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. May in the Summer
    Cherien Dabis is least successful at connecting her character May's marital crisis to the rumblings of her repressed heritage.
  2. 3 Hearts
    Throughout, Benoît Jacquot never loses sight of the primordial compulsions that drive feelings and expressions of great love and beauty.
  3. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here
    The research that went into the film seems a largesse, but it's compromised at every turn by filmmaker Amei Wallach's sloppy, pedantic delivery.
  4. Mufasa: The Lion King
    The film, unbound by having to recreate large swaths of the original Lion King whole cloth, was clearly allowed to be a product of its director.
  5. Infinite Storm
    Not only does Infinite Storm lack for a complete vision, it’s all too comfortable in settling for mawkishness.
  6. The Commuter
    The final optimism of the film's worldview lands with a conviction that's rare in contemporary Hollywood cinema—a resilience that's strong enough for Liam Neeson to ride out on.
  7. The Journals of Musan
    If The Journals of Musan indicates anything, it's that people, for the most part, either can't or simply aren't willing to comprehend the circumstances behind others' actions.
  8. G.B.F.
    The film, lensed in appealing candy-striped colors, has so much fun exploding stereotypes and radiates with such infectious comic gusto and genuine good nature, that it would be almost churlish to resist its charms.
  9. Pump
    The doc does a good job of avoiding partisan caterwauling, limiting its argument to a clear thesis and well-articulated supporting statements.
  10. I Am Michael
    Justin Kelly's film is more interested in rushing through the narrative's events than contemplating their environment.
  11. Dream Boat
    If the global reunion that the cruise ship presents here is such a panacea, why is there so much moping?
  12. The Legend of Hell House
    The Legend of Hell House is a regrettably just-competent adaptation of a great American horror novel.
  13. Die Another Day
    The collection of clever quips on parade here are both tiresome and predictable.
  14. Weightless
    The title Weightless is an apt description for this stylish but emotionally inert film.
  15. The Driver
    A visceral symphony of screeching tires and crushing metal.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    La Maison de la Radio
    Whether or not you consider this a banal topic, it's plain to see that the puttering documentary doesn't achieve magnificence.
  17. Diary of a Chambermaid
    The lack of ambiguity reflects Benoît Jacquot's treatment of the text, which is devoid of either formal obsessiveness or a contemporary hook.
  18. Citizen Gangster
    Its commentary on our fascination with law-breakers is virtually nonexistent, except to the extent that the film itself revels in the doomed romanticism of its own protagonist.
  19. Scarlet
    On paper, anime master Hosoda Mamoru’s Scarlet sounds positively electrifying.
  20. Wine Country
    The film’s relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance.
  21. It's What's Inside
    The camera, the cuts, the needle drops, and story twists all contribute to the feeling of a machine that’s spinning faster and faster until finally it careens right out of control.
  22. Alpha
    The possibility of relating to the characters is constantly hindered by the struggle to make sense of the story’s messily sketched dystopia.
  23. Concussion
    The near-imperceptible finesse of Abby's characterization reflects writer-director Stacie Passon's effortless, interesting mix of richness and economy.
  24. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Benicio Del Toro's performance is showy, a great actor's parade of indulgences that occasionally sets the deranged camp tone that should have been the narrative's starting point.
  25. Adrift
    Director Baltasar Kormákur's film is a simple, acutely observed love story that also happens to be a rousingly stripped-down tale of survival.
  26. Stuffed
    Erin Derham’s unadventurous aesthetic inoculates her from taxidermy’s subversive spirit.
  27. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    When does intensity and commitment supersede historical understanding?
  28. The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger
    It insists that it's in moments of small talk, between life's larger events, that one finds vitality.
  29. Tag
    As dumb as Tag is on the surface, it offers amity, emotional support, awkward tears, the specter of death, and the spectacle of ass-punching slapstick all rolled up in one somehow cohesive collection of all-good spare parts.
  30. Turtle: The Incredible Journey
    Though it boasts its fair share of shots that approximate the turtle's first-person point of view, the film's most dominant presence is its heavy-handed maker.
  31. Guilty of Romance
    Though it begins with the aesthetic and conceptual rigor of Blade Runner, it quickly veers toward the gratuitous outlandishness of a Bruce La Bruce film.
  32. Capital
    Costa-Gavras's new film is more a funhouse-mirror panegyric (albeit on an exhausted topic) than the staid thriller promised by its press materials.
  33. God Bless America
    By wholeheartedly taking its main character's side instead of complicating or censuring his homicidal vigilante crusade, it proves inanely one-note and preachy.
  34. Three Stars
    As a sampler course of what it means to court the Michelin honor, Three Stars is enjoyable, but it's simply a collision of details that never entirely converge into a meaningful whole.
  35. Embattled
    The film muddies its sense of moral righteousness by suggesting that violence and vengeance can only be defeated by more of the same.
