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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    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Night of the Creeps
    Night of the Creeps is the “I Love the ‘80s” of moviemaking. It has every element and cliché ever put into a film made in the greatest decade.
  2. Armand
    By the time we’re watching whole conversations be drowned out by noise of pounding rain, the abstract tendencies of Armand begin to feel like an act of unintentional self-sabotage
  3. Ted
    Seth MacFarlane's comedic modus operandi is to shock with outrageousness and pander with TV and movie citations via one non sequitur after another, a strategy that leads to a few laughs but nothing approaching lasting humor.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Buffalo Girls
    Todd Kellstein doesn't allow you to entirely indulge convenient (though understandable and perhaps irresistible) armchair outrage.
  5. Bad Turn Worse
    A reminder that crime movies pointedly inspired by other, better genre films can still be enjoyable, if they wear their influences lightly and cleverly connect them to something tangibly human.
  6. Visitors
    Godfrey Reggio's symphony of pristine 4K images doesn't add up to one grand epiphany, but an intermittent cluster of small ones.
  7. Not Okay
    Not Okay doesn’t make any points that, now over a decade into the ubiquity of social media, aren’t painfully obvious.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Beautiful Boy
    This complex emotional texture no doubt owes a lot to Bello's stunning performance, which works by screwing with the familiar conventions of reaction shots; she goes cold when we expect her to freak out and explodes when we expect her to be silent.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Woman in Black
    In the end, The Woman in Black displays a higher regard for the material makeup of gruesome-looking Victorian dolls than it does for the psychological turmoil of its characters, making one wish that some of the money it budgeted for cranes and fog machines had been offered to a script doctor.
  10. The Bookshop
    The Bookshop is steadfast in avoiding drama at all costs.
  11. Goodbye to All That
    If Junebug focused on quieter moments of extended family dynamics, with its city-meets-country clashes delving into resonant, region-specific sensibilities, Angus MacLachlan never goes beyond signpost sentiment.
  12. My Scientology Movie
    The only element that significantly differentiates this documentary from its peers is Louis Theroux's good-natured cheekiness.
  13. Wakefield
    Writer-director Robin Swicord's film seems content to merely carry out its absurdist premise until the bitter end.
  14. 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.
  15. Ten Thousand Saints
    Even when tragedy strikes early on, the revelation is just another "growing up is hard" dot on the grid.
  16. The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne
    Even at 74 minutes, the documentary comes to feel arduous in its recycling of the same points and imagery, the filmmaking as plodding as its subject is polished.
  17. Ip Man 4: The Finale
    The film is overstuffed with characters and subplots that ultimately have little to do with Ip Man and his legacy.
  18. The Five-Year Engagement
    The film proves that neither gross-out gags nor pseudo-sophisticated Woody Allenisms are necessary to make a smart, funny comedy.
  19. Free Guy
    There’s so much discernible IP baked into Shawn Levy’s film to make its calls for artistic ingenuity feel hypocritical at best.
  20. The Salt of Tears
    Philippe Garrel illustrates the absurdity behind the myth of the complementary couple with the same cynicism that permeates his previous work but none of the humor or wit.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 23, 2020
  21. About Last Night
    Kevin Hart turns an essentially crude wingman into the conscience of the film's torturous, nettled discourse on romance.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    Empire of the Sun
    While screenwriter Tom Stoppard supplies a literate script, it’s Spielberg’s peerless command of film technique that drives the film, with the director crafting a number of sequences that function as impressive examples of pure visual storytelling.
  23. Let the Corpses Tan
    Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani get so lost in their catalogue of fetishes that they lose grasp of the snap and tension that drive even a mediocre heist narrative.
  24. Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
    Of all the ’70s road movies, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot may be the only one in which the characters find themselves.
  25. The Mummy
    The Mummy is one of Hammer’s classics, cleverly fusing the human pathos of the original Universal film with the creature-centric physicality of the sequels the latter inevitably yielded.
  26. Una
    The film gives Una a little more agency, but director Benedict Andrews often invalidates such empowerment.
  27. Jonathan
    The dichotomy represented by Jonathan and John is too clean for the film's exploration of a divided psyche to ever feel particularly complex.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Fright Night
    What makes Fright Night such a hoot to this day, on top of the great performances, is the deft blending of humor and suspense that Holland manages to build in his story.
  29. Match
    Patrick Stewart's performance is practically an argument for Belber to jettison everything else and take the actor on the road as a one-man spoken-word act.
  30. Supporting Characters
    Glides from a mildly off-putting opening across several scenes that waver between sitcom superficiality and sudden, unexpected gusts of feeling, ultimately ending on a note of perfectly judged emotional ambivalence.
  31. 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.
  32. Lynch/Oz
    Alexandre O. Philippe’s essay film is both dead-serious about its subjects and playfully exploratory.
  33. The Mafia Only Kills in Summer
    Individual politicians, detectives, and mafiosi come and go so quickly that the audience doesn't have enough time to become emotionally invested in their lives and deaths.
  34. Labyrinth of Lies
    It only scratches the surface of the mass psychological wounds and trauma that the trials unleashed on the Germany psyche.
