Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,769 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 6.4 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: 4,345 out of 7769
  2. Mixed: 1,491 out of 7769
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7769
7769 movie reviews
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  1. In the Heart of the Sea
    The narrative is helplessly adrift, a yarn that extols vague grit and determination with no discernible through line.
  2. The Tainted Veil
    The filmmakers refuse to promote a political agenda of their own in order to let the varied convictions of others foster a necessary dialogue.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Big Short
    Its fourth-wall-breaking wags a finger at the perceived facile nature of celebrity-driven mass culture even as it ultimately condescends to audiences.
  4. Joy
    David O. Russell proposes that there may be no real barrier between the caustic worldview he wears and the sense of childlike wonder he sells.
  5. Don Verdean
    If the film is any indication, Jared and Jerusha Hess remain committed to clotting up the screen with ostensibly charming "eccentricity."
  6. Boy and the World
    One wonders how receptive young audiences should be to a film that puts its storytelling secondary to its message-making.
  7. Stinking Heaven
    As in Nathan Silver's previous work, what could have been a rote retread of Pasolini's Teorema blossoms into a study of factional identity and power dynamics.
  8. The Revenant
    What pushes the film, at long last, into the icy river, is its very design, as a monument to slick, mercenary grandeur.
  9. Krampus
    At the center of the film is a conservative lesson that asks us to unquestioningly abide by society's capitalistic impulses.
  10. Every Thing Will Be Fine
    The premise, of a terrible event unleavened by the easy out of someone being at fault, should be prime fodder for Wim Wenders's brand of poetic regret.
  11. Chi-Raq
    A Spike Lee joint in the urgent sociopolitical register of Radio Raheem's boombox—a call to arms that's also a call to disarm.
  12. The Letters
    A brain-dead slog whose bankrupt aesthetics ironically soil the very legacy it purports to aggrandize.
  13. The Lady in the Van
    The film's annoying glibness is neatly summarized by the line: "In life, going downhill is an uphill job."
  14. Bikes vs Cars
    Director Fredrik Gertten's Bikes vs. Cars is passionate but contradictory, a frustrating combination for a documentary that utilizes admittedly interesting data as a pitch to wean our car-crazed world off excessive driving.
  15. Dementia
    The film doesn't quite earn Jones's performance, but it engenders considerable goodwill for allowing him to give it.
  16. My Friend Victoria
    The film disappoints in its refusal to allow for deeper articulations of racism beyond, well, visible and verbal displays of racism.
  17. The Wannabe
    The film is less a revisionist take on the circumstances of John Gotti's 1992 indictment than a tedious love child of Bonnie and Clyde and Goodfellas.
  18. Hitchcock/Truffaut
    A buoyant tribute, even if the pedigree of the project implies something more paradigm-shifting.
  19. Youth
    As ever, Paolo Sorrentino ironically cuts the legs out from under his protagonists' wistfulness with grotesquerie.
  20. Macbeth
    Throughout, director Justin Kurzel's stagey pretensions clash with each of his aesthetic choices.
  21. Theeb
    Theeb insists on the importance of preserving cultural difference against the totalizing vision of racial and religious hegemony.
  22. Victor Frankenstein
    Victor Frankenstein is the movie version of a carnival sideshow, all smoke and mirrors, presenting a litany of human freaks and animal monstrosities to distract from the superficiality of its psychological and intellectual concerns.
  23. The Good Dinosaur
    The main character is a collection of insecurities that have been calculatedly assembled so as to teach children the usual lessons about bravery, loyalty, and self-sufficiency.
  24. Creed
    One of the Ryan Coogler film's greatest traits is its reticence, its refusal to say 10 words when two will do, or to say one word when silence says it all.
  25. Janis: Little Girl Blue
    It grounds us so effectively in Joplin's emotional realm as to partially rekindle the social transcendence that her voice must have represented for its owner.
  26. The Danish Girl
    In so clearly viewing Lili through the lens of 21st-century political correctness, the film only blunts the resolve of her struggle.
  27. The Secret in Their Eyes
    Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.
  28. Secret in Their Eyes
    Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.
  29. The Night Before
    It aims to foster a spirit of giddy anarchy in order to tie a ribbon around its shambolic script and rickety pacing.
  30. Legend
    Given how Legend's script is so bereft of insight into its characters' psyches, perhaps there's only so much even an actor of Tom Hardy's stature can do.
  31. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    It careens from carnage to group therapy so wildly that the action never gets to build and the conversations just repeat themselves.
