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. Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — Featuring a Very Special, Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton
    The film is about the idea of Andy Kaufman, about how artists channel their influences and keep the dead alive.
  2. Princess Cyd
    Stephen Cone's Princess Cyd is distinguished by a dramatic complexity that would seem to run counter to its remarkably even-tempered tone.
  3. Flesh and Blood
    Mark Webber's stripped-down approach renders the messy, unglamorous lives at the film's center with dignity.
  4. 1945
    The fractured rhythm of 1945 and the desolate aesthetic are engrossing, but Ferenc Török's film doesn't linger.
  5. A Prayer Before Dawn
    A Prayer Before Dawn is concerned above all with ensuring that we share its main character's sense of dislocation and entrapment.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Beirut
    Brad Anderson's Beirut doesn't quite make foreign espionage look fun, but it shows how it might appeal to the sort of masochist who's also an adrenaline addict.
  7. Hellraiser
    Barker’s vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, but Hellraiser‘s overriding ridiculousness (and nagging budgetary shortcomings) can’t disguise the fact that the movie is at least unwittingly a product of the AIDS crisis.
  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. The Strangers: Prey at Night
    Opening with the pulsing synth lines of Kim Wilde's “Kids in America,” Johannes Roberts's film announces itself as a looser, bouncier, more self-consciously frivolous effort than its now decade-old predecessor.
  10. Smallfoot
    There’s something undeniably ballsy about a children’s film that’s so insistent about pushing young viewers to think bigger, to be open to new ideas and question culturally coded notions of good and evil.
  11. Shadowman
    This is a gruesome art-world fairy tale unafraid to face the bitter details of its hero's tumultuous life.
  12. The Goldfinch
    Enough of the individual moments pulled from the rag-and-bone shop of Donna Tartt’s sprawling mystery narrative make an emotional impact that the story’s structural issues fail to register as much at first.
  13. Alita: Battle Angel
    Battle Angel is by some distance the most entertaining of the recent crop of would-be franchise starters, exciting on its own merits while leaving just enough of its world tantalizingly unexplored to actually fuel our interest in wanting to see where its characters go from here.
  14. What They Had
    What They Had gracefully coasts on its patient observations of one family’s dynamics, but once the third act hits, Elizabeth Chomko goes about neatly tidying up seemingly every loose end.
  15. Half Magic
    The film displays a sprightly tone and blissful sense of liberation in charting the exploits of characters seeking to live by their own feminine-centric rules.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Arachnophobia
    Arachnophobia isn’t great filmmaking, appearing to be kept in check by vaguely resembling Spielbergian entertainment without rising to its altitudes. But it’s a pleasant, acutely nostalgic elicitation of the VHS era and the woozy, preadolescent excitement of awaiting the next cranked-out Spielberg Xerox picture.
  17. Oh Lucy!
    Atsuko Hirayanagi's feature-length directorial debut offers a surprising take on the tricky art of communication.
  18. Can You Ever Forgive Me?
    Richard E. Grant is captivating on his own, but his rapport with Melissa McCarthy is so effortless that their characters’ conversations offer deeper pleasures than the main plot of the film.
  19. Never Goin' Back
    Writer-director Augustine Frizzell's film is funny and surprisingly tender, if at times frustratingly uneven.
  20. Braven
    Lin Oeding’s action thriller thrives on both the beauty of its natural, snowbound surroundings and the brutal instincts of man.
  21. Lu Over the Wall
    Throughout, director Masaaki Yuasa’s imagination runs so wild that it becomes impossible to resist.
  22. Maya
    The film’s intimacy is as precise as its intellect is vague.
  23. Piercing
    If the film is mildly disappointing, it’s because it doesn’t go far enough. It confidently prepares us for a frenzy that never quite materializes.
  24. American Animals
    As he showed in "The Imposter," writer-director Bart Layton knows how to spin a compelling yarn.
  25. Skate Kitchen
    The film is empathetic toward and clear-eyed about its young characters, even if the drama it constructs around them tends toward the superficial.
  26. Pow Wow
    Its tension between ethnographic ensemble study and thesis-oriented docu-essay is irreconcilable.
