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. 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.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Where Soldiers Come From
    A four-year study of an Afghan war-bound group of friends (the mother of Cole, the goofy joker of the group, compares the boys to the characters in The Deer Hunter), Courtney's documentary is equal parts heartfelt and public-television predictable.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (Une bouteille à la mer)
    The film obviously can't resolve the conflict between Palestine and Israel, but the resolution to the story's arc feels nonetheless forced and misplaced.
  4. Complete Unknown
    Underneath the impersonal formal beauty and good acting is a familiar moral about self-imposed limitations.
  5. Back to Burgundy
    Cédric Klapisch correlates wine’s complex arrangement of flavors to the complexity of memory itself, which, it should be said, is the most nuanced of the filmmaker’s wine metaphors.
  6. The Glorias
    The film weaves its refreshingly unpredictable web as the strands of Steinem’s life spiral around each other through snippets of scenes that work efficiently and never preachily.
  7. The Voices
    For most of the film's running time, one mistakes the main character's callousness for the filmmakers'.
  8. Free Men
    For much of its runtime, the film is simply there, decent for the most part, but at no point immersive.
  9. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    The film is unable to reconcile a desire to ridicule its own artifice with constant attempts to foster genuine empathy and dramatic tension.
  10. Beuys
    The film fails to seriously address Joseph Beuys voluntarily joining the Hitler Youth and serving with the Luftwaffe.
  11. God Help the Girl
    Stuart Murdoch clearly knows quite a bit about crafting pop tunes, but the film's consideration of the work of songwriting is totally flippant.
  12. Blood for Dust
    The film is held together by the intensity of its haunted-looking cast and the dour atmosphere.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Norwegian Wood
    Even if this Haruki Murakami adaptation amounts to a gorgeous but lethargic emo ballad, there's no denying the stately lyricism of its melancholy.
  14. Baskin
    The film mostly functions as a tour of familiar horror tropes for much of its running time.
  15. Oliver & Company
    Oliver & Company is as out-of-touch as anything the studio ever made.
  16. To the Wonder
    Throughout To the Wonder, the new and old are incessantly twinned, blurred into a package that suggests an experimental dance piece.
  17. Lady Sings the Blues
    It’s an amateur star performance-as-Stanislavski mail order catalog: a powerhouse of Method-ology (born more from a lack of acting experience than pop singers’ already refined sense of emotive abandon), complete with ingénue tics, a self-conscious display of age range, tentative ad-libs, flailing limbs, leaky eyes, precariously receding eyelids.
  18. A Kid Like Jake
    Though the film makes the important point that even the most liberal parents' acceptance of a child's difference may be repression by another name, it fails to excite sufficient sympathy for its broadly drawn principal characters.
  19. The Accountant 2
    As The Accountant 2 drags out to over two hours, and its two storylines remain tonally at war with one another, it becomes increasingly clear that, two films in, this series still hasn’t figured out exactly what it wants to be.
  20. Operation Finale
    The film never manages to reconcile the enormity of the Holocaust with how ordinary a bureaucrat Eichmann was.
  21. Before I Fall
    All the film has to show for its efforts are tired platitudes about the value of altruism and living each day as it if were the last.
  22. Life in a Day
    Only a few snippets escape the uncritical narcissism that the film celebrates and, despite their unimaginative employment, they stand as something of a rebuke to the film's dominant images.
  23. Dolphin Tale 2
    Writer-director Charles Martin Smith's tin ear for dialogue and contrived symbolism is as unmistakable as his enormous heart.
  24. August: Osage County
    What works about the film can largely be attributed to the original text, which is full of cruel twists and savage blows that Tracy Letts wisely retains for the screen.
  25. It: Chapter Two
    The film argues we’re stronger and better when we’re home, building communities that can oppress the oppressors and build up so-called “losers.”
  26. Spin Me Round
    Cleansed of all risk and personality, Spin Me Round subsides, as though with a sigh, into the reheated sauce of mediocrity.