  35. Little Girl (La Pivellina)
    The film lacks the immediacy of the Dardenne brothers' pictures, the electrifying sense that anything might happen, while also avoiding their penchant for redemptive resolutions.
  36. The Help
    High school creative-writing-class ironies of all kinds abound in The Help.
  37. Lu Over the Wall
    Throughout, director Masaaki Yuasa’s imagination runs so wild that it becomes impossible to resist.
  38. Charm City Kings
    The film looks for an emotional payoff by continually upping the stakes of its main character’s self-destructive short-term thinking.
  39. Annabelle: Creation
    Like Lights out, David F. Sandberg's previous film, Annabelle: Creation is a haunted-house horror story that plays on our primeval fear of the dark.
  40. Black Box
    The film ruminates on how virtuality infiltrates the deepest regions of our subconscious to reprogram the inner workings of the self.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Daddio
    The film is as tedious and predictable as its traffic-clogged Long Island Expressway setting.
  42. The Names of Love
    Chockfull of ideas in a way that's both scattershot and more than a little exciting.
  43. Dark Star: HR Giger's World
    It weaves through past and present, memories and reality, analysis and history, like a mercurial mind reminiscing seemingly at random.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Dragnet
    Dragnet winks at its source material often, but besides a committed lead performance by Dan Aykroyd and the return of Webb’s partner, Harry Morgan, little remains of the original show. This ain’t your grandmother’s Dragnet; it’s your deranged drunk uncle’s Dragnet.
  45. Ideal Home
    The broad strokes of the performances make the film's occasional lurches into sentimentality seem especially jarring.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Köln 75
    Unfortunately, for a film mainly about an assertive young woman making her way in a culture ruled by men, Köln 75 becomes far more compelling after Jarrett finally makes his entrance.
  47. Joshy
    The film feels most real, even at its most absurd, when focused on the idea of closure as a kind of fantasy.
  48. Ramen Shop
    Its drawn-out descriptions of culinary traditions and practices are enticing enough, but the same can’t be said about the characterizations.
  49. The King
    If only the film made more of the curious tension between Timothée Chalamet’s Henry and Robert Pattinson’s dauphin.
  50. A Glitch in the Matrix
    Rodney Ascher is a sly master of mining potentially jokey or gimmicky subjects for the alienation they primordially express.
  51. 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.
  52. Abigail
    While there’s plenty to be said about Abigail’s impressively over-the-top scarlet mean streak, the hellride that the filmmakers take us on is all the more effective for the character groundwork laid prior.
  53. Destroyer
    The filmmakers treat their material sternly and humorlessly, as if there's some great moral lesson to be imparted from Erin's inexhaustible blotto jerkiness.
  54. The Last Mountain
    Haney's movie is not great cinema, nor was meant to be, but as an introduction to one of the myriad dangers threatening our earth, it serves its cause well enough. And that, after all, is the whole point.
  55. Dragon
    Peter Ho-Sun Chan and Deonnie Yen Chan are too resourceful to let things remain dull for long.
  56. Sleight
    Sleight never shows much interest in exploring how blackness can inform its genre's tropes.
  57. On Chesil Beach
    The film’s imaginative daring springs from its willingness to render repression sexy, even if it will prove to be the seed of a young couple’s dissolution.
  58. All the Light in the Sky
    In Joe Swanberg's disaffected little film, the drama is never explicit, or even fully conscious.
  59. Things Will Be Different
    In many ways, the film feels like a micro-budget rendition of Tenet, as our heroes discover that they’ve been caught in a “vice-grip” between past and future that functions much like that film’s famous “temporal pincer.”
  60. Grafted
    Grafted’s biggest problem is that it loses all momentum once the face-swapping kicks into motion, meandering along with no real sense of rising danger or ensuing consequence as the baton is passed from one victim to the next.
  61. The Rental
    Dave Franco has a mighty command of silence as a measurement of emotional aftershock.
  62. Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale
    There's something to be said about a two-and-a-half-hour war epic that manages to make each of its countless decapitation scenes feel earned, even called for, in the moment.
  63. Seven Veils
    The film’s pleasures are ultimately more textural and academic than those of Tár.
  64. Wish You Were Here
    From the opening montage alone, it's clear that Australian director Kieran Darcy-Smith plans to play his cards close to the vest in this maddeningly underwritten thriller/domestic-drama hybrid.
  65. Cuckoo
    One may wish that the absurdity of the conceit had been matched by a bit more irreverence in the script and audacity in the imagery.
  66. The Monkey
    The mayhem that the monkey doles out makes The Monkey closer in spirit to Evil Dead than Final Destination, as the film is less a Rube Goldberg contraption of overdesigned chaos than it is a Looney Tunes-esque spectacle of quick and dirty violence that hits like a punchline.
  67. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    The film is home to some unique redeeming factors, but it panders to viewers by diluting its lesson, which teaches that some comfort zones can only be truly abandoned on the other side of the world.
  68. The Bad Batch
    Ana Lily Amirpour has learned a few lessons from QT about the disreputable joys of blending kitsch and ultraviolence.
