Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. The Nine Muses
    The Nine Muses is the kind of nonfiction film I actively hope for: a picture of intuitive, free-associational power that cuts far deeper emotionally than a dry recitation of dates and facts could ever hope to.
  2. Under Control
    Volker Sattel takes us on a blank-eyed tour of the country's biggest plants (plus a few from Austria), exposing both the tenuous balance of precision and innovation that has provided 20th-century Western society with its most controversial power source.
  3. Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same
    Madeleine Olnek has a limited repertoire of jokes, so it's fortunate that the film, at 76 minutes, is fairly amusing, even if it's never quite laugh-out-loud funny.
  4. Keyhole
    A night of reckoning by a hoodlum in his haunted former home is a more sober and remote Freudian farrago than one expects from Guy Maddin.
  5. Player Hating: A Love Story
    One of the more intimate and revealing looks at American projects ever made; it's assured and empathetic without indulging in fashionable white guilt.
  6. You Are Here
    Some will find the film compelling, but underneath the riddles it's basically a self-important proclamation of "who the hell knows?"
  7. State 194
    It too often feels like just one more aesthetically uninspired documentary that gives way in the end to a special round of pleading for its specific cause.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Student
    Kazakh cinema's stalwart auteur Darzhan Omirbaev adapts Crime and Punishment to modern-day Almaty, but with little to say beyond the obvious.
  9. Farewell to Hollywood
    It suggests that a disease isn't a product of one single person's body, but the eruption of an entire family history of unarticulated desire.
  10. Brand: A Second Coming
    Ondi Timoner's documentary about Russell Brand basically gives the English comedian turned "activist" a free pass.
  11. Love at First Fight
    Transparently wearing metaphors on its singed sleeves, the film shuttles around courses of meaning and significance without committing to any.
  12. Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told
    This strange time capsule of late 1960s dementia more or less lives up to its oddball reputation—too unnerving to fall into the category of horror comedies but too cutesy to be labeled as a straight-up shocker a la The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In other words, it’s unclassifiable, which has amplified its cult appeal.
  13. Bone Lake
    The horror here proves as much a dead end as the main characters’ relationship.
  14. WTO/99
    WTO/99 sets out to correct misrepresentation by corporate media about the aims of the movement, but that attempt is hampered by the recycling of much of the same news footage from news broadcasts.
  15. Thanksgiving
    This Thanksgiving is a slasher for today, slickly made, coolly mean, and with a satiric bite.
  16. Mayhem
    Like so many shoot-‘em-up video games that repeatedly break for cutscenes, the film too often diffuses its tense energy by whipping up context.
  17. 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.
  18. Farmageddon
    Farmageddon quite piquantly raises questions about the dim figures who determine what's suitable for national consumption, but it's more eloquently an ode to a group of dysfunctional, if essential, underground misfits.
  19. 11/8/16
    Too often, the documentary’s highly calibrated curation reduces its subjects to mere demographic representations.
  20. The Fitzgerald Family Christmas
    Edward Burns certainly doles out his fair share of family turmoil, but he admirably doesn't make lunatics out of his characters.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Totally F***ed Up
    The total lack of pity and condescension carries the film over its rough spots and aimless patches. The endings of the director’s Teen Apocalypse Trilogy (of which Totally F***ed Up is the first part) may seem utterly desolating, yet they all move toward a rejection of negativism in favor of the harsh but inescapable complexities of the world. Life is f***ked up, Araki is saying, but it is worth living.
  22. The Young Karl Marx
    The film is ironically gripped by the sort of ideological "vagueness" that Krk Marx dismisses throughout.
  23. Oh, Hi!
    After its opening act, the film gets silly fast, with a frankly stupid witchcraft subplot and narrative turns that are telegraphed with audience-insulting obviousness.
  24. Bleak Street
    Bleakness, Arturo Ripstein's film implies, demands different kinds of labor from a man than from a woman.
  25. Simon & the Oaks
    The film is at its best when it lingers on intimacy and the characters' incompetency to manage it.
  26. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    The imprint of Star Wars on everyday American life now feels so despotic that it's too much to ask a film like Solo to be moving or thrilling as a piece of cinema.
  27. Dreams Rewired
    The documentary isn't advancing an argument so much as simply restating a European socialistic breed of fact.
  28. Arizona Dream
    Recalling the ‘70s shaggy-dog stories of Makavejev, Ashby, and Schatzberg, Kusturica’s French-financed American venture deserved better than the neglect it suffered in the blockbuster age.
  29. Iron Man 3
    A madly creative, darkly comical, and fiendishly self-aware actioner with muscle to spare.
  30. The Sweet East
    Sean Price Williams’s solo feature directorial debut is pretty fuzzy on what it wants its national tour of brainless dogma to mean.
  31. Backcountry
    After a surprising development, the film grows slack and sentimental, reverting to the survival-movie platitude about hardship making you a better human.