  27. Tokyo Tribe
    Sion Sono's film imagines gangs not as rebels without a cause, but a lost generation of displaced, poisoned youths.
  28. Jug Face
    Chad Crawford Kinkle impressively imbues this supernatural world of backwoods mysticism with a plausible milieu while still staying committed to the film's own brewing insanity.
  29. F9: The Fast Saga
    At its best, F9 delivers the most spatially coherent, dynamic car scenes in the series to date.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Lads & Jockeys
    Half-formed expressions of disappointment, hope, struggle, confusion, and boyish playfulness on faces otherwise marked by youth's inexperience, and a self-consciousness brought on by the curiosity of being filmed, constitute the most memorable moments of Lads & Jockeys, a documentary on 14-year-old aspiring jockeys in France.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Cosmopolis
    Diamond-hard and dazzlingly brilliant, David Cronenberg's film plays like a deeply perverse, darkly comic successor to Videodrome.
  32. Dillinger
    This rough, lurid, pointedly un-preachy work of macho outlaw cinema, one of the best of the many John Dillinger movies, deserves to be better known.
  33. Footloose
    If the Footloose remake had its own signature dance, it'd be called the Push-Pull, as this hip-to-be-sorta-square movie, much like the small-town teens within it, has a mind for propelling itself toward a progressive future while continually being yanked back by cherished hallmarks of the past.
  34. Jason Bourne
    One of the more admirable traits of the original Bourne trilogy is how little pleasure it takes in its violence, but Jason Bourne revels in its vicious action sequences.
  35. Nocturne
    If Quirke’s film means to mimic the tunnel vision of its protagonist, it does so perhaps too effectively, losing its thematic potency as it travels on a predictable trajectory, involving spooky drawings and sisterly spats, all the while leaving the existential miasma sitting out of frame.
  36. Victoria and Abdul
    By privileging the white characters in its narrative, Victoria & Abdul exposes itself as insidiously hypocritical.
  37. Boston Strangler
    While the film’s determination to spotlight the women who brought down the Boston Strangler over the killer himself is admirable, it leaves a hole in the middle of the film that nothing else really manages to fill.
  38. Altered States
    The most interesting dimension of Altered States has to be the way Russell sexualizes Eddie’s relationship with godly figures, most notably symbols of Jesus, crucifixion, and his father.
  39. Crimes of the Future
    Gradually, Crimes of the Future becomes a surprisingly thorough and anticipatory working draft of the prototypical Cronenberg body-horror film, dramatizing, with characteristically repulsed fascination, a series of biological mutations that usher in a micro-culture given to cannibalism, pedophilia, and other practices that indicate a looming erasure of personal identity.
  40. Wolf Totem
    It becomes difficult to separate the natives from their communist masters in terms of their treatment of their natural surroundings.
  41. The Model
    The film unapologetically warns us at every turn that fashion is nothing but a business, fueled by naiveté and rape.
  42. Balls Out
    The film reveals itself as a sports movie actually attuned to the knowledge that victory in an inconsequential game bears no meaning.
  43. Brainwashed: Sex-Camera-Power
    Nina Menkes’s documentary comes dangerously close to inhabiting its own title.
  44. Freaky Tales
    For all of its spiritedness, Freaky Tales wants for the sense of invention that defines the films that it references and whose moves it often falls back on borrowing.
  45. Child's Play
    Child’s Play is only a shade more terrifying than Teddy Ruxpin.
  46. Stoker
    The film's weird mix of dollhouse dread and fashion-magazine chic can be fetching, but it's nothing if not vacuous, a series of disjointed, improvisatory riffs that recall the brazen aesthetic overload of Amer.
  47. Love & Air Sex
    Whatever predictable plot the film tries to unfold never lives up to the excitement of its conceptual gimmick.
  48. Trouble with the Curve
    Clint Eastwood makes his infamous chair speech look like chapter one of a season of self-parody.
  49. Nerve
    By merely transposing its generic high school clique drama onto an augmented reality platform, Nerve sacrifices most of its novelty, but the filmmakers demonstrate a marginal interest in how this mediated environment warps the perspectives of its characters.
