Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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 6.5 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
view
per page
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Luz
    It’s in the VR world that the film best conveys its themes of modern intimacy and alienation.
  2. The Things You Kill
    Alireza Khatami’s third feature is a subtly enigmatic examination of the nature of masculinity.
  3. The Legend of Ochi
    A simplicity of spirit guides writer-director Isaiah Saxon’s fable-like feature debut.
  4. Flight Risk
    Given that Mel Gibson makes little attempt to instill any sense of physicality to this dispiritingly paint-by-numbers affair, it becomes easy to understand the marketing of the film’s 4DX theatrical option as an act of overcompensation.
  5. Inheritance
    Its bizarre mismatch of form and content mostly saps it of life, tamping down the tension and frequently suggesting an accidentally distributed proof of concept for a project that never managed to secure funding.
  6. The Colors Within
    The film is able to suggest great depths by withholding so much, by having characters express what they feel only in abstract terms during a fraught, transitional period of their lives.
  7. Grafted
    Grafted’s biggest problem is that it loses all momentum once the face-swapping kicks into motion, meandering along with no real sense of rising danger or ensuing consequence as the baton is passed from one victim to the next.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Back in Action
    Seth Gordon’s film is largely, and awkwardly, beholden to the most banal of spy tropes.
  9. One Of Them Days
    The film revives Friday’s spirit while bringing its own flavor, and taking the current state of the world into full account.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wolf Man
    Wolf Man neither embraces the fundamentals of the werewolf folklore from which it draws nor convincingly reinvents them.
  11. Night Call
    Michiel Blanchart’s film often feels like a patchwork of half-developed ideas, each more loosely and tenuously woven into the whole than the last.
  12. Grand Theft Hamlet
    Grand Theft Hamlet excels at blurring the line between low and high art.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
    Pantera feels far more anonymous, sleeker and less outlandish, than its predecessor.
  14. Every Little Thing
    Terry Masear’s experience as a victim of childhood abuse is succinctly and broadly addressed, underscoring a largely unspoken meta-narrative about the necessity of compassion and forgiveness.
  15. Oceans Are the Real Continents
    With the film, Tommaso Santambrogio puts neorealism in the service of dream.
  16. From Ground Zero
    The film is a stirring testament to art as a tool of survival, to the power of community art-making to affirm life in the face of omnipresent death, and to a nationless people’s desire to be seen by and engage in dialogue with the community of nations.
  17. 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.
  18. Sonic the Hedgehog 3
    The hedgehogs are the stars here, and after three delightfully breezy good times at the theater, it’s no longer a surprise as to why that is.
  19. Mufasa: The Lion King
    The film, unbound by having to recreate large swaths of the original Lion King whole cloth, was clearly allowed to be a product of its director.
  20. Carry-On
    The star of the show here is Collet-Serra. Nothing here reinvents the genre wheel, but the way that the stakes and scope of Carry-On keep escalating even as the focus remains resolutely intimate and paranoid showcases a refreshingly old-school grasp of thriller mechanics.
  21. Kraven the Hunter
    Aaron Taylor-Johnson skulks and slays across a slew of gory insert shots that scream “reshoots” from the highest mountain, and while he certainly looks the part with his shirt off, there’s little here that Hugh Jackman hasn’t delivered multiple times over the years and with a deeper well of earned pathos to draw from.
  22. A Complete Unknown
    The bevy of documentaries, narrative films, and books about Bob Dylan’s breakout, ascent, and impact on the 1960s pop zeitgeist could fill a library, which makes this oversimplified retread of the same topic all the more tedious and superfluous.
  23. The Return
    The Return may render its mythological figures lifelike through flesh and blood, but nowhere inside that viscera lies a beating heart.
  24. Theater of Thought
    It’s as if by being confronted by new innovations that appear to have come straight out of a sci-fi film, Werner Herzog exercises his galaxy brain to see what we could be capable of a decade, even a century, from now.
  25. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
    The film combines cutting-edge Japanese animation with the audiovisual language established by Peter Jackson’s original trilogy of films.