  32. Hell Hole
    The most consistent recurring theme across the work of the Adams family—parenthood as a siphoning off of the life giver’s vitality in a protracted, eternal cycle of decay and renewal—finds its most literal, alien expression here.
  33. Call Jane
    The film consistently fails to underline the risks and pressures faced by the women in an underground abortionist network in Chicago in the late ‘60s.
  34. 42
    The film elevates the story of Jackie Robinson to that of cornball legend rather than just honoring his legitimately uplifting, heroic saga by telling it straight.
  35. California Solo
    Robert Carlyle's performance compensates for the film's less successful elements and even makes you wonder if they might be strengths.
  36. Beneath the Harvest Sky
    It flourishes in the spaces between the plot's necessary setups and subsequent payoffs, which is nearly enough to redeem the film if not for the narrative going belly up in the third act.
  37. 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Burning Hot Summer
    The Louis Garrel character's mixture of self-containment and alleged possessiveness over his wife fails to convince, if not to irritate.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Twins of Evil
    Twins of Evil benefits considerably from seasoned performances by a veteran cast that includes genre icon Peter Cushing, Dennis Price, and Kathleen Byron.
  40. Dual
    Riley Stearns’s film consistently tickles the funny bone, even when it comes at the expense of psychological nuance.
  41. Godzilla
    In form, it's no wham-bam VFX sizzle reel replete with sputtering, ejaculatory climaxes. It's the magnificently sustained equivalent of Ravel's "Bolero," with nuclear warheads in place of timpani rolls.
  42. The Discoverers
    It pushes itself beyond shrill predictability in its willingness to indict the public and familial histories at its core.
  43. Willow Creek
    Bobcat Goldthwait exposes the characteristic male pursuit of power to which females are often made subservient.
  44. Killer Joe
    It thrills in seeing dumb people getting their due in hyper-stylized displays of violence, and yet it never feels contemptuous of them.
  45. The Assessment
    The Assessment works its way through intriguing conundrums about the motivations and qualifications of parenthood, as well as the power dynamics at play between parents and children.
  46. Dead Man
    Dead Man is likely Jim Jarmusch’s most stunning achievement.
  47. Grabbers
    Good, clean genre entertainment, the sort of harmless yet endearing brand of moviemaking seemingly unattainable in today's Hollywood system.
  48. Ava
    The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.
  49. Let Sleeping Corpses Lie
    Despite some satisfyingly gut-busting moments, The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue retains a very British stiff upper lip.
  50. Bitter Moon
    As easy as it would be to make rude connections between the film’s raunchy shenanigans and Polanski’s own history, the fact is that Bitter Moon doesn’t feel like either an explanation, an apology, nor a defense of the kinky sexual games adults play. Think of it as Polanski’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
  51. Kon-Tiki
    It lacks the fire and eccentricity that we want from our stories of adventurers driven by obsessions that could be seen as egotistical or just plain bonkers.
  52. Loving Vincent
    Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman's film is driven by an off-putting and oxymoronic fusion of reverence and egotism.
  53. The German Doctor
    In Lucía Puenzo's film, things always feel off balance even as the plot points click all too neatly into place.
  54. Love, Brooklyn
    Love, Brooklyn, especially its loftier ideas, might have benefited from more of a satirical bite.
  55. Young Woman and the Sea
    The film leaves no room for doubt about what Trudy Ederle will accomplish, and thus creates virtually no dramatic tension in her inevitable rise to the top ranks of women’s swimming.
  56. American Dharma
    The film feels rather like listening to the arsonist calmly explain why he set the fire as we continue to watch it rage.
  57. Begin Again
    It's a film that lives in the high and not in the comedown, even though its characters are often stalled and wallowing.
  58. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water
    Its dedication to the transgressive power of frivolity remains the franchise's greatest weapon.
  59. Amulet
    The film never feels as satisfying or as haunting as its bow-tying epilogue strives for.
  60. The Daughter
    It too often strains for a tragic gravity that its ultimately melodramatic characters never earn.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Newlyweeds
    Going neither in the direction of Reefer Madness nor a Cheech and Chong movie, it's both funny and serious, and its depictions of pot-smoking could be read as either promotional or cautionary.
  62. Stress Positions
    The film is an insightful look at modern discontent and the pandemonium that it breeds.
  63. The Source Family
    The research and elucidating synthesis on display effectively illuminate the pernicious aura of a lifestyle pursued by the yearning, lost souls of the time.
  64. New Order
    The film utilizes a trendy issue as window dressing for a tedious and delusional exploitation film-slash-museum piece.
  65. La Última Película
    The film isn't so much about "the end of cinema" as it is about the people who abuse the medium and their subjects for their own political agenda.
  66. Junction 48
    At its best, the film demonstrates that no art is more political than that which depicts the lived experience of the oppressed with accuracy, empathy, and moral clarity.
