Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,786 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 6.2 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: 4,357 out of 7786
  2. Mixed: 1,495 out of 7786
  3. Negative: 1,934 out of 7786
7786 movie reviews
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  1. The Pearl Button
    Despite the defeated tone of Patricio Guzmán's tales, a spotlight is placed on the power of persistence.
  2. Jason and Shirley
    Stephen Winter's film doesn't earn the gall it evinces by pissing on Shirley Clarke's masterpiece.
  3. Bone Tomahawk
    One wishes that S. Craig Zahler had more explicitly faced the cultural demons lingering within his premise, attempting to exorcise them.
  4. Nasty Baby
    The film is a compelling addition to Sebastián Silva's cinema of compassionate comeuppance.
  5. Tokyo Tribe
    Sion Sono's film imagines gangs not as rebels without a cause, but a lost generation of displaced, poisoned youths.
  6. Heart of a Dog
    Laurie Anderson condenses contemporary, human experience to the point where exterior and interior are made indistinguishable from one another.
  7. Extraordinary Tales
    It offers a CliffsNotes encapsulation of Edgar Allen Poe's most enduring works for viewers unacquainted with them.
  8. Truth
    It can't develop themes because it's too busy disseminating information, and this extends to its main characters.
  9. 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.
  10. Crimson Peak
    Guillermo del Toro's fussiest, most compartmentalized construction, filled with the most powerful sense of repression and delusion.
  11. Meadowland
    Both Olivia Wilde and Luke Wilson understand the greatest pain of loss to be rooted in its searing inexpressibility.
  12. Tab Hunter Confidential
    The film lacks perspective beyond a rather limited preoccupation with the details of Hunter's personal life.
  13. Room
    The film, never sensational or saccharine, is a tough but tender tribute to the creative power of maternal love.
  14. Goosebumps
    Some of the wittier one-liners and more affecting emotional moments feel undermined by the frenzy of chaotic excess.
  15. Beasts of No Nation
    Cary Joji Fukunaga’s artistry registers less as psychological imprint than as a measure of his professional bona fides.
  16. Knock Knock
    There's satiric potential here, but Eli Roth's sense of humor abandons him when his hero isn't about to get down with the get down.
  17. Pan
    Whatever drugs director Joe Wright may or may not have been on when he wrestled Pan to the ground, pulverizing the material into a quivering mound of monkey-bread dough, you can trust that they were synthetic. Not a single emotional moment in this entire origin story for J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Captain Hook, and Neverland feels organic.
  18. The Treasure
    The Treasure is no thriller, but there are moments here that inculcate the stakes with prisoner's-dilemma paranoia.
  19. Brooklyn
    The allure of the road not taken and Saoirse Ronan's performance exert a powerful pull.
  20. Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom
    This is activist filmmaking that manages to be both angry and elegiac in its recounting of the 2014 Ukrainian revolution.
  21. The Final Girls
    It lobs a grenade at slasher-movie sadism by making us care about the characters as more than just body-bag fodder.
  22. Victoria
    One can chart the very moment that Victoria's existence slips out of the routine into the nightmarish, and there's no escape by temporal omission.
  23. Reversion
    It may look like a dream, but it plays like someone reading a congressional report on corporate finagling out loud.
  24. Dukhtar
    The film functions as a love letter to Pakistan, despite the misogynistic culture it exposes.
  25. Xenia
    It leaves room for a few flights of fancy where the lack of verisimilitude feels less like screenplay filler and more like unabashed poetic license.
  26. Yakuza Apocalypse
    The film doesn't add up to much, but it's a diverting tour of Takashi Miike's anything-goes, splatter-paint sensibility.
  27. Trash
    Director Stephen Daldry, working from an exploitative script by Richard Curtis, opts for a full-on Slumdog Millionaire imitation.
  28. (T)error
    It displays a staggering propensity for examining its unauthorized scenario without succumbing to either too insular or too general a set of assertions.
  29. Steve Jobs
    The screenwriter's signature verbal-diarrhetic dialogue allows for a nonstop blaring of actorly chops that, like the movie at large, is nothing if not committed.
  30. Maggie's Plan
    As a writer and director, Rebecca Miller is at her best when she finds the shared wavelengths of her lead cast's divergent styles.
  31. Bridge of Spies
    The film has a streamlined efficiency, but it feels like the work of a master who wants to please rather than probe.
  32. Brand: A Second Coming
    Ondi Timoner's documentary about Russell Brand basically gives the English comedian turned "activist" a free pass.
  33. My Golden Days
    Arnaud Desplechin tries his hand at a coming-of-age tale, and does so with equal doses of mature reflection and youthful impetuosity.
  34. Carol
    The film dares its viewers to consider that--for a couple of hours, at least--even when a thing seems too good to be true, it might not be.
