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. What Happened, Miss Simone?
    It utilizes Maya Angelou's claim as tantalizing bait rather than the starting point for a feature-length thesis statement.
  2. The Wolfpack
    Crystal Moselle aims her cinematic arrow at the hearts of the same choir that Andrew Jarecki's stunted aesthetics preach to.
  3. October Gale
    The film begins as a moodily introspective drama about grief before implausibly morphing into a stale thriller.
  4. Meru
    Its expositional crutch proves most inadequate when the team ascends the final pitch to the top after years of preparation in no more than a minute of screen time.
  5. People Places Things
    The film introduces a promising romantic pentagon, only to let it float away unfulfilled into studiously benign coming-of-age clouds.
  6. Steve Jobs
    The screenwriter's signature verbal-diarrhetic dialogue allows for a nonstop blaring of actorly chops that, like the movie at large, is nothing if not committed.
  7. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Director Kiah Roache-Turner's film is an excitingly efficient and ultraviolent zomedy.
  8. Cut Bank
    If the film is meant only as a pulpy genre exercise, Matt Shakman's competence in various modes actually works to strip it of any sense of coherent vision.
  9. Victoria
    One can chart the very moment that Victoria's existence slips out of the routine into the nightmarish, and there's no escape by temporal omission.
  10. Spring
    It bridges the cautionary elements of a horror film with the wish-fulfilling platitudes of a touristy romance.
  11. Snowden
    The film depicts Edward Snowden's ethical dilemmas in a political vacuum that disregards America's increasingly complex security threats.
  12. Young Bodies Heal Quickly
    Its lack of dramatic specificity places it in a precarious middle ground between exacting character study and ethereal parable.
  13. Futuro Beach
    It masks depleted drama under a progression of long takes, various music cues, and a three-chapter structure that grows successively tedious.
  14. Champs
    An unfocused mishmash that thrives only when it fixates on footage of actual bouts.
  15. Bluebird
    Unable to reconcile plot with poetry, Bluebird is knitted-together by its sense of place and lived-in performances, yet unraveled by anemic false melodrama and overbearing music.
  16. 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.
  17. Cupcakes
    Eytan Fox opts for a thoroughly hollow rumination on pop-culture mechanics as they pertain to young, aspiring professionals.
  18. Marfa Girl
    The film finds the actors' performance deficiencies functioning less as signs of authentic teenage behavior than as an incompetent carrier of plot.
  19. Free State of Jones
    After its bracing opening, the film begins to indulge the worst impulses of well-meaning liberal cinema.
  20. Trumbo
    Like Jay Roach's Game Change and Recount, the film's patina of relative apoliticism masks (or enables) its blandness of inquiry.
  21. Tangerines
    For all of the potential, historically specific revelations regarding nation and religion, Tangerines elects to become bathetic hokum.
  22. Central Intelligence
    It's a pity that no one else involved in the making of the film had Dwayne Johnson's sly intuition.
  23. Man Up
    Lake Bell and Simon Pegg's star wattage isn't enough to distract from the sense that their characters are almost exclusively defined by their single-ness.
  24. 52 Tuesdays
    Sophie Hyde barely elaborates on the toll James's transition takes on him and only superficially as it affects Billie's psyche.
  25. Eddie the Eagle
    It remains more committed to printing the uplifting legend of its title character than in actually examining the human beings underneath.
  26. Félix And Meira
    Maxime Giroux's sharp filmmaking instincts aren't always supported by similarly acute dramatic instincts.
  27. Electric Slide
    Like the characters, the film's exterior flash can't conceal a glaring emptiness.
  28. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    The juxtaposition of courtship and violence is the film's one true coup, but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies still mistakes weaponry for agency.
  29. Krisha
    It rams home the main character's relentless downward spiral though an incessant parade of grandstanding stylistic flourishes.
  30. Live From New York!
    Formally, it relies on a bevy of spectacularly funny clips and a plethora of talking heads, most of which fall back on plaudits rather than sage insights.
  31. Closer to the Moon
    Writer-director Nae Caranfil oddly forgoes the abundant elegiac aspects of his film's factual material for a tone approaching the ebullient.
  32. Hello, My Name Is Doris
    Michael Showalter is content to trade They Came Together's mischievous genre deconstructionism for cheap-shot indie quirk.
  33. Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine
    A work of arduous assemblage that values information over affect and zip over conviction in its ramshackle historicizing of Apple CEO Steve Jobs.
  34. 10,000 km
    It ends up feeling like an unsatisfying cautionary tale on how much detachment is too much detachment.
  35. Batkid Begins
    Any hope of meaningful reflection or insight is doused by a steady drip of often redundant and banal observations.
