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. When You Finish Saving the World
    Jesse Eisenberg’s satire hits its targets dead on, but he flattens his mother-and-son narcissists to the point of caricature.
  2. Scream VI
    It simply picks up the baton from the previous film, relying on a series of increasingly nasty, and at times exciting, kills to thrill audiences, while leaving everything in between to feel as fake as its vision of the Big Apple.
  3. At Any Price
    Alternates between business-world morality play, family drama, and portrait of a local community without ever comfortably integrating these disparate elements into his messy stew.
  4. The Bourne Legacy
    One successful set piece in 135 minutes, and it involves very little running, no parkour, and no genetically enhanced superheroes from clandestine government projects.
  5. Elysium
    A cheekily gruesome and genuinely urgent entertainment, Blomkamp's latest nevertheless can't help but beg the question: Where's Snake Plissken when you need him?
  6. The Lair of the White Worm
    Cheap effects and gratuitous displays of nudity only heighten the film’s delirious demeanor.
  7. Divinity
    The story’s attempt at an excoriation of spectacle and empty pleasure comes off as little more than a reluctant swipe.
  8. Cyrano, My Love
    The film is imbued with an airless blend of buoyant comedy and soap-operatic backstage drama that recalls Shakespeare in Love.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Last Gladiators
    Makes room for tender moments of reflection from a guy who, against impossible odds, still managed some victories, the biggest of which may be that he's still standing.
  10. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark
    Once it gets past what feels like submission to genre demands, the drama reaffirms its focus on the central themes.
  11. The Wolverine
    This may be the year's best superhero movie because, for a sufficient amount of time, it doesn't feel like a superhero movie at all.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Sicario: Day of the Soldado
    Day of the Soldado's strained credulity in the last act has an undercurrent of kooky exhilaration, as the plot takes leaps that feel as reckless as they are refreshing in such a doleful film of terminal prognoses.
  13. Saltburn
    Be it sexuality, gender, class, age, or race, there’s scarcely a hot-button issue of identity that Emerald Fennell won’t invoke to amplify the stakes of an obvious metaphor.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    Cheery and happily empty-headed, the present-day subplot adds little but sentiment to a film shot through with cliché characters, a predictable plot, and undisguised reverence.
  15. Brain Damage
    This gnarly gem of 1980s-era punk horror still looks and sounds a little rough, but the film and the supplements justify the plunge.
  16. 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.
  17. Shooting the Mafia
    Kim Longinotto is so eager to celebrate her hero that she also glides past thornier portions of Letizia Battaglia’s life.
  18. Murph: The Protector
    One wonders if the filmmakers ever asked themselves who their film was intended for, or if it was at least a consciously self-serving effort from the outset.
  19. Past Life
    Its improbable story gives breath to the burden of fate on those living with a past unreconciled.
  20. Footnotes
    The ending cheapens its main character and weakens the film's firm commitment to the importance of workplace organizing.
  21. Kingsman: The Secret Service
    It's tructured in familiar, safe terms, plays for very low stakes, and appeals to no one so much as white, male teenagers with chips on their shoulders.
  22. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    Birds of Prey feels at times less like its own story and more like a trailer for what’s coming next.
  23. Otelo Burning
    The film grows increasingly tiresome the more it flirts with melodrama, unraveling themes of jealousy, regret, and ambition in broad strokes.
  24. Nightmare Cinema
    The anthology justifies Mick Garris’s passion for horror, though he ironically proves to be one of his project’s liabilities.
  25. Kevin Hart: What Now?
    At times throughout this concert film, Kevin Hart’s brash honesty about himself can feel liberating.
  26. Watermelon Man
    Gradually, Van Peebles turns stereotypical images of postwar bourgeois prosperity against themselves, leading to a denouement that feels oddly empowering in its total alienation from the status quo.
  27. The Killer
    This remake is absent the far richer character development that made the original as much a melodrama as a shoot-’em-up.
  28. Saturday Night
    There’s a certain pleasure in basking in the anarchic behavior of the SNL cast as depicted in Saturday Night, but it’s rendered hollow by the film’s often grating mythologizing of them, which includes trying to turn the 90 minutes before the first episode into a frenetic comedy of Safdie-esque proportions.
  29. The Beast Must Die
    When The Beast Must Die is ripping off The Most Dangerous Game, it’s an amusing, if minor, genre offering.
  30. The Light Between Oceans
    Derek Cianfrance's film is a beautifully sustained study in adult themes of emotional crisis.
  31. Bad Hair
    The film has an exciting, lived-in quality that elevates what are otherwise some markedly unsteady attempts at horror.
  32. The Man Who Invented Christmas
    Since “humbug” is already spoken for by Ebenezer Scrooge, “opportunistic” would be the most apt word for The Man Who Invented Christmas.
  33. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
    While Roger Ebert’s screenplay contains overt jabs at Hollywood’s culture of exploitation, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls cannot be called anything but sincere regarding its penchant for buxom female anatomy.
  34. Good Neighbors
    Good Neighbors basically runs on the assumption that Montreal is the last place you would ever want to live.
