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. TÁR
    The film is consistently compelling visually and aurally, but neither Todd Field nor Cate Blanchett seem quite decided on whether Tár’s comeuppance is a grand tragedy or a cosmic joke.
  2. R.M.N.
    R.M.N. is more suspense thriller than procedural, and it’s content to have the audience walk on the razor’s edge of doubt and fear through much of its two-hour running time. Perhaps too content.
  3. M3GAN
    There’s enough sardonic humor to keep the proceedings edgy enough, but it’s hard not to wish that the filmmakers would’ve taken a cue from their eponymous villain and really pushed things past the boundaries of good taste.
  4. There Are No Saints
    At its best, Alfonso Pineda Ulloa’s film gleefully embodies the grungy spirit of classic exploitation cinema.
  5. Enys Men
    Enys Men might have been called A Blueprint for Revival: an attempt to restore to horror something that Jenkin feels has been lost. If only it didn’t lack the power to truly frighten us, it may have flourished.
  6. Good Night Oppy
    Ryan White’s documentary is cute to a fault and filled with a rapturously uncomplicated glee about the joys of exploration.
  7. Godland
    The film’s unifying theme is the egocentrism and inevitable violence of masculinity.
  8. Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery
    The climax has a certain primally cathartic power, but it doesn’t quite dispel the air of self-satisfaction that envelops the script.
  9. See How They Run
    The film breaks little new ground but is at least a notable improvement on, well, The Mousetrap.
  10. Asteroid City
    A dryly comedic bricolage of mid-century Americana and postwar anxieties with only the lightest dusting of plot, the 1950s-set Asteroid City finds Wes Anderson moving even closer to cultural curation and further from sustained storytelling.
  11. Thunder Road
    The ubiquitously involved star’s charisma can’t completely overshadow a sluggish plot... Nonetheless, its hard-charging chase sequences make it a vintage Dukes of Hazzard-flavored noir.
    • Slant Magazine
  12. Fall
    Scott Mann’s film succeeds by simply committing to and steadily ratcheting up the ludicrous awesomeness of its premise.
  13. Book Club: The Next Chapter
    The film is devoid of serious conflict, yet it hits with unexpected feeling.
  14. Argentina, 1985
    For a film about the crimes of a fascist military dictatorship that employed mass torture, rape, kidnapping, and murder as weapons of social control, Argentina, 1985 sure goes down smooth.
  15. Country Gold
    For all its formal playfulness, the film never loses its grip on the interior lives to its characters.
  16. No Bears
    No Bears generally spends less time finding aesthetic articulations of its themes than it does building out an increasingly convoluted plot to support them.
  17. Dos Estaciones
    For all its lush cinematography, capturing regional custom and dramatic panoramas alike, this is a film about repression, an inhibition that no amount of tequila can take away.
  18. The African Desperate
    That The African Desperate is a send-up of art school is beyond doubt, but what’s less clear is just how far the satire goes.
  19. Master Gardener
    For Paul Schrader, even a film called Master Gardener ultimately pivots on a man having to take out the macho trash.
  20. A Compassionate Spy
    The suggestion that Ted Hall’s actions were that of simple and pure heroism leaves Steve James’s documentary in tension with the more nuanced view that Hall seemed to have of himself.
  21. 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.
  22. 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.
  23. Sick
    Throughout, the film’s characters impressively hold their own when forced to defend their lives, with director John Hyams catching every incident of bone-crunching mayhem as if he were shooting a martial arts film.
  24. Please Baby Please
    The film’s unapologetic level of artifice is at once the source of its pleasures and limitations.
  25. Project Wolf Hunting
    There’s an admirably propulsive, single-minded sense of purpose to the film’s commitment to gore.
  26. Piggy
    Throughout, writer-director Carlota Pereda announces herself as a skilled manipulator of audience sympathies.
  27. There There
    The artifice of There There certainly generates an added layer of frisson that might not have been there were the film shot under more conventional circumstances. But the root material has enough rich humanity and taut conflict to it that the result would have succeeded regardless.
  28. Scarlet
    The film drifts so far into weightless fantasy that it practically dissipates before one’s eyes.
  29. Inside
    Whether or not Vasilis Katsoupis’s film achieves escape velocity from genre limitations though overt sociopolitical commentary is questionable.
  30. Boston Strangler
    While the film’s determination to spotlight the women who brought down the Boston Strangler over the killer himself is admirable, it leaves a hole in the middle of the film that nothing else really manages to fill.
  31. The Holdovers
    The Holdovers is ultimately a story about the absence of family, and as it watches three individuals come together and apart, it’s subtly attuned to the way that class constricts people’s lives.
  32. Cat Person
    Cat Person only succeeds when it stays in a space of mystery and unknowing.
  33. Cassandro
    Like any good fighter film, Cassandro builds to the sort of incredible final bout that makes your hairs stand up and the rest of your body want to.
  34. Sometimes I Think About Dying
    The film is an imperfect but affecting portrait of social isolation that captures both the pain and the warmth that comes with finally letting others in.
