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. Navajo Joe
    Navajo Joe plays more like a ’50s B western in its fluid pacing, compact narrative construction, and hokey emphasis on star power than it does the kinds of sprawling genre re-workings common to its era.
  2. Downton Abbey
    Every scene here feels as if it begins with a grenade being thrown into a room, leaving one to wonder how it will be diffused, and after a while, all you see are the gears of various sublots turning separately until they mesh together and move in unison.
  3. The Mule
    The film finally ends up souring its perspective on responsibility with a hardened take on the limits of the American dream.
  4. Missing Link
    As in Laika’s other efforts, the humor in the film is more wry than gut-busting, but Chris Butler has developed some truly inventive comic characters.
  5. Possum
    In the end, there's little payoff for all the repetitive series of evocative visions and mute stares.
  6. 9 Fingers
    Despite all its confoundments, 9 Fingers works as a unified whole thanks to F.J. Ossang's playful sense of humor.
  7. Searching for Ingmar Bergman
    Margarethe von Trotta's documentary reminds us of the reasons for Bergman's continued influence on cinema today.
  8. The Quake
    When the devastating quake finally strikes, it creates a truly suspenseful scenario of vertiginous falls and last-minute saves.
  9. Bambi
    While not nearly as emotionally impacting as some of Disney’s other classics, Bambi might be the most restrained and lyrical of the bunch, a poem to the simplicity and purity of natural life.
  10. Alice in Wonderland
    This lack of force-fed moralizing, coupled with its diffuse plot and hazily psychedelic imagery, makes it hardly surprising that the film’s revival came about when it developed a cult following.
  11. Bird Box
    Many sections of Bird Box don’t hold up to a second’s scrutiny; the conceit’s silliness and convenient scare tactics make Shyamalan’s take on infectious-suicide horror seem downright subtle by comparison.
  12. What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael
    The documentary is enjoyable, but one suspects that its subject may have found it soft.
  13. The Good Liar
    An airport novel of a movie, Bill Condon’s The Good Liar is efficient and consumable, if a bit hollow.
  14. The Mustang
    Single-minded and direct in its execution, the film is a hard look at the extremes of masculine guilt and healing.
  15. The Prowler
    What the film lacks in narrative drive, coherence, and performance, it makes up with thoughtful lighting, strong cinematography from Raoul Lomas and an uncredited João Fernandes, and, of course, Savini’s lovingly overblown and impossible splatter effects.
  16. BMX Bandits
    Ignoring the fact that BMX Bandits is as intimate as a trip to Toys “R” Us, it has almost nothing to offer in the way of impressive stuntwork, carefree yuks, or semi-competent acting. Trenchard-Smith, a master at condescending to his audience, clearly diluted Hagg and Edgeworth’s already toothless concept; that said, there was probably no good way to dress up a line as dire as “You’re right in the poo now, sister” or even “Your little walkie talkies have gone walkies.”
  17. An Acceptable Loss
    Writer-director Joe Chappelle’s An Acceptable Loss is a B movie with a morally urgent message.
  18. The Wedding Guest
    Michael Winterbottom’s film succeeds in translating the problematics of intercultural conflict into thriller fodder.
  19. Deadly Blessing
    More often than not, the movie only glancingly burrows beneath America’s attitudes toward rural evangelism that surfaced concurrently with the advent of the Moral Majority.
  20. Hail Satan?
    The documentary shrewdly illustrates how media savvy can turn a fledgling protest into an international cause célèbre.
  21. Polar
    The film’s horniness and amorality, a slap in the face of fanatically cautious contemporary mores, might’ve been more shocking if it weren’t placed so firmly in quotation marks.
  22. I'm Not Here
    Throughout, J.K. Simmons invents the film with a primordial physicality of loneliness and self-loathing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    East of Eden
    Even viewers who acknowledge Kazan’s lack of visual imagination usually concede that nobody got better performances out of actors, but this last vestige of his reputation is in real need of examination.