  36. The Glass Castle
    As in Destin Daniel Cretton’s previous feature, Short Term 12, the oscillations between sociological horror and misty-eyed sentimentality call attention to how meticulously the film arranges its emotional punches.
  37. Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish
    What's most disappointing about Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish is how it fails to deliver on the hybridizing NYC gimmickry of its title.
  38. West of the Jordan River
    Amos Gitai regularly takes incidents and anecdotes out of context, making it difficult for viewers who lack intimate knowledge of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to follow the proceedings.
  39. Sonic the Hedgehog 3
    The hedgehogs are the stars here, and after three delightfully breezy good times at the theater, it’s no longer a surprise as to why that is.
  40. Genius
    It makes a convincing argument for viewing Thomas Wolfe's work as a product of the excess and exuberance of the 1920s.
  41. Chasing Portraits
    Its major contribution, as one museum curator suggests, may be to bring the works of Moshe Rynecki back into prominence.
  42. Greedy Lying Bastards
    What Craig Scott Rosebraugh's film lacks in originality, it makes up for in comprehensiveness.
  43. The Cut
    Fatih Akin falls back on convenience and contrivance to streamline the thornier specificities of his grand-scale narrative.
  44. Radioactive
    Marjane Satrapi’s film could have benefited from the tangy humor and cynicism of her graphic novels.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Flesh+Blood
    In the end, Verhoeven’s greatest irony, and the often pedestrian narrative’s most brilliant stroke, isn’t to decide in favor or against Martin. He’s of a piece with his nature, and he leaves the story as he entered it: unchanged and unbowed by the carnage he’s both witness to and agent of
  46. Race
    This is a complication-smoothing take on Jesse Owens's elegant riposte to Hitler's racism at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
  47. Our Time
    The film elides politics in order to earnestly consider whether love is necessarily an act of possession.
  48. Midnight's Children
    Preserves much of the novel's intricacy and human drama, perhaps due to Salman Rushdie's involvement as co-screenwriter, even if it remains singularly unremarkable from a cinematic perspective.
  49. The Human Surge
    The film’s default state is an ambient inertia that gestures vaguely in multiple directions without concerning itself with the hard work of constructing an argument, a convincing milieu, or even a compelling mood.
  50. On the Road
    The lack of a strong expository voice further simplifies the wealth of explicit sex Walter Salles dramatizes, much of it drawn from juicy swathes of Jack Kerouac's only recently published original scroll.
  51. The Details
    The Details is as smug and self-satisfied as its privileged lead character.
  52. Nightbitch
    It’s disappointing to see a film with such a weird premise as Nightbitch ease into an orthodox storytelling mode.
  53. Deadpool & Wolverine
    Deadpool & Wolverine doesn’t flinch from speaking some measure of truth to power.
  54. Invaders from Mars
    Committed horror nerds and conspiracy-minded liberals alike will find fleeting suggestions of the canny parable that nearly manages to surface.
  55. Focus
    The film turns out to instead be a strained trumpeting of the return of the proverbial king of the box office.
  56. Miami Connection (1987)
    Love it or hate it, it's doubtful you'll ever forget it, and it may just force you to redefine your definition of what constitutes "good" cinema.
  57. Live Cargo
    The faces in Logan Sandler's film, like the landscapes of the paradise setting, only convey an empty sort of ambiguity.
  58. The Wizard of the Kremlin
    Olivier Assayas’s knack for fostering insight through irony is nowhere to be found in the film.
  59. Paper Towns
    To hose down the white elephant in the room right off the bat, yes, it falls into place as a coming-of-age spin on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype.
    • 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.
  61. Hyena
    The Gerard Johnson film's blanket cynicism is its most shopworn quality of all.
  62. 1BR
    The film gives palpable expression to the sense of hopelessness felt by those who fall under the control of cults.
  63. The Fate of the Furious
    The film finally tips the franchise over from modestly thoughtful stupidity into tedious, loud inanity.
  64. Girls Just Want to Have Fun
    But even from an objective viewpoint, Girls Just Want to Have Fun isn’t really a bad film, at least not in the ways in which we tend to define bad films. The acting is more than competent, there’s not much glaringly bad dialogue, the humor is inventive, and the song-and-dance is engaging.
  65. Non-Stop
    The latest collaboration between director Jaume Collet-Serra and star Liam Neeson is made with far more care and visual detail than you might expect.
  66. Little Accidents
    A movingly authentic exploration of a working-class milieu and the psychological and economic trauma that ripples through a town in the wake of a tragic accident.
  67. Decoding Annie Parker
    This isn't a film of bedside conversions or radical emotional transformations, nor is it a story about laughing at one's own hardships as a coping mechanism.
  68. Storks
    Maybe it's not the worst thing in the world that Storks doesn't take many cues from Pixar's tear-jerking playbook.
