Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,769 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 6.5 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: 4,345 out of 7769
  2. Mixed: 1,491 out of 7769
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7769
7769 movie reviews
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    • 83 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Misericordia
    Misericordia finds Alain Guiraudie revisiting old standbys under a relatively conventional set of aesthetic strategies. Fortunately, the ideas roiling under the former wildman’s newly placid surfaces are as potent as ever.
  2. Presence
    The unoriginality of Presence’s story eventually calls out the POV conceit as a one-note gimmick, especially when the tension is dialed up in the film’s second half.
  3. The Seed of the Sacred Fig
    Often blunt and unwieldy, Mohamed Rasolouf's film is nevertheless impactful.
  4. Universal Language
    Though juxtaposing Canada’s drabness and relative lack of heritage with Iran’s millennia of unbroken tradition brings out the former aspects particularly clearly, Universal Language is aiming beyond mere satire or culture-clash playfulness.
  5. The Room Next Door
    Centering the impermanence of human existence in the euthanasia drama The Room Next Door doesn’t indicate resignation to a “late period” style so much as it suggests a natural outgrowth of Almodóvar’s formidable body of work.
  6. Babygirl
    It’s not a film about saying the right thing so much as it’s about people mutually arriving at the right place—no matter the untidiness involved in getting there.
  7. Pepe
    As an anguished cry against colonialism, Pepe works best when illustrating the micro ways in which culture is erased by capital interests.
    • 71 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Damned
    Roberto Minervini’s camera ably conjures the melancholy and alienation that afflict his characters across scenes that merge documentary and neorealist techniques, but it’s far from realistic to expect a troop of soldiers to act aloof around each other when they’re all in the shit.
  9. Rumours
    The film is winningly defined by its peculiar admixture of national pride and self-deprecation.
  10. By the Stream
    Art is a mode of potential connection built in large part on narcissism, and Hong Sang-soo is without peer these days in wrestling that irony onto the screen.
  11. Viet and Nam
    Truong Minh Quy’s new queer romance-cum-sociohistorical lament mines beauty from both collective desolation and individual endurance.
  12. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice
    Tim Burton’s belated sequel to 1988’s weird, wild, and hilariously macabre Beetlejuice abounds in morbid, nauseating delights.
  13. The Front Room
    If there’s any food for thought in The Front Room, it’s the ongoing portrayal of old folks in the A24 catalog.
  14. His Three Daughters
    His Three Daughters sneaks up on you, for as chatty, monologue-forward as Jacobs’s screenplay may be, it conveys so much through absence and suggestion.
  15. Rebel Ridge
    Rebel Ridge never rises to the panic-infused heights of its opening, but Jeremy Saulnier is still able to maintain a baseline of oppressive tension as we watch a man navigate the deep-seated corruption of a sundown town.
  16. No Other Land
    With exceptional lucidity, No Other Land reminds us of the human stakes of Israel’s resettlement of the West Bank, and that fighting for justice starts from the ground up.
  17. The Order
    The Order illuminates the pipeline from economic insecurity and racial anxiety into outright white nationalism without casting a sympathetic eye toward the eponymous group’s tenets.
  18. Wolfs
    The witty repartee between Clooney and Pitt feels like the only thing holding the film together.
  19. The End
    Perhaps the script is deliberately harking back to a storytelling mode that was characteristic of Hollywood cinema for dramatic effect, but the musical aspect, while a neat gimmick, isn’t memorable or cohesive enough to make the homage, well, sing.
  20. Look Into My Eyes
    Leave it to a documentarian to find subjects who profess a similar faith in the power of ecstatic rather than merely objective truth.
  21. Red Rooms
    Red Rooms interrogates how the only thing preventing someone from being sucked down a moral whirlpool is to catch sight of their own zombified reflection on their computer screen.
