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. Sushi: The Global Catch
    The documentary is ultimately a dry endeavor that feels closer in spirit to an Afterschool Special than a full-blooded movie.
  2. Our Kind of Traitor
    It works as both a modern morality play for our globalized world and as an indictment of Europe's ethical bankruptcy.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Brainstorm
    As though this ridiculousness weren’t sufficiently groan-inducing, the scenes depicting the mischief Brace wreaks on the corporation while he’s mid-hack undergo a bizarre tonal shift into Keystone Kops slapstick.
  4. Arcadian
    Even as the shotgun shells start flying, it makes time for the quiet dramatic moments that carry its family drama forward amid the carnage.
  5. Bad Words
    The meager comeuppance and hasty notes of sweetness that end the film feel pre-approved rather than organically realized.
  6. Natural Selection
    The film works because what it documents is less a transformation and more a return to a former, more natural state for its troubled protagonist.
  7. Uncle Drew
    Uncle Drew, the old-school streetballer played by NBA all-star Kyrie Irving, is a cheerfully scruffy creation, and so is the film that bears his name.
  8. Katy Perry: Part of Me
    This frothy 3D concert doc often plays like a Perry ad campaign, assuring viewers that their "Teenage Dream" diva is a good, fun-loving person, and that, by God, she's doing fine.
  9. The Look of Love
    With its softened edges, bland aftertaste, and watered-down distillation of Raymond's life and career, Michael Winterbottom's film represents the house champagne of biographical cinema.
  10. I, Olga Hepnarová
    The filmmakers take few measures to engender sympathy for Olga, but their prismatic take on her life, while novel, precludes making any resonant statements about homosexuality, emotional health, or humankind’s capacity for evil.
  11. Crumb Catcher
    Chris Skotchdopole’s feature debut is a tantalizing mix of the absurd and the mundane.
  12. Albert Nobbs
    Perhaps thrown by the challenge of having to direct women as men and not just as themselves, director Rodrigo Garcia turns in what may be his poorest effort to date, opting for a nearly airless tone, presenting a look that's sadly un-cinematic, and presiding over a collection of performers that seem to be operating on very different planes, and with accents of varying thicknesses.
  13. Simple Passion
    The film makes no attempt to embody the themes that form the core of Annie Ernaux’s story in its aesthetics.
  14. All Together
    The film is somewhat flimsy, tinged with the impulse to make the elderly characters just the right amount of ridiculous for the benefit of younger viewers.
  15. Chimpanzee
    The astonishing footage of apes in their natural environment is made perfectly accessible and then nearly undone by a narration track that plays to the audience's basest desires for gag-inducing cuteness.
  16. Teen Spirit
    In the end, the film is all too ready to transform into just another shiny pop object indistinguishable from so many others before it.
  17. Southpaw
    Each battle scar in the film is a testament to a vaguely but nonetheless forcefully defined notion of masculinity.
  18. Happy Death Day 2U
    Happy Death Day 2U pushes further than even matters of life and death into a realm in which stakes don’t even really apply anymore, concerned as it is not with how we live our best lives, but with how we can be the best possible versions of ourselves.
  19. Shirley
    In the end, this sub-Sorkin-esque political potboiler sidelines Chisholm's most meaningful community work to the fact that she tried and failed to run for president.
  20. Anniversary
    This is an overtly political film that’s hesitant to express its own political views.
  21. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
    Tim Burton's direction reminds us of the distinct, peculiar coyness that was always at the heart of his best films.
  22. Piranhas
    Claudio Giovannesi’s film is more an interesting tweak of Goodfellas than an eye-opening social statement.
  23. Easy Money: Hard to Kill
    There's ultimately little in the way of authentically resonant drama underneath the film's self-conscious busy-ness.
  24. Limelight
    Limelight focuses far too much on the club's downfall and not nearly enough on what attracted its denizens there in the first place, managing only to preach to the choir, forgetting to also take it to church.
  25. The First Monday in May
    Andrew Rossi pays sporadic lip service to recognizing cultural specificity before returning to his star-gazing ways.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Evil Dead
    The setup and geography are consistent with the original, though the film never makes the mistake of trying to rebottle the lightning that electrified Sam Raimi's movie.
  27. In the Name of My Daughter
    This adaptation is to concerned with narrative fidelity and formal objectivity to pierce the veil of power dynamics that largely comprises the film's concerns.
  28. Thor: Love and Thunder
    Across Taika Waititi’s film, a war against the gods feels like an afterthought to a bad rom-com.
  29. The Burnt Orange Heresy
    The film allows that we are complicit in privilege for our fascination and envy.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Painted Skin: The Resurrection
    A vaporous, watered-down frappe of a fantasy epic.
  31. The Flying Swords of Dragon Gate
    Tsui Hark's film is the veteran director's chance to let his imagination run riot in the context of a high-budget, 3D IMAX production.
  32. The Maze Runner
    A curious blend of our newly acquired taste for dystopia alongside a healthy sprinkling of Lord of the Flies, the film offers familiar pleasures without prompting the sense of having already been here before.