  35. Nostalgia for the Light
    Guzmán creates an interesting dialectic between the different searchers profiles, uniting them under an umbrella of humanism and cautious hopefulness.
  36. The Measure of a Man
    It exhibits the spry subtlety of Jean and Luc Dardenne's films, and, consequently, it's possible that it will be similarly mistaken for a work of “naturalism.”
  37. 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.
  38. The Creeping Garden
    It's something unique for both a genre exercise and a documentary: a science-fiction film that doesn't contain an ounce of fiction.
  39. Partisan
    Ariel Kleiman fashions an erotic atmosphere of dusty sensuality that complicates our judgement of this world, but he takes shortcuts.
  40. Mountains May Depart
    It's the first segment that feels the most fleshed out, for how well it presents characters with actual lives as compared to the thinly veiled talking points of the film's second half.
  41. Microbe and Gasoline
    Microbe and Gasoline is enervating for both relishing whimsy and looking behind it to absorb the yearnings of youth and its attendant complications in all their nakedness.
  42. Jafar Panahi's Taxi
    Jafar Panahi spotlights the act of filmmaking as an act of resistance as well as a possible source of propaganda and manipulation.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Mia Madre
    The film is a carefully measured and satisfying, albeit occasionally deaf-tone, suite of fleeting, dispersed impressions.
  44. Deathgasm
    Director Jason Lei Howden has a flair for punchlines that are funny for reasons that are essentially impossible to describe.
  45. He Named Me Malala
    The effect of the film's animated sequences is to distance the viewer from real-life horrors--another misguided attempt at turning recent history into instant myth.
  46. Addicted to Fresno
    The film's larger points essentially fall by the wayside in the name of black comedy that's largely without genuine edge.
  47. The Lobster
    The near-surgical precision with which Yorgos Lanthimos approaches the most surreal of conceits turns out to be a double-edged sword.
  48. Shanghai
    Everything in Mikael Håfström's film is needlessly bloated to accommodate its status as an international, prestige production.
  49. The Walk
    In order to make the walk, and in order for it to matter to him, Philippe Petit has to comprehend it as real and impossible. Zemeckis teaches us the same lesson.
  50. Experimenter
    Aesthetically, the film cunningly suggests life that exists solely within an academic experiment, closed off from chaos that isn't manufactured.
  51. In the Shadow of Women
    Philippe Garrel's film uses its characters' stodgy, formal language to betray their self-consciousness.
  52. The Forbidden Room
    Its utter indulgence in esoterica paradoxically leaves it most vulnerable to the beating heart of this great artist of self-therapy.
  53. Arabian Nights: Volume 3, The Enchanted One
    Miguel Gomes combats austerity with expansiveness, leavened by doses of frivolity and scatology.
  54. Hotel Transylvania 2
    It risks offense by putting a typically Adam Sandler-ian twist on a tired familial trope, though such risks can often be the only thing enlivening forced franchise installments like this one.
  55. Western
    After the film's early optimism and speculative midsection, Western struggles to manage all the rich dramatic irony of its final half hour, perched uneasily between plot and stasis.
  56. The Intern
    Nancy Meyers is unquestionably committed to her auteurist signature of giving her female protagonists their cake and letting them eat it too.
  57. Labyrinth of Lies
    It only scratches the surface of the mass psychological wounds and trauma that the trials unleashed on the Germany psyche.
  58. The Martian
    The film goes in for the idea of texture and tics and human behavior, but there's no conviction, and no real push for eccentricity.
  59. Arabian Nights: Volume 2, The Desolate One
    It forays into satirical terrain in order to elide actual dealings with the problems at hand, so that each piece feels alternatively frivolous and weighty.
  60. Arabian Nights: Volume 1, The Restless One
    Miguel Gomes's formal talents, which include a flair for close-ups of elegantly smooth or weathered faces, transcend his soft spot for the didactic.
  61. Stonewall
    At its worst, the film dangerously repackages the queer experience using language invented by those originally deployed to break it apart.
  62. Becoming Bulletproof
    The trust that Bulletproof's filmmakers have in their cast and their talent is humanely and succinctly illustrated throughout.
  63. Cemetery of Splendor
    It gently and often imperceptibly shifts between past and present, legend and modernity, wakefulness and reverie.
  64. Mississippi Grind
    Ryan Boden and Anna Fleck convey an engagingly low-key atmosphere, pervasive with wayward souls haunted by poor choices.
  65. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    It mistakes touch-and-go navel-gazing for comprehension, as if speaking to as many subjects as possible produces an inherently compelling take.
  66. 99 Homes
    Ramin Bahrani's talent for orchestrating sequences of tightly wound tension is in full bloom here, as is his complementary knack for quieter grace notes.
