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. Lawless
    Lawless may be full of half-hearted overtures toward depth and emotional complexity, but the film's prestige sheen is mostly a sham; the real focus here is the irrepressible lure of bad behavior.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Kid-Thing
    Its main character's moral predicament with a woman inside a pit becomes a muddle of confused symbolism and trite psychoanalysis.
  3. Jobriath A.D.
    The film never explores the depths and nuances that could actually place Jobriath in conversation with figures who came after him, however reductively.
  4. Skin
    After a while, the film’s not-strictly-linear structure and handheld camerawork come to feel like self-conscious signs of “gritty” realism, attempts at masking a certain conventionality.
  5. A Hologram for the King
    Remarkably faithful, except in how it rather boldly transforms Dave Eggers's drama into a broad comedy.
  6. Happy Death Day
    Happy Death Day twists the inherent repetitiveness of slashers to its advantage by exaggerating it to an impossible degree.
  7. The High Note
    Everything here wraps up as tidily as it does in your average Hallmark Channel movie.
  8. Henry Johnson
    Ultimately, Henry Johnson’s cynical assertions about society and human nature are the only aspects that end up resonating, for better or worse.
  9. Vanishing Waves
    A scintillating sci-fi throwback, Vanishing Waves draws inspiration from Stanley Kubrick and Andrei Tarkovsky, among others, but without feeling plagiaristic.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    One Million Years B.C.
    One Million Years B.C. ends where the story of humanity begins: in a seemingly endless saga of strife and solidarity that resonates down to the present day.
  11. Eden
    As the plot progresses, the film appears increasingly adrift, discordantly sliding between farce, satire, and murder mystery.
  12. Penance
    The film is ultimately, and disappointingly, revealed to be a contraption that's less concerned with mental portraiture than with getting all of its expository ducks in a row.
  13. The Moving Creatures
    Caetano Gotardo's triptych of short tales features a sense of experimentation and poetic license mostly seen in European cinema.
  14. Jimmy P.
    Too often Jimmy P. seems to struggle in making its interesting ideas apparent, leaving them stranded beneath the dry surface of an otherwise ordinary procedural.
  15. Knives and Skin
    The film gets so lost in its affected idiosyncrasies that it stops probing any discernible human feelings.
  16. Jumanji: The Next Level
    For all the emphasis on video game characters who can be swapped out on a whim, it’s the players themselves who come across as the most thinly drawn and interchangeable beneath their avatars.
  17. Moana 2
    For a story that so prizes how far its heroine will go, Moana spends so much of this sequel stuck in a rut.
  18. Mean Girls
    If this Mean Girls thrives too much on its relationship to the original, more tribute with songs than independent adaptation, its enjoyability is also a testament to the original’s staying power, as well as to Fey’s decades-long faith in the recyclability of her own material.
  19. Somebody Up There Likes Me
    Bob Byington's perspective may be above it all, but that doesn't quite account for the shades of melancholy that pop up unexpectedly in lines of dialogue and in some of the performances.
  20. The Equalizer 3
    The overarching plot of the film is pretty boilerplate, but the fine details count for a lot.
  21. Hope Gap
    So many grandiose tactics portend a grander revelation than the film’s otherwise low-key three-hander delivers.
  22. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
    The film, still only clearing its throat, hints at a wellspring of emotional riches to come.
  23. Southbound
    Southbound is yet another contemporary horror film that belongs to seemingly every era but its own.
  24. The Finest Hours
    A square journey through choppy waters, it boasts a Greatest Generation nostalgia so thoroughgoing it might as well be called Boys Becoming Men.
  25. The Trust
    Throughout Alex and Benjamin Brewer's film, Nicolas Cage holds the screen with his distinct timing and expressive force of being.
  26. The Hummingbird Project
    Throughout, the film can’t decide what attitude to strike toward its characters’ evident greed.
  27. The Tree
    This is one film that's overly reliant on a dubious central symbol, schematically employed.
  28. The Seagull
    The film is content to present Anton Chekhov's ideas rather than grapple with their provocative and complex subtexts.
  29. The Night Before
    It aims to foster a spirit of giddy anarchy in order to tie a ribbon around its shambolic script and rickety pacing.
  30. Hotel Artemis
    Hotel Artemis quickly reveals its future setting as an empty pretext for a banally convoluted and sentimentalized show of emotional rehabilitation.
  31. Our Man in Tehran
    Never is there an Iranian perspective on the proceedings, giving the documentary the jingoistic bent its title implies.
  32. Blue Bayou
    The film’s evocative imagery doesn’t compensate for the story being told with such a heavy hand that it dulls, rather than sharpens, Justin Chon’s urgent political message.
  33. Fading Gigolo
    The question of why one should actually work up any emotional investment in what happens to these people is never really answered, much less asked in the first place.
  34. Escape from Tomorrow
    The film is just a stunt or, more specifically, a calling card, but that might be enough for anyone who's ever wanted to kick Mickey Mouse square in his padded, pious balls.
