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. Magical Universe
    To varying degrees of success, it attempts to prominently display Al Carbee's creations, yet keeps undermining his art in favor of investigating his skewed relationship to everyday realities.
  2. The Nowhere Inn
    The film is elevated by funny, cleverly staged sequences, but it too often hammers the notion that fame destroys authenticity.
  3. A Perfect Day
    The film finally seems conspicuously at odds with itself, neither funny nor impassioned enough to pass as an accomplished vision of transnational welfare.
  4. Mr. Nice
    Writer-director Bernard Rose effectively conjoures an atompshere of poetic stoned-1960s British rebellion, a feeling of woozy, intoxicating possibility that will not-so-eventually be squashed.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Christopher Robin
    Unlike the red balloon that Winnie the Pooh follows through much of the running time, Marc Forster's film lacks lightness.
  6. Day of the Dead
    Any real zombie fan knows that political parable and decomposing cannibal corpse gore go together like peanut butter and jelly, but Day of the Dead found the subgenre’s reigning master and poet-in-residence mismanaging the proper ratios a bit.
  7. Wonder Woman 1984
    The film shows a preference for forgiveness over vengeance, which feels like an okay way to end this particular year.
  8. Ophelia
    Transforming Ophelia’s abuser into a helpful co-conspirator hardly seems like the most daring feminist reading of Hamlet.
  9. The Heat
    With the film, Melissa McCarthy definitively cements her status as a legitimate comic talent, leaving her co-star stumbling behind in her wake.
  10. Bad Times at the El Royale
    The film begins as a cheeky retro chamber drama before morphing into an often expectation-busting blend of noir and pitch-black comedy.
  11. The Choral
    This is a historical drama with a handsome enough period setting and a couple of pleasant musical moments but whose roteness keeps it from resonating.
  12. Tomorrowland
    In Brad Bird's film, the way forward is backward, on a path that stumbles into misplaced nostalgia and dicey humanism.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Point Break
    In terms of Hollywood history, Bigelow's film is the perfect document of its time.
  14. Jeannette: The Childhood of Joan of Arc
    It's true that the disorientation produced in the collision of Igorrr's frenetic style-mashing and Dumont's unadorned long-take aesthetic ensures that the film feels remarkably distinct from prior cinematic adaptations of Joan of Arc's life, but it's also hard not to wonder how this particular story might have played without the farfetched musical conceit grafted atop it.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Love Is All You Need
    At times it seems as if Susanne Bier set out to create some kind of absurdist comedy, but lost her nerve somewhere along the way.
  16. Three Thousand Years of Longing
    George Miller’s film is a passionate exploration of how image-making is inextricable from storytelling.
  17. Darling
    The film's aesthetic is striking, but feels almost intangibly derivative, most obviously suggesting an austere cover of Repulsion.
  18. Dark Night
    Tim Sutton's film often surprises on the micro level, but its broader execution gives reason for pause.
  19. Over the Moon
    At its most beguiling, director Glen Keane’s animated film Over the Moon mixes the unbridled free-association of playtime with an undercurrent of barbed satire.
  20. The Last Sentence
    Though ambitiously busy, the film is also self-sabotaging and stagnant, showcasing its main character's struggles without interpreting them into a cohesive thesis.
  21. Sea Fever
    Writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s film is undone by earnestness.
  22. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    A cursory history lesson with no interest in probing the deeper or more complex implications of Mandela's positions and their relationship to his country's shifting landscape.
  23. Saw X
    The film mostly makes you wish that a Saw film would finally let Amanda be the one that audiences worship.
  24. The Other Half
    The film's emotional resonance is consistently stifled by excessively gloomy aesthetic and stylistic tics.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Citadel
    Citadel is stripped down and no-nonsense, fixating on Tommy's emotional and psychological struggles with an intensity that's harrowing.
  26. Goosebumps
    Some of the wittier one-liners and more affecting emotional moments feel undermined by the frenzy of chaotic excess.
  27. An Officer and a Spy
    The sum of its aesthetics, as in The Pianist, feels at once like a gritty window into history as it was and a haunting amber-trapped essence of the feeling of an age.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Den of Thieves 2: Pantera
    Pantera feels far more anonymous, sleeker and less outlandish, than its predecessor.
  29. Rules Don't Apply
    Warren Beatty's portrayal of Howard Hughes has the overly polished feel of an anecdote that's been told too often.
  30. Happy, Happy
    The filmmaker looks to American modes of visual and aural expression to give Happy, Happy its soul, but all her fetish accomplishes is depersonalizing her story, making a sitcom of her character's lives.
  31. Sidewalls
    Animation, motion graphics, and slow motion all pop up at some point, further splintering Sidewalls into a pandering pastiche of better films.
  32. RA. One
    But all the charm in the world wouldn't make Ra.One's sanctimoniousness seem any more genuine.
  33. The Other F Word
    Covered in tattoos and clinging to wisps of their outsider status, the men profiled here seem assured of the novelty of their dilemma, as if they were the first generation to settle into a middle-class existence after a youth spent on the fringes.