  27. Generation Wealth
    Into a broad-strokes picture of a culture in crisis, Lauren Greenfield attempts to incorporate autobiographical elements, which results in some awkward narrative pivots and jarringly clunky voiceover.
  28. Sorry to Bother You
    For a spell, Boots Riley's cultural ire is so cool-headed that Sorry to Bother You easily distinguishes itself from Mike Judge's similarly themed Idiocracy, but along the way it, too, settles for swinging for the fences—so much so that the target of its satire is no longer in its crosshairs.
  29. Journey's End
    Director Saul Dibb has infused his adaptation of R.C. Sherriff's play with a striking sense of urgency.
  30. Searching
    As nimble as Aneesh Chaganty is in presenting his main character's multi-faceted interaction with technology in the first hour, the film suddenly morphs into a generic and manipulative missing-person thriller.
  31. Death Race 2000
    Death Race is a maladroit but exuberantly gamey mix of social commentary and blue-collar goofiness.
  32. Blaze
    With Blaze, a fractured story of country music singer-songwriter Blaze Foley, director Ethan Hawke admirably battles the clichés of the musical biopic.
  33. Uncle Drew
    Uncle Drew, the old-school streetballer played by NBA all-star Kyrie Irving, is a cheerfully scruffy creation, and so is the film that bears his name.
  34. The Forgiven
    Roland Joffé's film is largely successful in its attempt to grapple with the terrible truths of apartheid and its legacy.
  35. Death on the Nile
    Once things get moving, it’s smooth sailing to the double-shocker of a denouement.
  36. Angels Wear White
    In her understandable fury, Vivian Qu almost valorizes suffering, embracing it as a substantial signifier of identity.
  37. Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town
    Christian Papierniak manages to get a tricky tonal balance more or less right, capturing the false sense of superiority that Izzy projects over her environment without allowing the film itself to revel in said superiority.
  38. Sadie
    Sadie remains a clear-eyed portrait of maternal love, teenage turmoil, and the singular type of tight-knit bonds formed, out of necessity in many cases, in low-income communities.
  39. Roxanne Roxanne
    One presumes that Michael Lerner's sense of emphasis is meant to humanize Shanté, defining her apart from the fame she achieved, but this stratagem backfires as Roxanne Roxanne mires itself in scenes of speechifying domestic strife.
  40. Dovlatov
    According tot he film, truly courageous artists aren't necessarily the ones who tackle the state head-on, but rather the ones who stay true to themselves even when no one likes what they have to say.
  41. Dark River
    While Clio Barnard so masterfully limns her protagonist’s tortured soul, the brother-sister drama at the center of the film remains frustratingly hazy.
  42. The Endless
    Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead veer away from the deeper, even meta-cinematic, implications of their plotting.
  43. Once Upon a Time in America
    As a magnum opus, Once Upon a Time in America falls just a few point tragically shy of greatness.
  44. The Workshop
    Matthieu Lucci deftly carries the weight of all the symptoms that The Workshop loads upon Antoine, a resonant character whose inscrutability is at once dangerous, sympathetic, and eerily apt.
  45. The Devil and Father Amorth
    The Devil and Father Amorth is a flimsy stunt, but in his blunt, slapdash way, William Friedkin locates the intersection existing between religion and pop culture—a fusion that insidiously steers political currents.
  46. Friday the 13th Part 2
    By now, everyone knows what to expect from this kind of movie, but what’s surprising is how the low-budget rawness, cheap film stock bubbling over with grain, and washed-out lighting schemes give the film a kind of base in reality.
  47. Whitney
    For most of Kevin Macdonald's film, Whitney Houston seems a guttering flame in a public crosswind, with only fleeting celebration given to the wildfire of her success.
  48. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
    Even though we would see more of Jason over the years (first as a zombie, then battling a telekinetic super-girl, taking on Freddy Krueger within his own warped dreams, even hacking teens to bits in outer space), this one certainly felt as if it properly closed out the Friday the 13th series before it devolved into unadulterated camp.