  69. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Does Katie Holmes's hubby get script-doctoring rights even on her own film projects? That would explain why Troy Nixey's inane Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, co-written and produced by Guillermo del Toro, at times suggests an anti-Rx PSA.
  70. Drive-Away Dolls
    In the classic queer punk tradition of Bruce LaBruce, John Waters, and Gregg Araki, Ethan Coen’s film knows when to pay homage and when to move to its own rhythm.
  71. Mosquito State
    The film hauntingly suggests that a man’s most rational move in a rigged society is to fade away into the ecosystem.
  72. The DUFF
    The film deposits its heroine and everyone in the audience looking toward her for image-maintaining guidance back at square one.
  73. Loro
    Like most of Paolo Sorrentino’s films, Loro is closer to a stylistic orgy than an existential rumination on Italy’s heritage.
  74. French Exit
    In French Exit’s best passages, sadness and curt, resonant comedy exist side by side unceremoniously.
  75. Wagner & Me
    Even when Wagner & Me seems uneven as an art historical study, it's fairly successful as a travelogue.
  76. Towheads
    There's but one sequence in the entire movie that offers even the slightest bit of filmmaking verve, and even this speaks to the project's essential myopia.
  77. Casa Grande
    The film uses its critique of white privilege as a means to woo the legitimizing gaze of international audiences.
  78. A Bride for Rip Van Winkle
    The film is an interminable saga full of soap-operatic plot twists involving quickly broken marriages, sexual assault, a secret porn career, terminal illness, and a quasi lesbian love affair.
  79. Hellraiser
    Barker’s vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, but Hellraiser‘s overriding ridiculousness (and nagging budgetary shortcomings) can’t disguise the fact that the movie is at least unwittingly a product of the AIDS crisis.
  80. Forbidden Fruits
    The film is a witchy mall comedy that mostly keeps you under its spell.
  81. I Only Rest in the Storm
    Whatever the post-colonial lessons are, I Only Rest in the Storm’s characters articulate them too evidently, as if preemptively justifying the making of a film in or about “Africa” on the condition that the white man’s presence is relentlessly denounced.
  82. The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
    Temperamentally, Guy Ritchie aligns more with the lithe, James Bond-like Solo: detached, above-it-all, eternally cool under pressure.
  83. Miss Julie
    The film is no tearjerker, but it makes the stage play's hidebound, soul-baring pleasures mesmerizing on screen, and without copping to reductivism.
  84. Minions
    It's a buzzkill to enter the world of Minions primed for a tidal wave of gibberish-talking lemmings to tear the roof off, only to see them once again led astray by the ordinariness of human affairs.
  85. Real Steel
    If familiarity is endemic to this feel-good drama, there's nonetheless also something to be said for competent amalgamation and regurgitation of tired genre tropes.
  86. War Machine
    Writer-director David Michôd's film renders existential crises of American entitlement dull and tedious.
  87. The Fence
    The late Bernard-Marie Koltès’s 1979 play isn’t opened up so much as clinically dissected by the film, with every character an enfeebled pawn in situations they’re at a loss to resolve.
  88. For No Good Reason
    Charlie Paul isn't content to let his stock footage and interviewees lead for him, driven as he is to "make something out of a frame of mind," though to needlessly busy effect.
  89. The Rum Diary
    The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson's amorphous hodgepodge of a film, wants to be many things: period recreation, social commentary, morality play, romance, an insider look at the newspaper game.
  90. Take Me
    Schilling and Healy never quite overcome the fact that Take Me is a suspense comedy that simply isn't very suspenseful or very funny and, just as importantly, never finds a thematic through line.
  91. Frank & Lola
    The film occasionally benefits from the weird energy shared between Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots.
  92. Filth
    Ultimately, the film is too nihilistic to believe its protagonist can be saved, declaring him a lost soul and satisfied to let him suffer.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Rollerball
    Director Norman Jewison’s Rollerball remains a poignant and unusually prescient vision of our world as defined by Walmart and Exxon-Mobil.
  94. The Croods: A New Age
    The film is brightly colored, inventively designed, and constantly flirting with the outright psychedelic, but it's so packed full of incident that it rarely gives its jokes the space to land.
  95. Death Becomes Her
    Death Becomes Her is one of the few mainstream comedies that you don’t feel even had to try to be outlandish. It was simply born that way.
  96. Fast X
    Being as this is the first of a possibly three-part finale, Fast X’s sense of fun is constantly deflated by all the table-setting.
  97. Maleficent
    We may have all wanted to know the story behind those famed horns, but the mystery was far preferable to having Maleficent de-fanged and de-clawed in the process.
  98. The Island of St. Matthews
    It gives us a series of images that, free from definitive context, form a new reality of their own, a small composite portrait of previously untold stories.
  99. Claire in Motion
    Throughout, writer-directors Lisa Robinson and Annie J. Howell's film buckles under the weight of its symbolism.
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