ghostbusters
    When it's good, this new Ghostbusters is funny, driven, sometimes even a bit scary.
  25. The Infiltrator
    Its clunky incidents of exposition leave us with no real understanding of what anyone is thinking or feeling.
  26. Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
    Director Joe Berlinger essentially allows his subject to hijack the film for his own end.
  27. Café Society
    As clarified potently by the film, most of life is spent distracting oneself from matters of the closest personal significance.
  28. Hooligan Sparrow
    The Nanfu Wang film's noble aims are mirrored in its more frustrating and conventional qualities.
  29. My King
    Maïwenn fashions a bracing film about co-dependency, capturing the erotic contours of subservience and flattery.
  30. Free to Run
    The doc's caginess is a weakness that results from an inherently nostalgic sense of reverie.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Zero Days
    Director Alex Gibney does this vital material a disservice, giving it an air of deflated pomposity.
  32. Under the Sun
    Under the Sun's overall aesthetic identifies a willingness to settle for an easy condemnation of an obviously abysmal regime, while not doing anything challenging or enlightening with all the outstanding footage collected.
  33. 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.
  34. Men Go to Battle
    It's too texturally exacting in its recreation of a transitory moment in U.S. history to register as a failure.
  35. 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.
  36. Fathers and Daughters
    The film's weird reformulation of the Electra complex is nothing short of a sexist fantasy of salvation.
  37. The Mermaid
    It offers a wonderful visual reprieve from the cumbersomely mechanized aesthetic of so much contemporary fantasy.
  38. Our Little Sister
    The film's reserve softens some of its more piquant observations about tradition and mortality.
  39. 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.
  40. Cell
    The film insufficiently connects the book's prophecy with its present-day, real-world forms of realization.
  41. The Legend of Tarzan
    The film's action sequences are a jumble of movement and cuts that have no discernible relation to the actual motion of the characters.
  42. 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.
  43. The Purge: Election Year
    Its greater focus on disreputable genre thrills comes at the expense of making coherent points about class inequalities, political exploitation, or man's inhumanity.
  44. The Innocents
    Anne Fontaine's film is an allegory for women's condition more generally, in times of war or peace.
  45. Carnage Park
    The film covers "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" by way of Rob Zombie, Quentin Tarantino, and Ti West.
  46. Life, Animated
    It never addresses Disney's wholly manufactured stranglehold on turning adolescent desire into a consumerist impulse.
  47. The BFG
    The film, full of such quietly inventive visual magic, is perfectly content to simply revel in the stuff dreams are made of.
  48. Independence Day: Resurgence
    Emmerich rewards our patience with an impersonally massive set piece involving the usual generic stew of mass CGI-imagined demolition. The insensitivity displayed toward human life in these sequences would be galling even by Emmerich's standards, if this pitiful albatross of corporate capitalism could work up enough energy to be offensive.
  49. Misconception
    The even-handedness of Yu's gaze throughout the first part of the film, alas, isn't sustained in the second and third chapters.
  50. The Shallows
    What makes the film churn so forcefully for so long is Jaume Collet-Serra's visual acrobatics.
  51. Free State of Jones
    After its bracing opening, the film begins to indulge the worst impulses of well-meaning liberal cinema.
  52. 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.
  53. Swiss Army Man
    Even as it invites snarky ridicule, the film dares you to buy into its singular earnestness.
  54. Wiener-Dog
    The film's back half nearly goes completely astray with two segments featuring unimaginative characterizations and tepid, mean-spirited scenarios.
  55. Nuts!
    Throughout, director Penny Lane strings together telling incidents and anecdotes with a light touch.
  56. Eat That Question: Frank Zappa in His Own Words
    It presents a captivating portrait of one of the era's greatest defenders of artistic freedom and a true American original.
  57. The Phenom
    Noah Buschel shows that formula can be repurposed to serve empathetic ends without losing its self-actualizing appeal.
  58. Three
    The film shows how much Johnnie To still experiments with his form, especially as he continues to transition to digital cinema.
  59. Land and Shade
    The landscape seems to push the characters away at the same time that it anchors them into place, suggesting that elsewhere is a promise that only dreams can keep.
  60. Central Intelligence
    It's a pity that no one else involved in the making of the film had Dwayne Johnson's sly intuition.
  61. Finding Dory
    Finding Dory follows its predecessor in being broadly concerned with comforting notions of home and family.
  62. Cosmos
    Andrzej Zulawski's film experiment ranks somewhere between captivatingly off the wall and utterly exhausting.
  63. My Love, Don't Cross That River
    Jin Mo-young fetishizes his subjects' wholly modest behaviors as cute manifestations of a pure form of human interaction.