  49. First Match
    After a certain point, Olivia Newman's film treats the womanhood of its main character as an afterthought.
  50. Relaxer
    Joel Potrykus's droll world is defined by feats of man-child pettiness, by lazy guys who turn the banalities of daily life into meaningless trials of integrity.
  51. Duck Butter
    The setup of a 24-hour relationship that bypasses the getting-to-know-you phase speaks to the nature of expedited modern dating culture, but despite its attempts at intimacy, Duck Butter is difficult to fall in love with.
  52. The Informer
    Outside of the Easy Money series, Kinnaman has rarely been allowed to utilize his tightly wound intensity this explicitly.
  53. Fighting with My Family
    While it pays lip service to the fascinating theatrical norms of pro wrestling, the film ends up expending most of its energy on its search for barriers that Paige can break through.
  54. Bad Times at the El Royale
    The film begins as a cheeky retro chamber drama before morphing into an often expectation-busting blend of noir and pitch-black comedy.
  55. Beautiful Boy
    Felix Van Groeningen commendably sustains the story's profound sense of irresolution: abuse-rehab-relapse, abuse-rehab-relapse, abuse-rehab-relapse—an endless cycle of teeth-gritted optimism at best, soul-deadening dashed hopes at worst.
  56. The Hills Have Eyes
    The major saving grace of The Hills Have Eyes is that it’s better acted than probably any other film from Craven’s early period. Because of his emotionally bare nature, Robert Houston’s achingly implosive terror is more complex than your average male lead in a horror film.
  57. Upgrade
    Upgrade is most effective when mining the comical and bizarre love-hate chemistry between Grey and Stem and pairing that singular conflict with batshit-crazy action, but the film’s follow-through is clunky and unfulfilling.
  58. That Summer
    The makers of this rescued-footage documentary ultimately understand the power of its subjects' personalities.
  59. Motel Hell
    This film’s pleasures are extremely mild, but they’re discernable for the curious fan of retro redneck horror, or, far more likely, for the genre critic looking to finish their dissertation pertaining to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’s vast influence on the 1970s and 1980s grindhouse movie’s vision of gleeful small-town Americana hypocrisy.
  60. Little Pink House
    Courtney Moorehead Balaker's film is mostly a sobering dramatization of a true and controversial story in recent Connecticut history.
  61. The 12th Man
    At 130 minutes, it isn't a short film, and its most intriguing elements, much like Baalsrud's rations, are in short supply.
  62. In the Last Days of the City
    By diagramming a vastly complicated metropolis like Cairo from an unabashedly first-person perspective, In the Last Days of the City interrogates middle-class privilege in a time of crisis as a series of either-ors: leaving for Europe or staying in Cairo, hiding at home or protesting in the streets, filming blindly or seeking retrenchment in broad certainty.
  63. Nana
    The film flattens Maryla's personal story into hazy generalities about tolerance and the value of remembrance.
  64. The Quest of Alain Ducasse
    The documentary provides little sense of intimacy with its subject, but it gives an in-depth look at the master chef's uniquely obsessive work habits.
  65. Jonathan
    The dichotomy represented by Jonathan and John is too clean for the film's exploration of a divided psyche to ever feel particularly complex.
  66. Love, Gilda
    Its success is due to the way it relies on Radner's often elegant words to relay her experience of female stardom.
  67. Wrestle
    The documentary shines a piercing light on the sorts of people that our governments would too often rather forget.
  68. 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.
  69. Arctic
    The film has a raw immediacy that can only be achieved when most cinematic excesses have been eliminated.
  70. Girls of the Sun
    With its naked celebration of self-sacrificial combat and idealization of the soldier as an avenging angel, it strikes a tone redolent of old-school war propaganda.
  71. Rafiki
    The film's slotting of two African women into a familiar romantic structure represents a radical and important upending of contemporary Kenyan sexual mores.
  72. Diamantino
    The film is at its strongest when depicting how Diamantino becomes a tool of politicians hoping to oust Portugal from the EU.
  73. 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.
  74. Rocketman
    As a musical, Dexter Fletcher’s film is just fun enough to (mostly) distract us from its superficiality.
