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. Runoff
    This emotionally affecting film never loses sight of the ethical complexity of forsaking a community in the name of an individual.
  2. Alien: Romulus
    Romulus ends up as the franchise’s strongest entry in three decades for its devotion to deploying lean genre mechanics.
  3. Enforcement
    The film is both a lurid urban thriller and an earnest parable about (almost literally) walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.
  4. Frozen II
    Woke Disney, trying to navigate a tricky representational path, steps all over itself throughout.
  5. There Was Once...
    A not insignificant act of oral history, Gabor Kalman's There Was Once… makes for considerably less compelling cinema whenever it turns its focus away from the talking-head testimony of the Holocaust survivors of Kalosca, Hungary.
  6. The Vanishing
    The Vanishing seems truly troubled by its action violence in a way that many similar thrillers aren’t.
  7. Disconnect
    Fails not so much because of its occasional self-seriousness or didacticism than it does from a scattered plot that makes the story's overriding theme or message difficult to grasp.
  8. The Damned
    Had we been allowed to truly sit with the characters’ prejudices, then The Damned might have earned the desperation with which it strains for contemporary resonance.
  9. Gretel & Hansel
    Beginning with the reversed names in its title, the film announces itself as a distinctly feminine spin on the Grimm fairy tale.
  10. Goat
    The film's understanding of the brittleness that begets the "traditions" of frat culture is altogether shallow.
  11. MaXXXine
    First with X, then with Pearl, and definitively with MaXXXine, West has buried his unique style and forward-thinking vision under an astroturfed surface of compulsory cinematic references and cliché cultural signifiers.
  12. The Shine of Day
    As in Tizza Covi and Rainer Frimmel's 2009 film, La Pivellina, modesty is the key to The Shine of Day, and sometimes to the detriment of audience involvement and focus.
  13. Dementia
    The film doesn't quite earn Jones's performance, but it engenders considerable goodwill for allowing him to give it.
  14. Sleeping with Other People
    This is exactly the kind of movie at which David Wain took aim with his sublime rom-com parody They Came Together.
  15. Gaia
    After a while, the film’s elaborate, often breathtaking special effects come to feel like it’s only source of complexity.
  16. Your Lucky Day
    The film coasts far on the pleasant surprise of some sharp plotting.
  17. Captain Marvel
    The film doesn't pay nearly enough attention to Danvers’s crucial emotional metamorphosis from dual-identity self-doubter to fearless warrior battling to keep Earth safe.
  18. Dolphin Tale
    If its plotting can be slight, the film's restraint and earnestness help prevent it from ever tipping over into outright mawkishness, and its performances similarly avoid over-the-top histrionics.
  19. A Better Life
    Save for its loving, plaintive, and thorough tour of the seldom-filmed East L.A., A Better Life is, top to bottom, derivative-of Polanski in its direction and of "Bicycle Thieves" in its plot (even Alexandre Desplat's gussy score suggests Angelo Badalamenti playing Mariachi Night).
    • 64 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Rental Family
    The few glimpses we get of the supporting cast suggest a more exploratory film, but these strands only exist to be woven back into Philip’s formulaic journey of self-discovery.
  21. undertone
    Throughout Undertone, Ian Tuason delights in deploying sound to eerily suggestive ends.
  22. Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist
    Lorna Tucker's documentary sustains a tone that oscillates between earnest admiration and wry exasperation.
  23. The Innkeepers
    Winding up the tension to an almost stubborn degree, Ti West forestalls the inevitable disappointment of its release, a blow that's further softened by how immaculately the whole movie is shot.
  24. Dark Touch
    The film is beholden to a strange internal logic that gives primacy not to its protagonist's suffering, but to its maker's thirst for fun.
  25. Catch Me Daddy
    The film plods from one gruesome moment to the next, as if its mere aversion to optimism constitutes a philosophy.
  26. Quartet
    For a movie that aims to make four artists' last spotlit hurrah a revel-worthy moment, Quartet shouldn't urge the viewer to welcome the closing of the curtain.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Prometheus
    It aspires to Stanley Kubrick's "2001", but in its maddeningly unresolved plot threads and cornball cosmic mysticism, it lands closer to "Mission to Mars" -though Prometheus lacks any action set piece as gripping as the Brian De Palma film's sentient sandstorm.
  28. New York, New York
    New York, New York, like most Martin Scorsese films, is about the trials and glories of making art.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Bonjour Tristesse
    The film finds a state of grace in that torrential pull between the familiar and the new.
  30. Goon
    A second-rate dude comedy in which an untalented knucklehead becomes a star through brute violence.
  31. Mimosas
    Mimosas confounds its surface narrative with intimations of more layered meanings to come through a jockeying of story threads.
  32. The Lost Bus
    Paul Greengrass employs a peripatetic restlessness to the material, and while that brings an often thrilling sense of verisimilitude to the film, the cliché-stuffed screenplay too often plays against the intended solemnity of the project.
