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. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story
    Rogue One is less the fetish object that The Force Awakens is because it at least has the ambitions to create its own character dynamics and plot routes rather than coast on existing ones.
  2. Summer of 85
    François Ozon’s paean to nostalgia wraps tragedy and obsession in a whimsical bow.
  3. A United Kingdom
    The Amma Asante film's broade sociopolitical overview is balanced by the intimate attention paid to the leads.
  4. A Good Woman Is Hard to Find
    The film’s early scenes turn the stuff of paying bills and managing kids into manna for an unsettlingly intimate domestic thriller.
  5. Last Night in Soho
    In the end, Edgar Wright isn’t particularly interested in taking aim at all that is dark in the zealotry that shapes a culture.
  6. White Girl
    It's an entertaining and unapologetic tale of female risk-taking, filled with clever camerawork, but the characters remain shallow.
  7. The Love We Make
    The Love We Make is mostly about placing viewers in an icon's shoes as he makes a rehabilitative gesture toward a city with which he's grown considerable roots.
  8. Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation
    Director Laura Archibald's approach is fatally safe, often turning poets into self-congratulatory windbags.
  9. Camille Claudel 1915
    Juliette Binoche's face, as we know, can tell a million stories in a simple and brief rearrangement of her facial muscles.
  10. The Royal Road
    The cumulative effect is altogether perplexing, as it's difficult to tell if Olson's trying to upend clichés or settle for them.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Spinning Plates
    Spinning Plates may inadvertently be one of the year's best films about class differences in America.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
    While it may not pack the rollicking drama of his first feature, Street Fight, Marshall Curry's timely If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front likewise chronicles the personal tale behind political headlines.
  13. Bless Me, Ultima
    The film's interest in social themes remains background fodder within a far more generic good-versus-evil narrative.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Philip Roth: Unmasked
    In spite of the film's exhaustive chronology, those who deduce from its title that they're in for an unveiling, or an unraveling, of a major literary figure may come out empty-handed.
  15. Paddington In Peru
    While it’s never didactic or heavy-handed about its messaging, Paddington in Peru also offers an idea of Britishness that’s multifaceted and modern.
  16. Staying Vertical
    The film changes gears whenever one is lulled into believing that it has finally settled into a recognizable narrative pattern.
  17. Birth of the Living Dead
    The film is unavoidably slight, but there's a certain pleasure in watching talented people wax passionate about a common source of inspiration.
  18. Girl on the Third Floor
    The film is loud and obvious about declaring its themes, as if to distract from their ultimate shallowness.
  19. Ismael's Ghosts
    Arnaud Desplechin’s latest simultaneously collapses and expands his entire body of work, reflexively revealing its many layers, like a pop-up book.
  20. Stars at Noon
    In Claire Denis’s film, sex is the great equalizer, or at least the act that allows people to defer taking a firm moral or ethical stance.
  21. Ouija: Origin of Evil
    The film complements its goose-pimply frights with an unabashedly naked emotional gravitas.
  22. Lee Daniels' The Butler
    With the film, Lee Daniels quietly pushes his talent for hashing out visceral, violent emotions into unexpected dramatic terrain.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Life, Above All
    By the time the narrative winds toward its key revelation, even the most earnest viewer is numbed and emotionally desensitized by the unfathomable bleakness already overcrowding the screen.
  24. Old Cats
    Walks a fine line between empathetic treatment of its characters and voyeuristic freakshow gazing.
  25. Dzi Croquettes
    What's easy to appreciate in the documentary, however, is the way it reassembles the Dzi Croquettes' trajectory without polishing off its jagged edges. It's through their brilliance and their flaws that they become muses.
  26. The Bullet Vanishes
    It's a prevailing sense of decency that explains why The Bullet Vanishes is such an effective tonic for summer-movie fatigue.
  27. Charlie Victor Romeo
    The film's tension doesn't come from the why or how, but more from the idea that one becomes so settled into habit that seemingly nothing is capable of interfering.
  28. West
    Christian Schwochow's film is a tense psychological slow burn, putting us in the muddled headspace of its protagonist as she gradually comes unglued.
  29. Ants on a Shrimp
    It offers lively and layered images that reveal the chefs both as individuals and components of a larger social organism.
  30. Kills on Wheels
    Writer-director Attila Till is content to indulge a complication-free mix of bloodshed and pathos.
  31. Ex-Husbands
    The film is full of little moments that speak clearly to the particularities of father-son bonds.
  32. The Debt
    Its performances are resourceful and affecting, with Chastain and Worthington in the past sequences, and Mirren and Wilkinson in the later chapters, exuding a complicated mess of responsibility, guilt, sacrifice, revenge, and regret.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Black Christmas
    Black Christmas just may be the perfect antidote to the saccharine sweetness of most Christmastime fare.
  34. Fishing Without Nets
    Though this setup is perhaps infused with too much piety, cheating audience empathy toward the main character, it nonetheless generates a compelling air of social fatalism.
  35. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
    In the theater, whenever Mike, Crow or Tom Servo flub a punchline or resort to a fart joke, you almost want to lean forward and shush them.
