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. Immaculate
    The film’s final act contains some of the most twisted, gory violence this particular subgenre of horror has seen in years, ultimately recalling nothing less than the films of the ultra-violent New French Extremity movement.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Invisible Fight
    Writer-director Rainer Sarnet’s deliriously weird The Invisible Fight would be irksome if it weren’t crafted so lovingly and with a charming earnestness.
  3. Longlegs
    This is a sturdily constructed horror film with a foundation sneakily built on shifting sands.
  4. The Room Next Door
    Centering the impermanence of human existence in the euthanasia drama The Room Next Door doesn’t indicate resignation to a “late period” style so much as it suggests a natural outgrowth of Almodóvar’s formidable body of work.
  5. The Deliverance
    Lee Daniels does such a good job investing us in the human drama of The Deliverance that it almost feels unnecessary when the supernatural elements inevitably take over in the final act.
    • 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.
  7. Mother, Couch
    Other than a sort of wistful quirkiness, it’s not clear what Mother, Couch gains by skewing away from a more straightforward, streamlined family drama.
  8. 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.
  9. Another End
    Despite its initially familiar trajectory, Another End disarmingly and purposefully sweeps us away on a wave of apathy not unlike that which plagues its main character, challenging our sense of who we fundamentally are as humans.
  10. Seven Veils
    The film’s pleasures are ultimately more textural and academic than those of Tár.
  11. Crossing
    Crossing is never less than nobly intent on showing trans people as worthy of dignity, safety, and love.
  12. A Traveler's Needs
    Hong Sang-soo’s films have tricky narrative juxtapositions and symbols that often render potentially mundane moments transcendent.
  13. Omen
    The patchwork structure of Omen is suited to the complexity a setting where characters switch between French, Swahili, and English depending on who they want to keep in the dark. Yet it’s difficult to shake that there are too many threads for a film of this length to do them justice.
  14. Blood for Dust
    The film is held together by the intensity of its haunted-looking cast and the dour atmosphere.
  15. LaRoy, Texas
    While it never quite reaches the hilarious heights or existential depths of the Coens’ finest work, it does offer similarly enjoyable mixture of the macabre and the absurd.
  16. Red Island
    Red Island is at once lackadaisical and urgent, relaxed but with a clear eye for how swiftly everything will end for the characters at its center.
  17. Bob Trevino Likes It
    It has its very powerful moments, but the oddly linear, untroubled journey of its two main characters robs the film of some of its emotional authenticity.
  18. Love Hurts
    The film is startlingly earnest in its affection for Ke Huy Quan and making him play both to and against type.
  19. Oddity
    Thanks to its expert staging, the film doesn’t lose much in the way of immediacy.
  20. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
    Mandalorian and Grogu is, basically, four Mandalorian episodes wearing an IMAX trench coat.
  21. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
    The film lays out an impassioned case for the nearly unique greatness of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s body of work.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Damned
    Roberto Minervini’s camera ably conjures the melancholy and alienation that afflict his characters across scenes that merge documentary and neorealist techniques, but it’s far from realistic to expect a troop of soldiers to act aloof around each other when they’re all in the shit.
  23. Wild Diamond
    The film is at its best when it’s keyed to its main character’s breakneck energy.
  24. 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.
  25. The Surfer
    When The Surfer does break out of the sun-addled fugue state that marks its midsection, it delivers a gonzo finale that lets Nicolas Cage rev himself up into his most manic, meme-able self.
  26. The Woman in the Yard
    The film is a slow-burning tale of very real traumas suffered by a woman far out of her element and forced to process a tragedy on top of it all.
  27. Black Phone 2
    Throughout, Scott Derrickson collapses dreams, reality, past, and present sidelong into a singular cinematic haunted space.
  28. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    Often blunt and unwieldy, Mohamed Rasolouf's film is nevertheless impactful.
  29. Gazer
    The main character’s condition feels like a dramatically dubious attempt to shroud the somewhat spindly nature of the film’s plot.
  30. Sacramento
    The film’s strength is that it knows how to keep things moving.
  31. 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.
  32. Only the River Flows
    The craft brought to bear on Only the River Flows is captivating, but when it comes to matters of story, it cultivates a frustrating air of disinterest.
  33. Happy Campers
    Amy Nicholson’s empathy for her subjects is undeniable.