  35. A Little Prayer
    The film patiently illustrates how places imprint themselves upon us and guide our actions.
  36. Kokomo City
    The film’s most significant accomplishment is the mood it crafts with its cool black-and-white images, fast-paced editing, unorthodox camera angles, handheld camera, and overall jazzy atmosphere.
  37. Full Time
    Full Time doesn’t have much to say about organized labor, or labor in general, other than that work can be really stressful.
  38. The Civil Dead
    Clay Tatum’s film is wholly and refreshingly uninterested in tugging at the heartstrings.
  39. In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis
    The film unfolds at an excessive remove from its subject matter, and it becomes less an incisive thesis about the pope than an occasion for Gianfranco Rosi to flex his stylistic muscles.
  40. The Adults
    The Adults affectingly captures the uniquely American ennui provoked by the banalities of a hometown and the lost utopia of childhood.
  41. Damsel
    At its best, Damsel suggests a dark fantasy riff on Neil Marshall’s The Descent.
  42. Femme
    Femme fascinatingly taps into the radical possibilities of the sartorial as narrative device, exploring the tabooed nuances of queer subjectivity and muddying the lines between gay and trans in the way that lived experience tends to do.
  43. On the Adamant
    Unwilling to risk subjectivity or authorial input, and also lacking in the forensic detail that might have provided a more in-depth analysis of the Centre de jour l’Adamant and its functioning, On the Adamant ultimately feels half-formed.
  44. Sansón and Me
    Sansón and Me has a way of frustratingly pulling focus away from its ostensible subject.
  45. The Lesson
    It’s a testament to the skills of the cast and filmmakers that The Lesson’s mysteries, while easy to foretell, are worth unraveling.
  46. The End
    Perhaps the script is deliberately harking back to a storytelling mode that was characteristic of Hollywood cinema for dramatic effect, but the musical aspect, while a neat gimmick, isn’t memorable or cohesive enough to make the homage, well, sing.
  47. Matter Out of Place
    Consisting largely of long takes sans music or commentary, the film uncovers the paradox that trash, so apparently devoid of meaning or use-value, needs little commentary.
  48. Gran Turismo
    What the film lacks in connective tissue, it makes up for in sheer vibes.
  49. I Used to Be Funny
    The nimble way that Rachel Sennott hops between the two versions of her character easily makes up for the odd narrative misstep that I Used to Be Funny makes along the way.
  50. 20,000 Species of Bees
    The film blooms in moments where, instead of literally addressing Coco's gender trouble, we’re simply allowed to inhabit it.
  51. The Out-Laws
    The Out-Laws shines when it spotlights the committed performances of its cast.
  52. Padre Pio
    Offering visceral immediacy over meticulous construction, Padre Pio bristles with arresting images.
  53. Monster
    Across the film, you can feel the push and pull between a master technician who built his career on the patient, delicate plucking at our heartstrings and his newfound desire to please a wide audience with the broadest of affective strokes.
  54. The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed
    The film embodies the alienating angst of millennial life in all its nakedly neurotic glory.
  55. Youth (Spring)
    Twenty years on from Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, we return with Wang Bing to the factory floor, but this time he doesn’t muster the formal strategies or the narratological scope that once allowed him (and us) to imagine broader implications for China’s future.
  56. Terrestrial Verses
    The sense of repetition that the film leans into in order to acknowledge the inescapable grip of the state is as much a feature as it is a bug.
  57. Cyclo
    An extraordinarily imaginative director, Tran fashions Cyclo into a sensualist nightmare.
  58. The Amateur
    The Amateur is a relaxed and pleasurable throwback to the spy pulp of the 1970s and ’80s, yet told with a (mostly) honest appraisal of the C.I.A.’s ethical failings.
  59. Priscilla
    Priscilla’s delicate mystique struggles to free itself from an oppressive mood board imposed from without by six decades of history.
  60. The League
    At its most engrossing, the film vibrantly sketches out the historical roots of the Negro baseball leagues.
  61. Irma la Douce
    If not exactly an endearing experience on the whole, Irma la Douce is a fine example of Billy Wilder’s mid-career eccentricity and cosmopolitan curiosity.
  62. The Line
    The film is most interesting when observing the subtler power dynamics at play within frats.
  63. Fremont
    The film has the ethereal feel of a half-remembered, mostly pleasant dream.
  64. Saw X
    The film mostly makes you wish that a Saw film would finally let Amanda be the one that audiences worship.
  65. American Fiction
    Without spoiling its increasingly ludicrous (and ludicrously believable) escalations, American Fiction ultimately gets off scot-free clinging doggedly to the middle ground.
  66. Rustin
    Organizing is thankless work, and even though the film, like others in its lineage, functions as an ode to the unsung workers for the revolution, it only turns that tedium to spectacle, rarely willing to truly think about organizing as, well, boring.