  33. The Sleepwalker
    The film soon settles into a confident, well-staged groove, primarily because of two unambiguously terrific performances.
  34. Band of Robbers
    It places more focus on the childish fabulousness of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer than the racial reckoning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
  35. Strange Weather
    There’s a tough and mysterious film within Strange Weather, though it doesn’t quite escape the strictures of a busy and studiously weird narrative that’s governed by formula screenwriting.
  36. Phenomena
    The whole of Phenomena is less than the sum of its parts, but the parts are often terrifying and exhilarating.
  37. Moss
    Daniel Peddle's film emphasizes, for better and worse, the crushing monotony of living in insolated parts of the Deep South.
  38. Human Flowers of Flesh
    There’s an emptiness to Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh that no amount of striking cinematography, thematic suggestion, and allusions to Jean Painlevé can disguise.
  39. Blackout
    As in his prior work, the far-reaching curiosity and fascinatingly conflicted nature of Fessenden’s perspective is still his greatest strength.
  40. Neptune's Daughter
    As if trying to put quotation marks around its disposability, 1949’s Neptune’s Daughter uses a perpetually underwhelmed narrator to undercut its central love story, surrounded by polo antics and swimwear fashionistas.
  41. Baby Ruby
    The film’s depiction of the fear and uncertainty of motherhood gives in to monotony.
  42. Barbarians
    Throughout, Barbarians oscillates between smugness and apprehensiveness about the film that it’s trying to be.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cars 2
    A crass and uncharacteristically threadbare cash-grab.
  44. The Revenant
    Since Bart's bloodlust is never matched in tenor by his righteousness, the story remains rife with unfulfilled moral inquiry.
  45. France
    France indecisively utilizes a news personality’s crocodile tears as a symbol of the bad faith that pervades news discourse.
  46. Toast
    Joan aside, the film goes down easy enough.
  47. Cirkus Columbia
    Its lightheartedness and overtly traditional narrative structure become a smart strategy for crafting what is ultimately a very nuanced political critique of capital.
  48. Cold Pursuit
    It’s the way the film’s humor specifically subverts its genre’s expected emotional valences that makes it so effective.
  49. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    The final act of The House with a Clock in Its Walls stumbles between awkward, telegraphed jolts and busy, effects-heavy action, completely losing sight of the trauma and grief that was meant to give the film its emotional core.
  50. Generation War
    The perverse thrill of seeing less-than-popular considerations of Nazism on screen fades hurriedly to the old ache of seeing any kind of questions about Nazism answered noxiously.
  51. Robin Hood
    If Robin Hood’s charmingly sh**ty animation comes damn close to redeeming the film from utter vapidity, it’s a damn shame they couldn’t manage to supply a villain with the balls of an Ursula, a Cruella, or a Maleficent.
  52. Dog Pound
    The plot willfully denies our satisfaction, often at the risk of compromising its own structural integrity.
  53. Shut Up Little Man! An Audio Misadventure
    Shut Up Little Man! fails to legitimize its topic as one of any significance.
  54. The Wall
    The Wall packs a surprisingly savage punch by boiling the exploits of battle down to its essential elements.
  55. Charlie Says
    The film appears to be striving for humanistic understanding, but the end result is far too jumbled to have the proper impact.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tornado
    Tornado’s winking theatricality, thematic fixations with myth and avarice, and pared-down plotting add up to a heady concoction, but it’s more conducive to reflection than engagement.
  57. Snow White and the Huntsman
    As feminist fantasy, the film is non-committal, and as a reimagining of the fairy tale, it's at best expensive-looking without seeming wantonly so.
  58. Greetings from Tim Buckley
    Despite the counter-culture subjects at its core, Daniel Algrant's film possesses a put-upon hipness that cannot mask its disarming dorkiness.
  59. Finch
    The end of the world may never have had less impact than it does in Miguel Sapochnik’s Finch.
  60. 1,000 Times Good Night
    It's difficult to swallow the premise of yet another tale of a heroic white Westerner with good intentions trying to give hope to Middle-Eastern misery.
  61. How It Ends
    The film is so economical in its momentum, and its tone of comic wistfulness so uniform, that its string of tableaux rarely feels jerky.
  62. The Quiet One
    In the end, the film feels like a sketch that’s been offered in place of a portrait.
  63. Brighton Rock
    Brighton Rock never brings its baby-faced hood antihero, the scarfaced Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley, pouting and hunched in the late-DiCaprio manner), into a semblance of human plausibility.
  64. The Dinner
    The film is shrilly, luridly, dully, and unremittingly ugly, preaching to a choir that it also demonizes.
  65. The Quiet Ones
    The Quiet Ones is a reminder of the simple pleasures of a caper film with ice in its veins.
  66. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    All of Scott Frank's thematic concerns are little more than window dressing for a run-of-the-mill detective story in line with '90s thrillers like The Bone Collector.
  67. Three Peaks
    The film ably plumbs the fears of a well-meaning man who tries his best to play by the rules of middle-aged courtship.