  36. The Little Death
    It's perched uneasily on a fence separating a rote comic sketch film from something weirder, stranger, and less engaged with offering reassuring domestic homilies.
  37. The Adderall Diaries
    It's too busy skipping through subplots to do much more than gloss over such heady issues as the fundamental subjectivity of truth and self-identity.
  38. Storks
    Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world that Storks doesn't take many cues from Pixar's tear-jerking playbook.
  39. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Steven S. DeKnight's film lacks for Guillermo del Toro's visual acumen, but it makes up for that with an energetic sense of chaos throughout its front-and-center skirmishes, and in the end hedges closer to the nightmarish intensity of such inspirational texts as Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion.
  40. American Made
    Doug Liman may effectively maintain a madcap energy through to the end, but unlike Adam McKay or Martin Scorsese, he isn't all that interested in explicating the complex inner workings of vast criminal enterprises.
  41. 5 Flights Up
    Ira Sachs, for all the tenderness of feeling he brought to Love Is Strange, wouldn't have countenanced the stacked-deck sentimentality that lies at this film's heart.
  42. Animals
    It sticks firmly to a Kerouac-lite immersion into young love rather than a more provocative portrait of the hazards inherent to modern urban life.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Know How
    Overall, the film's educational prerogatives tend to overwhelm its more interesting formal properties.
  44. La La Land
    Every element of La La Land is bound up in a referentiality that largely precludes the outpourings of emotion we come to musicals for.
  45. Barely Lethal
    The film settles into a time-honored groove of so many forgettable juvenile comedies before it.
  46. Intrepido: A Lonely Hero
    Gianni Amelio bogs down into a family drama that's neither supplementary to the film's initial quest or a fulfilling substitute.
  47. Two Shots Fired
    The lack of tangible dramatic follow-through leaves the film feeling incomplete, indistinguishable from so much other undercooked festival fare.
  48. In Stereo
    The film is just another fantasy of living only the good portions of the life of an artist.
  49. Love at First Fight
    Transparently wearing metaphors on its singed sleeves, the film shuttles around courses of meaning and significance without committing to any.
  50. The Accountant
    The film juggles a “follow the money” procedural with corporate espionage thriller, producing two competing tones that never reconcile into one fluid narrative.
  51. Son of Saul
    The film's meticulousness orchestration only calls attention to its dubious sense of purpose, which lies beyond human subjectivity.
  52. Journey to the Shore
    Kurosawa allows for a few brief flights of fancy, further abandoning realism for whimsical bursts of glowing color, but otherwise it's a humdrum slog of a voyage.
  53. Chronic
    A dour and withholding character study, Michel Franco's film invites more questions than it’s willing to answer.
  54. Sunset Edge
    Writer-director Daniel Peddle's anthropological concerns never really wed themselves to a sturdy narrative bedrock.
  55. The Club
    Pablo Larraín's thematic interests shift toward constructing a didactic tongue-lashing against the Catholic Church disguised as speculative fiction.
  56. Felt
    A hollow bit of violence exposes the film's sense of empowerment as nothing more than a harmless sheep masquerading in wolf's clothing.
  57. Alléluia
    Both Lola Dueñas and Laurent Lucas are impressively committed to their roles, but the film's script is elusive to a fault.
  58. Do I Sound Gay?
    Another link in an increasingly tiresome chain of naval-gazing think pieces posing as personal documentary.
  59. The Program
    The Program is flashier and more self-conscious than many biopics, but it's ultimately just as hollow.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Equalizer 2
    Order and righteousness being the product of one great man, The Equalizer 2 is symptomatic of a confused time when people are collectively looking for invulnerable superheroes who don't so much as speak truth to injustice as beat the hell out of it, and its cathartic pleasures leave a bad taste.
  61. Mala Mala
    The filmmakers aren't really interested in the space between what these women say and what they mean.
  62. Closer to God
    The end result suggests Re-Animator as told through an airless CNN report.
  63. 10 Cent Pistol
    One wishes the director had as burning of an interest in significance as he does trickery and quippery.
  64. 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi
    Of course, when the action gets underway, Bay unleashes that flashy id of his, and all of his flaws as a titan of blockbuster filmmaking come to the fore.
  65. Breathe
    Aside from the innate understanding of female friendship dynamics, it's hard to see exactly what else Mélanie Laurent brings to this overly familiar story.
  66. Solo: A Star Wars Story
    The imprint of Star Wars on everyday American life now feels so despotic that it's too much to ask a film like Solo to be moving or thrilling as a piece of cinema.
  67. When Animals Dream
    The film is one long funereal slog in which the main character discovers something about herself that's almost immediately apparent.