  22. The Mother of All Lies
    Through her use of recreation, Asmae El Moudir suggests that the act of documentary filmmaking can turn historical truths into fiction, in which everyone becomes an active participant.
  23. Anora
    The film’s initial pull lies in the way that Sean Baker intoxicatingly keys his aesthetic to the fervor of a budding romance that we clearly know won’t end well.
  24. Cloud
    Kurosawa Kiyoshi is an empathetic yet pitiless poet of the modern void.
  25. City of Dreams
    The film resembles less a realistic peek into the modern slavery of immigrants in America as it does grist for the torture porn mill.
  26. Reagan
    The film’s treatment of its subject is belligerently hamfisted, disingenuous, and incurious.
  27. Blink Twice
    Blink Twice clearly has thoughts about the danger that men can pose and the way women are forced to perform happiness while in the company of such predators, but it never provides more than a surface-level understanding of such dynamics.
  28. The Killer
    This remake is absent the far richer character development that made the original as much a melodrama as a shoot-’em-up.
  29. The Crow
    The remake gets bogged down by a superfluous, hackneyed backstory and narrative threads that are conspicuous for their lack of emotional gravitas, causing the film to feel like a wheel-spinning exercise.
  30. Transamazonia
    Plunging headlong into the murk of exploitative missionary work and environmentally destructive capitalism, Transamazonia is a film with undeniable import and sociopolitical urgency, which its muddled narrative can’t completely dampen.
  31. The Outrun
    With The Outrun’s neat but poignant metaphor work in mind, mental illness and addiction are understood as natural responses to the conditions of a ravaged life.
  32. Strange Darling
    Strange Darling is a cunningly devised thriller that wields our assumptions against us like a sharp implement, delighting in making us squirm.
  33. The Deliverance
    Lee Daniels does such a good job investing us in the human drama of The Deliverance that it almost feels unnecessary when the supernatural elements inevitably take over in the final act.
  34. The Sparrow in the Chimney
    The film seems to insist upon the idea that intimacy and isolation are ultimately two sides of the same coin.
  35. Mountains
    Mountains interprets leisure not so much as the opposite of work or struggle, but a stance that can and should suffuse each moment of life, not discounting those we sell to make a living.
  36. Blue Sun Palace
    Blue Sun Palace’s tale is filled with quiet spaces, and the way the texture of this quiet changes over the course of the film is a testament to its power.
  37. Red Island
    Red Island is at once lackadaisical and urgent, relaxed but with a clear eye for how swiftly everything will end for the characters at its center.
  38. Alien: Romulus
    Romulus ends up as the franchise’s strongest entry in three decades for its devotion to deploying lean genre mechanics.
  39. Borderlands
    The film makes mind-boggling choices for an adaptation of a game series so inseparable from its obnoxiously rough-and-tumble tone, characters, and humor.
  40. Daughters
    The importance of touch between a parent and child—and, in the case of this film, specifically between a father and daughter—is rarely discussed openly in Daughters, but it looms large over nearly every scene.
  41. Dance First
    Rather than grappling with the mind and soul of the man who birthed bizarre, fatalistically funny and existentially unsettling works like Waiting for Godot, James Marsh’s film seems content to merely adapt the “Personal Life” section of Samuel Beckett’s Wikipedia page.
  42. Trap
    M. Night Shyamalan’s stylish thriller is schizophrenic in more ways than one.
  43. The Instigators
    Like a well-executed heist, the film knows how to get in and get out with minimal fuss.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In
    Soi Cheang richly draws the city as both prison and refuge, where brutal exploitation sits alongside the residents’ deep sense of solidarity and cooperation.
  45. War Game
    By setting up such a potentially cataclysmic scenario and not convincingly illustrating how it could be resolved or stopped from occurring in the first place, War Game undercuts the very reason it was made.
  46. Happy Campers
    Amy Nicholson’s empathy for her subjects is undeniable.