  34. Between Two Worlds
    Even when the film becomes something like a spy thriller, it never loses sight of its political themes.
  35. Rolling Papers
    It neither glorifies nor castigates pot usage, letting consumers speak for themselves without the intrusion of an omnipresent voice.
  36. Mrs. Hyde
    Although the film never allows itself to be quite so freewheeling as Bozon’s earlier work, and pales as a result, one of its pleasures is how giddily it suggests its characters finding release from the bureaucratic rigmarole in minor though often inane ways.
  37. Kumaré
    Kumaré has a premise that could've been the launching point for one of Sascha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles's satirical outrages.
  38. Benny's Video (1992)
    Benny’s Video is a smug, contemptuous, passive-aggressive attack on the dehumanizing effects of media, without even the common decency to offer shrill sensationalism to punch up its subsequently feckless, reactionary, pomo assertions.
  39. They Came Together
    What results is chaotic but ultimately focused, bound by an intense devotion to disassembling genre and narrative standards.
  40. Bad Tales
    Narration, as the film reminds us, isn’t only a diversion but a form of authority, of power, and when authority is least conspicuous, it’s often at its most insidious.
  41. Isn't It Romantic
    As the film becomes increasingly reliant on predictable narrative tropes, it evolves into the very thing it set out to parody.
  42. Norman
    Alternately maudlin and snarky, Norman just doesn't risk enough, and can be consigned to the status of what the school drama geek would call "some contemporary, obscure, teen-angst thing."
  43. The Iceman
    Michael Shannon has no interior to play with, since the film seems intent on ridding Richie of any emotion other than love for his family, and also no catharsis to build toward.
  44. The Aeronauts
    As a suspense film, it’s so sluggishly structured that it borders on the avant-garde.
  45. A Magnificent Life
    Sylvain Chomet provides only a scant sense of Marcel Pagnol’s creative inklings, such as the ideas and themes that fuel the films that he fights so vehemently to make.
  46. Little Joe
    Jessica Hausner confidently expresses a thorny and disturbing theme, though perhaps with too much confidence.
  47. Under the Silver Lake
    Even after the film (quite entertainingly) explains itself, it never feels like more than a howl of frustration and cynicism.
  48. Went Up the Hill
    Samuel Van Grinsven’s Went Up the Hill is characterized by a starkly precise aesthetic and withholding approach to the ghost story.
  49. The Sisterhood of Night
    The film is so unusually moving and penetrating because it refuses to cloud its emotions in distancing irony, anger, or nihilism.
  50. Dracula
    As Dracula wears on, its lack of focus starts to grate, while Radu Jude’s deployment of profane, disreputable dialogue and imagery starts to resemble a stylistic tic more than a genuine affront to his audience’s sensibilities.
  51. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw
    The film’s action is the most extreme encapsulation yet of Dwayne Johnson’s bombastic blockbuster work.
  52. Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted
    In spite of its lazy, cookie-cutter screenplay, simple narrative mechanics are only dutifully observed to the extent that they step aside to make way for numerous flights of madness.
  53. Electrick Children
    Rebecca Thomas's debut feature is a sensible and humane exploration of youthful curiosity.
  54. Pilgrimage
    The film remains too uncompromisingly black and white as a character study and a story of the conflicts of faith.
  55. Gifted
    The grace notes are crowded out by the screenplay’s plot machinations and emotional manipulations.
  56. Lone Survivor
    Like his prior "The Kingdom," Peter Berg's film pretends to dabble in a frothy moral ambiguity, swiftly betraying its true aims with trigger-happy jingoism.
  57. Smallfoot
    There’s something undeniably ballsy about a children’s film that’s so insistent about pushing young viewers to think bigger, to be open to new ideas and question culturally coded notions of good and evil.
  58. Price of Gold
    While the real-time aesthetic approach sporadically enthralls, it also reveals the narrow worldview that burdens the film.
  59. House of Gucci
    Ridley Scott’s tale of greed and revenge practically begs for melodramatic excess.
  60. Being the Ricardos
    Like all Aaron Sorkin-penned characters, this film’s version of Lucille Ball is a mouthpiece for his brand of smarmy, know-it-all sarcasm.
  61. Bad Moms
    The end-credits sequence shows up the rest of the film as the broad and incoherent live-action cartoon that it is.
  62. Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again
    It boasts such confident performances and choreography that it feels as much like a final draft of the 2008 film as a continuation of it.
  63. Life of Crime
    Down to its too-crisp rubber Nixon masks, Daniel Schechter's film revels in obnoxiously self-aware period detail.
  64. Thin Ice
    The icy fatalism of film noir is turned to slush by Thin Ice, a crime saga that reduces its chosen genre to a series of atonal, old-hat clichés.
  65. Hateship Loveship
    It ultimately offers little more than another opportunity for famous actors to indulge their fetishistic, inadvertently condescending impressions of "everyday" people.