  35. The Greasy Strangler
    It aims for John Waters-style transgression without evincing half of Waters’s wit and affection for eccentric lifestyles.
  36. Gemma Bovery
    The film dabbles in the French romantic-comedy tradition and simultaneously spoofs it, committing to neither.
  37. The One and Only Ivan
    The charitable representation of Bryan Cranston’s character greatly diminishes the emotional resonance of the film’s dramatic turns in the final act.
  38. We Bought a Zoo
    Far more concerned with pratfalling animal shenanigans and unearned uplift than crafting a single complex or amusing moment, it's a film caged in by formulaic plotting and plentiful pap.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    No Place on Earth
    A remarkable story made almost unremarkable in the hands of lazy filmmaking.
    • 58 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Monday
    Ultimately, the film is unable to overcome the mundanity of its simple, overly familiar scenario.
  41. Low Down
    There's only so much that Fanning's vividly expressive face and Hawkes's charismatic sensitivity can mask before we realize how little we truly understand what goes on in anybody's head.
  42. Les Coquillettes
    It's hard to ignore the fact that a substantial percentage of Letourneur's would-be character study is dedicated to concentrated Schadenfreude that's unbalanced and without any real narrative weight.
  43. Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    Great auntie to waking nightmare movies about distaff insanity as diverse as Images, 3 Women, A Woman Under the Influence, and Mulholland Drive, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death spends 90 minutes tapping lightly but incessantly on its heroine’s fragile sanity, as though it were some sort of Fabergé S&M model egg.
  44. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    The only past that Dial of Destiny is interested in plundering is the glory of its predecessors.
  45. Wicked: For Good
    The film is stretched out, breathless, and never really emotionally affecting, even on the level of nostalgia.
  46. Elemental
    Elemental does a whole lot of huffing and puffing but, at its core, feels no more grounded than a gentle wisp of air.
  47. Death Race 2000
    Death Race is a maladroit but exuberantly gamey mix of social commentary and blue-collar goofiness.
  48. 7500
    Convenient plot twists undermine its early pretense that it’s aiming for something other than to exploit our deepest, most regressive fears.
  49. The Lords of Salem
    Rob Zombie understands horror as an aural-visual experience that should gnaw at the nerves, seep into the subconscious, and beget unshakeable nightmares.
  50. There There
    The artifice of There There certainly generates an added layer of frisson that might not have been there were the film shot under more conventional circumstances. But the root material has enough rich humanity and taut conflict to it that the result would have succeeded regardless.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    It's a Disaster
    The film flirts with big ideas about adult relationships, but fails to locate any gravitas about its characters' existential or psychological crises.
  52. The Patsy
    The Patsy reflects a genuine affection for the artisans and jacks-of-all-trades that make careers like his possible.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Eddie: The Sleepwalking Cannibal
    Because the film clearly aims for satire, Boris Rodriguez isn't entirely guilty of indulging gruesome spectacle for its own sake.
  54. Terraferma
    Its self-seriousness never allows it to become the realist counterpoint to Aki Kaurismäki's tragicomic approach in Le Havre that one initially hopes it will be.
  55. Trishna
    Class privilege and sexual politics are inextricably linked in Trishna, Michael Winterbottom's blunt, self-consciously brutal, and rather loose updating of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles."
  56. The Book of Clarence
    The film does keep the smirking undercurrent of the first half present in the more serious second, but, slowly but surely, it starts asking big questions about the nature of God, what measure of divinity lies in us all, and the value of basic humanity and grace in a world where God’s intervention isn’t a given.
  57. The Gorge
    For a solid hour or so, the film is patient and tense, with just the right touches of levity and romance. Until, suddenly, it isn’t.
  58. Rabbit Trap
    It’s when the film plays in the gaps between sound and image that it’s most disturbing.
  59. You All Are Captains
    Oliver Laxe goes full-on meta by casting himself in the role of a visiting moviemaker who travels to Morocco to shoot footage with disadvantaged children living in a shelter.
  60. R100
    The set pieces follow their own insane, unstoppable logic, with each new twist yielding its own outré surprises.
  61. Pet Sematary
    The story has enough pathos to fulfill the expectations of a great tragedy, but the film feels like a commercial for something else entirely.
  62. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
    Temple of Doom doesn't so much pay tribute to the serial adventures of yore as it does embody them. Here, frivolity and evil blithely coexist—and women are a lot more likely to scream than win drinking contests.
  63. How to Grow a Band
    The movie is unsurprisingly devoted to peddling up-and-comer Chris Thiele as something daring, something new.
  64. The Laundromat
    Steven Soderbergh takes a macro approach to the scandal, though the results, with rare exception, are vexingly micro.
  65. The Zookeeper's Wife
    The film imbues a pessimistic view of the seemingly bottomless depths of human cruelty with sorrowful tragic force.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ezra
    The film gets within striking distance of new territory for its subject matter but stalls out due to its pat storytelling.
  67. Last Letter from Your Lover
    Across the film, director Augustine Frizzell balances a dynamic aesthetic energy with a generosity of spirit.
  68. 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.
