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. Buck and the Preacher
    For all of Buck and the Preacher’s serious attempts to function as a revisionist western by centering Blacks in the narrative and examining the critical role they played on the frontier, it’s also a wildly entertaining film.
  2. Honeymoon
    It waffles between dramatizing youthful self-absorption and succumbing to it, and this tonal instability comes to effectively mirror the domestic discord that's revealed to be its real subject.
  3. Deathgasm
    Director Jason Lei Howden has a flair for punchlines that are funny for reasons that are essentially impossible to describe.
  4. 1001 Grams
    In the end, Bent Hamer's view of current international relations comes to down to a treacly rendition of "Kumbaya."
  5. Alien: Covenant
    The only saving grace of the film's mostly recycled horrors is how they deepen Michael Fassbender's android David.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Sunset
    László Nemes’s follow-up to Son of Saul simply feels like two films awkwardly affixed to one another.
  7. Metro Manila
    Sean Ellis doesn't so much understand Filipino society as merely sees it as grist for standard genre fare, perhaps hoping that the foreign setting will somehow automatically make the clichés feel fresh.
  8. Bull
    Director Annie Silverstein tries to enrich the tropes of her class-conscious buddy scenario by canceling them out.
  9. Monsters University
    Unfortunate proof that the animation studio previously known for its brains is now resting a little too heavily on its nominal brawn.
  10. Deadpool
    The whiplash contrasts between snideness and sincerity is deeply rooted in the main character's psychology.
  11. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
    If the SpongeBob franchise has finally gone on the run, it seems like it’s left the audience that matters most in the dust.
  12. The Courier
    Dominic Cooke’s film is content to regurgitate some of the more tired artistic tropes about the Cold War.
  13. Men
    Men is ultimately about as deep as its title, a swipe at the multi-faceted terribleness of its titular subject that rarely gets beyond being a mere catalogue of the different ways that guys can be irritating around and dangerous toward women.
  14. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    The deconstruction of corporatized play culture gets run through the sequelizer machine, with predictably acrid results.
  15. Maudie
    Maud Lewis herself couldn’t paint a hurricane that would blow the film’s overburdened narrative off course.
  16. The Good Boss
    In the end, Fernando León de Aranoa’s film suggests that there may not be a lot of daylight between a good boss and a true villain.
  17. Stopmotion
    The film falters when it attempts to mold its best instincts into a discernible narrative shape.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Love in the Buff
    The film has an exhilarating tossed-off quality that characterized many of the most entertaining works of the French New Wave.
  19. Take Me to the River
    It's difficult to believe in Ryder's gullibility, if not willingness to be caught in his uncle's strange web of provocations.
  20. High-Rise
    The film's notion of a caste system is crudely reductive in the manner of a routine future-shock thriller.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Young Sherlock Holmes
    As a work of fictional imagination, Holmes is simply fascinating, and Young Sherlock Holmes attempts to unlock the source of that fascination. The film re-imagines the first encounter between Holmes and Watson from within the dusty honeycombs of a boarding school buried deep within the folds of Victorian London. What one finds there are fascinatingly incomplete portraits.
  22. Paradise: Love
    It often seems more intent on spelling out its awareness of the politics involved than in lingering on the aching human engaged in the libidinal transactions.
  23. Good Night Oppy
    Ryan White’s documentary is cute to a fault and filled with a rapturously uncomplicated glee about the joys of exploration.
  24. The Boys in the Band
    The sizzle of the bon mot-tossing ensemble, intact from the stage original, is bracing and fuels the film’s momentum, along with Crowley’s lacerating dialogue.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling
    Like his stand-up, Pryor deftly mixes humor and tragedy, subtly tweaking familiar tales from his routines.
  26. Hockney
    After a nearly virtuoso opening, it reduces passages of the painter's life into multiple montages of pop pabulum.
  27. Entertainment
    It conjures a menacing perspective on how the titular occupation hulls out empathy and cultivates a particularly unsettling strain of cynicism.
  28. Twisters
    The film proceeds as a jumble of poorly sketched backstories and subplots, half-hearted topical references, and tepid fan service.
  29. Strange World
    While Strange World’s examination of generational tension is tender and inspiring, as well as nicely tied to its theme of the necessity of adapting to changing times, the film’s sci-fi elements and environmental message are more half-baked in their execution.
  30. Oh, Canada
    There’s a sense here of Paul Schrader wanting to pare back his customary aesthetic even further than it’s already been parred over the last several films and speak plainly, with as little scrim between the audience and himself as possible.
  31. Ali
    Ali‘s narrative laxness comes at the fault of boxing time (a good one-third of the film’s three-hour time span is spent inside the ring). You say: But Mann knows how to direct a fight. But I say: So what?