  75. Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist
    Lorna Tucker's documentary sustains a tone that oscillates between earnest admiration and wry exasperation.
  76. What Will People Say
    The film flirts with miserablism, but it counterbalances the direness of its main character's situation with moments of levity.
  77. Convoy
    At its best, the film finds Peckinpah moving into a new poetry of non-violence, of movement associated with explicit, actualized harmony, but the director doesn’t trust himself, mistaking change of form for impersonal commercial stewardship.
  78. Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts
    The film is enlivened by an acute grasp of the impossibilities that abused Indonesian women face in a society predicated on their continued physical and emotional subjugation to men.
  79. What Keeps You Alive
    If Hannah Emily Anderson's performance was as fully imagined as Brittany Allen's, then What Keeps You Alive might have attained the emotional dimensions of a robust psychodrama.
  80. Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives
    Though it has the requisite murder every 10 minutes or so (including victims snapped in half and punched through the heart, and a triple decapitation), Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives feels more like a harbinger for the Scream series with its self-aware jokiness.
  81. The Night Eats the World
    Dominique Rocher reinvigorates the zombie film only to succumb to the strictures of the coming-of-age romance.
  82. The Citizen
    It adheres too rigidly to news-cycle replications of barbaric governmental acts, and without putting them into greater perspective.
  83. Dark Money
    Kimberly Reed's approach is too bloodless to make us feel the full weight of the injustices her film identifies.
  84. Mirai
    The fabric of the fantasy world depicted in the film lacks the cohesion of its central theme about appreciating one’s place in a family tree.
  85. Cielo
    Alison McAlpine's documentary lacks urgency beyond its persistent pondering of the sky's eternal mysteries.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Hal
    Just before the documentary slips into hero worship, Amy Scott pries beneath the calm surface of her bearded and bespectacled subject to reveal the silent rage that fueled his work.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Little Women
    Individual scenes are set to the rhythm of the young women’s conversations, which at times approach Gilmore Girls-level warp speed.
  88. Stan & Ollie
    At its best, Stan & Ollie shows how the private and personal dimensions of art are achingly inseparable.
  89. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged
    The film more or less keeps things efficiently moving, wringing white-knuckle tension less through jump scares than from the darkness of a seemingly infinite void.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Gate
    If you can get in touch with your inner 12-year-old, The Gate is a pleasant diversion.
  91. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
    In their best films, the Coens mine the depths of loneliness and egotism and frailty and solipsism. But in THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS there's a noticeable lack of deeper insinuation, a lack of curiosity.
  92. Lookin' to Get Out
    Lookin’ to Get Out, however, though pieced together with Ashby’s trademark character sympathy and technical aplomb, is one toke over the line: Unkempt and unconvincingly funny, the film is infused with the thin, despondent languor of a mourning man’s second-hand marijuana smoke.
  93. Chef Flynn
    At times, Cameron Yates appears to be too protective of his subjects, which somewhat neuters the drama of the narrative.
  94. Too Late to Die Young
    The experience of watching Dominga Sotomayor’s film is not unlike entering a stranger’s dream without an anchor.
  95. The Fall of the American Empire
    Despite a few undeniably intense and lurid moments, the film lacks the pulsating fury of a significant genre work.
  96. Maria by Callas
    The film is less hagiographic than most documentaries of its kind, which isn't to say that Tom Volf's adoration of his subject is ever in doubt.
  97. The Biggest Little Farm
    The film is often quite moving in spite of its evasions, suggesting a real-life Charlotte’s Web, but one wonders what an artist with a bit more distance might’ve made of such rich material.
  98. Donnybrook
    The film knots several strands of new-millennium despair into something that very nearly approximates greatness in its first half.
  99. Her Smell
    A story of filth and fury and, eventually, of placidity and peace, Her Smell is Alex Ross Perry’s most chaotic and unmuffled film — until it isn’t.
  100. What You Gonna Do When the World's on Fire?
    The film is beautiful and occasionally quite moving, but its subject matter deserves more than art-house irresolution.
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