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. Dead Ringer
    The film, meekly directed far across the soundstage by former actor Paul Henreid, is a potboiler filled with oh-so-convenient plot twists and purely incidental characterizations.
  2. Cunningham
    While some individuals are inevitably more compelling than others, as a whole the entire series, and “63 Up” in particular, is completely enveloping as it draws us into the latest happenings of these people we’ve followed for so long.
  3. Martin Eden
    Pietro Marcello’s film works better as a story of self-loathing and self-destruction than it does as a social critique or political statement.
  4. Disappearance at Clifton Hill
    What distinguishes the film from much of its ilk is Albert Shin’s ongoing taste for peculiar and unsettling details.
  5. The Moneychanger
    It’s apparent that Veiroj disdains no one so much as Humberto, but the film makes vanishingly little of the man’s undoubtedly twisted psyche.
  6. The Kingmaker
    The film confirms that the ruthless knack of the wealthy and powerful to remain so is a universal impulse.
  7. In My Room
    In My Room often exhibits an interest only in the accruing of incidents, giving it a this-happens-then-this-happens quality that defiantly eschews psychological shading.
  8. Richard Jewell
    Ironically, Clint Eastwood is as condescending of Jewell as the bureaucrats he despises.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Experiment in Terror
    Credit the film’s modest virtues to Edwards’s undeniable verve as a visual stylist. Still, with a running time slightly over two hours, Experiment in Terror is a bit too protracted to count as an unqualified success.
  10. The Trial of the Chicago 7
    It pulses with relevancy in a time when debates over authoritarianism, protests, and the necessity of radicalism are convulsing America.
  11. Waxwork
    Waxwork is certainly no hidden horror gem, but its flashes of wit and genuine enthusiasm for the horror genre are enough to make it a reasonably enjoyable time.
  12. Shooting the Mafia
    Kim Longinotto is so eager to celebrate her hero that she also glides past thornier portions of Letizia Battaglia’s life.
  13. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin
    A supplementary subject of most of Herzog’s work, which it shares with Chatwin’s, is a bottomless yearning for wonder.
  14. Slay the Dragon
    The film is suitably direct, clear-eyed, and exhaustive in documenting the massive impacts that gerrymandering has, particularly on communities of color.
    • 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.
  16. The Silent Partner
    Though Duke’s film lacks the warmth and humanism of Something Wild, it’s possessed of a similarly idiosyncratic edginess.
  17. Whirlybird
    At its best, Matt Yoka’s documentary vividly captures how personal demons shape creative output.
  18. Respect
    When Jennifer Hudson is singing her heart out, not so much approximating Aretha’s voice as channeling her soul, the effect is transportive.
  19. The Photograph
    The film is at its best when it’s focused on the euphoria and tribulations of its central couple's love affair.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Beastie Boys Story
    Often feels like a cross between a TED talk and a memorial service, but one gets the sense that Diamond and Horovitz are finally getting years’ worth of grief off their chests. The cumulative effect is, at the very least, touching.
  21. José
    Li Cheng gets much closer to capturing his characters’ predicaments when he trusts the images alone.
  22. Irresistible
    These are desperate times, but if Jon Stewart wants to tack toward a more Frank Capra vein, that’s just fine. We already have one Adam McKay.
  23. West Side Story
    Steven Spielberg's West Side Story is at its best when it zooms in and settles down into character study.
  24. Bad Hair
    The film has an exciting, lived-in quality that elevates what are otherwise some markedly unsteady attempts at horror.
  25. Minari
    The film’s orderliness of plot somewhat undermines the sense that the family at its center is steeped in a truly messy situation.
  26. The Truffle Hunters
    The film’s reminder of the fragility of agrarian traditions in the face of a merciless profit motive is delivered with tact and subtlety.
  27. Relic
    The film heralds the arrival a bold and formidable voice in horror cinema.
  28. Surge
    More than effective in visualizing its protagonist’s disorientated state of mind, the camerawork may leave viewers feeling like they just stepped off of a merry-go-round.
  29. The Fight
    The film justly draws attention to the perpetual work that must go into preserving democratic institutions.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Flesh+Blood
    In the end, Verhoeven’s greatest irony, and the often pedestrian narrative’s most brilliant stroke, isn’t to decide in favor or against Martin. He’s of a piece with his nature, and he leaves the story as he entered it: unchanged and unbowed by the carnage he’s both witness to and agent of
  31. The Green Knight
    A methodical, if largely allegorical, exploration of its main character’s psyche, the film smooths out the enduring mysteries, opaque psychology, and narrative idiosyncrasies of its source material.
  32. Resistance
    The film functions as a handsomely mounted biopic that tells a little-known story with considerable passion.