  67. Stay Awake
    Jamie Sisley’s film looks at its serious subject matter through a maudlin lens.
  68. Beautiful Boy
    Felix Van Groeningen commendably sustains the story's profound sense of irresolution: abuse-rehab-relapse, abuse-rehab-relapse, abuse-rehab-relapse—an endless cycle of teeth-gritted optimism at best, soul-deadening dashed hopes at worst.
  69. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    Tim Burton’s belated sequel to 1988’s weird, wild, and hilariously macabre Beetlejuice abounds in morbid, nauseating delights.
  70. Big Eyes
    In style as in content, it offers neither the granular detail of more subtle period pieces nor enough of Tim Burton's spirited eccentricity to register as anything other than what one character derides as "that representational jazz."
    • 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.
  72. Black Sea
    As much as the film is primarily a genre workout for director Kevin McDonald, the script makes room for a tough-minded, psychologically corrosive depiction of vengeance.
  73. Klown
    An ostensible Danish "Hangover" that more closely resembles "Two and a Half Men" with nudity and unexpurgated dick jokes.
  74. Maya
    The film’s intimacy is as precise as its intellect is vague.
  75. Sadie
    Sadie remains a clear-eyed portrait of maternal love, teenage turmoil, and the singular type of tight-knit bonds formed, out of necessity in many cases, in low-income communities.
  76. That Summer
    The makers of this rescued-footage documentary ultimately understand the power of its subjects' personalities.
  77. The Children Act
    The Children Act stages the clumsiness of belated domestic confrontations with the very coldness that’s kept its characters from having discussed their emotions for decades and from having had sex for almost a year.
  78. Kong: Skull Island
    Every creature here that's intended to burrow themselves into the audience’s nightmares are less wonders of imagination than of size.
  79. Veronica Mars
    For all its references to the show's history, the film never panders. It's an evolution of the core concept as opposed to a nostalgia-tinged reproduction, and is all the better for it.
  80. Antarctic Edge: 70° South
    It appears afraid of alienating viewers by overloading on scientific jargon, and in the process becomes too attracted to ultimately superfluous anecdotes from her subjects.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nate & Margaret
    Nathan Adloff's Nate & Margaret is an endearing, hopeful, and quietly radical film.
  82. Food Chains
    Perhaps Sanjay Rawal's most fascinating excursion into agriculture's dark side is the vineyards of Napa Valley, where the practically Eden-like scenery masks a dreary labor model.
  83. Hud
    Remarkably dull Hud more or less plays out as a home-on-the-range knock-off of Nicholas Ray’s brilliant Rebel Without a Cause.
  84. The Knife
    The overriding suspense here is largely created by watching truth become negotiable, and through the small, plausible distortions of the truth that people come up with when survival instincts kick in.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Harold and Maude
    The effortless depiction of their growing camaraderie and unconscious courtship is one of Harold and Maude‘s great charms, as Ashby and screenwriter Colin Higgins transpose fading ideology into boundless truth across a modest framework of pitch-black exposition and glowingly pastoral aesthetic touches.
  86. 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.
  87. Two Lives
    The film's educational impetus is to announce to the world that even picture-perfect Norwegians continue to pay a heavy price for the horrors of WWII.
  88. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    The material being offered has been edited, composed, and made sentimental with the rigor of a political ad campaign.
  89. The Conquest
    Even as it takes pleasure in imagining the wheeling and dealing that politicos make when no one is looking, it never offers as much insight into the process by which a president is made as its premise would seem to promise.
  90. Dreams of a Life
    Dreams of a Life succeeds in making its point about the unkowability of the people in our lives, but there isn't quite enough substance here to fully sustain the film.
  91. Bleed for This
    Any initial gestures toward acknowledging Vinny Paz's macho egotism are eventually downplayed as the film becomes just another formulaic triumph-over-adversity saga.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Aftermath
    The film isn't so much about the moral atrophy of people who refuse to come to terms with their past as it is about cosmic karma passed from fathers to sons like an ancient curse.
  93. The Banshee Chapter
    Director Blair Erickson surely has style to burn, even if he oftentimes betrays his atmospheric shorthand and gets cold feet at the most inopportune moments.
  94. Permission
    Brian Crano is as skittish as his protagonists are about the particular contours of their dilemma. To put it bluntly, Permission is a sex film without the sex.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Wise Guys
    The macho bluster taken seriously in De Palma’s gorgeous but uninterestingly pumped-up Elliott Ness saga is here intriguingly skewered.
  96. The Photograph
    The film is at its best when it’s focused on the euphoria and tribulations of its central couple's love affair.
  97. 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.
  98. Fall
    Scott Mann’s film succeeds by simply committing to and steadily ratcheting up the ludicrous awesomeness of its premise.
  99. Despicable Me 2
    The script's jumble of plot asides and family-friendly pandering is enough to make you want to root for a hero.
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