  66. Self Reliance
    There’s never any danger of Self Reliance’s reach exceeding its grasp, but it gets a firm handle on the things it does want to achieve: tell good jokes, craft likeable characters, and strike a lighthearted tone that’s always just a little bit odder than you may be expecting.
  67. Celeste and Jesse Forever
    An honest and breezily melancholic film, thoroughly clear-sighted in its intentions and ideas and bravely committed to the emotional rigors of its central relationship.
  68. Metal Lords
    Peter Sollett’s coming-of-age comedy betrays rather than upholds the values of the very kids it wants to revere.
  69. Standing Tall
    The film quickly devolves into a contemptible, exploitative presentation of sociological matters.
  70. Anthropoid
    Director Sean Ellis's film offers a potent examination of the moral rectitude of resistance.
  71. We Live in Time
    John Crowley’s film blunts the force of the naturalistic performances by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as it shifts around the timeline of the story with little rhyme, reason, or rhythm.
  72. Heli
    The emotional and political point through all this isn't to be taken lightly, but because the entirety of the film has such a nihilistic temperament, its effect is muted.
  73. She's Lost Control
    Anja Marquardt feels the need to puff up her film with relatively artificial conflict that generally comes off as sops to screenwriting conventions.
  74. Sibyl
    Justine Triet is less committed to some make-believe realism than she is to the tricks that memory and language can play on us.
  75. Voyeur
    It's hard to come away from the film feeling anything but disdain and a twinge of embarrassment toward Gay Talese.
  76. The Humbling
    Philip Roth's original ending is cranked up to 11, flattening the more interesting contours of Al Pacino's performance into a martyr's desperate plea for an audience's love.
  77. White Boy Rick
    By treating its main character as exceptional, Yann Demange's film validates the punitive system it seeks to criticize.
  78. The Secret Garden
    In lieu of pluming the emotional states of the characters, the film resorts to a whimsical, otherworldly fantasy element as an easy resolution.
  79. Seeds of Time
    First-person accounts from individuals most affected by the drop in agricultural productivity are rarely the focus of the film's vision.
  80. The Wanted 18
    The eccentric artistry calls so much attention to itself as to make the subject of the film feel like an afterthought.
  81. Mom and Dad
    Writer-director Brian Taylor's Mom and Dad invests a hoary conceit with disturbing and hilarious lunacy.
  82. Road to Nowhere
    The script is busy and unconvincing, and much of the acting is lousy, but there are haunting touches.
  83. Unbroken
    The film's chief misstep is taking its title too literally, and ultimately depicting Louie as an indestructible, and thus largely inhuman, superhero.
  84. Into the Forest
    Essentially a post-apocalyptic telenovela, it sanitizes the concept of sisterhood, and even womanhood.
  85. The Shallows
    What makes the film churn so forcefully for so long is Jaume Collet-Serra's visual acrobatics.
  86. Obsession
    Bujold’s enthusiasm as a performer redeems the entire picture, especially when she’s asked to perform flashback scenes that shouldn’t work, but, thanks to her, represent another of De Palma’s fearlessly experimental whims.
  87. Italian Studies
    During an amnesiac’s atmospheric nighttime ramble through Manhattan, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured.
  88. The Best Man Holiday
    The sexism isn't quite as noxious as one might find in Tyler Perry's films, but that's as far as the compliments go when it comes to this overextended and deeply crude sermon.
  89. Restless City
    The script simply isn't in the same league as the images that Andrew Dosunmu and the gifted cinematographer Bradford Young have fashioned.
  90. Two Plains & a Fancy
    No description can do justice to its best moments, which render the absurd and sublime one and the same.
  91. Outlaw King
    Outlaw King rattles along at a bracing pace, but the assured bloodshed of the final showdown looms large, casting a weary shadow over the film’s middle section.
  92. Biosphere
    Mel Eslyn’s film is a thoughtful drama about life, gender, and male friendship.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Shakespeare High
    These SoCal kids are passionate about their craft and it shows in their renditions of the famous bard's work.
  94. Inside Hana's Suitcase
    A film relating a story of the Holocaust is destined to provoke a number of adjectives, but "cloying" shouldn't be one of them.
  95. A Land Imagined
    Writer-director Yeo Siew Hua suggests that becoming another person is as easy as dreaming it.
  96. Advantageous
    The dialogue is so disaffected it's as if humans were replicants even before going through the aforementioned twin-making procedure.
  97. Lemon
    Self-absorption is Janicza Bravo’s focus, though—as in other smug and mock-ironic comedies—it’s a topic that’s less examined than indulged.
  98. Tower Heist
    Defiantly graceless, Brett Ratner deals in loudness, haplessness, obviousness, and, certainly, crudeness, reminding you of his directorial presence with such inclusions as a scolded kid who tells his disciplinarian to "suck it."
  99. Sarah's Key
    Sarah's Key becomes a musing ("meditation" would be too generous) on the importance of uncovering the past that fails to honestly contemplate why such an act is significant.
  100. The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies
    These films, and Tolkien's entire oeuvre, are most affecting in their depictions of friendship, and the performances here represent plutonic male intimacy in convincing, often moving ways.
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