  35. Like Me
    Like Me is exhilarating because of Robert Mockler’s willingness to deviate from his satire so as to surprise himself with seemingly spontaneous emotional textures and tangents.
  36. The Grab
    The Grab makes a clear choice to conclude not just with doomsaying, but with a call to action and a look at the things that can still be done to avert a global crisis.
  37. Tab Hunter Confidential
    The film lacks perspective beyond a rather limited preoccupation with the details of Hunter's personal life.
  38. Dragged Across Concrete
    With his latest, S. Craig Zahler doubles down on the best and worst elements of the pulp film.
  39. The Lost City
    The Lost City is proof that star power and chemistry can only take a film with a mediocre script so far.
  40. What We Become
    When Bo Mikkelsen springs his traditional yet cathartic climax, it's earned because the violence matters truly as violation.
  41. Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
    The testimony we hear from suspects' neighbors and similarly curious media underlings feels muted, like a halfhearted repetition.
  42. The Commune
    The Thomas Vinterberg film's sentimentality is suspect, laced with an intriguing but vague strain of bitterness.
  43. Cleopatra
    Cleopatra is, disappointingly, neither a visionary masterpiece nor a fascinating catastrophe, but something altogether more banal: an unusually intimate epic that falls very flat.
  44. SPECTRE
    All of its revisionism centrally incorporates the history of the franchise, and the film both excels and suffers for frequently recalling its forbears.
  45. Headshot
    This "Buddhist film noir," as writer-director Pen-ek Ratanaruang calls it, is surprisingly slow-moving and soulful for a film full of double-crosses and cold-blooded killing.
  46. The Invisibles
    The film doesn’t bring to light otherwise unexplored aspects of the experience or memory of persecution and genocide.
  47. Transamazonia
    Plunging headlong into the murk of exploitative missionary work and environmentally destructive capitalism, Transamazonia is a film with undeniable import and sociopolitical urgency, which its muddled narrative can’t completely dampen.
  48. Ghostbusters
    When it's good, this new Ghostbusters is funny, driven, sometimes even a bit scary.
  49. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness
    At its finest, this psychedelic, horror-strewn romp’s artistry perfectly reflects the intensity of Strange navigating endless alternate realms.
  50. From Beyond
    The functional plot and Gordon’s non-flashy directorial style aren’t what make From Beyond such a memorable cult item; as with Re-Animator, it’s more the audacity of staging elaborate sequences that mix up steamy sexual proclivities and monster madness.
  51. Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog
    The exquisite live-action Quill: The Life of a Guide Dog may be the family film of the year.
  52. Eisenstein in Guanajuato
    What comes through clearly by the end of the film is the act of one artist's eccentric generosity breathing new awareness into the life of another.
  53. Our Idiot Brother
    Shat makes Our Idiot Brother work is the endless appeal of watching Rudd's lovable idiot run roughshod over the sophisticated New York mini-universe while winning the confidence and admiration of everyone around him.
  54. +1
    It ambitiously parodies and mourns the implications of the one coherent message that mass media manages to convey to all of its consumers in all its endlessly proliferating, ever-shifting permutations.
  55. Where Do We Go Now?
    Nadine Labaki's film awkwardly hybridizes somber politizized drama with regional humor in the style of "Waking Ned Devine" and "Calendar Girls."
  56. See How They Run
    The film breaks little new ground but is at least a notable improvement on, well, The Mousetrap.
  57. Kill the Messenger
    The film devolves quickly into a pedestrian character study that basks in Gary Webb's public shaming and victimization, losing sight of the bravery and probing talent that characterized his writing.
  58. Good Ol' Freda
    The documentary will prove fascinating only to the die-hard fans that Freda Kelly spent years writing to, though in this case that's no small number of people.
  59. Jeff Who Lives at Home
    For the most part, this is a boys-will-be-boys movie that excuses everything its pair of protags do in the name of some sort of cosmic order.
  60. Breathe In
    Seemingly high-brow because it's so low-key, but underneath that veneer is an inert, thinly plotted melodrama premised on trite characterizations that would be offensive if they weren't so absurd.
  61. Actor Martinez
    Mike Ott and Nathan Silver's film has a ghostly, tremulous quality that eats under the skin.
  62. Saludos Amigos
    Saludos Amigos and its sequel (or, more accurately, expansion), The Three Caballeros, had a shelf life significantly shorter than that of your standard MRE. Together, they kicked off nearly a decade’s worth of anthology-based wastes of time and resources that all but derailed Disney’s manifest destiny to rewrite children’s dreams in the corporation’s own latently art deco, actively anti-twat image until Cinderella put the needle back on the record.
  63. The Do-Deca-Pentathlon
    In Jay and Mark Duplass's film, the fragile middle-aged male ego is indulged, massaged, and, finally, critiqued.
  64. Wolfs
    The witty repartee between Clooney and Pitt feels like the only thing holding the film together.
  65. The Kill Team
    Despite glimpses of a larger critique of the American project in Afghanistan, it lets us escape from the horrors of war before it finishes demolishing the illusion of a clean one.
  66. Burn Country
    For a film that warns against believing in a mirage, Burn Country seems all too comfortable perpetuating one.