  69. Dreamland
    Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s ultimately succumbs to melodramatic clichés and simplistic political demagoguery.
  70. Birds of Paradise
    Birds of Paradise lacks the nuance and finesse needed for its story to really take flight.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    White Wash
    "Why are there so few black surfers?" That's the question posed by Ted Wood's incisive, if ultimately repetitive, documentary White Wash, and to answer the question the film digs deep into US political and social history.
  72. Ip Man 3
    Donnie Yen's performance is so good that it's a shame Wilson Yip's films have never strived to be more than briskly entertaining hagiography.
  73. Born in China
    The film is neatly organized around not only the changing of the seasons, but a Disney-branded "circle of life" ethos.
  74. The Woman in the Fifth
    Pawlikowski has crafted a film that throbs with substantial personal weight and bristles with a violent, haunting interior life.
  75. Jane by Charlotte
    The film neglects to find a conceptual framework for its prolonged consideration of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s eventual revelation: “I have always loved you, but it’s much clearer to me now.”
  76. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    The film abounds in excruciatingly obvious, often precious, articulations of grief, where armchair philosophizing volleys back and forth with punishing abandon.
  77. Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football
    In the documentary, the game is a make-believe war of pent-up frustrations linking race, nation, and manhood, one which teenage boys named Mohamed can actually win.
  78. Dicks: The Musical
    In the instances where it’s not going hard, Dicks is a surprisingly flaccid affair.
  79. Vamps
    A sense of anachronism is what provides the film with its melancholy heart.
  80. Flesh and Blood
    Mark Webber's stripped-down approach renders the messy, unglamorous lives at the film's center with dignity.
  81. The Intouchables
    A cheeky dream-drama about the friendship between a rich, white quadriplegic and a penurious black job-seeker, the premise of The Intouchables alone nearly renders analysis redundant.
  82. Life Partners
    The romantic elements are secondary to what is essentially an astute and cleverly written dissection of a co-dependent friendship being gradually eroded by the incremental ravages of age, rivalry, and rapidly diverging personal arcs.
  83. Me and You
    Not even Bernardo Bertolucci's choice of a lead actor with visible facial acne scars, in a welcome gesture toward authenticity, is enough to overcome the gaping hole of psychological nuance at the center of the film.
  84. The Wedding Guest
    Michael Winterbottom’s film succeeds in translating the problematics of intercultural conflict into thriller fodder.
  85. Antlers
    In Antlers, the big bad is never supposed to be as scary as society’s collective wrongdoing.
  86. The Notebook
    János Szász's film is a thoroughly provocative WWII screed that almost deliberately goes out of its way to avoid sentimentality or bathos of any sort.
  87. Road House
    Not quite a grim-dark reimagining of a cult favorite, this Road House is still a needlessly un-nice rework that takes the business end of a broken beer bottle to the soul of the original.
  88. The Grand Seduction
    Like many films that contrast the simplicity of a rural community against the confusion of city life, The Grand Seduction exhibits a patriarchal, xenophobic attitude.
  89. Bite
    Chad Archibald doesn't quite land Bite's transition over from claustrophobic character study into full-blown monster movie.
  90. Adult Beginners
    Given its played-out subject matter and hoary coming-to-terms narrative arc, one's ability to enjoy the film hangs on a tolerance for the ever-popular on-screen man-child.
  91. Break Point
    A mostly laugh-free, paint-by-numbers approach to a pair of former pros vying for relevance as they enter, kicking and screaming, into their mid 30s.
  92. Powaqqatsi
    Powaqqatsi is every bit as viscerally engaging though less provocative than its predecessor.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Up in Smoke
    That’s the trouble at the center of the benign but tepid ganja-classic Up in Smoke: Its toking Abbott-and-Costello duo are so content to simply drift away in clouds of smoke that the audience is often left behind looking for the jokes.
  94. Heaven's Gate
    To his credit, Cimino renders us helpless not before carnage or greed, but before his epic’s breadth of motivation and circumstance. It’s not the past’s ugliness that terrifies us in Heaven’s Gate, but its far more intimidating immensity.
  95. Encounter
    In spite of the film’s troublingly naïve take on mental trauma, Riz Ahmed vividly and empathetically captures a man’s wounded soul.
  96. Sacrifice
    A historical melodrama that retains an ancient, elemental pull even as it insufficiently charts motivation and the self-denying values of antiquity.
  97. The Big Fix
    The Tickells' style is a predictable grab bag of interviews with outraged experts and journalists, TV news footage, and scenes in which the filmmakers (and, during one trip, fellow activists Peter Fonda and Amy Smart) make faux-daring journeys into the fray to bring back supposed realities that corporate America seeks to hide.
  98. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
    Its feminist perspective checkmates the frat-boy misogyny and machismo that too often mar films set in combat zones.
  99. Army of the Dead
    The film’s masterful prologue writes a check that the remainder of this very long, very indulgent film labors mightily to cash.
  100. How I Live Now
    There are a few effectively disquieting sequences early on, but the film never recovers from director Kevin Macdonald's indifferent staging of a pivotal moment.
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