  69. Bad Milo!
    It's fair to say that a filmmaker is thinking outside of the box when he or she stages a scene in which an ambulatory hemorrhoid tears a guy's cock off with its teeth and swallows it.
  70. Never Goin' Back
    Writer-director Augustine Frizzell's film is funny and surprisingly tender, if at times frustratingly uneven.
  71. Rubble Kings
    It fails to go deep enough, suggesting an appetizer offered as an opening to an ultimately unserved meal.
  72. On the Map
    It captures how sports can bring wholly disparate people together to accomplish feats that change the destiny of nations.
  73. I Touched All Your Stuff
    A documentary whatsit acutely aware of the inherent performance people put into social discourse to maintain appearances.
  74. Lamb
    Ross Partridge seems flatly fascinated by Lamb’s pathology without trying to understand its formation from environmental factors.
  75. Lucy
    Vulgar auteurist Luc Besson finally commits wholeheartedly to his decades-long preoccupation with waifish young women discovering their inner Shiva, spinning the concept out to its most delirious possible extremes.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Major League
    Comedy is the lasting virtue here—and more specifically what veteran screenwriter Ward (The Sting, Sleepless in Seattle) got out of a solid comic framework to make Major League continue to work beyond its odd collection of characters and a very specific setting.
  77. Hello I Must Be Going
    Thanks to Melanie Lynskey's performance, the movie feels like a believably worked-out, sympathetically presented study in thirtysomething uncertainty.
  78. Apostle
    The film's victims are simply pawns in a super-gory bacchanal, which is aesthetically striking but emotionally dull.
  79. Touched With Fire
    The film is a thinly dramatized series of arguments against, then ultimately in favor of the medication of bipolar disorder.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    We Are the Flesh
    The film establishes a hypnotic rhythm through razor-stropped editing and a reverberant sound design that later scenes will disrupt with alarming impunity.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Nuit #1
    It works--quite successfully, in places--as a warming tonic against this emotional nippiness of the cinema of Canadian coldness.
  82. Eric Larue
    While the film features a strong performance from Judy Greer, it’s essentially a patchwork of broad strokes that rarely feel like they’re bringing its world to credible life.
  83. 2 Days in New York
    It keeps the entrances, exits, and misunderstandings rolling while rooting the action in emotions and character traits that are only slightly exaggerated for comic effect.
  84. Words on Bathroom Walls
    The film reeks of the extremely idealistic notions of young love that plague many a YA adaptation.
  85. Trollhunter
    Injecting some down time to intimate a vast internal life is one thing, but needlessly approximating patches of wasted time is another, and Trollhunter's dully drawn characters suggest that the latter is closer to what André Øvredal came up with.
  86. How to Train Your Dragon
    As heartwarming as this story remains at its core, it’s hard to shake that you already know how it will play out.
  87. Big Miracle
    Any goodwill it boasts is terminally suppressed, buried beneath a layer of bullshit as thick as blubber.
  88. Buried Prayers
    Steven Meyer's documentary treads a middle ground between illumination and cheap waterworks.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 11, 2012
  89. A Birder's Guide to Everything
    The film exhibits strong character interplay and resides in an unconventional milieu, in effect turning rote material into something that feels decidedly eccentric.
  90. The Tower
    As the psychology of the characters hardly connects with their distinctive milieu, the film merely suggests a conventional family drama littered with empty pot-shots at governmental authority.
  91. Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet
    A consummate sampler platter of the bounty of state-of-the-art animation currently available as alternatives established major-studio house styles.
  92. Braven
    Lin Oeding’s action thriller thrives on both the beauty of its natural, snowbound surroundings and the brutal instincts of man.
  93. This Is Our Land
    Throughout the film, Lucas Belvaux sidelines the emotional textures that might complicate all his sermonizing.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Year of Spectacular Men
    The film collapses on the crutch of hackneyed narration and constant music cues that formally undermine the ripe banter between Madelyn Deutch and her male co-stars.
  95. The Moneychanger
    It’s apparent that Veiroj disdains no one so much as Humberto, but the film makes vanishingly little of the man’s undoubtedly twisted psyche.
  96. We Bury the Dead
    There’s a thoughtful zombie tale with its own distinctive personality lurking somewhere within We Bury the Dead, but it’s overridden by the film’s more generic elements, and that identity ultimately gets lost among the horde.
  97. Grand Piano
    Eugenio Mira thrills in watching his main character attempt to worm his way out of a most unusual hostage situation, synching his indulgences of style to the pianist's wily physical maneuvering.
  98. Copshop
    With its pulpy thrills, hyperbolic dialogue, charismatic scumbags, and a score heavy in electronic effects and percussion, the film effortlessly coasts on a gnarly old-school vibe.
  99. The Boxtrolls
    The flippancy toward the story's thematic concerns and character construction suggests that the film, like the boxtrolls' myriad gadgets and inventions, was largely built from used parts.
  100. Roadie
    A slice of slight character-driven conventionality in which directorial sensitivity and drama rooted in tense conversations and intermittent blow-ups prove incapable of imparting depth to a tale that plays like a series of simplistic stock gestures.
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