  26. The Last Showgirl
    The film is less a character study than a numbly tragic workaday fantasia held aloft by Pamela Anderson in a performance that seems to grasp beyond the bleary-eyed edges of Gia Coppola’s screen for larger truths about the choices women make to feel seen.
  27. Nosferatu
    Robert Eggers’s sublimely severe remake of the oft-told tale of a bloodsucker wreaking unholy havoc is less a composition for full ensemble and more a moody piece of chamber music, equally as orchestrated as the Murnau, but uncomfortably intimate in its effects.
  28. Moana 2
    For a story that so prizes how far its heroine will go, Moana spends so much of this sequel stuck in a rut.
  29. Wicked
    Wicked’s frequent patches of sluggishness are particularly frustrating because so much of the film—especially the songs—is glorious.
  30. Dream Team
    Dream Team’s absurdist brand flirts with an art-for-art’s-sake disengagement: the meaningless void as light entertainment, yet another opportunity for burying our heads in the sand.
  31. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
    The film paints a vivid portrait of what life was like for Black South Africans under apartheid.
  32. Flow
    Gints Zilbalodis’s animated feature is movingly attuned to its characters’ primal instincts.
  33. Paddington In Peru
    While it’s never didactic or heavy-handed about its messaging, Paddington in Peru also offers an idea of Britishness that’s multifaceted and modern.
  34. Red One
    It’s neither naughty or nice, and in Santa’s book, that likely means it just ends up getting nothing this Christmas.
  35. Gladiator II
    Like so many latter-day Ridley Scott films, Gladiator II at once feels half-baked and overstuffed, and the lack of internal consistency robs its action of sustained tension and its comedy of bite.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Piano Lesson
    This film feels at times like the earnest result of a group of artists paying tribute to a great playwright rather than a fully realized work of its own.
  37. Bird
    As evocative as it is, the film’s use of small-town squalor as a blank canvas for artful indulgences often detracts from its purported authenticity.
  38. Juror #2
    Juror #2 casts a morally inquiring side-eye at the American legal system, questioning whether it’s reasonable to convict anyone on the basis of something so fallible as memory.
  39. The Graduates
    While Hannah Peterson, with her emphasis on quiet moments and mementos mori, effectively suffuses The Graduates with a mournful absence of life, she also reminds us of the warmth that can be so typical of high school.
  40. September 5
    The film isn’t interested in anything that would detract from providing audiences with the sustained pleasure of watching a clock-ticking thriller.
  41. Here
    Here is all moments, some small and many big, but it’s lacking in gravitas, concerned as it is with tugging at our heartstrings by serving up little more than signifiers that we can project our own memories or personal baggage into.
  42. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
    There’s an alive-ness that emanates from the characters, in large part due to all those visible fingerprints and indentations on their skins—a tactile counterbalance to a story about humanity’s over-reliance on technology.
  43. Venom: The Last Dance
    As the film progresses, it consistently escalates the stakes and scale of its action, which doesn’t devolve into incomprehensible CG murk as it hurtles toward the climax.
  44. Your Monster
    Melissa Barrera’s Laura may be full of rage, but the kind of monster she is doesn’t line up with where her rage leads her.
  45. La Cocina
    La Cocina goes further than recasting the American dream as a nightmare and the much sought-after visa as a ticket to infinite exploitation.
  46. Memoir of a Snail
    Adam Elliot, whose work is no stranger to despondency, never allows the film to fully succumb to despair.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Goodrich
    Goodrich is a moving and warmly humanist story of a vaguely unseemly, mostly harmless guy trying to be a better person.
  48. Smile 2
    Parker Finn, like his entity, is interested in getting his bony fingers into those sticky tender parts we’d rather hide away, slurping our pain like ambrosia and confronting us with the fact that more often than not, the enemy staring back is you.
  49. Nocturnes
    The film is uplifting in its understated optimism that understanding of the natural world driven by technology might accompany understanding of the divine.
    • 74 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Suburban Fury
    Robinson Devor is less interested in reconciling Sara Jane Moore’s contradictory allegiances than in exposing how they were formed.
  51. The Line
    The film is most interesting when observing the subtler power dynamics at play within frats.