  32. Very Semi-Serious
    It doesn't seem to aspire to much more than proving that there are nice, talented people behind the New Yorker's walls.
  33. #Horror
    A blunt satire of the dehumanization inherent in social media that also gets off on said detachment.
  34. Kingdom of Shadows
    The visible numbness and empty stares of the doc's three subjects painfully evoke years of being gripped by the war on drugs.
  35. The Creation of Meaning
    In the simultaneously heady and lyrical The Creation of Meaning, we're obviously implicated in that comment, as the film views the meaning-making process as something malleable and dependent on perspective.
  36. The Summer of Sangaile
    Writer-director Alanté Kavaité's film is a string of softly weaved pictorial metaphors steeped in reverie.
  37. Democrats
    According to the film, individual misdeeds aren't the final enemy, but the byproduct of an unregulated regime.
  38. Censored Voices
    By negating more conventional, facts-first priorities, Mor Loushy creates an alternative historiography that's more meant to be felt than learned.
  39. Mediterranea
    The film is unwaveringly attentive to problematizing the dividing line between predator and prey.
  40. Criminal Activities
    The actors have the showmanship to chew the lurid, shopworn material up to bits, savoring it like a Royale with cheese.
  41. Mustang
    The film punctuates the sisters' confinement with various episodes united by their contrivance.
  42. Love the Coopers
    Sloppy and haphazard where it should be calculatedly chaotic, it can't ever seem to settle on an appropriate tone.
  43. Concussion
    The tacky and loose means by which the platitudinous screenplay dances around what ails the story's football players is just one cog in a whirligig of pat representations.
  44. My All American
    All of the film's nuances are ultimately negated by the its relentless canonization of its subject.
  45. Casa Grande
    The film uses its critique of white privilege as a means to woo the legitimizing gaze of international audiences.
  46. James White
    It confronts the hard realities of a world in which few make it to maturity without their share of scars, and no one makes it out of adulthood alive.
  47. By the Sea
    If it stumbles when it seeks our sympathy, it thrives when it's exploiting our fascination with the surface of things, and all that's unknowable underneath.
  48. The 33
    The film doles out a shock or hits a (usually hollow) emotional note every few minutes with mechanical precision.
  49. Shelter
    The characters' marginalized social standing is less indicative of a real-life epidemic and more akin to window dressing.
  50. Ingrid Bergman in Her Own Words
    It highlights the potent dichotomies that, combined with Bergman's relatively unmediated beauty, made the actress luminescent both on and off screen.
  51. Man Up
    Lake Bell and Simon Pegg's star wattage isn't enough to distract from the sense that their characters are almost exclusively defined by their single-ness.
  52. Funny Bunny
    Alison Bagnall and her talented leads appear to effortlessly achieve a tone that's tricky to sustain, one that abounds equally in absurdism and empathy.
  53. Madam Phung's Last Journey
    With the invocation of national allegiance as an inherent contradiction, the documentary blooms its larger, allegorical inklings.
  54. Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans
    The film forsakes all ambiguity regarding McQueen's psychology by stubbornly defining him as a determined, charismatic womanizer.
  55. Heist
    Heist is competently staged, but Scott Mann maintains audience interest with the preponderance of dissonant absurdities.
  56. Miss You Already
    It winningly reflects how to utilize quiet understandings and, yes, very loud laughter.
  57. The Peanuts Movie
    Failure hovers over the film as much as it did in Schulz's comic strip, infusing even its most ebullient set pieces and designs with a sense of melancholy.
  58. Trumbo
    Like Jay Roach's Game Change and Recount, the film's patina of relative apoliticism masks (or enables) its blandness of inquiry.
  59. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere (1971)
    Out 1 is largely a film of conversation, as its prolonged rehearsal vignettes regularly give way to even lengthier scenes of verbal self-analysis.
  60. Sand Dollars
    It respects and plumbs the feelings of all three main characters while surfacing the economic, ethnic, cultural, and gender power imbalances in their relationships.
  61. In the Basement
    Cinema hasn't been this close to the dusty cogs of desire's machinery and unapologetic about pleasure since Pasolini.
  62. SPECTRE
    All of its revisionism centrally incorporates the history of the franchise, and the film both excels and suffers for frequently recalling its forbears.
  63. Spotlight
    By modeling its structure so closely after "All the President's Men," Spotlight only draws closer attention to its lack of scope and ambition.
  64. Sembene!
    The film unfolds as a kind, politically soft offering of what lies beneath both Sembène's films and the man himself.
  65. Of Men and War
    A work of astounding sensitivity and precision, it argues for emotional honesty as a moral and psychic imperative.