  33. The Dolls
    Dolls is still ultimately minor-key Gordon, exhibiting nowhere near the level of ambition or invention of many of his hot-house splatter classics, but it has been rendered with an artisanal level of craftsmanship that distinguishes it as an almost-hidden horror gem, ready for rediscovery.
  34. C'mon C'mon
    C’mon C’mon admirably doesn’t indulge in heartstring-tugging pathos, but the film suffers from a certain shapelessness.
  35. Da 5 Bloods
    Lost in so much bombast is the kind of story about its main characters’ lives that could’ve affirmed Spike Lee’s critique of America.
  36. i'm thinking of ending things
    The film has a weird, ghostly, even beautiful pull, but it functions mostly on theoretical terms because Charlie Kaufman has thought it to death.
  37. Arkansas
    The film’s insistence on keeping the stakes low throughout is probably its key strength.
  38. The Mitchells vs. The Machines
    While the film certainly lays out the dangers of technology run amok, it also sees its power to connect people.
  39. Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
    Jia Zhang-ke’s film is a quietly reflective, intermittently rambling rumination on an explosively momentous period in Chinese history.
  40. Sublet
    Eytan Fox’s film is a low-key observance of two men finding the beauty in each other’s mysteries and contradictions.
  41. Inheritance
    Simon Pegg occasionally fulfills the nightmarish potential of the film’s fairy-tale premise.
  42. She Dies Tomorrow
    Perhaps as a result of her attempting to avoid all matter of clichés, not just of genre, Amy Seimetz revels in vagueness.
  43. Slaughter High
    Despite the pretense of commentary, the film asks no underlying questions about the society that produces slasher films and revels in its narrative’s basic premise to numbing ends.
  44. 1BR
    The film gives palpable expression to the sense of hopelessness felt by those who fall under the control of cults.
  45. 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.
  46. You Don't Nomi
    Has the time come to ask if the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction?
  47. Hill of Freedom
    It isn’t without its pleasures and insights, but it’s ultimately little more than an excuse for Hong to try out a new stylistic color in his auteurist palette.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    For All Mankind
    If not the screen’s ultimate portrait of space travel, For All Mankind remains a peerless planetarium show.
  49. The Front Page
    Milestone’s direction is only sporadically inspired.
  50. Amulet
    The film never feels as satisfying or as haunting as its bow-tying epilogue strives for.
  51. The Rental
    Dave Franco has a mighty command of silence as a measurement of emotional aftershock.
  52. All I Can Say
    The film refuses to shy away from the unvarnished honesty of Blind Melon frontman Shannon Hoon during his brief moment of fame.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Follow That Bird
    While kids will and have enjoyed the film as a sweet-and-occasionally-exciting road trip with all their favorite Sesame Street friends, parents are presented with far deeper themes to consider.
  54. Gagarine
    The film is at its most effective and engaging when simply capturing the vibrancy of a world onto its own.
  55. Sweat
    Sweat mostly adheres to a time-honored tale of the pitfalls of fame, despite its ultra-modern context.
  56. Slalom
    The film’s real subject is a young woman awakening to her oppression, rendered poignant in all its awkwardness by Noée Abita.
  57. A Girl Missing
    Kôji Fukada adores stray textures that stick in the proverbial throat and free-associatively affirm his characters’ rootlessness.
  58. Blessed Child
    Filmmaker Cara Jones offers a poignant testament to the baggage and insecurities hounding her own life.
  59. Greenland
    There are enough left turns here to allow us to shake the impression that we’ve been to this rodeo before.
  60. French Exit
    In French Exit’s best passages, sadness and curt, resonant comedy exist side by side unceremoniously.
  61. I Care a Lot
    Throughout, J Blakeson crafts sharp, curt dialogue that makes a fashion statement out of contempt.
  62. The Secrets We Keep
    The film is ultimately too tidy to embrace anything truly startling or unexpected, either stylistically or narratively.
  63. Enola Holmes
    Even when the plot occasionally falters, Enola’s continuous invitations to complicity renew the film’s momentum.
  64. Ammonite
    Francis Lee’s compulsion to make Mary Anning stand in for something broader than herself keeps tripping up the film.
  65. 12 Hour Shift
    The plot, geared as much for comedy as horror, is wound with efficient build-up, and its revolving-door atmosphere is consistent enough to paper over some iffy acting, baggy dialogue, and more than a few minutes of wasted real estate.
  66. Luca
    Pixar’s most intimate and laidback effort since Ratatouille feels like a throwback to one of Mark Twain’s rollicking picaresque sagas.
  67. Z
    Forty years on, it’s still an eye-catching, fast-paced watch, but the plaudits it won as an uncompromising thriller and landmark cinema seem as shaky as the film’s villainous military officers’ insistence that its central murder was an accident.
  68. Buoyancy
    The film never quite pushes beyond the archetypal nature of its scenario to fully unearth its characters’ psychological turmoil.