  52. Blitz
    Blitz is an earnest, broad-strokes portrait of a bustling city that occasionally succeeds in communicating the unprecedented sensory shock of modern warfare, but its uncritical craftsmanship and quarantining of past atrocities from present-day concerns also render the proceedings mostly lifeless.
  53. We Live in Time
    John Crowley’s film blunts the force of the naturalistic performances by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as it shifts around the timeline of the story with little rhyme, reason, or rhythm.
    • 85 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    I'm Still Here
    The film has trouble excavating any coarse humanism from this decidedly human story, opting instead to paint the family at its center in broad, uninspired strokes.
  55. Queer
    In the end, Luca Guadagnino effectively turns a very complicated literary figure into the kind of blubbering, nostalgic old man you’d expect to see in a student film or a Sundance prizewinner.
  56. Who by Fire
    One of Who by Fire’s greatest assets is Philippe Lesage’s willingness to shift the tenor of the film to fit the wildly divergent narrative concerns of any given sequence.
  57. On Becoming a Guinea Fowl
    Rugano Nyoni’s critique of her native country’s gender-based discrimination is as acerbic as it is unforgiving.
  58. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point
    In Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, holiday tropes born of life and movies alike are exaggerated, parodied, celebrated, and compressed to suggest how our idea of Christmas is a river of memories real and imagined.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Hard Truths
    Even at its funniest, Hard Truths finds Marianne Jean-Baptiste channeling an anger that feels excruciatingly real.
  60. The Shrouds
    The film shares with Crimes of the Future an alternately intrigued and critical fascination with the ways technology encroaches on humanity, and a paranoid interest in rooting out underlying conspiracies.
  61. Emilia Pérez
    If a musical is supposed to communicate things that can’t be conveyed through normal dialogue, Emilia Pérez’s biggest problem is that it falls prey to redundancy, regurgitating the same ideas about identity, desire, violence, and redemption, betraying how little it has to say in the first place.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Pavements
    Alex Ross Perry’s Cubist portrait finds a fitting balance between reverence and mischievousness.
  63. Nickel Boys
    RaMell Ross’s remarkable film finds an expressive power in formally adventurous technique that fashions mesmerizing, cumulatively affecting poetry out of Colson Whitehead’s prose.
  64. Better Man
    Walking a dizzying line between the stupid and the profound, this exuberant, positively unique biopic is as hard to resist as it is to believe that it got made in the first place.
  65. Bookworm
    Ant Timpson’s heartwarming Bookworm is an effulgent love letter to ’80s kid cinema laced with a distinctly quirky, Kiwi dryness.
  66. Plastic
    Even a banal life can have a musicality and life to it, but once it leaves high school, Plastic’s portrait of adult life comes off as a monotone drone.
  67. Daaaaaalí!
    Quentin Dupieux melts the frames that separate dream, film, and reality until they become one plate of tangled spaghetti.
  68. Maria
    Between Jackie, Spencer, and, now, Maria, Pablo Larraín has thrice committed the cardinal sin of taking a female icon of the 20th century and, in an attempt to hold a mirror up to her multitudes, flattened her into the equivalent of a kitschy postage stamp.
  69. Union
    The level of detail with which the filmmakers depict the unionization process is eye-opening.
  70. Intercepted
    The film’s most effective material comes in its analysis of how the military state’s permission structures for inhumanity traumatize citizens in order to harden them and focus their hatred.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Grand Tour
    If Tabu locates the colonial mindset in madness and obsession, Grand Tour does so in cowardice and obliviousness.
  72. Joker: Folie à Deux
    In grappling with the implications of its story, Folie à Deux’s every attempt at showcasing cleverness, verve, or engagement is held cruelly underwater by staid direction, shoddy emotional plotting, a gleeful sense of cruelty, and a grave nihilism that makes Zack Snyder’s work seem like a season of Bluey.
  73. Things Will Be Different
    In many ways, the film feels like a micro-budget rendition of Tenet, as our heroes discover that they’ve been caught in a “vice-grip” between past and future that functions much like that film’s famous “temporal pincer.”
  74. It's What's Inside
    The camera, the cuts, the needle drops, and story twists all contribute to the feeling of a machine that’s spinning faster and faster until finally it careens right out of control.
