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. Doctor Sleep
    Like a traumatized psyche, it remains uncomfortably stuck in the past, replaying familiar events in an effort to empty them of terror.
  2. Let the Corpses Tan
    Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani get so lost in their catalogue of fetishes that they lose grasp of the snap and tension that drive even a mediocre heist narrative.
  3. The Song of Sway Lake
    Despite Ari Gold’s knack for visual flourishes that capture a sense of place seemingly outside of time, The Song of Sway Lake plays like several disparate melodies overlapping one another.
  4. Poltergeist III
    At its best, Poltergeist III recalls that surreal mix of DIY ingenuity and narrative ineptitude that mark some of Lucio Fulci’s lesser efforts. At its worst, well, it’s just another soulless, hacky-tacky horror sequel.
  5. Five Feet Apart
    In the film, hardly any fact about cystic fibrosis is raised without being doubly, even triply, underlined for viewers.
  6. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
    It all feels cheap and looks cheap, a far cry from what S. Craig Zahler can do when overseeing both a film's words as well as its images.
  7. Hud
    Remarkably dull Hud more or less plays out as a home-on-the-range knock-off of Nicholas Ray’s brilliant Rebel Without a Cause.
  8. Love, Cecil
    Lisa Immordino Vreeland's avoidance of a serious analytical bent ends up stifling the documentary.
  9. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
    If it’s possible for a parable to be too simple to even qualify as a parable, the convincingly dim Snow White represents the dopey standard.
  10. Class of 1984
    No matter how much director Mark Lester attempts to hide his sermonizing behind sensationalistic-pedagogic terrorism, he does himself in whenever a jaded cop shrugs his shoulders and grunts, for the umpteenth time, What can we do, they’re juveniles?
  11. The Hate U Give
    The film lays out the complexities of contemporary race relations with a deliberateness that frequently edges over into didacticism.
  12. The Captain
    In one fashion, Robert Schwentke proves to be too complicit with his protagonist, regarding evil and human banality as stimulation.
  13. Moss
    Daniel Peddle's film emphasizes, for better and worse, the crushing monotony of living in insolated parts of the Deep South.
  14. On the Basis of Sex
    On the Basis of Sex is too often busy revering Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her confidence and brilliance to bother with presenting her as a living, breathing human being.
  15. Angel Heart
    It would all be laughable if the evil deeds and premature deaths and withered witch doctor hands led us to more than the protagonist’s unnecessarily messy self-discovery. As it is, it’s mostly just gratingly pointless.
  16. Jungle Cruise
    Jaume Collet-Serra’s deft touches elevate what otherwise feels like another formulaic contemporary Disney blockbuster.
  17. Milford Graves Full Mantis
    Jake Meginsky's documentary is insular, precious, and too pleased with its unwillingness to reach out to the unconverted.
  18. Bad Reputation
    The documentary often struggles to extract deeper thoughts from its subject about her wild career as a pioneering rock feminist.
  19. The Prodigy
    The filmmakers fail to realize that the darkest horror here doesn’t lie in the triumph of true evil, but in seeing how far a regular family will go to protect itself before doing the right and necessary thing, however hard or horrible it might be.
  20. Ben Is Back
    As the film hurtles toward its tense climax, you may find yourself both deeply resenting its narrative contrivances and passionately rooting for its protagonists.
  21. No Date, No Signature
    Vahid Jalilvand's film is so worked out that you know that every nuance is pointed and intentional.
  22. At Eternity's Gate
    This is both a fitting tribute to an artist who rebuffed conventional painting techniques, and a disappointingly self-indulgent exercise, the efforts of a filmmaker whose affinity for abstractions often interfere with the story he’s trying to tell, and distract from the purported subject of the film.
  23. What Men Want
    This gender-swapped update of What Women Want doesn’t pass up the opportunity to undercut itself whenever it gets the chance.
    • 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.
  25. Kusama - Infinity
    Despite the exuberance of the works featured, which are promptly flattened by the film's commitment to a traditional documentary blueprint, Yayoi Kusama's resilience still commands our attention.
  26. A Private War
    A Private War ultimately sides with the late journalist’s assertion that the whos and whys of war matter far less in journalism than finding the right human-interest angle to hook an audience.
  27. Five Fingers For Marseilles
    What happens in this neo-western isn't dictated by the tried and true themes of classic westerns but by the films themselves.
  28. Galveston
    The film is a slow, directionless anti-thriller that never manages to build tension or establish any stakes.
  29. Midway
    In the film, the Battle of Midway suggests something out of a photorealistic animated film.
  30. MFKZ
    The bulk of MFKZ is composed of chases and shoot-outs that, despite their chaotic energy, drive the plot forward at a plodding pace.
  31. American Dharma
    The film feels rather like listening to the arsonist calmly explain why he set the fire as we continue to watch it rage.
  32. Charlie Says
    The film appears to be striving for humanistic understanding, but the end result is far too jumbled to have the proper impact.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Torn Curtain
    Torn Curtain, which was a commercial success because of the drawing power of its stars, is an artistic flop.