  50. Eternity
    The film is very old-fashioned in its thinking and approach to fantastical romance, despite some occasional, vague allusions to the fact that it is, still, a 2025 film.
  51. The Keeping Room
    Director Daniel Barber uses a bleak and unresolved portion of American history to justify indulging typical genre-film nihilism.
  52. The Highwaymen
    Where Bonnie and Clyde is gloriously tragic, The Highwaymen is blunt and anti-climactically savage, fulfilling as well as somewhat critiquing former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer’s bloodlust.
  53. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising
    The film's expected rehash of recent pop-culture totems is accompanied by a novel attention to millennial-centric debates about entitlement and identity politics.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
    Like a stiff Schwarzeneggerian conqueror making good on an "I'll be back," John Hyams returns to one-up the franchise again.
  55. Gayby
    While Jonathan Lisecki is well in tune with his film's niche market, his knack for comedy, both visual and verbal, is universally hilarious.
  56. Orchestra of Exiles
    Its episodic nature poses a narrative challenge that director Josh Aronson's just barely feature-length documentary can't quite surmount.
  57. Wheeler
    Ryan Ross's Wheeler is at its strongest as a showcase for Stephen Dorff’s husky, lived-in performance.
  58. The House of Tomorrow
    The impressionistic tenor of the unabashedly energetic final sequences is so wondrous that you may wish that writer-director Peter Livolsi had utilized it as The House of Tomorrow's guiding principle.
  59. Duck Butter
    The setup of a 24-hour relationship that bypasses the getting-to-know-you phase speaks to the nature of expedited modern dating culture, but despite its attempts at intimacy, Duck Butter is difficult to fall in love with.
  60. High & Low: John Galliano
    The film shamelessly announces from the very start that it’s an attempt at atonement for disgraced designer John Galliano.
  61. The Mule
    The film finally ends up souring its perspective on responsibility with a hardened take on the limits of the American dream.
  62. The Oath
    Even while it asks us to recognize ourselves in a world not too distant from our own, The Oath seems to say that the worst part of a full-fledged American dystopia would be the ruined holiday dinners.
  63. Turbo
    As a film about social issues, and simply being yourself, it's commendably progressive, going so far as serving as a kind of coming-out story.
  64. Bottom of the 9th
    Raymond De Felitta’s film offers a sampler course of formulas, which creates a strangely unfulfilling tension.
  65. Sisters
    A regurgitation of Apatowian formula, wherein ostensibly edgy humor hides a core of conservative moralizing.
  66. The Dictator
    Its dolly- and crane-operated polish points toward an acquiescence to Tinseltown mores, which until now Baron Cohen hovered cheekily above.
  67. Quantum of Solace
    Updating this anachronistic cash cow with the scrappy and sexy Craig still looks like a wise move, but it requires a greater quantum of style than Solace provides.
  68. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    Throughout the film, a promising character study is smothered beneath lazy genre machinations.
  69. Gainsbourg: A Heroic Life
    Handsomely mounted and shot with an eye for nocturnal Parisian mystery by Guillaume Schiffman, Gainsbourg somewhat mercifully peters out after the grande scandale of the provocateur's reggae version of "La Marseillaise," which earned him the wrath of French patriots.
  70. I Declare War
    The film rarely takes us past its rather obvious conclusions about the potential bestial nature of kids and how that may translate to the larger battlefields.
  71. Danny Collins
    The chemistry between Pacino and his cast mates gives this lightly amusing contrivance surprising emotional resonance.
  72. Uncle Frank
    When the distance between uncle and niece shortens, Uncle Frank ceases to be a tender portrait of outsider kinship and transforms into a histrionic road movie with screwball intentions.
  73. Tragedy Girls
    The film's central theme, about where attention-starved narcissism leads when taken to extremes, isn't quite sufficient to sustain an entire feature.
  74. Come Play
    While it can be expected that high-concept horror movies will often be sewn together from the premises of recent genre successes, it’s much too easy to see the stitches in writer-director Jacob Chase’s Come Play.