  68. Wrath of Man
    Cacophony eventually takes over Wrath of Man, stranding the actors in the process. Except, that is, for Jason Statham, who’s by now a master of presiding over Guy Ritchie’s gleeful chaos.
  69. The Mountain
    Thomas Salvador frustratingly never offers a concrete sense of what his character feels that he’s lost, and so we’re tasked with loading meaning onto the character’s journey of apparent self-reclamation.
  70. The Ritual
    Eventually, the filmmakers reveal the secrets they'd previously withheld, spoiling the film's sustained mystique.
  71. Horrible Bosses
    As its titular tyrants, Spacey, Aniston, and Farrell all revel in their over-the-top noxiousness, though the latter is mysteriously given short shrift even though his performance is far and way the most novel and gonzo.
  72. True Adolescents
    Glomming conceits and situations from a vast range of similarly themed films, it ambles along in a lethargic, good-natured manner, fitfully amusing but never approaching substantial.
  73. Mama
    The premise isn't even worthy of executive producer Guillermo del Toro, who will apparently lend his name to any film as long as it fulfills its quota of moths and vulvic openings.
  74. The Company You Keep
    A would-be thriller masquerading a long, dry monument to the reliability and comfort of community, blindly cocooned by its own nostalgic self-regard.
  75. Cujo
    To be blunt, because there was just barely enough material in the source text to pad out the film, the filmmakers also used a lot of the stuff that worked in novel form but came off as stultifying on the screen.
  76. Them That Follow
    Unfortunately, the care with which the filmmakers set up Them That Follow’s context and their characters crumbles in the final act.
  77. Proxy
    It transforms itself from a meek lo-fi indie stalker thriller in the key of May to a hysterically sexist and homophobic revenge film.
  78. Red Trees
    The banality of Marina Willer’s voiceover only goes to prove the old cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words.
  79. Galveston
    The film is a slow, directionless anti-thriller that never manages to build tension or establish any stakes.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    You've Been Trumped
    Though Anthony Baxter seems driven by empathy rather than greed, his film is ultimately as reductive and misleading as the expensive Trump PR campaigns he righteously rails against.
  81. The Strange Ones
    The film's mixture of sensationalism and self-conscious artiness is experimentally disingenuous at best.
  82. Havoc
    If the rest of it had been as driven by such a ferocious sense of purpose as its final act, Havoc would be one of the finest action movies of the decade so far.
  83. I Origins
    It treats its characters as placeholders for philosophical arguments and spends the majority of its running time trying to "solve" existential mysteries without adequately exploring them.
  84. Unfinished Song
    Part end-of-life romance, part grossly manipulative mush, the film tries to stare grief and mortality in the face while practically shitting rainbows.
  85. War Dogs
    The film is unrepentantly cynical when it comes to the global business of warmongering, but proves unsurprisingly earnest when it comes to the lure of the American dream.
  86. Rubberneck
    The film takes on high-concept ideas that it can't sustain, and which only make its other problems more obvious.
  87. The Equalizer
    All this should build up to a moderately engaging battle of wits, but Richard Wenk's script has little interest in wit and no capacity for psychology.
  88. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit
    In keeping his actors on his sober-yet-buoyant plane, Kenneth Branagh presents a convincing romance that doesn't stall the film's brisk clip.
  89. Immaculate
    The film’s final act contains some of the most twisted, gory violence this particular subgenre of horror has seen in years, ultimately recalling nothing less than the films of the ultra-violent New French Extremity movement.
  90. The Intervention
    Clea DuVall crafts an entire film out of aborted attempts at a revelation that feel completely anodyne.
  91. Salvation Army
    It's a quiet thud of a film, which embraces, with grace and precision, the nastiness of growing up with desire stuck in one's throat like a muffled scream.
  92. Settlers
    Settlers allows for weighty themes to play out inside a cramped domestic setting, wary of easy answers or moral platitudes.
  93. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    It believes that the avenue to proving humanity is through banalizing gestures of quotidian significance.
  94. Combat Obscura
    The portrait it paints of its Marines is appropriately discordant, redolent of the twitchy frustration caused by a long stint in a sparse landscape with a hazy mission.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Plan 9 from Outer Space
    Plan 9 stands as a testament to sincerity run amok, and as a passionate display of artistic limitations, it’s as glorious as it is flabbergasting.
  96. Collaborator
    The banter is playful and brazenly self-aware, but the ideas are a bit stale and don't lead anywhere emotionally substantial or narratively spontaneous.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Date and Switch
    The film's forced quirkiness and repeated displays of bro-ism in action hinder the potential for a more subtle approach to the potentially challenging issue the story depicts.
  98. Good for Nothing
    The title is apropos, but it's also an understatement.
  99. Koko-di Koko-da
    Nothing hinders surrealism more than the sense that its creators are actively working for it, though Koko-di Koko-da is nonetheless difficult to dismiss.
  100. Extraction
    Chris Hemsworth’s hyperbolically skilled soldier is borne of childish fantasies about the order of the world.
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