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. The Journey
    Paisley and McGuinness's intellectual back and forth is rendered so compellingly that one wishes the filmmakers didn’t feel a need to resort to a surfeit of momentum-killing plot contrivances.
  2. The Woman Who Left
    It suffers by resembling arty, didactic bloat when it most begs for a more sophisticated dramatic touch.
  3. Tanna
    The film blends the Bard with National Geographic, failing to make a case for the inexplicability of their union.
  4. Baden Baden
    The film plays like it's been methodically configured to snuff out an even marginal indulgence of its characters' emotions.
  5. The Whole Truth
    The filmmakers are so disengaged from the psyches of its characters that The Whole Truth ultimately plays as little more than the cinematic equivalent of a trashy airport novel that will grip you in the moment before it dissolves from memory immediately afterward.
  6. My Scientology Movie
    The only element that significantly differentiates this documentary from its peers is Louis Theroux's good-natured cheekiness.
  7. Phantasm IV: Oblivion
    The freewheeling atmosphere of dread more than make up for the incoherence, but Phantasm IV: Oblivion at times feels like an expensive, 35mm home movie made by some kids in their backyard.
  8. Ocean's 8
    With Ocean's 8, Gary Ross serves up a mildly engaging riff on the heist film, but he rarely strays from the established formula of Steven Soderbergh's original Ocean's trilogy.
  9. My Dead Boyfriend
    Slacker that it is, the film never seems willing to put in the necessary work to live up to its potential.
  10. Always Shine
    The film undermines the unity of its characterizations, redirecting into garish phantasmagoria.
  11. Rainbow Time
    Linas Phillips's contrived sense of follow-through betrays the truthfulness of his initial characterizations.
  12. Detour
    The effect of the film becomes not unlike watching a puzzle solve itself without demanding either the audience’s emotional or intellectual investment.
  13. Mifune: The Last Samurai
    In many ways, Toshirô Mifune the man remains just as mysterious after watching Steven Okazaki's film as he was before.
  14. Portrait of a Garden
    Portrait of a Garden‘s distance from its human subjects forestalls the film’s momentum and strips it of a heart.
  15. Bitter Harvest
    The film is an awkward mix of swashbuckling love story and polemic, painted in very broad strokes.
  16. Buster's Mal Heart
    Writer-director Sarah Adina Smith's film confuses narrative gimmickry for the sensitive evocation of an inner life.
  17. Like Crazy
    Restless, at times even chaotic, the film often seems to be replicating the experience of having a manic episode.
  18. Mission: Impossible – Fallout
    As in Rogue Nation, Fallout‘s action scenes are cleanly composed and easy to follow, and so abundant as to become monotonous.
  19. A Wrinkle in Time
    The film may involve the instant movement among unfathomable distances and the shattered limits of space and time, but it’s only Storm Reid's character who feels multidimensional.
  20. Railroad Tigers
    Despite its energetic, intricately climax, Railroad Tigers is at its most entertaining when merely observing Chan’s smaller movements.
  21. The Belko Experiment
    The film's characters are stock types without enough satirical texture to fulfill their function in the narrative.
  22. Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America
    The film is a debater with some interesting points to make but no overall argument to contain them.
  23. The Crash
    The film may be too preposterous to take seriously, but at least writer-director Aram Rappaport trains his sights on the right enemies.
  24. Manifesto
    The film’s visceral pleasures often work at cross purposes with the cerebral message of the manifestos.
  25. Leap!
    The film’s careful attention to detail in the animation is continuously undermined by a formulaic plot and anxious pandering to contemporary sensibilities.
  26. Suntan
    Argyris Papadimitropoulos struggles to lift his material out of a downbeat mode of cringe comedy.
  27. Don't Knock Twice
    The film's storylines fail to inform or intensify each other in any theme-deepening or character-developing ways.
  28. Wonder
    The film has an almost pathological need to ensure that everything turns out well for every single character, while at the same time eliding any truly difficult issues.
  29. Murder on the Orient Express
    Once the film gets to the Orient Express, it's as if Kenneth Branagh is always itching to get off of it, even having Hercule Poirot at one point look over a list of names while standing atop the train for no discernible reason, except perhaps to enjoy the way the sun peeks out between two distant mountain peaks.
  30. The Other Half
    The film's emotional resonance is consistently stifled by excessively gloomy aesthetic and stylistic tics.
  31. Dean
    One has to wade through a lot of eye-rolling comic marginalia to get to the film's pained beating heart.
  32. Paris Can Wait
    The film leaves the lasting impression of a story that takes place in its own elitist and hermetically sealed world.
  33. Churchill
    The film simplifies Winston Churchill's legacy for the dubious purposes of narrative momentum and emotional lift.
  34. Landline
    Heroin is to Landline what abortion is to Robespierre's Obvious Child: a dangerous little variable planted to strategically unsettle the pervading cutesiness.