  32. Knuckle
    A documentary of bareknuckle fights among feuding Irish Traveller clans can't give the participants' self-perpetuating, dead-end rivalry the scope of tragedy.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    We Women Warriors
    Looks and sounds considerably better than nearly every other independent documentary of its kind, forming an argument that's clear and cogent and virtually free of obvious manipulation or pandering.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Samsara
    Ron Fricke's film is a brightly hued bauble, fit for rapturous contemplation.
  35. Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
    The absence of a central narrator for the most part prevents the film from devolving into gratuitous pedagogy.
  36. The Transfiguration
    The film is at its strongest when navigating the story's uneasy relationship to its genre.
  37. The Projectionist
    Where The Projectionist ultimately excels ... is as the kind of cultural microcosm that makes Ferrara’s other documentaries feel at once urgent and incredibly rich in their broader implications.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    El Topo
    Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo remains an enduring cult-film experience.
  39. Alice, Darling
    The emotional crux of Alice Darling is less the manner in which it lays out a roadmap for an exit from an abusive relationship and more its attentiveness to the profound ramifications of such relationships for the women in them.
  40. Drop
    The film knows that when the stakes are sky high, the emotions need to be firmly grounded.
  41. Nuisance Bear
    Nuisance Bear is at its most powerful when its message has been condensed down into a single image.
  42. The Good Nurse
    For a while, the work on the part of the performers is nuanced enough to distract us from the film’s implausibilities.
  43. Magazine Dreams
    Magazine Dreams melds the alluring and the horrific in an unsettling mixture suited to its account of the peril of pursuing physical perfection.
  44. Transformers One
    A realm without physical limits is truly where the Transformers belong, but it doesn’t stop the film from delivering some surprising pathos while it’s there.
  45. The Black Phone
    Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill are adept enough at setting up rich, evocative horror concepts, but they don’t always know what to do with them once they’re in place.
  46. In the Fade
    In the Fade is executed with precision, particularly the third act, in which the film morphs into a tense yet unconvincing revenge thriller.
  47. The Swell Season
    Ultimately, though, they never cohere into something more than a moderately engaging for-fans-only tour diary.
  48. The Audition
    With great clarity, the film conveys how discipline can be directed both inward and outward.
  49. Eddington
    Eddington is especially pointed in the way that it views our online connectedness as a social cancer rather than an engine for progress.
  50. A Letter to Momo
    It offers a realistic portrayal of Momo's emotional state, but this comes at the expense of a deeper exploration into both the story's lush supernatural landscape and its inhabitants.
  51. Klaus
    Sergio Pablos’s film is essentially a metaphor for its own unique and refreshing mode of expression.
  52. Tyrannosaur
    The brutality of Tyrannosaur isn't so over the top as to make director Paddy Considine's sympathy for his flawed characters look like a sham. But it does frequently bring his film's seesawing exploration of blue-collar existence to the brink of collapse.
  53. We Are Mari Pepa
    The film finally works because of its multitudinous interests in adolescent shell-shock, where paralysis and uncertainty can only be momentarily assuaged through gendered outrage.
  54. Tharlo
    In the logic of the film, for the camera to move at all would feel like a betrayal of its contemplative hunger.
  55. The End
    Perhaps the script is deliberately harking back to a storytelling mode that was characteristic of Hollywood cinema for dramatic effect, but the musical aspect, while a neat gimmick, isn’t memorable or cohesive enough to make the homage, well, sing.
  56. A Brilliant Young Mind
    The film focuses on Nathan's emotions and backstage dramas in ways that generally feel forced or inauthentic.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Scalene
    More concerned with the novelty of its three-act, "three-perspective" structure than with how that structure actually functions (hint: poorly), Scalene epitomizes the pitfalls of the Memento-copping trend, its strained conceptual ingenuity an exercise in aid of nothing.
  58. Hostiles
    Scott Cooper's film moves at a funereal pace, implicitly celebrating its sluggishness as a mark of integrity.
  59. Coherence
    The film's impression of personas is less traditionally sinister than representative of its inquiry into identity and what happens when social barriers begin to fall away.
  60. Do I Sound Gay?
    Another link in an increasingly tiresome chain of naval-gazing think pieces posing as personal documentary.
  61. The We and the I
    A delirious representation of incipient personalities in bloom, its form as amorphous and reckless as the vibrant youths it portrays.
  62. The Sparrow in the Chimney
    The film seems to insist upon the idea that intimacy and isolation are ultimately two sides of the same coin.
  63. Sharper
    A fumbled ending lets the air out of what is otherwise a fun and quietly stylish caper.
  64. The First Omen
    Pulsating in the film’s veins is an eerie eroticism and a tactile awareness of the way the Church is controlling the bodies and minds of its women.
  65. Generation P
    The film is incredibly cynical, but the experience of watching it is occasionally joyful in its sense of freedom.
  66. Come Sunday
    In the film, Joshua Marston leaches the narrative of nearly all the social texture that infused and empowered “Heretics,” the 2005 episode of the This American Life podcast that inspired this biopic.
