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. Ratchet & Clank
    The film crams in jokes long past the point of relevance and often to outright distraction, if not annoyance.
  2. Criminal Activities
    The actors have the showmanship to chew the lurid, shopworn material up to bits, savoring it like a Royale with cheese.
  3. Elstree 1976
    It too often fails to examine how the long shadow cast by Star Wars affected its its background actors' lives.
  4. The Royal Road
    The cumulative effect is altogether perplexing, as it's difficult to tell if Olson's trying to upend clichés or settle for them.
  5. Snatched
    The mother-daughter relationship ostensibly at the film’s heart is largely reduced to tired jokes about how moms can be overprotective and don’t understand how to use Facebook.
  6. Noma: My Perfect Storm
    Too much of Noma is composed of gorgeous pillow shots, which grow static and fussy, appearing to exist almost apart from the subject matter.
  7. Touched With Fire
    The film is a thinly dramatized series of arguments against, then ultimately in favor of the medication of bipolar disorder.
  8. Boy and the World
    One wonders how receptive young audiences should be to a film that puts its storytelling secondary to its message-making.
  9. 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.
  10. Very Semi-Serious
    It doesn't seem to aspire to much more than proving that there are nice, talented people behind the New Yorker's walls.
  11. Dreams Rewired
    The documentary isn't advancing an argument so much as simply restating a European socialistic breed of fact.
  12. Alien: Covenant
    The only saving grace of the film's mostly recycled horrors is how they deepen Michael Fassbender's android David.
  13. Body
    The filmmakers exhibit no interest in watching the story's central wolves wiggle out of the trap they've potentially set for themselves.
  14. My Friend Victoria
    The film disappoints in its refusal to allow for deeper articulations of racism beyond, well, visible and verbal displays of racism.
  15. Bad Moms
    The end-credits sequence shows up the rest of the film as the broad and incoherent live-action cartoon that it is.
  16. Martyrs
    It's hardly a desecration of Pascal Laugier's 2008 French horror film of the same name, but that assumes the original is a canonical text.
  17. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    With this film, nuance seems to have disapparated from the wizarding world altogether.
  18. Keanu
    Keanu is declawed by design, but it's hard not to wonder what the cat could've dragged in.
  19. Men Go to Battle
    It's too texturally exacting in its recreation of a transitory moment in U.S. history to register as a failure.
  20. Rabid Dogs
    There's no reason for Rabid Dogs to exist, as even character identity and motivation receives little attention.
  21. Elvis & Nixon
    The film is taken with comfy gags that celebrate these men's ownership of pop culture, filtering them through a lens of unrevealing caricature.
  22. 31
    It collapses into repetition and unintended self-parody, as it's devoid of the subtext and empathetic audacity.
  23. Standoff
    Standoff isn’t quite inspired, but it coasts on unexpected modesty of professionalism.
  24. 10 Cloverfield Lane
    The legacy of Syd Fields's screenwriting manual hangs over 10 Cloverfield Lane, as it does all of Abrams's productions, which never even accidentally casts a whiff of subtext or authorial personality.
  25. Wiener-Dog
    The film's back half nearly goes completely astray with two segments featuring unimaginative characterizations and tepid, mean-spirited scenarios.
  26. Goat
    The film's understanding of the brittleness that begets the "traditions" of frat culture is altogether shallow.
  27. American Honey
    This is a patchwork dystopia of white poverty whose facets are both difficult to deny and to prove exist precisely as depicted.
  28. Baywatch
    In terms of body objectification, Baywatch is an equal-opportunity exploiter, but when it comes to comedy, it's a total boys' club.
  29. Sing Street
    All traces of grit from John Carney's earlier films have been scrubbed away in favor of relentlessly crowd-pleasing slickness.
  30. The Birth of a Nation
    Nate Parker strains to control the strange and stirring complications of his subject's visionary apocalypticism.
  31. Songs My Brothers Taught Me
    The film is more taken by its own formal composition than enunciating the musical edification promised by its title.
  32. Dark Night
    Tim Sutton's film often surprises on the micro level, but its broader execution gives reason for pause.
  33. Author: The JT LeRoy Story
    Jeff Feuerzeig isn't skeptical enough of Laura Albert's explanations and rationalizations.
  34. Newtown
    Its enervated address of both mental-health treatment and gun laws receives few constructive articulations beyond a single scene.