  24. Ask Dr. Ruth
    At its best, the film is a testament to how Ruth Westheimer’s practiced decency was literally a saving grace during the Reagan era.
  25. Funan
    There are hints that the film will scale itself to the broader historical context of this era, but the screenplay never elaborates on the ethnic strife the undergirds the Cambodian genocide.
  26. Girls Just Want to Have Fun
    But even from an objective viewpoint, Girls Just Want to Have Fun isn’t really a bad film, at least not in the ways in which we tend to define bad films. The acting is more than competent, there’s not much glaringly bad dialogue, the humor is inventive, and the song-and-dance is engaging.
  27. The Changeover
    It’s this carefully managed equilibrium between the inherent preposterousness of its mystical milieu and the convincing emotional reality of Laura’s journey that ultimately makes The Changeover, for all its muddled mythos, a lively and engaging excursion into an unusually naturalistic world of magic.
  28. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
    Chiwetel Ejiofor announces himself as a sensitive, shrewdly restrained filmmaker with his quietly assured directorial debut.
  29. The Dirt
    Like most biopics, The Dirt crams so many events into its narrative as to compromise the sense that these are real characters in the here and now.
  30. Someone Great
    The film plays like a mixtape of various sensibilities, partly beholden to the self-contained form of the bildungsroman; surely it’s no coincidence that a James Joyce poster hangs in the background of one scene.
  31. Big Time Adolescence
    The film is at its weakest when it has to do drama, since the fallout of Mo and Zeke’s actions feels perfunctory and tossed-off in the rush to an ending, a hasty come-down after the proverbial party.
  32. Blinded by the Light
    The film bottles a palpable emotion of unabashed joy, even when the rest of it seems to barely hold together.
  33. Official Secrets
    Gavin Hood wrings suspense out of the parsing of the nuances of evidence and the tapping of mysterious contacts.
  34. David Crosby: Remember My Name
    The film captures a man haunted by his past mistakes and nearly certain that he doesn’t have the time left to begin making up for them.
  35. The Lodge
    It’s best appreciated not with the parts of your brain responsible for reason and judgment, but in the unthinking terror centers, where the film’s style of God-fearing fanaticism also resides.
  36. The Sound of Silence
    A wonderful high concept is compromised for another story of lonely people learning to connect.
  37. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning
    The action consistently snaps the film into focus, but it also further illustrates how badly the decision to split this narrative into two parts throws off the delicate rhythm that’s made Mission: Impossible arguably the most consistently entertaining American action franchise of all time.
  38. Abominable
    The second half’s series of hollow visual spectacles foreground the film as a corporate product.
  39. Piranhas
    Claudio Giovannesi’s film is more an interesting tweak of Goodfellas than an eye-opening social statement.
  40. Combat Obscura
    The portrait it paints of its Marines is appropriately discordant, redolent of the twitchy frustration caused by a long stint in a sparse landscape with a hazy mission.
  41. Queen & Slim
    For a spell, Melina Matsoukas’s film exudes the concision of an old B movie.
  42. The Peanut Butter Falcon
    The film’s improvisational feel helps to ground a fable-esque narrative in a discernible reality.
  43. Saint Frances
    It has almost enough genuine charm and heart to compensate for the moments that feel forced.
  44. Sword of Trust
    Marc Maron’s commanding aura of regret gives the film, despite its missed opportunities, an emotional center.
  45. Get Duked!
    A taut genre exercise that delivers enough surprises and cleverly timed bits of humor for its sometimes familiar, uneven narrative beats to play an original tune.
  46. The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley
    Alex Gibney’s documentary tells a dramatic, if somewhat workmanlike, story of Silicon Valley hubris meeting old-fashioned scamming.