  75. Rise of the Guardians
    This spirited enough yarn is sincere and heartening in its belief that our devotion to these youthful myths is healthy for our sense of wonderment.
  76. The Midnight Sky
    The film minimizes the tragedy of the human race’s near-complete annihilation by positioning it as the backdrop for the world’s most grandiose deadbeat-dad redemption arc.
  77. Pioneer
    Its greatest asset, and another trait it shares with Mann and Fincher's work, is a careful attention toward the particulars of its milieu in a way that doesn't call attention to those period touches.
  78. The Blob
    The heroes may be teenagers, but The Blob, though generally a goofy and enjoyable B-programmer ideal for watching while loaded in the middle of the night, is still one of the most pointedly reactionary of the 1950s’ alien-invasion movies.
  79. Ferdinand
    Any potential subtext of Munro Leaf's children's book has been bleached out in the marketplace-oriented Ferdinand.
  80. 13 Minutes
    Aside from further vilifying the Nazis, the film's ideological endgame remains a bit too slippery.
  81. Days of Grace
    Eventually, the film's impressive array of formal pyrotechnics overwhelms its morals.
  82. Dean
    One has to wade through a lot of eye-rolling comic marginalia to get to the film's pained beating heart.
  83. Frontera
    By turns abrasive and stately, sermonic and impartial, plot-heavy and meandering, often within seconds of each other.
  84. The Prey
    The Prey doesn't have the obsessive pull of a great thriller, as it's undeniably an impersonal toy, but it's a hell of a toy.
  85. Just a Sigh
    When Jérôme Bonnell allows his two magnificent leads to work at the sparse dialogue, he invokes a powerful, elemental sense of frank, sexual discussion and high-end flirtation, imbuing the relationships with a maturity that's loathsomely rare in films today.
  86. Creative Control
    The film is overrun with characters, but it's less interested in their identity than their plasticity.
  87. Jojo Rabbit
    Waititi is incapable of dealing with the twin horrors of oppression and indoctrination beyond cheap-seats sentimentality and joke-making.
  88. Mother Mary
    The film is a boldly theatrical pop exorcism where the wounds of the past serve as a gateway to forces that can consume or lift the possessed to ecstatic new levels of self-expression.
  89. Lights Out
    Few horror films are as insistent about the trauma mental illness inflicts on families as Lights Out, and still fewer are so insensitive about it.
  90. The Deer King
    The Deer King leaves one with the impression that it hasn’t given itself enough room to truly soar.
  91. Sleepaway Camp
    Seriously, watching Angela (and to a lesser extent Ricky) being targeted throughout the film is like watching a group of shrill brats shooting rocks at a baby bird—if it wasn’t so obvious that everyone’s non-stop cruelty was in service of some big-reveal, or if the performances weren’t so damn preening, the film would be completely intolerable.
  92. The Misogynists
    Onur Tukel’s film doesn’t live up to the promise of this fleet-footed opening.
  93. Cry Macho
    The film achieves the nourishing simplicity of a fable, and its devotion to the quotidian elements of mythical small-town western life is nearly religious.
  94. Christy
    Christy lulls us into complacency by deviating little from the standard inspirational sports-movie playbook.
  95. Populaire
    Candy-colored to a potentially cavity-causing degree, the film is a bubbly regurgitation of retrograde romantic comedy tropes and reactionary sexual politics.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Men in Black III
    More like an attempt to reenergize a franchise than rebottle the lightning that electrified the original.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Wrong
    It doesn't seem to have any pretensions beyond the regimented unveiling of a parade of odd occurrences, plodding along under the banner of absurdity.
  98. Snowden
    The film depicts Edward Snowden's ethical dilemmas in a political vacuum that disregards America's increasingly complex security threats.
  99. Hello Lonesome
    Hello Lonesome isn't really that much of a movie, but it has something that a number of more polished pictures in the same vein don't: human decency. Sadly, that's noteworthy.
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