  66. In Jackson Heights
    The lightning in the film’s bottle isn’t some generic feel-good humanism, but a complicated one, fighting for its own existence, sometimes angry, sometimes despondent.
  67. Barista
    It captures the frustration and the longing of forever wanting more and better at the expense of casualness of being.
  68. Wrecker
    Time and again, the filmmaker cuts the money shot meant to theoretically cap a sequence.
  69. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    The conclusion suggests the film exists to affirm the preconceived desires and perceptions of its makers.
  70. 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.
  71. Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse
    The flick is an artless, puerile shadow of the likes of Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's Cornetto trilogy.
  72. Our Brand Is Crisis
    It only serves to validate George Clooney's devotion to showmanship as Hollywood's current reigning poster boy for blue-state morality.
  73. Flowers
    Everyone heals, or doesn't heal, on cue, and the initial pathos of the narrative is dulled by the architecture of its through lines.
  74. Hard Labor
    The allegorical possibilities of a disintegrating wall point to a film that could have been.
  75. The Royal Road
    The cumulative effect is altogether perplexing, as it's difficult to tell if Olson's trying to upend clichés or settle for them.
  76. Love
    Gaspar Noé's lack of self-investigation merely situates the film as a libidinal advertisement for a tantrum-prone filmmaker's delayed adulthood.
  77. Bare
    Dianna Agron, suddenly inspired to let go, proves the perfect on-the-prowl foil to Paz de la Huerta's free spirit.
  78. The Armor of Light
    It doesn't trust the inherently complex material to speak for itself or care to consider its consequences beyond instances of manufactured, gut-wrenching immediacy.
  79. Insiang (1976)
    Lino Brocka's portrait of familial treachery and societal abandonment channels its melodrama through the filter of neorealism.
  80. Jem and the Holograms
    It's the screenwriting equivalent of Ryan Adams sucking the pop vitality out of Taylor Swift's deliriously produced tunes.
  81. Burnt
    Everything in the by-the-numbers script signals that Adam must transform himself from and abusive tyrant in the kitchen to the head of a loving and fully functional family.
  82. The Last Witch Hunter
    It has enough ingredients for a reasonably entertaining fantasy adventure—except, that is, for an interesting lead character with an emotionally compelling hook.
  83. Suffragette
    The film's episodes and attitudes register with searing immediacy while feeling true to their time period.
  84. Rock the Kasbah
    The film quickly settles into a depressingly one-note groove as a culture-clashing circus act.
  85. Asthma
    Asthma inevitably becomes another film about a man airing out his traumas and hitting all the requisite marks on his path to healing.
  86. Pasolini
    Biopics ascribe titanic importance to a subject's every gesture, but Ferrara stresses the reality of creation, of its ordinary activities that nonetheless give an artist a sense of fulfillment.
  87. The Pearl Button
    Despite the defeated tone of Patricio Guzmán's tales, a spotlight is placed on the power of persistence.
  88. Jason and Shirley
    Stephen Winter's film doesn't earn the gall it evinces by pissing on Shirley Clarke's masterpiece.
  89. Bone Tomahawk
    One wishes that S. Craig Zahler had more explicitly faced the cultural demons lingering within his premise, attempting to exorcise them.
  90. Nasty Baby
    The film is a compelling addition to Sebastián Silva's cinema of compassionate comeuppance.
  91. Tokyo Tribe
    Sion Sono's film imagines gangs not as rebels without a cause, but a lost generation of displaced, poisoned youths.
  92. Heart of a Dog
    Laurie Anderson condenses contemporary, human experience to the point where exterior and interior are made indistinguishable from one another.
  93. Extraordinary Tales
    It offers a CliffsNotes encapsulation of Edgar Allen Poe's most enduring works for viewers unacquainted with them.
  94. Truth
    It can't develop themes because it's too busy disseminating information, and this extends to its main characters.
  95. 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.
  96. Crimson Peak
    Guillermo del Toro's fussiest, most compartmentalized construction, filled with the most powerful sense of repression and delusion.
  97. Meadowland
    Both Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson understand the greatest pain of loss to be rooted in its searing inexpressibility.
  98. Tab Hunter Confidential
    The film lacks perspective beyond a rather limited preoccupation with the details of Hunter's personal life.
  99. Room
    The film, never sensational or saccharine, is a tough but tender tribute to the creative power of maternal love.
  100. Goosebumps
    Some of the wittier one-liners and more affecting emotional moments feel undermined by the frenzy of chaotic excess.
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