  35. Beach Rats
    Beach Rats is most compelling when it puts a self-aware focus on Harris Dickinson’s sculpted male figure.
  36. Beatriz at Dinner
    Despite its gestures toward nuance, the very broadness of the dichotomies in the film prove to be its undoing.
  37. Crown Heights
    The film plays like a human-interest story in which all of the humanity has been gutted in favor of deadening narrative efficiency.
  38. Dayveon
    Shot in 4:3 with sliver-thin depth of field and a lush palette of swampy greens, Amman Abbasi's film is largely predicated on the idea of imparting a hyperreal sensuality to a region not often depicted on the big screen.
  39. The Hero
    Sam Elliott’s calmly affecting performance is overwhelmed by a doggedly conventional screenplay that often plays like end-of-life wish-fulfillment fantasy.
  40. The Yellow Birds
    You may want for something to hold on to, but Tye Sheridan and Alden Ehrenreich slip through the fingers, both seeming uninterested and restless to move on to other projects.
  41. Wolves
    Bart Freundlich alternates somewhat arbitrarily between his various plots, leaving a lot of loose ends in the process.
  42. Marshall
    Marshall arguably intends for societal 20/20 hindsight to provide the bulk of perspective throughout.
  43. mother!
    If Black Swan was filmmaker Darren Aronofsky's fevered valentine to the artist's self-abnegating drive toward greatness, then Mother!, his loudest and most comprehensive work to date, is either a critique of or a doubling down on that impulse.
  44. 13 Minutes
    Aside from further vilifying the Nazis, the film's ideological endgame remains a bit too slippery.
  45. It Comes at Night
    The film’s minimalism is rigorous, but its every moment of barebones craftsmanship is accompanied by plodding drama and an unsustainable heap of unanswered questions.
  46. The Ticket
    The Ticket abandons the potentially complex web of drama it initially sets up and moves toward a limp, shallow critique of superficiality itself.
  47. Final Portrait
    As seen through James Lord’s eyes, the dramas and passions on display throughout the film come off as melodramas and grotesqueries.
  48. A Fantastic Woman
    Superficial when it means to be elliptical and regressive in its attempts to promote pride and tolerance, Sebastián Lelio’s film is beautiful but vacant, the type of melodrama that reminds us that they shouldn’t always make them like they used to.
  49. The Young Karl Marx
    The film is ironically gripped by the sort of ideological "vagueness" that Krk Marx dismisses throughout.
  50. Django
    The film's most crucial shortcoming lies in its failure to illuminate both the inner life of its subject and his artistic genius.
  51. Félicité
    Alain Gomis never reconciles throughout how the film's disparate parts are meant to fit together.
  52. Step
    By fitting Cori, Tayla, and Blessin's lives into a predetermined narrative arc, Step reduces the girls to plucky, up-by-the-bootstraps archetypes.
  53. Wonder Wheel
    The tone throughout vacillates wildly from silly comedy to classic Hollywood melodrama, and all of it feels as artificial and unsatisfying as the cotton candy twirling in a vending cart.
  54. War Machine
    Writer-director David Michôd's film renders existential crises of American entitlement dull and tedious.
  55. Trolls World Tour
    At its best, the film doesn’t just privilege altered states of consciousness, it is an altered state of consciousness.
  56. 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.
  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 Ballad of Lefty Brown
    For what it's worth, Jared Moshe seems genuinely interested in the role of unflagging decency in a sullied world.
  59. A Woman, a Part
    The film’s depiction of friendship seldom pushes past insights predicated on a fundamental tension between characters.
  60. Battle of the Sexes
    Battle of the Sexes sacrifices some of its innate appeal by making ham out of the supposed relics of a less enlightened era.
  61. The Boys from Brazil
    Jerry Goldmsith’s ominous score is reminiscent of his Oscar-winning work for The Omen but The Boys From Brazil is pure pomp and circumstance.
  62. The Old Man & the Gun
    David Lowery has a carefree, bordering on insubstantial touch, which gives rise to several rank absurdities.
  63. Thank You for Your Service
    The film is admirably frank in its depiction of lingering trauma but too often struggles to capture its more ineffable qualities.
  64. Polina
    Even its sensitive and gorgeous choreographies can't fully offer respite from the hollow narrative.
  65. Obit
    The film ascribes to a conventionally contrapuntal take on the lives of those who spend all day surrounded by death.
  66. The Shape of Water
    The Shape of Water has been made with a level of craftsmanship that should be the envy of most filmmakers, but the impudent, unruly streak that so often gives Guillermo del Toro’s films their pulse has been airbrushed away.
  67. Thelma
    Thelma's transition into a paranormal thriller doesn’t complicate its initially potent character study.
  68. Avatar: Fire and Ash
    The crystal clarity of Russell Carpenter’s cinematography is often unnerving, as is the uncanny nature of Pandora’s computer-generated flora and fauna, which never truly seem alive and vital.