  35. Weiner
    Josh Kriegman and Elyse Sternberg's film never discovers a greater purpose beyond its undeniable sideshow appeal.
  36. The Confirmation
    The premise is undermined by the film's occasionally dubious ethics and its tendency to soft-pedal the dangerous situations it sets up.
  37. White Girl
    It's an entertaining and unapologetic tale of female risk-taking, filled with clever camerawork, but the characters remain shallow.
  38. Blade Runner 2049
    Denis Villeneuve’s film is designed to reward the audience for recognizing references in the midst of an action pursuit, and, after an hour or so of the clipped and earnest signifying, one may find themselves nostalgic for Ridley Scott’s unforced indifference to the issue.
  39. Fatima
    The film appears to have been devised to pander to the presumptions of Western, liberal viewers.
  40. After the Storm
    The stock character types that Hirokazu Kore-eda employs across the board are pretty much open books from the start.
  41. Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
    Unimaginatively directed and indifferently shot, the film never establishes a distinctive voice for itself.
  42. Presenting Princess Shaw
    The peculiar circumstances of the documentary necessitate more transparency than the filmmaker is willing to offer.
  43. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny
    The only past that Dial of Destiny is interested in plundering is the glory of its predecessors.
  44. 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.
  45. The Girl in the Photographs
    The film is ultimately devoted to formula, as Nick Simon discards his jumbled meta-media conceit at around the halfway mark.
  46. The Blue Hour
    An initially intriguing attempt to splice together a gay romance and a horror film that ultimately shows little flair for either genre.
  47. Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt
    It reduces its historical moment to a series of vignettes and voiceovers, each evincing a curiously tone-deaf sentimentality.
  48. Unlocking the Cage
    The problem here isn't necessarily the tension between emotion and rationality, but that the doc does little to explore these dimensions as they arise.
  49. The Neon Demon
    The simmering insinuations of Nicolas Winding Refn's film eventually flower into full-on exploitation.
  50. Kicks
    It's less notable for its originality than for how dynamically it blends a few styles that ultimately prove incompatible.
  51. Streit's: Matzo and the American Dream
    Michael Levine provides a history without a real sense of individuated struggle or even singular personage.
  52. Hockney
    After a nearly virtuoso opening, it reduces passages of the painter's life into multiple montages of pop pabulum.
  53. The Take
    For a film so interested in the public's malleability, The Take isn't particularly good at controlling its own audience.
  54. It
    It cashes in on trendy retroism instead of utilizing the perspective of, to borrow from Joni Mitchell, seeing clowns from both sides now.
  55. Viktoria
    The film is ultimately stultifying because the disconnection between the various characters is so immediately accepted as such a foregone conclusion that nothing ever seems to be at stake, and the heavily horizontal imagery, though accomplished and evocative, if fussy, only evokes two states of mind: loneliness and disconnection.
  56. Bite
    Chad Archibald doesn't quite land Bite's transition over from claustrophobic character study into full-blown monster movie.
  57. Hacksaw Ridge
    This is a work of defiantly simplistic, classically structured Hollywood storytelling, and Mel Gibson takes to its hokey plot points with some gusto.
  58. I, Daniel Blake
    It's pock-marked by the conservative dramatic conventions and broad political gestures that have marred much of Ken Loach's recent output.
  59. Morgan
    The film's makers lose trust in the intellectual heft of their material and chose to prioritize empty sensation instead.
  60. 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.
  61. The Greasy Strangler
    It aims for John Waters-style transgression without evincing half of Waters’s wit and affection for eccentric lifestyles.
  62. Misconception
    The even-handedness of Yu's gaze throughout the first part of the film, alas, isn't sustained in the second and third chapters.
  63. Almost Christmas
    The film is most affecting in its simpler moments, particularly those revolving around food.
  64. Rough Night
    To some degree, Rough Night's attention to character detail compensates for its weaknesses as a comedy.
  65. Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie
    There's something to be said for a summer movie that offers up Chris Colfer as an unapologetic misogynist hairdresser.
  66. Free to Run
    The doc's caginess is a weakness that results from an inherently nostalgic sense of reverie.
  67. Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV
    The film is, at least, a marvelously enticing advertisement for the upcoming Final Fantasy XV video game.
  68. War on Everyone
    The film is in love with the tropes it ridicules, and it doesn't take long for that love to dwarf any possibility of critique.