  67. White Heat
    White Heat’s ultimate message: love’s a bitch…even crypto-incestuous love.
  68. Totally Killer
    It might not be quite as incisive a piece of genre dismemberment as Wes Craven’s Scream or Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods, but it has a lot of fun poking at the tricks and tropes of slasher movies all the same.
  69. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
    In its own way, the film is as suitable a final work as a culminating magnum opus.
  70. The Bikeriders
    The sheer exuberance of the story and the stylistic brio of Jeff Nichols’s direction often compensate for the film’s lack of authenticity.
  71. All of Us Strangers
    Andrew Haigh’s film always feels perched on the precipice of unlocking a deeper register.
  72. Origin
    Thanks to Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s unflappable performance, the theories that Isabel Wilkerson laid out in her book emerge with an emotional clarity that can be forceful, but the film’s often inelegant, choppy structure also works against that clarity.
  73. Green Border
    The journeys that Jan and Julia undergo feature such obvious narrativization that they cannot help but feel a bit out of sync with the more observation segments featuring the refugees.
  74. Memory
    The film reveals itself as a prototypical yet surprisingly tender love story between two damaged people re-learning how to move through a world that’s unable to adequately support them.
  75. Wildcat
    By shooting the fiction sequences with the same dreamy fish-eye unreality as the scenes showing O’Connor’s real life, the film blurs the line between the two until it’s almost nonexistent.
  76. They Shot the Piano Player
    Unlike, say, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, which takes advantage of rotoscoping to lend a unique style to the animation depending on who’s talking and about what, They Shot the Piano Player aims for more stylistic continuity than one would expect, given the free-wheeling soundtrack.
  77. 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.
  78. Sing Sing
    In its depiction of actors flourishing through artistic struggle, Sing Sing ultimately argues that the most effective liberation happens through the freeing of the body as well as the soul.
  79. Mean Girls
    If this Mean Girls thrives too much on its relationship to the original, more tribute with songs than independent adaptation, its enjoyability is also a testament to the original’s staying power, as well as to Fey’s decades-long faith in the recyclability of her own material.
  80. Crumb Catcher
    Chris Skotchdopole’s feature debut is a tantalizing mix of the absurd and the mundane.
  81. The Letter
    Like Frankenstein’s monster in the Universal horror classics, The Letter keeps its prize creature too long in the shadows. But a Davis movie cannot withstand scrutiny without her, and even a bad Davis movie where she’s hamming and mugging and even humiliating herself is more fun than practically no Bette at all.
  82. Your Lucky Day
    The film coasts far on the pleasant surprise of some sharp plotting.
  83. Lisa Frankenstein
    Even as the film revels in violent, necrophiliac delights, the dialogue keeps everything grounded with its humor.
  84. Out of Darkness
    Shot in the Scottish Highlands, Out of Darkness draws on the eerie atmosphere of a place that still feels ancient and steeped in mystery.
  85. Inside Out 2
    The film’s visual complexity isn’t matched by the actual journey the core emotions take back to the forefront of Riley’s mind, which can’t help but feel like a more convoluted retread of the first Inside Out’s abstract buddy comedy.
  86. Chicken for Linda!
    However pleasurable and pretty Chicken for Linda may be in its individual scenes, it doesn’t so much achieve harmony through its balancing of contrasting elements as it fully surrenders to childlike whimsy.
  87. Kung Fu Panda 4
    The film is a good time, and it doesn’t exactly betray any of Kung Fu Panda’s strengths, but it also exhibits the telltale signs of a series struggling to justify its existence.
  88. Love Lies Bleeding
    In the end, it’s a memorably girthy, if not evenly muscled, ode to the treacherousness but ultimate value of romantic love.
  89. 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.
  90. MaXXXine
    First with X, then with Pearl, and definitively with MaXXXine, West has buried his unique style and forward-thinking vision under an astroturfed surface of compulsory cinematic references and cliché cultural signifiers.
  91. Rebel Ridge
    Rebel Ridge never rises to the panic-infused heights of its opening, but Jeremy Saulnier is still able to maintain a baseline of oppressive tension as we watch a man navigate the deep-seated corruption of a sundown town.
  92. Dario Argento Panico
    It’s Argento who consistently makes the most compelling and incisive on-screen presence throughout Simone Scafidi’s documentary.
  93. Freaky Tales
    For all of its spiritedness, Freaky Tales wants for the sense of invention that defines the films that it references and whose moves it often falls back on borrowing.
  94. 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.
  95. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
    There’s considerable emotional truth on display throughout Benjamin Ree’s documentary.
  96. Dìdi
    The film speaks unflinchingly to the unique anxieties and frustrations of early teenhood.
  97. 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.
  98. 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.
  99. Eternal You
    The film approaches a new tech frontier with an objective, responsibly apprehensive, eye.
  100. Sujo
    Befitting the unseen forces that seem to drive the characters, writer-directors Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero bring a haunted, dreamlike undercurrent to the film similar to sequences from their prior collaboration, Identifying Features.
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