  47. Buddy
    It would appear that some of Buddy’s humans have indeed written off their fellow people. Does this matter? Honigmann’s film doesn’t plumb this potentially resonant question, as it’s hesitant to look a gift dog in the mou
  48. Suburban Birds
    The film’s refusal to commit to its passing fancies is a highly intentional and eventually tiresome declaration of Qui Sheng’s arthouse bona fides.
  49. Instant Dreams
    While the film offers an appealingly nostalgic trance-out, it’s often short on detail, especially in terms of Stephen Herchen’s struggle to create the instant film technology, which director Willem Baptist reduces to exchanges of jargon in atmospheric laboratories.
  50. Chasing Portraits
    Its major contribution, as one museum curator suggests, may be to bring the works of Moshe Rynecki back into prominence.
  51. Master Z: Ip Man Legacy
    The film is a reminder of the potential of these films before they became weighed down by blockbuster-ready excesses.
  52. The Kill Team
    Despite glimpses of a larger critique of the American project in Afghanistan, it lets us escape from the horrors of war before it finishes demolishing the illusion of a clean one.
  53. Skin
    After a while, the film’s not-strictly-linear structure and handheld camerawork come to feel like self-conscious signs of “gritty” realism, attempts at masking a certain conventionality.
  54. Nightmare Cinema
    The anthology justifies Mick Garris’s passion for horror, though he ironically proves to be one of his project’s liabilities.
  55. A Regular Woman
    Where When We Leave built to simple outage, this one concludes with a rush of complex, conflicting emotions.
  56. American Woman
    Sienna Miller lends credibility to a character that in other hands might seem like a caricature of the white underclass.
  57. Ready or Not
    Only in its giddily gory finale does the outrageousness of the film's violence come close to matching that of its plot.
  58. Pain and Glory
    Pedro Almodóvar’s latest only occasionally captures the spry, comedic rhythms and impassioned intensity of his finest work.
  59. Frankie
    Only Marisa Tomei’s face can compete with Isabelle Huppert’s ability to turn even the sappiest of scenarios into a nuanced tour de force.
  60. Portrait of a Lady on Fire
    What's most stirring about Céline Sciamma's film is the lack of artifice in Héloïse and Marianne's feelings for one another.
  61. The Traitor
    It’s at its best when showing how gangsters undermine their lofty notions of nobility with displays of narcissism.
  62. Lux Æterna
    If the film-within-the-film is a vapid fetishization of women’s martyrdom, Lux Æterna is a willful exercise in repulsing its own audience.
  63. The Professor
    The film goes down easy because it saves the self-improvement clichés for the homestretch.
  64. Crawl
    The film is more straight-faced than Alexandre Aja’s prior work, trading absurd kills for narrow escapes from gaping alligator jaws.
    • 84 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Giant
    Sitting through it is like cramming a decade’s worth of daily television-watching into a single sitting.
  66. Weathering with You
    Contemporary outrage could’ve potentially counterpointed the film’s increasingly mawkish tendencies.
  67. A Face in the Crowd
    Strong performances and a fiery aggressive tone keep things moving, but A Face in the Crowd is dated and not particularly deep.
  68. Ford v Ferrari
    At a time when the nation continues to weigh the fate of its auto industry, James Mangold’s depiction of the Ford Motor Company facing its first major financial threat transparently plays to nostalgic reveries of the industry’s golden age.
  69. Three Peaks
    The film ably plumbs the fears of a well-meaning man who tries his best to play by the rules of middle-aged courtship.
  70. The Quiet One
    In the end, the film feels like a sketch that’s been offered in place of a portrait.
  71. Blackboard Jungle
    Poitier’s acting is scalding hot. If The Blackboard Jungle is worth anything, it’s for bearing witness to a major star in the making.
  72. The Bad Seed
    The Bad Seed might not have the lurid veneer of Oedipal conflict that turned The Good Son into a supreme guilty pleasure, but it’s got more false-façade performances than you could ever hope for.