  69. Pieces of a Woman
    When the film’s actors are given space to etch their characters’ feelings, they turn in strikingly naturalistic performances.
  70. Dear Comrades!
    It’s in its depiction of the communist party’s response to a peaceful demonstration that Andrei Konchalovsky’s latest is at its most effective.
  71. Unpregnant
    Its few nutty ideas demonstrate how little distance Unpregnant manages to put between itself and a standard high-school comedy.
  72. I Am Greta
    Even though it’s about a person who speaks with courage about the urgency of the global crisis, I Am Greta itself doesn’t possess enough of that urgency.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Nov 9, 2020
  73. Freaky
    Freaky doesn’t reach for any arch commentary beyond the suggestion that, hey, Freaky Friday the 13th is a pretty funny idea.
  74. The Dark and the Wicked
    This supernatural fable elevates the subtext of Bryan Bertino’s earlier work to the level of text.
  75. Sun Children
    The film tends toward the dramatically monotonous, but its unwavering sense of purpose ensures that it’s also compellingly human.
  76. Wife of a Spy
    Wife of a Spy could use a streak of live-wire, huckster crudeness, a bit of melodrama delivered in an unselfconscious manner.
  77. Gunda
    By the time the credits roll on the film, we realize we’ve been watching not so much a sketch of the lives of farm animals as a threnody for their deaths.
  78. Concrete Cowboy
    The film is stirring when it really dives into specificity.
  79. Limbo
    A comedy about the migrant crisis is more daring than a coming-of-age story, and Limbo, wanting it both ways, dilutes its best instincts with sops to formula.
  80. Shadow in the Cloud
    Roseanne Liang leverages the absolute implausibility of the film’s later scenes into something brisk and exciting right to the very end.
  81. The Lie
    At the heart of Veena Sud’s film is the raw material for a potentially ingenious satirical domestic thriller.
  82. Black Box
    The film ruminates on how virtuality infiltrates the deepest regions of our subconscious to reprogram the inner workings of the self.
  83. The Life Ahead
    With its tough-minded characters from divergent cultures finding a common bond despite their differences, the film doesn’t deliver much in the way of surprises, but it turns out to be a starker and more honest piece of work than it might initially seem.
  84. Over the Moon
    At its most beguiling, director Glen Keane’s animated film Over the Moon mixes the unbridled free-association of playtime with an undercurrent of barbed satire.
  85. Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey
    The greatest gift offered by the film is an empowering world that looks less like invention and more like real life.
  86. Black Adam
    The film has the courage of its convictions, suggesting that violence on behalf of an oppressed people isn’t only justifiable but even moral.
  87. Atarrabi & Mikelats
    A challenge inherent to a parable of this sort is that evil, being so seductive, can make good seem dull or prissy by comparison.
  88. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
    Too often, the film teases big, wild comedic set pieces that end up deflating almost instantly.
  89. Demons
    Demons is a coffee-table book of a horror movie, reveling in a purity of transcendent revulsion that marks it as something that’s really only suitable for the truest and most devoted of aficionados. It’s a snob’s objet d’art, disguised as a blood offering.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Thing Called Love
    Such strained touches notwithstanding, The Thing Called Love charms and touches, not the least for revealing Bogdanovich as a rare filmmaker still interested in human behavior, keeping the action mostly in medium shots and extended takes to better catch the emotional nuances from character to character.
  91. The Night
    It’s at the juncture between horror and philosophical surrealism that Kourosh Ahari’s film is at its most provocative.
  92. The Stand In
    The film allows the scion of one of Hollywood’s most notable families to interrogate her relationship with celebrity in self-aware fashion.
  93. Koko-di Koko-da
    Nothing hinders surrealism more than the sense that its creators are actively working for it, though Koko-di Koko-da is nonetheless difficult to dismiss.
  94. The United States vs. Billie Holiday
    The film finds its purpose most pointedly when it zeroes in on the unambiguous relationship between Holiday and “Strange Fruit.”
  95. Little Fish
    The film gets at the profound truth that our relationship with another person is, at its core, a collection of shared memories.
  96. Survival Skills
    While mostly pulling off this tricky balancing act of humor and real-life horror, the film doesn’t quite go far enough in its critiques.
  97. The Legend of Hell House
    The Legend of Hell House is a regrettably just-competent adaptation of a great American horror novel.
  98. Cryptozoo
    Dash Shaw’s deceptively simple animation regularly descends into phantasmagoria that delivers on his story’s strange premise.
  99. Flee
    The film effectively immerses us in the wrenching details of Amin’s story, but it keeps us just a bit too far removed from the man himself.
  100. How It Ends
    The film is so economical in its momentum, and its tone of comic wistfulness so uniform, that its string of tableaux rarely feels jerky.
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