  34. J.T. Leroy
    It’s disappointing that so much of the film feels like mere tilling of the soil.
  35. 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.
  36. Breathless
    Much like Body Heat, which valorized noirish archetypes instead of examining their original social contexts, Breathless simply has a hard-on for Hollywood lore, as convertibles, rockabilly, and monochromatic lighting are utilized to enshrine dominant legacies rather than invert or, at least, probe them.
  37. Critters
    Slap together a modestly budgeted horror film with an unmistakable resemblance to a recent hit film (Gremlins) and a notable inversion of another popular film’s ending (Poltergeist), insert just enough Podunk camp to ensure Joe Bob Briggs would catch its scent and you’ll guarantee yourself the birth of a franchise.
  38. Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)
    Birds of Prey feels at times less like its own story and more like a trailer for what’s coming next.
  39. Becoming Astrid
    Despite convincing performances, the film is hampered by its stylistic and moral conventionality.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Hills Have Eyes Part II
    Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 is a bland, bloodless shambles. Sequel-making of the laziest sort, it’s nothing more than a perfunctory, undisguised cash-grab.
  41. Vice
    Vice is as noisy as the media landscape that writer-director Adam McKay holds in contempt.
  42. Heavy Trip
    Its story distances heavy metal from any whiff of toxic masculinity by setting Turo and company against homophobes and rakes.
  43. Hellbound: Hellraiser II
    The sequel’s cure proves infinitely bloodier than the original’s disease, and its over-the-top depictions of brimstone and flesh are so loopy and unmoored, you’d swear the place where nobody dared to go suddenly became Xanadu.
  44. A Faithful Man
    It reveals itself as neither committed New Wave subversion nor skillful homage, but rather a weak and uninspired imitation.
  45. The Invisibles
    The film doesn’t bring to light otherwise unexplored aspects of the experience or memory of persecution and genocide.
  46. The Christmas Chronicles
    The film Despite its weird flourishes, the film succumbs to the tropes and emotional contrivances of the family melodrama at its core.
  47. Saludos Amigos
    Saludos Amigos and its sequel (or, more accurately, expansion), The Three Caballeros, had a shelf life significantly shorter than that of your standard MRE. Together, they kicked off nearly a decade’s worth of anthology-based wastes of time and resources that all but derailed Disney’s manifest destiny to rewrite children’s dreams in the corporation’s own latently art deco, actively anti-twat image until Cinderella put the needle back on the record.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Great Mouse Detective
    Mouse Detective, though, just tries to get by with nothing more than the novelty of having rodents play detective, and then pulls the rug out from under it by showing, however briefly, the human Holmes and Watson.
  49. Isn't It Romantic
    As the film becomes increasingly reliant on predictable narrative tropes, it evolves into the very thing it set out to parody.
  50. Weightless
    The title Weightless is an apt description for this stylish but emotionally inert film.
  51. Peter Pan
    Peter Pan, in retrospect, seems much more a footnote among the studio’s 1950s output.
  52. Lady and the Tramp
    Befitting its middle-ish chronological position, it’s not surprising that the serviceably cute but mundane Lady—a turn-of-the-century ditty about two love struck dogs from opposite sides of the gated community—might be the most ignorable, least assertive production of their golden era.
  53. Cinderella
    Despite its prodigious charms, it has probably destroyed more lives than any other Disney film, forcing a specific, unrealistic romantic archetype that truly does only exist in fairy tales onto generations of impressionable children, who would grow up desperate, needy, and crushed.
  54. Silent Night, Deadly Night
    Silent Night, Deadly Night brought the idea to new levels of cold sleaziness.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ruben Brandt, Collector
    The film doesn’t apply the necessary touch and precision to balance its sleek, chromed parts into a revving whole.
  56. Dumplin'
    As it proceeds through a series of teary reconciliations in the last half-hour of its 110-minute run time, the film's didactic drama begins to grate, its treacly emotions feeling increasingly unearned.
  57. The Kitchen
    The Kitchen’s inability to criticize its characters without falling back on mild endorsement for their warped empowerment cheapens the film’s moments of reflection, turning them into perfunctory scenes of mild protest.
  58. Superintelligence
    The big disappointment of the film is that Melissa McCarthy’s performance is all Jekyll and no Hyde.
  59. Perfect Strangers (Perfectos Desconocidos)
    Manolo Caro's film uses its characters as rigid markers of cowardice, lust, and entitlement.
  60. Photograph
    In pushing so many seemingly crucial moments off screen, the film transforms its main characters into blank slates.
  61. Radioactive
    Marjane Satrapi’s film could have benefited from the tangy humor and cynicism of her graphic novels.
  62. Aniara
    The filmmakers are interested in world building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui.
  63. Maniac
    Maniac simply exists as a wretched yet unforgettable succession of scenes meant to corrupt even the purest of minds, if you can help yourself from laughing uncontrollably at its overwhelming amount of inconsistencies.