  67. Misunderstood
    The film is only slightly dependent on the self-pity that informed Asia Argento's last effort, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, but it feels similarly airless.
  68. The Keeping Room
    Director Daniel Barber uses a bleak and unresolved portion of American history to justify indulging typical genre-film nihilism.
  69. The Assassin
    The film carves out a rich emotional sphere concomitant to its stunning production design, finding delicate poetry in the dispassionate pursuit of revenge.
  70. Ashby
    The film displays little ability to utilize Ashby's violent actions for means other than high-concept fodder and out-of-place bloodshed.
  71. The Green Inferno
    The savagery here is rooted in retrograde myths that might have been easier to stomach had the cannibalism been positioned as a fantastical unleashing of retribution.
  72. Everest
    It feels less like an cautionary adventure movie or the classy Hollywood equivalent of a Reader's Digest "Drama in Real Life" and much more like a disaster epic.
  73. Black Mass
    Like any crime saga without a more potent thematic hook, the film's relentlessly insular script dwells on themes of loyalty and fraternity.
  74. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    Every set piece brings to mind an Epcot Center attraction built from borrowed parts, geared toward reinforcing the young audience's belief that adults just don't understand them.
  75. Pawn Sacrifice
    It's best appreciated as a tragicomic profile of a man whose extraordinary talent was undermined by the farcical political reality in which he was enmeshed.
  76. Cooties
    It makes an occasionally spirited pretense of injecting the tensions of the United States's educational system into a familiar zombie-siege scenario.
  77. The Cut
    Fatih Akin falls back on convenience and contrivance to streamline the thornier specificities of his grand-scale narrative.
  78. Prophet's Prey
    One watches the film with an escalating sense of disbelief and horror, as Warren Jeffs is steadily revealed to be an even greater monster than we initially take him for.
  79. The New Girlfriend
    François Ozon is never willing to fully engage with the ridiculousness of his material, resulting in an uneasy mix of wry distance and unearned emotion.
  80. Freeheld
    The filmmakers, for better and for worse, stay out of the actresses' way, as Freeheld's artistry is so unadorned that the performances somehow feel more naked as a result.
  81. The Fool
    It takes place entirely at night, and the dingy color palette, washed-out and intentionally drab, presents Russia as an almost alien landscape.
  82. Tired Moonlight
    It's to Britni West's credit that she's yoked the film's experimental sequences with the hard reality of characters trying to figure things out.
  83. Songs from the North
    North Korean culture is lensed in part through a South Korean perspective, with the final chapter asking: “Is reunification possible?”
  84. Sicario
    Denis Villeneuve's film views life in the age of the modern-day drug war as an ever-crescendoing existential nightmare.
  85. The Perfect Guy
    It uses convention to its advantage through an intriguing play with casting choices and bizarrely effective allusions to film history.
  86. The Moving Creatures
    Caetano Gotardo's triptych of short tales features a sense of experimentation and poetic license mostly seen in European cinema.
  87. Wolf Totem
    It becomes difficult to separate the natives from their communist masters in terms of their treatment of their natural surroundings.
  88. The Visit
    When the trademark Shyamalan twist finally arrives, it doesn't synthesize anything other than the director's devotion to his signature gimmick.
  89. Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision
    For all of its evident toil in recreating historically accurate environments and researching the precise conditions in varying regions, it has little force as a work of cinema.
  90. 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.
  91. Meet the Patels
    In this picaresque documentary, the lightly comic musings of a likeable, somewhat nerdy Indian-American actor go surprisingly deep.
  92. Coming Home
    Coming Home is a film in which everyone's dreams are irrevocably broken, the pieces too small to grasp, let alone pick up.
  93. A Brilliant Young Mind
    The film focuses on Nathan's emotions and backstage dramas in ways that generally feel forced or inauthentic.
  94. Breathe
    Aside from the innate understanding of female friendship dynamics, it's hard to see exactly what else Mélanie Laurent brings to this overly familiar story.
  95. The Transporter Refueled
    The titular Transporter is now but a blank slate serving the characters and mayhem surrounding him, a walking metaphor for a franchise that's run out of gas.
  96. A Sinner in Mecca
    What the film lacks in narrative unity and aesthetic splendor it makes up in moral grandeur and ethical purpose.
  97. Before We Go
    The setup is so familiar that frustration sets in before the title has barely faded from view.
  98. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    A work of arduous assemblage that values information over affect and zip over conviction in its ramshackle historicizing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
  99. Dragon Blade
    Slacker and even less involving than the similarly terrible global kill-fest Last Knights, but easier to watch for the inadvertent camp value of two of the prominent performances.
  100. Dirty Weekend
    Even if the title is meant to be ironic, the latest from writer-director Neil LaBute is a frustratingly stilted vision of middle-aged repression unleashed.
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