  33. The Party
    The comically rich visual tapestry of Blake Edwards’s The Party still endures.
  34. Teenage
    It botches itself out of its own epic ambitions, an aesthetic slickness that seems to contradict, if not betray, its subject matter, and a maddeningly subdued critical spirit.
  35. The Patience Stone
    While Atiq Rahimi's film may peel away the many layers of its female lead like an onion, the end result is still just an onion.
  36. Jean Gentil
    Filmmakers Laura Amelia Guzmán and Israel Cárdenas have crafted a beautiful tale of alienation, solitude, and existential anxiety.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Soft in the Head
    Nathan Silver captures the young-adult experience, particularly the agony of first sexual pangs, in films that deftly mix beguilement and repulsion.
  38. Renoir
    A long string of picnics, portrait sessions, elaborate dinners, and countryside rituals, filtered through a svelte aesthetic pleasantness that ultimately corrodes its larger interests.
  39. Big Bad Wolves
    From a purely suspenseful vantage point, Big Bad Wolves is an efficient and effective beast.
  40. I Dream in Another Language
    Just as the director seems to be settling in to tackle some heady ideas, the screenplay’s stale narrative complications instead overtake the film.
  41. In Praise of Love
    A sniveling diatribe from a great director beginning to resemble someone's senile grandfather.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bombshell
    The film is too irreverent in tone and narrow in scope to place Roger Ailes’s criminality in a larger, more meaningful context.
  43. Belle
    The film is concerned largely with intellectual horrors and portrays the fight against slavery rather neatly as a growing feeling of internal guilt that slowly turns society toward the light.
  44. Suspiria
    Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria is a funereal pseudo-realist drama about political upheaval and the violence of systems that's at odds with itself.
  45. Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers And The Emergence Of A People
    Thomas Allen Harris's documentary consistently takes agency away from the art itself with a litany of talking heads.
  46. Swiss Army Man
    Even as it invites snarky ridicule, the film dares you to buy into its singular earnestness.
  47. Bettie Page Reveals All
    Mark Mori goes a bit overboard in hammering home his appreciation of Bettie Page's significance, allowing the film to occasionally lapse into repetitiveness.
  48. Whitney: Can I Be Me
    It's no surprise that Nick Broomfield finds little use for the moments of unabashed triumphalism in Houston's life, as he's doggedly fixated on the humiliating swan dive.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Domain
    The ultimate drama of Domain becomes how long he can be a witness to her self-destruction.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Medora
    It feels as if it set out to be an inspirational tale about underdogs beating the odds, but instead of giving color to the story, the filmmakers presented it with black-and-white ideas.
  51. Fright Night
    One of the minor triumphs of this Fright Night remake is Farrell's coolly assured performance, a cocksure spectacle of masculine virility far more intimidating to his character's victims, male and female alike, than the razor-sharp fangs Jerry uses to munch on human neck meat.
  52. XX
    These shorts follow female protagonists as they wrestle with exclusion and implicit social standards that may or may not extend to their male counterparts.
  53. Keep an Eye Out
    Quentin Dupieux imbues a trite genre scenario with a Kafkaesque brand of comic existentialism.
  54. 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.
  55. Youth
    As ever, Paolo Sorrentino ironically cuts the legs out from under his protagonists' wistfulness with grotesquerie.
  56. The Kidnapping of Michel Houellebecq
    Even though the film takes on a more overtly fictive aesthetic after he's kidnapped, Michel Houellebecq's understated presence lends the proceedings a factual quality throughout.
  57. 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.
  58. The Whale
    When considering the best voiceover artists in cinema history, Ryan Reynolds doesn't immediately come to mind as an especially dynamic one.
  59. Toys in the Attic
    Jirí Barta's film is a disturbing through-the-looking-glass reflection of traditional fairy tales.
  60. Nasty Baby
    The film is a compelling addition to Sebastián Silva's cinema of compassionate comeuppance.
  61. Born to be Blue
    Robert Budreau strip-mines the life of an amazing musician for the purpose of mounting yet another comeback story.
  62. Before We Vanish
    On its own, this is a fun, broadly satirical alien-invasion film, more self-aware than self-serious, but its beauty, its poignancy, comes from its relationship to Kiyoshi Kurosawa's other work.
  63. The Fury
    Ultimately, The Fury is a film about pre-pubescence by a director whose work had finally reached the level of confidence reflecting a post-pubescent talent. The best of both worlds, baby, and barely legal.
  64. Enzo Avitabile Music Life
    Even if the film never transcends its subject matter, Jonathan Demme's light touch adds up to a charming portrait, only rarely fumbling into hagiography.
  65. Madeleine Collins
    Seemingly channeling the spirit of Claude Chabrol, Antoine Barraud’s Madeleine Collins is a decidedly classy throwback thriller about a seemingly humdrum character committing perverse acts of subterfuge against others.