  64. Clown
    Jon Watts does nothing with the scarily funny notion of a respectable professional who suddenly refuses to shuck a party costume.
  65. Argentina
    The film stagnates by restricting camera mobility and focusing more on capturing dimensions of the performances in close-up.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)
    Eva Husson's controversy-courting debut is neither as lewdly subversive or as raucously debauched as its provocative title.
  67. 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?
  68. Genius
    It makes a convincing argument for viewing Thomas Wolfe's work as a product of the excess and exuberance of the 1920s.
  69. Diary of a Chambermaid
    The lack of ambiguity reflects Benoît Jacquot's treatment of the text, which is devoid of either formal obsessiveness or a contemporary hook.
  70. The Conjuring 2
    The Conjuring 2 is a model of heightened tension and uneasy release, but the tropes propelling these night terrors grow stale pretty quickly.
  71. Now You See Me 2
    The sheer amount of people and incident indifferently presented throughout this film suggests only an obligation to quota-filling.
  72. Call Her Applebroog
    It implies that not even the concentrated self-scrutiny required to make art like Ida Applebroog's is enough to make sense of ourselves to ourselves.
  73. From Afar
    The film renders visible a very complicated, and awfully repressed, truth not only about gay desire, but desire in general.
  74. 'Til Madness Do Us Part
    Wang Bing intends to give back to the inmates the opportunity for individual expression that society has robbed them of.
  75. 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.
  76. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    The film simply limps to predetermined truths that hypocritically advocate the maintenance of placid family values.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    King Jack
    Harsh punishments are dished out in a way that jolts the material away from coming-of-age cliché.
  78. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    Its openly mercenary ethos initially scan as a bracing lack of pretense in a market crammed to the gills with insidious faux-sentimentality, but its overstuffed relentlessness proves almost equally tedious.
  79. De Palma
    Like Hitchcock, De Palma reveals himself to be guided by an unusual mixture of intuition and intellectualization.
  80. The Neon Demon
    The simmering insinuations of Nicolas Winding Refn's film eventually flower into full-on exploitation.
  81. Me Before You
    It punks its impressionable audience into believing a lie, then punishes them for their foolishness.
  82. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
    The film's lampooning of a business built on pure surface extends to its riotous original songs.
  83. Honeyglue
    It's more interested in borrowing terminal cancer as a narrative shorthand for intensity than investigating it as a lived experience.
  84. The Witness
    The film presents Kitty Genovese's identity as an afterthought, turning her living days and nights into incidental details.
  85. Warcraft
    Watching this bloated mélange of derivative fantasy tropes unfold is akin to being forced to follow the efforts of a particularly ham-fisted gamer, with the viewer being jerked back and forth across countless busy CGI landscapes by a plot that's utterly predictable when it isn't confusing.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Approaching the Unknown
    The film fails to lay down the character foundation that might have elevated the third-act histrionics.
  87. Art Bastard
    Robert Cenedella exudes humility even as he sounds off against the societal forces that anger him and fuel his work.
  88. Les Cowboys
    Never content to suffice as a mediocre thriller, Les Cowboys is a wellspring of embarrassment for all parties involved.
  89. The Final Master
    The film is a seemingly endless series of convoluted double-dealing, backstabbing, and factional realignment.
  90. The Wailing
    Na Hong-jin's The Wailing is a work of thriller maximal-ism, a rare case of more actually being more rather than less.
  91. Jia Zhangke, A guy from Fenyang
    Walter Salles reinforces the impression of Jia's own art as emerging fluidly from the vagaries of his own life and socioeconomic position.
  92. The Thoughts That Once We Had
    Thom Andersen attempts to establish unity by effectively bridging vast swaths of film history into one cohesive body of work.
  93. ma ma
    Julio Medem's film has enough hanky-courting plot mechanics for three remakes of Beaches.
  94. Chevalier
    Athina Rachel Tsangari's obvious skill can't hide the fact that her concept is one-note.
  95. Presenting Princess Shaw
    The peculiar circumstances of the documentary necessitate more transparency than the filmmaker is willing to offer.
  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. Holy Hell
    It hopes to jolt audiences with OMGs instead of edifying them about the empty lure of Buddhafield's cult mentality.
  98. Unlocking the Cage
    The problem here isn't necessarily the tension between emotion and rationality, but that the doc does little to explore these dimensions as they arise.
  99. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    The film's expected rehash of recent pop-culture totems is accompanied by a novel attention to millennial-centric debates about entitlement and identity politics.
  100. The Angry Birds Movie
    The Angry Birds Movie is a lot of things, but none of them true to the app's appeal.
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