  34. The Sparrow in the Chimney
    The film seems to insist upon the idea that intimacy and isolation are ultimately two sides of the same coin.
    • 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.
  36. Ernest Cole: Lost and Found
    The film paints a vivid portrait of what life was like for Black South Africans under apartheid.
  37. 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.
  38. Drowning Dry
    Drowning Dry offers something akin to a cinematic concussion as it begins warping the experience of time.
    • 76 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Pavements
    Alex Ross Perry’s Cubist portrait finds a fitting balance between reverence and mischievousness.
  40. 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.
  41. Bring Them Down
    Bring Them Down uncovers an organic affinity between the genre mainstay of vengeance taking on a life of its own and the force exerted by paternal tradition.
  42. The Order
    The Order illuminates the pipeline from economic insecurity and racial anxiety into outright white nationalism without casting a sympathetic eye toward the eponymous group’s tenets.
  43. Relay
    Set to the rhythms of a pulsing, ultramodern New York milieu, the film, at its best, wrings real tension and excitement out of the simple exchanging of clandestine messages and sensitive information.
  44. 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.
  45. The Quiet Ones
    The Quiet Ones is a reminder of the simple pleasures of a caper film with ice in its veins.
  46. 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.
  47. Harvest
    The film is a handsomely mounted production in which much of the filth feels stage-managed.
  48. Wicked: For Good
    The film is stretched out, breathless, and never really emotionally affecting, even on the level of nostalgia.
    • 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.
  50. 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.
  51. When Fall Is Coming
    The film is a bit too muddled to bring its main character fully into focus, despite Hélène Vincent’s best efforts to do so.
    • 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.
  53. Ash
    Flying Lotus and his collaborators give Ash enough visual flair to occasionally transcend such limitations as forgettable characters with fuzzy motivations.
  54. 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.
  55. Heart Eyes
    Heart Eyes is a slasher movie first, and a gnarly one at that, with some imaginative, seat-shiftingly gruesome kills, and some particularly ominous set pieces.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Companion
    The film trenchantly satirizes 21st-century romance while delivering the gory genre goods.
  57. In the Lost Lands
    The film provides Paul W.S. Anderson with a sturdy canvas for his unique brand of gaudy, campy cool.
  58. Meeting with Pol Pot
    Rithy Panh’s film is hard-hitting yet illusive, much like the story its characters are hunting.
  59. Novocaine
    We’re used to heroes who can take a licking and keep on ticking, but Novocaine takes action-movie invulnerability to brutal comic extremes.
  60. 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.
  61. Sex
    The film’s microcosm of dysfunction is convincing for how it depicts an ongoing, even never-ending, struggle to define oneself.
  62. Until Dawn
    The film is far from original, but it successfully translates game logic to the big screen.
  63. Plainclothes
    Sexy, scary, and occasionally clumsy, Carmen Emmi’s feature-length directorial debut, Plainclothes, is an anxious and unabashed gay drama about social repression and its impacts.
  64. Love, Brooklyn
    Love, Brooklyn, especially its loftier ideas, might have benefited from more of a satirical bite.
  65. Train Dreams
    The film’s mythologizing is refreshingly measured, and it offers an appealingly earnest take on the American story.
  66. By Design
    By forcing us to identify with its largely comatose protagonist, By Design arouses resentment in order to shake us out of torpor.
  67. Bubble & Squeak
    Evan Twohy’s attempt to smuggle some sincerity into this largely absurdist tale shows that he isn’t especially committed to coherence.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Luz
    It’s in the VR world that the film best conveys its themes of modern intimacy and alienation.
  69. It's Never Over, Jeff Buckley
    The film is a resonant depiction of the gaping holes left by Jeff Buckley’s untimely death.
  70. Together
    That Together treats its body horror as just another wrinkle in the complexities of what it means to love someone else is writer-director Michael Shanks’s smartest move.
  71. Dead Lover
    The can-do spirit of Dead Lover, as evidenced by the way it couples goofy sound effects with cuts and camera movements, takes it a long way.
  72. Mercy
    More than anything, this twisty dystopian thriller commits to the jittery anxiety of doomscrolling.
  73. BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions
    This hybridized essay film embodies the complications and contradictions inherent within Black history—complete with all its erasures and variances.