  64. The Charmer
    Director and co-writer Milad Alami's film feels like several fused-together trial drafts of the same narrative.
  65. The Wolf Hour
    The film is all surface, and its depiction of trauma becomes increasingly exploitative and hollow as it moves along.
  66. Little
    Its most amusing moments are in the interplay between the central characters as they adjust to an abruptly shifting reality.
  67. Little Woods
    Nia DaCosta indulges one of rural quasi-thriller’s most tiresome gambits: humorlessness as a mark of high seriousness.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bobby Deerfield
    Bobby Deerfield is not so much a failed vanity project as it is a groping, often sensitive and rather death-obsessed character study based on Erich Maria Remarque’s fatalistically titled novel Heaven Has No Favorites.
  69. Honkytonk Man
    Though the film is obviously coated with a veneer of nostalgic sentimentality, Eastwood never lets Honkytonk Man veer into maudlin territory.
  70. Velvet Buzzsaw
    With its silvery sheen and sexy lure of celebrity actors being naughty, the film recalls the decadent, self-consciously chic art it parodies.
  71. Maiden
    Director Alex Holmes ultimately takes a frustratingly simplistic approach to his thematically rich material.
  72. The White Crow
    Ralph Fiennes’s film too conspicuously avoids an overt political perspective.
  73. The Tomorrow Man
    The film is content to peddle the naïve notion that love is the panacea for all that ails you.
  74. The Highwaymen
    Where Bonnie and Clyde is gloriously tragic, The Highwaymen is blunt and anti-climactically savage, fulfilling as well as somewhat critiquing former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer’s bloodlust.
  75. Wine Country
    The film’s relatively static approach to narrative works in scenes where the material is funny or elevated by a certain performance.
  76. Monos
    Alejandro Landes’s film depicts amorality with minimal curiosity and a surplus of numbing stylistic verve.
  77. The Report
    In the end, it can’t help but sentimentalize the better angels that supposedly reside in the land of liberty’s flawed human fabric.
  78. 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.
  79. Child's Play
    By the end, it becomes what it initially parodies: a dime-a-dozen slasher film with a silly-looking doll as the villain.
  80. Pavarotti
    Throughout, the too-brief depictions of Luciano Pavarotti’s flaws are conspicuously shrouded in a veil of hagiography.
  81. Monster Hunter
    Paul W.S. Anderson has simply combined the established iconography of the popular Capcom game franchise with prefab movie moments.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Young Racers
    The Young Racers mostly succumbs to the streak of pretension strongly felt beneath the hubristic surfaces of more than a few Corman features.
  83. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    The film hits its plot milestones as fast as humanly possible, cohesion or depth be damned.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Horror Express
    The best that can be said for Horror Express is that it doesn’t take itself at all seriously, and it isn’t too proud to steal outright what other films politely borrow.
  85. The Day Shall Come
    The film is an aimless, albeit sometimes funny, chronicle of absurd behavior and government ineptitude.
  86. Fisherman's Friends
    The script doesn’t contain many lines that ring true, and a few clang wildly off-key.
  87. Ramen Shop
    Its drawn-out descriptions of culinary traditions and practices are enticing enough, but the same can’t be said about the characterizations.
  88. A Man Called Horse
    Touted at the time of its release as a comparatively enlightened western, A Man Called Horse now looks like well-researched sensationalism—and is, admittedly, all the better for it.
  89. The Dead Don't Die
    In Jim Jarmusch’s film, what starts as a subtle undercurrent of knowing humor curdles into overt self-referentiality.
  90. El Chicano
    Throughout, the film peddles notions of self-realization and self-actualization that feel nothing short of moth-eaten.
  91. If the Dancer Dances
    It's less of an insightful backstage documentary than a gushing, sycophantic love letter to the late Merce Cunningham.
  92. Loro
    Like most of Paolo Sorrentino’s films, Loro is closer to a stylistic orgy than an existential rumination on Italy’s heritage.
  93. Buffaloed
    The filmmakers allow their characters to learn the usual humanist lessons, in the process eliding the ramifications of their scenario.
  94. Georgetown
    It’s an occasionally amusing and insightful beltway satire that’s ultimately undone by its conventional mise-en-scène and predictable plot.
  95. Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice
    It isn’t long into the film when the hagiographic soundbites from famous interviewees become the dominant mode.
  96. In the Aisles
    By subverting the impulse to indulge a winning romance between its two bright European stars, In the Aisles insists on the dignity of its appealing but rather thin characters.
  97. Judy
    Renée Zellweger can reach all the notes and hit all the marks, but Garland’s intense emoting eludes her.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Matthias & Maxime
    Xavier Dolan’s characters are of such broad definition that it’s impossible to regard them as anything other than aesthetic objects.
  99. Young Ahmed
    The Dardennes maintain a distance from Ahmed as a way of celebrating their refusal to reduce him to any easy psychological bullet points.
  100. Invisible Life
    Only rarely does Karim Aïnouz allow for loopholes to refreshingly emerge from the film’s stylistic deadlock.
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