  67. Trumbo
    Like Jay Roach's Game Change and Recount, the film's patina of relative apoliticism masks (or enables) its blandness of inquiry.
  68. The Line
    The Line isn’t without its moments of genuine beauty, but it’s difficult to shake that its distinct lack of a clear story hasn’t given enough space to the characters.
  69. Human Factors
    Despite the mystery of the home invasion becoming increasingly tangential, Human Factors remains a compelling puzzle-box.
  70. The Many Saints of Newark
    The juxtapositions between backroom politicking, intimate family drama, and the occasional lurches into action often give the impression of a TV season’s worth of content crammed into two hours.
  71. Oranges and Sunshine
    The film is so careful to avoid the luridness that would seem inevitably to accompany an excavation of child kidnapping, forced labor, and rape, that the result is a plodding, overly tasteful procedural that holds up its hero as an incorruptible embodiment of goodness.
  72. The Last Five Years
    The film mostly skirts any connection to musical theater as though it were faintly embarrassed.
  73. Any Day Now
    Its most redeeming quality is that it isn't so quick to neuter its queer characters into a package-friendly "gay couple" aesthetic a la Modern Family.
  74. The Exception
    David Leveaux's film cannily incorporates elements of spycraft and sheer trash into a familiar formula.
  75. Mary Queen of Scots
    As effective as director Josie Rourke is at exposing the emotional and physical toll of reigning as queen when exploring Mary and Elizabeth's relationship, her portrait of an endless string of betrayals ends up as simply faceless and impersonal.
  76. Fightville
    Fightville's most worthwhile material tends to lie in the space between what its subjects say and what we know to be true.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Caroline and Jackie
    Because the whole thing feels so amateurishly improvised, Caroline and Jackie doesn't so much enter into Michael Haneke territory as slip backward, over a banana peel, into some bad-faith parody of the same.
  78. Allied
    In the film, Robert Zemeckis brings to bear his pop-epic scope in what's otherwise a claustrophobic story.
  79. (Dis)Honesty: The Truth About Lies
    Yael Melamede doesn't dwell on each of her subjects' stories beyond the condensed version that's related on screen.
  80. Streit's: Matzo and the American Dream
    Michael Levine provides a history without a real sense of individuated struggle or even singular personage.
  81. Dredd
    The story places a premium on delivering its disreputable sex-and-violence goods with a minimum of fuss or pretension.
  82. The Ghosts in Our Machine
    Jo-Anne McArthur's cause draws sharp comparisons with the never-mentioned PETA, a seemingly insignificant omission that discloses a lingering problem of willful insularity.
  83. Medusa Deluxe
    Few, if any, single-shot movies ever justify the conceit. In fact, most of them do their material a disservice through the distraction that emerges naturally from the trickery.
  84. Scream
    It’s at a certain point toward the finale that this Scream becomes almost as drearily repetitious as the reboot culture that it skewers.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    C.O.G.
    As an adaptation of Davis Sedaris's short essay from his acclaimed 1997 compilation, Naked, it's a letdown, as it doesn't exude the pop of the author's trademark humor.
  86. American Teacher
    The movie is a curious blend of teacher-appreciation mandate and recruitment video, though it's not always clear at whom the narration's gravely spoken factoids are directed.
  87. Lightyear
    The film is a slickly produced but soulless spectacle whose jokey banter and space-opera action drowns out the story’s emotional beats.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Men on the Bridge
    If director Asli Özge has said something about modern-day Istanbul, she's done it in fairly broad strokes that may be too far apart for the sake of a discernible narrative.
  89. Good Boys
    Gene Stupnitsky’s Good Boys is Big Mouth for those who prefer ribald humor about tweenage sexuality in live action, though it lacks the Netflix show’s frankness and authenticity.
  90. Ne Me Quitte Pas
    The entirety of the film seems increasingly constructed around ill-begotten attempts at dark humor.
  91. Motherless Brooklyn
    Motherless Brooklyn feels altogether too tidy, a film that revives many of the touchstones of noir, but never that throbbing unease that courses through the classics of the genre.
  92. The Whale
    With The Whale, Darren Aronofsky brings a hollow sense of dignity to his schematic brand of cinematic misery porn.
  93. Warm Bodies
    It flouts convention in a number of ways in service of its genre-mash-up agenda while still contributing something original to the tradition of the zombie film.
  94. Crawl
    The film is more straight-faced than Alexandre Aja’s prior work, trading absurd kills for narrow escapes from gaping alligator jaws.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Matthias & Maxime
    Xavier Dolan’s characters are of such broad definition that it’s impossible to regard them as anything other than aesthetic objects.
  96. McFarland USA
    If there's a general air of emotional authenticity woven throughout all this garden-variety, faith-in-family hokum, it's in the racing scenes.
  97. Bride Flight
    It's all very tastefully handled by Ben Sombogaart, shot in plenty of staid compositions whose denuded color scheme suggests a historical remove, but it rarely generates any heat, even during a pair of graphic, but not particularly erotic sex scenes.
  98. Stillwater
    Stillwater gives itself over to drastic plot twists that derail what was already a film over-stuffed with narrative incident and ideas.
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