  75. April
    April’s frames seek to embody a dizzying span of human experience, even if Dea Kulumbegashvili occasionally strains to corral it.
  76. Youth (Homecoming)
    Throughout his trilogy, Wang Bing’s modus operandi has been expansion through repetition, a recursive exploration of similar spaces that nevertheless exhibits differing emotions, concerns, and personalities.
  77. Megalopolis
    If Megalopolis, as many speculate, marks the end of Coppola’s career as a filmmaker, it flourishes in that finality, having held back or compromised nothing.
  78. Saturday Night
    There’s a certain pleasure in basking in the anarchic behavior of the SNL cast as depicted in Saturday Night, but it’s rendered hollow by the film’s often grating mythologizing of them, which includes trying to turn the 90 minutes before the first episode into a frenetic comedy of Safdie-esque proportions.
  79. The Apprentice
    Perhaps there are limits on how deeply a film can explore the psyches of people who so nakedly show us their worst qualities.
  80. Happyend
    Sora Neo struggles to balance the immediacy of adolescent angst with the long-range outlook of using the students’ experience as a canary in the coal mine for society at large.
  81. The Brutalist
    Brady Corbet builds on celluloid what Adrien Brody’s László Toth does with concrete: an unvarnished monument to the authentic American character.
  82. Sleep
    Jason Yu’s film may not reach its full potential, but it offers a devious commentary on the all-too-human desire for easy explanations.
  83. Caught by the Tides
    Jia Zhang-ke’s Caught by the Tides attests to the fact that making art under the most adverse conditions can prove to be serendipitous.
  84. A Traveler's Needs
    Hong Sang-soo’s films have tricky narrative juxtapositions and symbols that often render potentially mundane moments transcendent.
  85. Terrifier 3
    Primarily a vehicle for inventive and wince-inducing practical effects that best anything to be found in a 1980s-era Italian gorefest or the Saw franchise, Terrifier 3 continues the series’s trend of dotting a sparse and sinuous thread of plot with mini-masterpieces of cinematic ultraviolence.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Stranger Eyes
    Lee Kang-sheng’s performance is the emotional and physical lodestone of a film about the fraught ambiguities of seeing through a one-way mirror.
  87. Harvest
    The film is a handsomely mounted production in which much of the filth feels stage-managed.
  88. Apartment 7A
    Rather than deepening or complicating the original work, Apartment 7A engages with it purely on franchise terms, as in how it foregrounds the Castavets for much of the runtime.
  89. Never Let Go
    As the film goes on, it stretches its own internal logic and, following a genuinely shocking third-act twist, renders the world that it’s created virtually incoherent merely in a ploy to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.
  90. Omni Loop
    The film retreads ideas familiar from time-loop stories without offering anything especially new.
  91. 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.
  92. Youth (Hard Times)
    The second installment in Wang Bing’s trilogy of documentaries about garment workers similarly leans into durational extremes but eventually and sneakily reveals a broadened scope.
  93. Heretic
    Heretic intriguingly plays with our expectations of who the heroes and villains are in this scenario.
  94. The Critic
    It’s only the winking malice of Ian McKellen’s title character that prevents the film from imploding entirely, dirigible-like, as the haywire plot begins to nosedive.
  95. Meanwhile on Earth
    The overbearing plot of the film sadly obscures the humanity of its characters.
  96. Nightbitch
    It’s disappointing to see a film with such a weird premise as Nightbitch ease into an orthodox storytelling mode.
  97. My Old Ass
    The world of My Old Ass retains a lived-in quality, in large part due to the shrewd, sensitive way in which it treats the emotional struggles of its teenage characters.
  98. The Wild Robot
    The film’s discernible brushstrokes serve as a reminder of the literal hands, the labor, it takes to raise someone, mold them into a survivor, and to carry love with you wherever you go.
  99. The 4:30 Movie
    Jam-packed with his familiar brand of vulgar yet verbose stoner humor and free-flowing riffs on movies—especially his own—the vibes are certainly off the charts in Kevin Smith’s film.
  100. Speak No Evil
    This hollow attempt to turn a provocative showpiece into a crowd-pleaser makes you wonder if the filmmakers are actively disdainful of the original.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »