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. Mass
    In the hands of its cast, Mass gives such precise and profound expression to the totality of grief that it comes to feel downright palpable.
  2. On the Count of Three
    Jerrod Carmichael is a volatile director and an electric actor, but Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch’s screenplay routinely force the characters into formulaic, trivializing scenarios.
  3. Cusp
    At its best, the documentary’s aura of desolation suggests a verité version of Peter Bogdanovich’s The Last Picture Show.
  4. Together Together
    Ed Helms and Patti Harrison’s wonderful rapport helps to keep the film grounded in the recognizably real.
  5. Hive
    A layer of ambivalence facilitates our identification with Fahrije but also makes her a distinct character and not just an archetype.
  6. Werewolves Within
    The film becomes unexpectedly, effectively violent just when you’ve written it off as a glorified SNL sketch.
  7. Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
    After a while, it’s hard not to feel like Radu Jude is simply shooting fish in a barrel.
  8. Next Door
    Unlike Malcom & Marie, Daniel Brühl’s feature-length directorial debut proves to be authentically self-castigating.
  9. What Do We See When We Look at the Sky?
    The film is an offbeat epic informed by a reverence for the past and a delicate wariness toward the future.
  10. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
    Despite this clever setup, Tom Gormican’s film isn’t the self-reflexive skewering of Hollywood that one might expect.
  11. The Man Who Sold His Skin
    Art, commerce, and immigration are inextricably bound in Kaouther Ben Hania’s playful and gently moving, if uneven, film.
  12. Oxygen
    At its best, Oxygen successfully approximates the feel of an escape room.
  13. Riders of Justice
    Ultimately, Anders Thomas Jensen cannot reconcile the fact that a mature story of men in crisis doesn’t coherently mesh with suspense scenes in which his protagonist viscerally annihilates a violent gang.
  14. Wrath of Man
    Cacophony eventually takes over Wrath of Man, stranding the actors in the process. Except, that is, for Jason Statham, who’s by now a master of presiding over Guy Ritchie’s gleeful chaos.
  15. Labyrinth of Cinema
    Manic, maximalist, and bristling with postmodern bells and whistles, Labyrinth of Cinema is exactly what its title suggests.
  16. The Banishing
    Christopher Smith’s film applies the haunted house trope in unfamiliar ways.
  17. Seance
    Simon Barrett imbues his narrative with a purplish emotionality that the Urban Legend movies didn’t even think to bother with.
  18. Downton Abbey: A New Era
    A New Era’s acknowledgement that some things must die for new things to be born works to justify the film’s title by quietly linking its themes of entitlement and survival.
  19. The Scary of Sixty-First
    In a way, the film feels like a true heir to the petulant, low-budget horror cinema of the ‘70s and ‘80s.
  20. Last Letter from Your Lover
    Across the film, director Augustine Frizzell balances a dynamic aesthetic energy with a generosity of spirit.
  21. Old
    In the moments when Old works, it’s because M. Night Shyamalan embraces the inherent weirdness of his material.
  22. The Northman
    While the canvas of Robert Eggers latest is considerably broader than that of The Witch and the Lighthouse, it feels as if its psychological chaos hasn’t expanded accordingly.
  23. Fathom
    Throughout, there are moments when you may feel as if Drew Xantholoulos could push harder on the film’s philosophical implications.
  24. Don't Breathe 2
    The film’s gore is just as likely to invoke fear as to serve as a killer punchline to one of Rodo Sayagues’s set pieces.
  25. The Meaning of Hitler
    Though uneven, the film is clever about avoiding age-old conundrums regarding the disavowal of the language of horror.
  26. The Novice
    At its best, the film suggests some kind of hellish Nike commercial, where “just do it” becomes less an inspirational motto than a grueling portent of doom.
  27. The Lost Leonardo
    The Lost Leonardo deals less with absolutes than fungible notions of perception and power.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Fast Company
    The only thing Fast Company says about Cronenberg the person and artist is that the dude really, really likes drag racing. Auteurists should probably look elsewhere. Fans of well-crafted B movies, on the other hand, will be right at home.
  29. Ahed's Knee
    With Ahed’s Knee, Nadav Lapid plays a game with alter egos that’s at once canny and frustrating.
  30. Decision to Leave
    Throughout the film, one often feels the plot machinations working against Park Chan-wook’s poetry, though in a few cases poetry wins out.
  31. The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52
    While 52 remains something of a mystery, The Loneliest Whale renders him less of a metaphor.
  32. tick, tick...Boom!
    tick, tick… BOOM! never quite resolves that tension between well-attended wake and intimate memoir.
  33. Mama Weed
    Mama Weed is intended to wash over you, leaving good vibes in its wake, but it doesn’t challenge Isabelle Huppert or the audience.
  34. Settlers
    Settlers allows for weighty themes to play out inside a cramped domestic setting, wary of easy answers or moral platitudes.
  35. My Heart Can't Beat Unless You Tell It To
    Jonathan Cuartas’s film vividly diagnose a sickness of insularity endemic to middle-class America.
  36. Encanto
    Encanto doesn’t steer away from the inevitable happy ending one expects from most animated films geared toward children, but it subverts expectations by bringing humanity to even its most flawed characters.
  37. Softie
    Writer-director Samuel Theis’s film is a noteworthy repurposing of the coming-of-age social drama.
  38. Bruno Reidal, Confession of a Murderer
    Vincent Le Port’s grim morality tale depicts a society caught between differing norms of discipline, punishment, and sex.
  39. The Beast Within
    An ambitious monster movie that attempts to explore the metaphorical ghosts lingering over the atrocities committed by the residents of a small, noxiously chummy Southern town, and whose collective closets obviously symbolize the troubled historical legacy of the American South at large.
  40. Turning Red
    After a first hour that may well hit Zoomers and their millennial parents in the feels, Turning Red gradually runs out of steam.
  41. A Chiara
    The film’s initial aimlessness is pleasurable for the way that it allows the viewer to stare at life being processed on the stunned, confused, and ecstatic face of a teenager.
  42. Homeroom
    Despite the film’s narrow scope, it’s hard to not be impressed by the political and civic engagement of its teen subjects.
  43. The Velvet Queen
    Long stretches of the film are simply mesmerizing, but both Sylvain Tesson’s written compositions and the conversation between him and Vincent Munier often lapse into clichés about the distractions and decadence of modern society.
  44. Il Buco
    The film meticulously evokes a 1961 speleological expedition, but its search for thematic resonance is frustratingly general.
  45. Lost Illusions
    Lost Illusions leans heavily on voiceover narration that, for better or worse, draws attention to its novelistic mode of its storytelling.
  46. The Hand of God
    Throughout Paolo Sorrentino’s film, the line between miracle and cosmic prank, even tragedy, is rendered indistinguishable.
  47. Belfast
    Kenneth Branagh's film understands the malleability of memory, and it embodies cinema’s ability to offer a kind of escapism, but up until its climax it plays like a retreat from reality.
  48. Mosquito State
    The film hauntingly suggests that a man’s most rational move in a rigged society is to fade away into the ecosystem.
  49. 499
    The film raises pertinent questions about Mexico’s mixed cultural heritage and the contested representation of reality.
  50. What We Left Unfinished
    Mariam Ghani’s documentary spurs audiences to consider the politics that underlies any artistic activity.
  51. The Voyeurs
    It’s hard to deny that Michael Mohan’s preposterous fable doesn’t exert the dark pull of voyeurism itself.
  52. The Feast
    The Feast makes a stab at drawing out modern, very real anxieties around wealth disparity and ecological devastation without falling back on genre tropes, asking us to consider how the land itself may come to feast on the rich.
  53. The Deer King
    The Deer King leaves one with the impression that it hasn’t given itself enough room to truly soar.
  54. The Summit of the Gods
    While the film intermittently stuns in revealing Everest’s topographical mystique, its expedition into what makes climbers tick struggles to get off the ground.
  55. Clean
    While its plot is strictly by the numbers, Clean is elevated by its stylistic flair and propulsive pace.
  56. Luzzu
    Alex Camilleri’s most significant departures from his influences take place on the level of content, but, thankfully, they strain the integrity of the neorealist framework just enough to keep Luzzu fresh, if not revolutionary.
  57. Murina
    With so much screen time devoted to portraying its main character’s complexities, the other characters remain half-developed, and to the detriment of the film’s themes.
  58. The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation
    The film persuasively sheds light on the grievances of the Palestinian people that have long fallen on deaf ears.
  59. 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.
  60. The Tragedy of Macbeth
    What’s absent here is the murderous lust for power that dovetails with Macbeth and Lady Macbeth’s lust for each other, and which proves their mutual undoing.
  61. Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone
    There are no new explanations here, just a better packaged version of what Anno already delivered, which makes You Are (Not) Alone very attractive but fundamentally pointless.
  62. Trauma
    Trauma is both an underachieving Deep Red and an unpolished facsimile of Stendhal Syndrome, and where Tenebre invites active spectatorship, Trauma is convoluted to the point of distraction, worth savoring solely for Argento’s excesses of gore.
  63. Freeland
    At their best, writer-director Mario Furloni and Kate McLean evince a masterful grasp of storytelling that’s subtle and rich in innuendo.
  64. Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
    The film pulls back the veil on Kurt Vonnegut to show how a gloomy dissatisfaction brooded underneath his quippy surface personality.
  65. Ambulance
    Rarely have Michael Bay’s frenzied stylistic tics been so effectively intertwined with the substance of one of his films.
  66. Dog
    Dog cannily smuggles a nuanced inquiry of a social issue under the guise of popular entertainment.
  67. The Outfit
    The Outfit is a dapper, twist-filled crime story that relies more on dialogue than gunplay to move the action.
  68. Hold Your Fire
    The film’s aesthetic approach is purposeful, echoing the us-or-them sentiment held by both groups aiming guns at the other.
  69. X
    While still intermittently thrilling as a basic retro-outfitted slasher, X ultimately comes off in a way that no porn (or horror) film should: like a tease.
  70. Speak No Evil
    Until its contrived conclusion, the film plays as a queasy satire of conditioned interpersonal behavior.
  71. The Sky Is Everywhere
    Throughout, Josephine Decker effortlessly keys her intimate and eccentric style to her main character’s complicated inner turmoil.
  72. A Love Song
    The film relies on wide shots of distant mountains to stand in for a fruitful interrogation of what it means to occupy the open terrain of the U.S.
  73. When You Finish Saving the World
    Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on, but he flattens his mother-and-son narcissists to the point of caricature.
  74. Emergency
    Emergency is uneven, but it’s grounded by dynamic performances and a vivid portrayal of the minutiae of friendship.
  75. Breaking
    Abi Damaris Corbin’s quiet and unobtrusive style helps 892 build tension primarily from character instead of incident.
  76. Living
    Living has the feel of a film afraid to fully step out of its predecessor’s giant shadow.
  77. Dual
    Riley Stearns’s film consistently tickles the funny bone, even when it comes at the expense of psychological nuance.
  78. Good Luck to You, Leo Grande
    The film abounds in honest and at times disarmingly off-the-cuff moments that are borne out of character contrasts.
  79. Watcher
    Watcher gives a feminist twist to a throwback genre, but never does its topicality dilute its gripping suspense.
  80. Bros
    Bros is ultimately let down by its pat perspectives on modern romance and social justice.
  81. Emily the Criminal
    The film may not suffer from didacticism, but it’s at its most volcanic when it promises to blossom into a study of a generation’s financial difficulties.
  82. Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
    Nina Menkes’s documentary comes dangerously close to inhabiting its own title.
  83. Utama
    Stock story beats of generational dispute run throughout Utama, existing mainly to show off the widescreen possibilities of the Scope frame.
  84. Flux Gourmet
    Peter Strickland’s playful mockery of performance art and excessively serious-minded “collectives” feels both insular and, at times, a shade too flavorless.
  85. Vengeance
    Though its lack of emotional escalation could be read as intentional, Vengeance is ground to a repetitive halt by B.J. Novak’s preaching.
  86. Alcarràs
    As a tribute to farmers’ way of life, its effective and at times moving, but as an exposé of the potential losses that a business-centric green revolution is in the process of incurring, it wants for a stiffer punch.
  87. Unrest
    Cyril Schäublin’s precisely framed snapshot of a microcosm of timekeepers ends up being a bit too, well, mechanical.
  88. Meg 2: The Trench
    If your hook is the promise of seeing Jason Statham go mano a mano with prehistoric sea behemoths, then leaning into the ludicrous is the only way to go.
  89. Fire Island
    The film is filled with a subtextual nostalgia for a fleeting youth and the urgency of figuring things out before it’s too late.
  90. Gone in the Night
    The film’s ominous atmosphere derives less from the mystery of a disappearance and more from the scary business of getting older.
  91. The Woman King
    The film is a historical action epic that, for all the novelty of its setting and subservience to contemporary attitudes, traffics in a lot of cliché narrative beats and ideologies.
  92. Till
    Because of Chinonye Chukwu’s willingness to let small-scale, ancillary scenes play out unhurried and at length, Till taps into to a deeper well of emotions than most biopics.
  93. Creed III
    The film comes down to a draw between its flashes of brilliance and its missed opportunities.
  94. Los Conductos
    A collage-like tale of vengeance told with an often impressionistic elusiveness, the film can also be bewildering in its juxtapositions.
  95. Broker
    Even when it edges toward sentimentality, Broker is redeemed by Kore-eda Hirokazu’s customarily bracing humanism.
  96. The Equalizer 3
    The overarching plot of the film is pretty boilerplate, but the fine details count for a lot.
  97. Day Shift
    Day Shift’s first half is an unexpectedly focused, consistent pleasure, while the second sags under the weight of recycled set pieces.
  98. Dragnet Girl
    Dragnet Girl features an array of seemingly debased molls and violent loners who blow off steam with punching bags in between petty wrongdoings, but it never outright vilifies any of them.
  99. Mr. Malcolm's List
    The period romance has been increasingly experimented with in recent years, yet both straight dramas and convention-spoofing comedies almost always end up upholding the strict boundaries of the genre as if to prove the limits of reimagining the past.
  100. Chevalier
    Chevalier doesn’t match the revolutionary spirit of Joseph Bologne’s life, but there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be taken from seeing a towering figure, long forgotten by history, returned to his rightful place at center stage.
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