  69. Under the Sun
    Under the Sun's overall aesthetic identifies a willingness to settle for an easy condemnation of an obviously abysmal regime, while not doing anything challenging or enlightening with all the outstanding footage collected.
  70. Max Rose
    The film occasionally and promisingly suggests an obsessive and free-associative paean to regret.
  71. Edge of Winter
    One comes to resent the film for how it thrills to the possibility of a father hurting his children.
  72. Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
    The documentary is just more of what we've come to expect from director Richard Linklater's expanded fanverse.
  73. The Confessions
    Director Roberto Andò takes the form of a classical whodunit and bludgeons it with naïve indignation and sanctimony.
  74. Command and Control
    Robert Kenner's stylistic choices amplify the film's fetishistic fascination with the nuclear weaponry itself.
  75. Sea Fog
    The film fails to lift off from this sturdy aesthetic launching pad; it never allows the characters, however stock, to evolve in their respective dealings with one another, which is the primary source of tension and escalation for a thriller set in a confined place.
  76. Skiptrace
    The film's bloated action-comedy machinery prevents any real chemistry from forming between Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville.
  77. A Beautiful Now
    Writer-director Daniela Amavia fails to link the lives of her characters to any deeper sense of meaning.
  78. Mary Poppins Returns
    For all of its slavish devotion to Mary Poppins, the sequel doesn't even seem to recognize its greatest attribute: its star.
  79. T2 Trainspotting
    The heart of T2 lies in the relationship between Renton and Sick Boy, but their rocky reunion is another victim both to the wheel-spinning innate in Hodge’s script and Boyle’s relative lack of fresh ideas.
  80. Salt and Fire
    Salt and Fire is a doodle, suggesting an assemblage of ecological riffs and fantasias that Werner Herzog may have entertained while making Into the Inferno.
  81. LBJ
    By pairing down Lyndon Baines Johnson’s multifarious life and career to this one piece of legislation, the film fails to do justice to both the man and the fraught times he so fundamentally influenced.
  82. The Tenth Man
    As films about dopey dudes finding love go, The Tenth Man is too modest for its own good.
  83. Will You Dance with Me?
    Derek Jarman's footage speaks to the freedoms afforded by the combination of a darkened dance floor and like-minded people.
  84. Land of Mine
    Land of Mine's fitful jolts of suspense can't compensate for the story's wholly familiar trajectory.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Antibirth
    It’s unfortunate that the only part of the film that works does so by taking the wind out of the rest of it.
  86. Ferdinand
    Any potential subtext of Munro Leaf's children's book has been bleached out in the marketplace-oriented Ferdinand.
  87. Kampai! For the Love of Sake
    Mirai Konishi's documentary inevitably reveals itself to be an elaborate infomercial for Westerners.
  88. Kiki
    When compared to the high-stakes dramas at the center of Paris Is Burning, where sex workers dreamed of becoming supermodels, Kiki feels rather tame.
  89. Girl Asleep
    From the overtly vibrant colors to the caricaturesque dimensions of the performances, the film's aesthetic promises a great allegorical message that never arrives.
  90. Miss Stevens
    It provides materials for discussion without directing the viewer toward a particular solution or easy answer.
  91. Blazing Saddles
    A limp, shapeless mess of a film trades in a genuine respect for westerns’ tropes for purile vulgarity and joy-buzzer showmanship.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Game of Aces
    The characters' motivations are dictated less by the dynamics of their personalities and more by the needs of the screenplay.
  93. Chuck
    Like its protagonist, Philippe Falardeau's film gets lost in a haze of incidental cacophony.
  94. Homeland: Iraq Year Zero
    Throughout his nearly six-hour documentary, Abbas Fahdel is content with showing only the outer surface of people's lives.
  95. Rat Film
    Inherent to director Theo Anthony's misappropriation of the essay form is a conflicting account of precisely which history his documentary seeks to investigate.
  96. Blair Witch
    It doesn't suggest documentary footage found in the woods so much as a haunted-house version of Hardcore Henry.
  97. Before the Flood
    The documentary's focus on elite solutionism effectively erases the role of popular agitation in formulating social change.
  98. Catfight
    Onur Tukel attempts to connect Ashley and Veronica’s barbarity to the broader callousness of American life, but the satire is too blunt to really stick.
  99. Frantz
    The pacing is so humorless and funereal that it squelches the possibility of heat or conflict arising between the characters.
  100. Jackie
    Pablo Larraín's film bluntly hammers home the notion that history is framed by perception rather than reality.
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