  66. Elvis
    The protracted rubbernecking at Elvis’s inexorable decline epitomizes a film that regularly backs away from its keenest observations about the icon to merely, and superficially, bask in his star power.
  67. Gypsy
    A Slovakian character study of a boy ambivalently caught between worlds that ultimately squanders its promise.
  68. Holy Hell
    It hopes to jolt audiences with OMGs instead of edifying them about the empty lure of Buddhafield's cult mentality.
  69. Ray Meets Helen
    After 15 years away from the cinema, Alan Rudolph reminds one of the suggestive potency of his films.
  70. Chinese Puzzle
    Cédric Klapisch's film becomes an effervescent variation on the time-honored story of striking out for the American dream.
  71. Napoleon
    More times than not, the film’s bursts of humor clash awkwardly with the far more frequent attempts at gravitas that the filmmakers strive for when our protagonist is in battle or engaged in political discussions.
  72. Glass Chin
    The story wisely focuses on the cast's worn-in and jazzy repartee and expresses a perfectly modulated sense of self-awareness.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Killing Them Softly
    The film's cynicism, like everything else, is nothing more than empty posturing, a fashionable pose adopted to ingratiate itself with a disenfranchised public.
  74. Downsizing
    Alexander Payne's defenders might call his often acidic touch Swiftian, though it comes off more toothlessly noncommittal.
  75. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    Best exemplified by its fixation on culottes, the film never feels like more than a half-formed in-joke between close friends.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Lost King
    The film, a shabby account of the story behind the story, muddles its themes and only superficially conveys the importance of the historical insights it contains.
  77. Infinitely Polar Bear
    Maya Forbes reveals herself as a sunny optimist, insistent on remembering the ecstatic highs and never dwelling on the despairing lows.
  78. Miles Ahead
    Less a character study than an impressionistic portrait of a troubled artist's internal chaos, it supplies just enough Miles Davis to leave us jonesing for more.
  79. Fury
    The film itself is a lumbering tank of a movie, chunky, loud, and clumsy, mulching down men into meat as proof of its dramatic seriousness and gloomy worldview.
  80. To the Bone
    One of the film’s great qualities is its casualness and willingness to be simply human and to not let sociological politics dominate.
  81. Coma
    A heady rush of ideas, the film’s avant-garde mélange of live-action footage, abstract video art, and multiple kinds of animation just barely masks that it’s a rather simple story about a Zoomer’s inner struggle with both her own mortality and that of the world.
  82. Cross of Iron
    Cross of Iron would almost seem a proper mea culpa by Peckinpah for his controversial career, and the pre-Dogville closing credit sequence featuring a risible, anti-patriotic photo slideshow reveals a director still capable of new and inventive provocation tactics.
  83. Miss Sloane
    The screenplay's enigmatic nature holds one's interest throughout, even as the film veers into pat moralism.
  84. Vivarium
    This a parable about adulthood boasts deeply cynical takes on home, community, and childrearing.
  85. Sleep Furiously
    An affectionate, if uncomfortably stagnant, portrait of moribund rural culture.
  86. The Chaser
    The opaque ethics of The Chaser elide the reductive nature of binary pairs, focusing instead on the far more piquant complexity of human behavior.
  87. 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.
  88. Lion's Den
    Although the film is essentially contemplative, there’s little here worth contemplating.
  89. Come to Daddy
    Unlike many [M. Night] Shyamalan films, which seem constructed out of Mad Libs, Come to Daddy retains an emotional consistency.
  90. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
    Can't mask that, at heart, it's merely a trifling tour documentary that gives further excessive attention to the late-night star's 2010 ouster as The Tonight Show host.
  91. The Happy Prince
    For every haunting sequence in The Happy Prince, there’s five that redundantly wallow in Oscar Wilde’s misery, which is Rupert Everett’s point, but it becomes wearisome.
  92. The Last Rites of Joe May
    Watching Dennis Farina dominate every scene is a joy, and thankfully the actor makes the most of this opportunity.
  93. Ant-Man
    Half-assed mentions of the Avengers, as well as a few cameo appearances sprinkled both within the feature and in its credits stingers, exude less shame than a crowd-pandering politico.
  94. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
    As a metaphor for the way we respond to the media, and the way our politics are funneled through the media lens, the film succeeds most when it revels in ambiguity.
  95. Where to Invade Next
    As informative and passionate as he often is on screen, Michael Moore also always toes the line toward shooting himself in the rhetorical foot with his own thuggish persona.
  96. Men & Chicken
    An admirably bizarre and beautiful genre mixtape, but Anders Thomas Jensen's empathy for his characters gradually impedes his imagination.
  97. 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Naked Prey
    A purified chase film, Naked Prey nevertheless is at its most affecting in the childlike scenes between the main character and a young native girl (played by Bella Randles) he befriends along the way.
  99. The Almost Man
    The script is perspicacious in making Henrik's bad choices understandable enough emotionally, but also nudges the audience toward wishing the man would wise up.
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