  36. Liberation Day
    Throughout, the documentary wavers between a sincere investigation of the avant-garde music group Laibach and self-satire.
  37. Better Than Something: Jay Reatard
    Intimacy doesn't completely give rise to insight in this loving, if largely for-fans-only, posthumous portrait of Memphis-bred punk rocker Jay Reatard.
  38. Mr. Malcolm's List
    The period romance has been increasingly experimented with in recent years, yet both straight dramas and convention-spoofing comedies almost always end up upholding the strict boundaries of the genre as if to prove the limits of reimagining the past.
  39. The Good Lie
    This is a Hollywood-delivered chronicle of the immigrant experience that earns its justification through good will and tact.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Fox and the Hound
    A wounded and unresolved movie free of the expected Disney cutesiness and complacency.
  41. The Bay
    The Bay is Barry Levinson's most engaged and entertaining movie since "Wag the Dog," which isn't to say that he's given up his irksome predilection for a certain bullish type of liberalism.
  42. Polina
    Even its sensitive and gorgeous choreographies can't fully offer respite from the hollow narrative.
  43. Pinocchio
    Matteo Garrone’s adaptation of Carlo Collodi’s story trembles with corporeal strangeness and unpredictability.
  44. Shoshana
    It’s possible that a kind of objective moral ambiguity was the goal here, but given the sensitive nature of the material, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that the film’s vagueness is the calculated strategy of those unwilling to take a side.
  45. Puss in Boots
    For all the fuss, it dissolves almost immediately upon contact.
  46. Bill & Ted Face the Music
    The film suggests that Bill and Ted’s dreams of stardom, which have evolved into dreams of acceptance and expression, aren’t so stupid after all.
  47. The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
    It ever so subtly zeros in on the extreme particularities of a remote place to find something universal, or at the very least easily comprehensible about despair.
  48. Beauty and the Dogs
    The film savors its obviousness and cruelty as badges of honor, reducing itself to a technical polemic.
  49. Manos Sucias
    Josef Kubota Wladyka is ultimately unable to reconcile complex dynamics any further than with a glimpse toward their fundamentally destructive effects.
  50. American Made
    Doug Liman may effectively maintain a madcap energy through to the end, but unlike Adam McKay or Martin Scorsese, he isn't all that interested in explicating the complex inner workings of vast criminal enterprises.
  51. Not Fade Away
    Triumphs when David Chase's empowerment as a kind of autobiographical historian is balanced with the thrill of submersing the viewer in the tidal pool of his memories
  52. Hearts Beat Loud
    The steadiness with which Haley's film progresses through its dramatic beats is rather like its familiar-sounding indie pop, moving rhythmically toward a predictable climax whose emotional intensity feels unearned.
  53. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool
    The film shows no interest in the inner workings of a relationship that’s defined by unusual circumstances.
  54. Plainclothes
    Sexy, scary, and occasionally clumsy, Carmen Emmi’s feature-length directorial debut, Plainclothes, is an anxious and unabashed gay drama about social repression and its impacts.
  55. Last Flag Flying
    Last Flag Flying is colored by how time reshapes our sense of self, embracing some memories while occluding others, and the film ingeniously folds the viewer into a similar state of reflection and uncertainty about previous eras of false optimism about national values.
  56. I See You
    The film’s tone is extremely eerie, with creeping camera movements, striking imagery, abrupt edits, and a delicately sinister score.
  57. Kill the Jockey
    Kill the Jockey’s originality consists not just in taking the clichéd metaphor of rebirth literally, but in casually ratcheting that literalness to ever more fantastical degrees.
  58. Rounding
    A few scenes show glimmers of promise for what Alex Thompson can achieve when he’s more in his wheelhouse. It’s a shame that the horror and tension that make up the bulk of Rounding are so clearly outside of it.
  59. 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.
  60. The Other Side
    Roberto Minervini's documentary is as quintessentially American a text as one could hope for in today's divided union.
  61. Windfall
    Whatever the legitimate arguments Windfall makes against the industry it targets, Meredith's feuding becomes just as inaccessible as the windmills that incite it.
  62. Faust
    Though its ballast of jokes and spectacle are formidable, it often lurches about at a remote, enigmatic distance
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Viva Riva!
    The near-slapstick escapes sit uneasily with the raw bits of very adult sex and cringe-worthy close-ups of brutality that dominate the rest of the proceedings.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Corpo Celeste
    Once Corpo Celeste began to recede a little in my rearview mirror, my initial impatience softened a little.
  65. A World Not Ours
    Mahdi Fleifel's usage of a domestic archive of home-video images inherited from his father lends the doc a simultaneous sense of historical gravitas and intimacy.
  66. Vengeance
    Though its lack of emotional escalation could be read as intentional, Vengeance is ground to a repetitive halt by B.J. Novak’s preaching.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Housemaid
    The Housemaid’s twist is a doozy, but it falls just short of being a deconstruction of tradwife values.