  47. Hell Hole
    The most consistent recurring theme across the work of the Adams family—parenthood as a siphoning off of the life giver’s vitality in a protracted, eternal cycle of decay and renewal—finds its most literal, alien expression here.
  48. Coup!
    The film has little to add on the subject of the interplay of politics and infectious disease, then or now.
  49. Only the River Flows
    The craft brought to bear on Only the River Flows is captivating, but when it comes to matters of story, it cultivates a frustrating air of disinterest.
  50. Deadpool & Wolverine
    Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t flinch from speaking some measure of truth to power.
  51. Dìdi
    The film speaks unflinchingly to the unique anxieties and frustrations of early teenhood.
  52. My Spy: The Eternal City
    My Spay: The Eternal City is derailed by how readily it succumbs to the ludicrousness of a plot that generates stakes that are far too heavy for the threadbare structure to support.
  53. Twisters
    The film proceeds as a jumble of poorly sketched backstories and subplots, half-hearted topical references, and tepid fan service.
  54. Crumb Catcher
    Chris Skotchdopole’s feature debut is a tantalizing mix of the absurd and the mundane.
  55. Oddity
    Thanks to its expert staging, the film doesn’t lose much in the way of immediacy.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    July Rhapsody (2002)
    Ann Hui’s investment in her characters and their passions bleeds through every frame.
  57. Crossing
    Crossing is never less than nobly intent on showing trans people as worthy of dignity, safety, and love.
  58. Fly Me to the Moon
    Fly Me to the Moon’s sudden shift toward the weighty throws off the pace of what had been a formulaic but charming rom-com, as the heavy-handed look at both Cole’s and Kelly’s past demons fails to mesh cohesively with the antic silliness that preceded it.
  59. Sing Sing
    In its depiction of actors flourishing through artistic struggle, Sing Sing ultimately argues that the most effective liberation happens through the freeing of the body as well as the soul.
  60. Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger
    The film lays out an impassioned case for the nearly unique greatness of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s body of work.
  61. The Convert
    All of the time spent on Thomas Munro’s various campaigns for reconciliation and harmony between two Māori tribes hampers the film, which would have been better served had it expounded on the grander conflicts that it only superficially acknowledges.
  62. Longlegs
    This is a sturdily constructed horror film with a foundation sneakily built on shifting sands.
  63. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    It’s a film of familiar pleasures, but like Harold Faltermeyer’s still infectiously enjoyable synth-pop theme, they do remain highly pleasurable.
  64. The Substance
    The humanity of Demi Moore’s performance, the greatest of her career, gives Coralie Fargeat’s boldest ideas an emotional backbeat.
  65. Eephus
    Carson Lund treats the power of a shared interest with profound, elegiac empathy.
  66. The Nature of Love
    The Nature of Love engages with the stylings and bubbly tonality of the classic rom-com in ironic fashion, along the way exploring complex aspects of human behavior.
  67. Mother, Couch
    Other than a sort of wistful quirkiness, it’s not clear what Mother, Couch gains by skewing away from a more straightforward, streamlined family drama.
  68. MaXXXine
    First with X, then with Pearl, and definitively with MaXXXine, West has buried his unique style and forward-thinking vision under an astroturfed surface of compulsory cinematic references and cliché cultural signifiers.
  69. Kill
    Kill continually finds clever ways to defy our expectations through the particular placement of dramatic beats, surprising shifts in tone, and even just the way it keeps flipping the geography of the action.
  70. A Family Affair
    Ultimately, Richard LaGravenese’s rom-com is a little too packed with soul-searching speeches.
  71. A Quiet Place: Day One
    Like most of this series’s best action, the big bombastic noise is often a distraction from something far more intimate, and in Day One’s case, something far more existentially beautiful.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Daddio
    The film is as tedious and predictable as its traffic-clogged Long Island Expressway setting.
  73. June Zero
    June Zero is a tender, if sometimes cynical, portrait of a new country on old land struggling through the growing pains of establishing its presence both to the international community and its own people.