  67. Wild Diamond
    The film is at its best when it’s keyed to its main character’s breakneck energy.
  68. Cargo
    Cargo makes the mistake of benching its menace, banishing the undead to blurred shots on the horizon, while doggedly pursuing its theme.
  69. The Unknown Girl
    This is a left-footed and clumsily insistent work, exposing the worst aspects inherent to the Dardennes' style.
  70. The Phantom of the Open
    The film loses its satiric edge as it begins to melodramatically detail how Maurice Flitcroft inherited the mantle of folk hero.
  71. The Hallow
    The film never really digs into its suggested themes of gentrification, domestic turmoil, or backwoods folklore, but most of its effectiveness stems from a kitchen-sink approach to genre clichés.
  72. The Overnight
    The film's Buñuelian potential for harpooning the bourgeoisie is quickly dashed in favor of mumblecore antics.
  73. Pacific Rim
    Guillermo del Toro doesn't rise above the obligations of staging a film of this sort as a multi-level video game, a stylish but programmatic ride toward an inevitable final boss battle.
  74. The Smashing Machine
    Despite the retro vérité aesthetic that Benny Safdie employs to give Mark Kerr’s story a stylish new coat of paint, all that his version ultimately does is whip up a feeling of déjà vu.
  75. Swallow
    Fortunately for the film, Carlo Mirabella-Davis continually springs scenes that either transcend or justify his preaching.
  76. Unraveled
    Marc H. Simon's documentary has the thrust of a great American noir or black comedy.
  77. Red Flag
    It surprisingly abandons its obvious meta elements and unfolds as a straightforward road-trip flick, opting for an exhibition of self-loathing rather than self-reflexivity.
  78. The Autopsy of Jane Doe
    This is cinema’s most comprehensive look at the gruesome business of necropsy since Stan Brakhage's The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes.
  79. 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.
  80. The Fantastic Four: First Steps
    This is a film that projects an unflinching sincerity and optimism, and the first in the MCU, a franchise that has brought much of Marvel Comics’s wildest flights of fancy to life, to really channel the spirit of Kirby’s creations and how that first endeared them to audiences.
  81. June Zero
    June Zero is a tender, if sometimes cynical, portrait of a new country on old land struggling through the growing pains of establishing its presence both to the international community and its own people.
  82. Black '47
    As the historical specificity embedded in the film’s more expansive opening act is abandoned, the more predictable, archetypal trappings of a revenge narrative begin to take hold.
  83. Asylum
    Asylum tries telling similar tales (twice) and comes up pathetically short in the scare department, but the atmosphere and theatrics of the Amicus presentation make it a more than worthwhile trip down memory lane for die-hard horror buffs.
  84. In My Mother's Arms
    Throughout, it becomes clear that both the film and its subject are defined by the necessity of multitasking.
  85. The Lovers and the Despot
    The haphazard blending of fact and clips from disparate films unrelated to Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee's ordeal confuses an already intricate tale.
  86. Bonsái
    Cristián Jiménez's film knows how entangled the will to know is with the will to make love.
  87. Touch Me Not
    Touch Me Not‘s commingling of narrator and narrative, character and actor, fiction and documentary suggests that cinema itself is capable of being a manner of touch, the site of a nebulous and freeing encounter between people.
  88. Please Baby Please
    The film’s unapologetic level of artifice is at once the source of its pleasures and limitations.
  89. Point and Shoot
    In abandoning a more vigorous discussion of class and race-based senses of entitlement, Marshall Curry reveals his goals to be less critical or rigid than passively honorific.
  90. Agnes
    The film is a thoughtful examination of the human desire for it and the accompanying hope that it may exorcise the emptiness we feel.
  91. Photograph
    In pushing so many seemingly crucial moments off screen, the film transforms its main characters into blank slates.
  92. 100 Nights of Hero
    The film’s brand of feminism is as skin-deep as the narrative.
  93. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    Morgan Spurlock has little to say about Comic-Con other than that its attendees value it on a par with Christmas.
  94. The Way
    The making of The Way must have been a nice moment for father and son, but why must the rest of us suffer?
  95. The Rover
    Robert Pattinson's stare is almost thousand-yard enough to make the film's sense of tragedy feel downright Greek.
  96. Suffragette
    The film's episodes and attitudes register with searing immediacy while feeling true to their time period.
  97. Les Nôtres
    The film is a j’accuse aimed at those complicit in oppressing the most vulnerable in order to protect the powerful.
  98. Coup de Chance
    The film is at once among Woody Allen’s most economical works and one of his most free-spirited.
  99. Folk Hero & Funny Guy
    In the film's best scenes, Jeff Grace displays a delicate understanding of various modes of male fragility.
  100. Digger
    Georgis Grigorakis’s film may not revolutionize the western genre by transposing it to an unlikely setting, but it doesn’t dilute it either.
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