  73. The Caine Mutiny
    The Caine Mutiny is not distinctive filmmaking or storytelling, and its idea of ethical debate is relying on familiar archetypes and arguments. It sure is standard, though. It’s like the well-constructed house that’s not meant to be distinctive, but was made to endure.
  74. The Americanization of Emily
    Though a bit overstuffed with long-winded speeches, Chayefsky’s scabrously funny script brims with snappy, crackling dialogue.
  75. Force of Evil
    Garfield’s likably unlikable protagonist provides Force of Evil with a semblance of cohesiveness, even if the film often feels like the product of dueling fetishes and pet symbols.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Wise Guys
    The macho bluster taken seriously in De Palma’s gorgeous but uninterestingly pumped-up Elliott Ness saga is here intriguingly skewered.
  77. The Band Wagon
    Only musical theater people will plug into this love-fest, breaking their arms patting themselves on the back. That’s entertainment?
  78. Black and Blue
    The film's command of action defuses concerns about whether it offers a thorough social critique.
  79. Soul
    While most Pixar films pride themselves on presenting rich, fantastical responses to real-world wonderings, Soul keeps conjuring up visions that don’t correspond precisely enough to anything in the real world.
  80. Gun Crazy
    Lewis, through sheer force of will, turns the script’s easy ways out into the essence of blunt, adolescent sexual flowering.
  81. Promare
    Promare often feels like a maximalist season finale trimmed of any build-up, a climax that’s outstanding to watch yet empty beyond its pure spectacle.
  82. Cassandro, the Exotico!
    It wouldn’t be fair to call the film hagiographic, but the director’s empathy, if not love, for her subject hinders her from examining Cassandro’s wounds with much depth.
  83. Tel Aviv on Fire
    Playfully biting as it can be, Tel Aviv on Fire tends to falter when it loses sight of the target of its satire.
  84. Angels Are Made of Light
    The film is an intimate portrait of a nation terminally anxious about who will see fit to rule it next.
  85. Dolemite Is My Name
    After its promising first act, Craig Brewer’s film becomes a series of fleeting bits, allowing questions to pile up.
  86. Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
    Robertson’s sense of having witnessed friends and collaborators get washed away by bitterness and addiction was more fulsomely evoked by The Last Waltz.
  87. True History of the Kelly Gang
    In more than one sense, Justin Kurzel’s aggressively strange film queers the myth of the oft-lionized Ned Kelly.
  88. Greed
    The film takes occasional stabs at comic grotesquerie, but it’s brought back to earth by an insistent docudrama seriousness.
  89. The Perfect Candidate
    The film’s aesthetic, understandably fused with its protagonist’s dogged can-do attitude, is both the source and limitation of its power.
  90. Wasp Network
    The final product feels like more of an interesting and beautifully filmed anecdote than compelling political and human drama.
  91. Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins
    The film is at its best when its focus remains on Ivins’s fierce commitment to her ideals and willingness to speak her mind.
  92. 1917
    The most thrilling and haunting details here are actively undermined by the chief technical gimmick of the film.
  93. The Missouri Breaks
    A beautiful, gleefully weird vanity project that never quite coheres.
  94. The Way Back
    The film makes the path to basketball glory and the road to personal redemption seem oddly effortless.
  95. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie
    For all the film’s invention, for all its trickiness, it doesn’t really move.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Dark Waters
    Todd Haynes’s film intermittently hits upon a few original ways of representing its ripped-from-the-headlines mandate.
  97. Wrinkles the Clown
    The film’s mid-act about-face lends a refreshing sense of complexity to an otherwise superficial depiction of Wrinkles.
  98. First Cow
    The sense of a nascent community rising up out of the primordial muck is palpable, so it’s unfortunate that John Magaro and Orion Lee's characters ultimately feel outside it all.
  99. Waiting for the Barbarians
    Ciro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel’s apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere.
  100. A Rainy Day in New York
    The film’s skittishness is particularly maddening considering that Woody Allen has nothing to artistically to prove.
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