  69. Deadpool 2
    Deadpool 2 muddies the distinction between parodying comic-book-movie conventions and perfunctorily adhering to them.
  70. Bohemian Rhapsody
    This charitable act of resuscitation for the benefit of Mercury’s admirers is something that the film as a whole ultimately fails to accomplish, as Bohemian Rhapsody mistakenly believes that simply trudging through a workmanlike overview of the Queen frontman’s life will allow it to arrive at something approaching intimacy.
  71. The Trip to Spain
    The premise of Michael Winterbottom's series has devolved from moderately diverting to actively stifling.
  72. Gook
    Justin Chon fumbles the take on how his characters' anger fits into the greater landscape of a L.A. during the aftermath of the Rodney King beating.
  73. Frozen II
    Woke Disney, trying to navigate a tricky representational path, steps all over itself throughout.
  74. Glass
    M. Night Ghyamalan’s film is aimed at an audience from whom he cringingly craves fealty.
  75. Happy End
    Happy End reveals itself as something vacuous and cold, a bizarrely seductive pseudo-thriller lacking a thoroughly worked-out payoff.
  76. In the Fade
    In the Fade is executed with precision, particularly the third act, in which the film morphs into a tense yet unconvincing revenge thriller.
  77. The Pirates of Somalia
    Writer-director Bryan Buckley's film is ultimately more interested in the journalist than his story.
  78. Sweet Virginia
    Sweet Virginia doesn’t have much of a point, as its characters are reductive variables in an inevitable equation of carnage.
  79. The Divine Order
    The film's performances and narrative flounder to strike the right balance between comedy and drama.
  80. Kill Switch
    Dan Stevens navigates the film’s literal and thematic alleyways with the same enthusiastic befuddlement that convinced many to soldier through Legion‘s more impenetrable stretches.
  81. 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.
  82. The Limehouse Golem
    Initially colorful, the script’s lurid and overripe dialogue eventually grinds the film to a halt.
  83. The Square
    While Ruben Östlund’s mastery of visually amplifying social unease is still very much intact, he’s partially undone here by his own thematic ambition, which, in scene after exquisitely staged scene, threatens to put too fine a point on otherwise thrillingly indeterminate situational comedy.
  84. Apostle
    The film's victims are simply pawns in a super-gory bacchanal, which is aesthetically striking but emotionally dull.
  85. Breathe
    The film is an easily digestible replica of the truth, bathed in honeyed cinematography and sentimentalized adulation.
  86. Raising Bertie
    The documentary mistakes its access to quotidian behaviors as evidence of the need for comprehensive educational and financial reform.
  87. Moka
    Frédéric Mermoud's film makes an elaborate pretense of honoring the traditions of the observational procedural.
  88. 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.
  89. The Only Living Boy in New York
    As the film spirals outward from its central relationship to delve into other characters’ hidden pasts, the story becomes too unwieldy and fragmented for the audience to develop a comprehensive understanding of Callum Turner's Thomas or his personal evolution.
  90. Back to Burgundy
    Cédric Klapisch correlates wine’s complex arrangement of flavors to the complexity of memory itself, which, it should be said, is the most nuanced of the filmmaker’s wine metaphors.
  91. I Do... Until I Don't
    It’s hard to tell who’s being lampooned and who’s being treated with sincerity at any given point.
  92. False Confessions
    The film is a trim farce with no blood flowing under its skin, as it’s all construction, setup, and payoff.
  93. The Persian Connection
    Daniel Y-Li Grove adeptly creates an icy, über-hip atmosphere of sleek clubs, pulsating synths, and woozy opium trips, a style which has the unfortunate effect of draining much of the cultural specificity from his story.
  94. Chaos Walking
    Beneath its perfectly entertaining surface, the film is a mess of contradictions that fails to live up to its own potential.
  95. I Feel Pretty
    Rather than pointing the finger at society for inducing insecurity in women, I Feel Pretty suggests the onus is on women to change their attitudes.
  96. There's Always Vanilla
    Unfortunately, the haphazard, showy cross-cutting between Laine’s to-the-camera narration and the flashbacks (sometimes to scenes he couldn’t possibly recollect) do little to hide the fact that Romero, like his aimless protagonist, seemingly couldn’t care less.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Professor Marston & the Wonder Women
    Throughout, internal conflict becomes external, and the passions and irrationalities of human emotion are condensed into explanatory dialogue.
  98. I Dream in Another Language
    Just as the director seems to be settling in to tackle some heady ideas, the screenplay’s stale narrative complications instead overtake the film.
  99. No Time to Die
    This Bond’s overall arc from modishly merciless killing machine to aging assassin with the familial feels comes off as a treacly sop to psychological complexity.
  100. Den of Thieves
    Den of Thieves displays a reverence for the taut and moody tension-building tactics of Michael Mann's Heat, but without a single compelling character or backstory to speak of, it's unable to bring even a modicum of emotional resonance to action.
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