  68. The Boy
    Craig William Macneill's film is a sporadically frightening slow burn with a fatally overlong fuse.
  69. Demolition
    It takes its literalism to such an extreme that, at points, it's difficult to determine whether or not the film is operating with a semblance of irony.
  70. Zipper
    It wants for a keener vision of corrupted power, but at least Mora Stephens navigates her main character's sudden slew of infidelities without banalizing them.
  71. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    J.A. Bayona's gothic flourishes suggest opioid hallucinations, and they're a welcome escape from the doldrums of the writing, but they seem at odds with the rest of the film.
  72. Freeheld
    The filmmakers, for better and for worse, stay out of the actresses' way, as Freeheld's artistry is so unadorned that the performances somehow feel more naked as a result.
  73. Misunderstood
    The film is only slightly dependent on the self-pity that informed Asia Argento's last effort, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, but it feels similarly airless.
  74. Goon: Last of the Enforcers
    Jay Baruchel's Goon: Last of the Enforcers faces an uphill climb that's inherent to retreads, as it's almost impossible for the film to honor its predecessor without lapsing into contrived and preordained formula.
  75. Homme Less
    Thomas Wirthensohn frequently sinks into dully positing Mark Reay as something close to the pinnacle of human integrity.
  76. The Falling
    The film all leads to a melodramatic climax that wraps up the main character's explosive acting out in a too-neat package.
  77. Rosenwald
    Director Aviva Kempner profile of Julius Rosenwald suggests a 60 Minutes segment stretched to feature length.
  78. What Our Fathers Did: A Nazi Legacy
    The conclusion suggests the film exists to affirm the preconceived desires and perceptions of its makers.
  79. Mustang
    The film punctuates the sisters' confinement with various episodes united by their contrivance.
  80. Race
    This is a complication-smoothing take on Jesse Owens's elegant riposte to Hitler's racism at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
  81. Home from Home: Chronicle of a Vision
    For all of its evident toil in recreating historically accurate environments and researching the precise conditions in varying regions, it has little force as a work of cinema.
  82. Where to Invade Next
    As informative and passionate as he often is on screen, Michael Moore also always toes the line toward shooting himself in the rhetorical foot with his own thuggish persona.
  83. My All American
    All of the film's nuances are ultimately negated by the its relentless canonization of its subject.
  84. Florence Foster Jenkins
    The film champions coddling people like Florence Foster Jenkins and treats critical thinking as the enemy.
  85. The Family Fang
    There's real texture and emotional heft to the central relationship between the siblings, but that's thanks more to the actors than the script.
  86. High-Rise
    The film's notion of a caste system is crudely reductive in the manner of a routine future-shock thriller.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Clan
    The Pablo Trapero film's parallels are drawn so bluntly that they lose all suggestive force, since there's little left to suggest.
  88. Evolution
    The film interprets itself, offering an essay on rape and gender fluidity that locks us out of the cognitive process of digesting it.
  89. A War
    Tobias Lindholm stages his claims through clunky dramaturgical scenarios, with the seams exposed at every turn.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Big Short
    Its fourth-wall-breaking wags a finger at the perceived facile nature of celebrity-driven mass culture even as it ultimately condescends to audiences.
  91. Reversion
    It may look like a dream, but it plays like someone reading a congressional report on corporate finagling out loud.
  92. Heist
    Heist is competently staged, but Scott Mann maintains audience interest with the preponderance of dissonant absurdities.
  93. Extraordinary Tales
    It offers a CliffsNotes encapsulation of Edgar Allen Poe's most enduring works for viewers unacquainted with them.
  94. A Monster with a Thousand Heads
    The politics of the film are consistently muddled by director Rodrigo Plá's conspicuous formal choices.
  95. Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans
    The film forsakes all ambiguity regarding McQueen's psychology by stubbornly defining him as a determined, charismatic womanizer.
  96. Darling
    The film's aesthetic is striking, but feels almost intangibly derivative, most obviously suggesting an austere cover of Repulsion.
  97. #Horror
    A blunt satire of the dehumanization inherent in social media that also gets off on said detachment.
  98. Cars 3
    Cars 3 doesn't seem to care about defining the contours of its universe or exploring the possibilities of an all-car world.
  99. Miles Ahead
    Less a character study than an impressionistic portrait of a troubled artist's internal chaos, it supplies just enough Miles Davis to leave us jonesing for more.
  100. Kill Your Friends
    Thanks to a strong performance by Nicholas Hoult, all reptilian sinew and heroin-chic vacuity, it keeps threatening to become more dynamic and self-critical than its final result.
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