  74. Family Portrait
    If the edge of Kerr’s scalpel is blunted somewhat by the sheer number of other films that show the “dark underbelly of suburbia,” Family Portrait stands out for its profound mistrust, not just of images but of the sense of sight altogether.
  75. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    The film is all table-setting, with the stories lacking in polish and dramatic momentum and the characters never developed beyond archetypes.
  76. The Devil's Bath
    Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala depict Agnes’s plight with empathy but with a horror maven’s sense of ratcheting unease and encroaching doom.
  77. Fancy Dance
    Erica Tremblay’s granular attention to place makes sure that you take note of the root causes of the defeat felt by the Native characters.
  78. Kinds of Kindness
    The abstraction is presented with cloying cuteness, the sadism is juvenile and purposeless, and the humor is stomach-turningly glib.
  79. Ghostlight
    Directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson are extraordinarily perceptive in highlighting the instances where stagecraft informs everyday life.
  80. Inside Out 2
    The film’s visual complexity isn’t matched by the actual journey the core emotions take back to the forefront of Riley’s mind, which can’t help but feel like a more convoluted retread of the first Inside Out’s abstract buddy comedy.
  81. 20,000 Species of Bees
    The film blooms in moments where, instead of literally addressing Coco's gender trouble, we’re simply allowed to inhabit it.
  82. LaRoy, Texas
    While it never quite reaches the hilarious heights or existential depths of the Coens’ finest work, it does offer similarly enjoyable mixture of the macabre and the absurd.
  83. Sweet Dreams
    The film captures the putrefaction of colonial rule with a morbid sense of humor.
  84. The Watchers
    Pacing is a conspicuous problem and the rushed third act threatens to crumble as The Watchers becomes overloaded with revelations and mythology that strain a foundation barely braced to hold their weight.
  85. The Grab
    The Grab makes a clear choice to conclude not just with doomsaying, but with a call to action and a look at the things that can still be done to avert a global crisis.
  86. Firebrand
    Ultimately, in trying to make Katherine both a historical girlboss and a near-martyr to a vaguely articulated cause, Firebrand’s meandering, under-baked screenplay manages to neither have its cake nor eat it too.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Treasure
    Because the casually observational moments of Julia von Heinz’s film are so rich, its thematic contrivance becomes harder to accept.
  88. I Used to Be Funny
    The nimble way that Rachel Sennott hops between the two versions of her character easily makes up for the odd narrative misstep that I Used to Be Funny makes along the way.
  89. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
    The film plays out like it might be preparing us to let go of its big-name legacy leads.
  90. Tuesday
    This is a film of tremendous emotion, spirit, and paradoxically restraint and ambition.
  91. Young Woman and the Sea
    The film leaves no room for doubt about what Trudy Ederle will accomplish, and thus creates virtually no dramatic tension in her inevitable rise to the top ranks of women’s swimming.
  92. In a Violent Nature
    Think of Chris Nash’s film as Béla Tarr doing an unholy doc-fiction hybrid about Crystal Lake.
  93. Oh, Canada
    There’s a sense here of Paul Schrader wanting to pare back his customary aesthetic even further than it’s already been parred over the last several films and speak plainly, with as little scrim between the audience and himself as possible.
  94. Samsara
    The film exemplifies Lois Patiño’s ongoing efforts to complicate docufiction approaches with otherworldly reveries meant to communicate states beyond our immediate reality.
  95. Robot Dreams
    Pablo Berger's film effortlessly brings a sense of universality to its story.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dead Don't Hurt
    Ultimately, the didacticism of Viggo Mortensen’s film lets it down.
  97. All We Imagine as Light
    Writer-director Payal Kapadia has created an exceptional document of a city and its people.
    • 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.
  99. Atlas
    Atlas seems like a story that should have been experienced with a gamepad in hand.
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