  68. Lucky Them
    It labors under the illusion that an abundance of Sub Pop memorabilia is adequate substitute for the honest evocation of a creative subculture and the personalities of which it's composed.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Sneakers
    It’s a surprise to discover a cerebral, 25-year-old film following the blueprint for today’s endless glut of superhero movies. It certainly operates on this level for the masses.
  70. Circumstance
    Since Mehran's embrace of hardline Islam is never dramatized or elaborated on in any insightful way.
  71. Swan Song
    The disconnect between the realities of different generations of gay men is one of Swan Song’s most unexpectedly joyful through lines.
  72. Journey from Zanskar
    It's the rare urgent-issue movie that refuses to pummel you with the importance of its subject matter, which in this case involves the shameful, potential extinction of a culture.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    My Brooklyn
    A thoughtful piece of documentary journalism that synecdochically uses the controversial redevelopment of the Fulton Street Mall to talk about the process of gentrification.
  74. A Call to Spy
    Because its focus is so split, the film lacks the pervasive sense of danger one expects from a spy thriller.
  75. Caught Stealing
    The story’s boilerplate setup gets a noticeable lift thanks to Darren Aronofsky’s style and focus.
  76. The Salt of Life
    A dry dream of postmenopausal-male sexual lethargy, this comedy's least musty ideas are among its worst.
  77. Herb & Dorothy 50X50
    Dorothy Vogel is less the soft-spoken housewife from the first film than a businesswoman both shrewd and mousy, and her trajectory affords the film its closest semblance to a story.
  78. Unexpected
    It suggests that Kris Swanberg has taken notes on what a film concerned with pregnancy should include without actually making it.
  79. Pawn Sacrifice
    It's best appreciated as a tragicomic profile of a man whose extraordinary talent was undermined by the farcical political reality in which he was enmeshed.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Picture of Dorian Gray
    Picture of Dorian Gray isn’t awful, though it’s certainly an instance in which an outright debacle would have made a much more interesting film.
  81. Ron's Gone Wrong
    The film celebrates individuality even as it suggests that everyone needs their own A.I. tech to validate everything they like and think.
  82. Memphis
    The film's music is the city itself as well as a subtle suggestion that Tim Sutton's own digital cinema is just as elusive and intangible as Willis's unwavering sense of dissatisfaction.
  83. My Week with Marilyn
    Only the star performances in My Week with Marilyn, cartoonish as they are, make seeing the film worth the effort.
  84. Kingdom of Shadows
    The visible numbness and empty stares of the doc's three subjects painfully evoke years of being gripped by the war on drugs.
  85. Kill Your Darlings
    An overmatched star and a scarcity of eccentricity sink this hip-lit origin story from director John Krokidas.
  86. The Princess of France
    The distinctiveness of Matías Piñeiro's alluring brand of formalism lies in this deference to chance and alchemy.
  87. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    It careens from carnage to group therapy so wildly that the action never gets to build and the conversations just repeat themselves.
  88. Venus and Serena
    Opting for inspiration over insight, Venus and Serena is a starry-eyed pop documentary that cannot transcend its scattershot, for-fans-only filmmaking.
  89. Tucker & Dale vs Evil
    Flip-flopping traditional genre dynamics in a manner more cute than uproarious, Tucker & Dale Vs. Evil charts the Three's Company-style shenanigans that ensue when two West Virginia bumpkins cross paths with a group of camping college kids.
  90. The French Minister
    With its broad performances, rapid-fire pacing, and rampant visual and verbal gags, Bernard Tavernier's first out-and-out comedy doesn't try too hard to hide its graphic-novel origins.
  91. A Skin So Soft
    The pleasure of Denis Côté's film radiates not so much from its storytelling as it does from the meditative force of its formal construction. Read our review.
  92. Francine
    In a character study of an ex-con who gives her heart and mind to animals rather than people, Melissa Leo's risky performance is ultimately framed with a disappointing, distanced pity.
  93. Saving Mr. Banks
    A tale of memory and redemption that does little to linger in the mind and even less to decry P.L. Travers's claim that Disney turns everything it touches into schmaltz.
  94. Beauty and the Beast
    Bill Condon's Beauty and the Beast actually delivers a remarkably optimistic balm to a festering, existential wound.
  95. Ivory Tower
    The documentary is more interested in covering all its bases than making sure it fully has its foot on each base.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Deconstructing Dad: The Music, Machines and Mystery of Raymond Scott
    The documentary is a work of careful consideration, moral weighing, and deliberateness of craft.
  97. Sin
    Andrei Konchalovsky’s film is fascinated with the creation of great art in the midst of socio-political turmoil.
  98. X-Men: First Class
    Despite his apparent comfort with F/X-heavy projects, the obligations of duty to the brand are too much for Matthew Vaughn's strange, singular voice, which rarely has the chance to shape the film unmolested by a curiously bland script.
  99. The Confirmation
    The premise is undermined by the film's occasionally dubious ethics and its tendency to soft-pedal the dangerous situations it sets up.
  100. Dancer
    It refuses to pass judgment on whether or not Sergei Polunin's success was worth so much sacrifice and heartache.
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