  74. Caught Stealing
    The story’s boilerplate setup gets a noticeable lift thanks to Darren Aronofsky’s style and focus.
  75. Final Destination: Bloodlines
    Bloodlines finds frights and fun alike in a string of gory kills.
  76. Another Simple Favor
    The first film was divided against itself—half a typically broad Paul Feig comedy, half imitation Gone Girl—and the sequel doesn’t fare much better as a genuine thriller.
  77. Notes on Displacement
    It presents all the complex and seemingly contradictory emotions of a forced life on the road.
  78. McVeigh
    McVeigh’s ominous atmosphere is omnipresent, clinging to Timothy like a dog to a bone.
  79. An Unfinished Film
    If the frames of Lou’s previous work suggested that reality was something that could be unlocked and unfurled, An Unfinished Film’s presentation of reality as it basically was unfortunately gives the filmmaker, and the audience, little to discover.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Klezmer Project
    As with a traditional documentary, The Klezmer Project is affected by forces outside the filmmakers’ control.
  81. Spinal Tap II: The End Continues
    The careful balance of “stupid and clever” that solidified the legend of the first film is less steady in its much-belated sequel.
  82. Fantasy Life
    Amanda Peet finds layers of shading in what could have been a dull and simplistic role.
  83. Project Hail Mary
    Phil Lord and Christopher Miller put a comedic spin on Andy Weir’s more straightforward 2021 novel Project Hail Mary, recasting the author’s hopeful vision of productive communication with extraterrestrials as an unlikely buddy comedy.
  84. Invention
    Courtney Stephens’s film blends fiction and autobiography to fascinating implications.
  85. Weapons
    For every moment of electrifying horror, Whitest Kids U’ Know alum Zach Cregger cleanses the palette with equivalent comic relief.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Mastermind
    The Mastermind marks a new chapter in Kelly Reichardt’s ongoing tapestry of American life through the eyes of its eccentric outsiders, specifically capping off a trilogy about the intersection of art and commerce at differing stages of American capitalism.
  87. A Private Life
    The film’s brisk pace does partly compensate for the essential banality of the central investigation.
  88. Everything's Going to Be Great
    The human struggles at play are too dire and relatable for us to say that these people don’t deserve that level of grace, but making the audience generally sympathize with them doesn’t make spending time with them particularly pleasant either.
  89. The History of Sound
    The film movingly conjures the feeling of music’s creation of a suspended present tense.
  90. Jay Kelly
    As Noah Baumbach sells the sappiness in Jay Kelly with the same sincerity of his convictions as in his more acerbic works, the film holds together as a lightweight delight.
  91. Amrum
    Fatih Akin’s Amrum is a delicate coming-of-age parable tracking national identity and violence to their most intimate origin points during the waning days of the Third Reich.
  92. Desert of Namibia
    The film is so welded to its main character’s perspective that it, too, shies away from understanding, tragic and frustrating in equal measure.
  93. Nouvelle Vague
    There’s an apparent contradiction between the radical spontaneity that Godard chases throughout the making of Breathless and the more conventional narrative approach of Linklater’s film, though spontaneity was perhaps always incompatible with the nature of this project.
  94. Best Wishes to All
    The film is comic yet vicious and cynically bleak in its portraiture of Japan’s silent plague.
  95. Eleanor the Great
    Scarlett Johansson’s direction keeps things simple and intimate in a way that Tory Kamen’s overambitious screenplay doesn’t.
  96. The Devil Wears Prada 2
    Befitting its image-conscious milieu, The Devil Wears Prada 2 has the aspartame fake-sweetness and zero-calorie comfort of its predecessor: It’s charming enough in the moment but you’ll be hungry again half an hour later.
  97. A Useful Ghost
    Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s defense of historical memory couldn’t be more timely.
  98. The Ballad of Suzanne Césaire
    This film essay grapples with the ethical and political considerations raised in the effort to retrieve Césaire from oblivion.
  99. Frankenstein
    Guillermo del Toro reassembles a multitude of fragments, both lifted from the text and drawn from his own life, into a bloody and beautiful organ of empathy that will assuredly live on.
  100. A House of Dynamite
    Kathryn Bigelow’s nerve-shredding A House of Dynamite stares down impossible questions about an unthinkable scenario.
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