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. Bull
    Director Annie Silverstein tries to enrich the tropes of her class-conscious buddy scenario by canceling them out.
  2. On a Magical Night
    Christophe Honoré deposits all his chips on the comedic premise at the expense of character study and gravitas.
  3. Joan of Arc
    Bruno Dumont seems perpetually aware of the trap of familiarity, which may be why he indulges in some of his most inscrutable filmmaking.
  4. The Misfits
    A perplexing misfire more than a complete dud, The Misfits‘s true legacy remains in the personal histories of those involved with the production rather than in the far more exceptional careers of the artists who brought it to its dull fruition.
  5. John Wick: Chapter 4
    In the gradual development and expansion of the Wickaverse, the filmmakers seem to have lost the thread of what makes the first and, at times, second film in the series work so well.
  6. Our Mothers
    Around his main character, writer-director César Díaz builds a complex but unpretentious interrogation of national belonging.
  7. Onward
    While Onward begins as a story of bereavement, it soon turns to celebrating the payoffs of positive thinking.
  8. Vita & Virginia
    The film frequently falls back on the stately demeanor of countless other historical biopics and period pieces. Read our review.
  9. The Hunger
    Scott’s film scarcely has its pulse on the encroaching conservatism of the nation. In the end, it’s just a shallow lesbian fantasy so aggressively spit and polished as to suggest a 96-minute White Diamonds commercial. Of course, that’s not to say that it isn’t fun.
  10. Into the Ashes
    Aaron Henry is prone to pulling back from any moment that might give greater depth to his revenge tale.
  11. The Other Story
    Through this endless string of undercooked subplots, Avi Nesher’s film continually trips over itself.
  12. This Is Not Berlin
    Hari Sama never quite manages to seamlessly sync the film’s anti-bourgeois political commitments to its soap-operatic register.
  13. The Hunt
    The film was almost canceled for being too partisan, so it’s ironic to discover that it’s practically apolitical.
  14. Paradise Hills
    Alice Waddington’s sci-fi fantasy never finds a cohesive story wrapper for its themes.
  15. Eternals
    At once bloated and rushed, Eternals suffers from frequent lurches in tempo that dispel its occasional moments of tranquil thoughtfulness.
  16. Just Mercy
    In a time when awareness and acknowledgement of racial bias and extrajudicial measures by law enforcement in America is at its most widespread, such scenes feel condescendingly pitched to an unconverted audience of the imagination.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Song of Names
    In the end, the film is unable to bridge the gap between the emotions it elicits and the messages it imparts.
  18. Hope Gap
    So many grandiose tactics portend a grander revelation than the film’s otherwise low-key three-hander delivers.
  19. Military Wives
    The film seems almost content to have you forget about everything that inspired it in the first place.
  20. Don't Let Go
    Would that Jacob Estes had kept the particulars of his murder mystery as intricate as the sci-fi of his main characters’ communion.
  21. Seberg
    Throughout, the filmmakers occlude the most fascinating and potentially powerful elements of Jean Seberg’s history.
  22. Ms. Purple
    Subtlety dissipates as Justin Chon’s film grasps for something louder and more obvious.
  23. Tigers Are Not Afraid
    It never resolves its commingling of the fanciful and the mundane into a particularly coherent argument about the legacy of trauma.
  24. Hello, Dolly!
    The choreography, the performances, the set decoration, the dialogue, everything about Hello, Dolly! is played directly to the back row of the theater, which would be fine on the stage, but on anamorphic widescreen close-ups tends to be more frightening than mirthful.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Face to Face
    Face to Face feels scattershot and incomplete, never adequately establishing connections between characters, motivations for significant actions, or even the simple causalities of time and space.
  26. Girl on the Third Floor
    The film is loud and obvious about declaring its themes, as if to distract from their ultimate shallowness.
  27. The Woman in the Window
    The Woman in the Window never manages to transcend the impression that it’s merely being clever.
  28. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
    Though its lugubrious and plodding narrative spins its wheels ahead of someone coming along to fill T’Challa’s shoes, Wakanda Forever does stand out for its depictions of grief.
  29. Last Night in Soho
    In the end, Edgar Wright isn’t particularly interested in taking aim at all that is dark in the zealotry that shapes a culture.
  30. The King
    If only the film made more of the curious tension between Timothée Chalamet’s Henry and Robert Pattinson’s dauphin.
  31. Waves
    This is a rare case of a film that’s stronger when it colors inside the lines than radically traces outside of them.
  32. Proxima
    The film falls back on a reductive rumination on the balance between maternal obligation and career aspiration.
  33. Synchronic
    About a drug that sends its users back in time for seven minutes, the film holds your hand and walks you through its chronology mazes
  34. Jungleland
    Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams.
  35. The Times of Bill Cunningham
    The film undermines Cunningham’s egalitarianism by linking him directly with the kind of elite snobbery and wealth fixation he abhorred.
  36. Venom: Let There Be Carnage
    The title isn’t only a promise of so much destruction to come, but also inadvertently an assurance that its most action-packed sequences will be defined by loudness, incoherence, and pointless cruelty.
  37. Tell Me Who I Am
    By focusing so narrowly on the Lewis brothers’ relationship with their mother, the film inadvertently minimizes the scope of their abuse.
  38. The World is Full of Secrets
    Graham Swon undermines our expectations of horror-movie conceits, attempting to tap the primordial manna of oral storytelling.
  39. Ip Man 4: The Finale
    The film is overstuffed with characters and subplots that ultimately have little to do with Ip Man and his legacy.
  40. James and the Giant Peach
    Though certainly not a travesty of any sort, James and the Giant Peach does strike me as the weakest thus far of Dahl’s to-screen adaptations and this mostly has to do with the problems Selick encounters with mixing the world of imagination with the real world.
  41. Wendy
    Wendy veers awkwardly and aimlessly between tragedy and jubilance, never accruing any lasting emotional impact.
  42. Betty Blue
    Indeed, the film flies by and feels weightless, like a spectacular rainbow-colored hydrogen balloon that passes out of our memory the moment we lose sight of it.
  43. Downhill
    Downhill never makes much of an impact as it moves from one mildly amusing cringe-comedy set piece to the next.
    • 69 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Tenet
    Every time that Tenet stops to speak, it only emphasizes a hollowness within: how enamored it is of its own cleverness.
  45. The Kentucky Fried Movie
    Uneven and amateurish, with a sense of vulgarity that’s now dated enough to seem downright Victorian, The Kentucky Fried Movie proves the maxim, “comedy is in the eye of the beholder.”
  46. The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It
    The film apes the style that James Wan established with the original Conjuring without establishing any real identity of its own.
  47. The Lovebirds
    Once the film shifts into a broader comedic register, it no longer capitalizes on Kumail Nanjiani and Issa Rae’s gift for gab.
  48. A Boy and His Dog
    The film is riddled with an unmistakably misogynistic bent, and can’t be bothered to supply one single likable soul.
  49. Earth
    With Earth, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s visual strategy is to wow us with tangibility and data, though he doesn’t give up aesthetic experimentation altogether in this survey of Anthropocene calamities.
  50. Sylvie's Love
    The film never finds the spark that would imbue the love affair at its center with a sense of passion or urgency.
  51. Stargirl
    It comes across like yet another casualty in the long line of stories about men having their eyes opened by their angelic girlfriends.
  52. Bloodshot
    Given its hero’s imperviousness, the film’s chaotically edited action sequences tend to be devoid of suspense.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Young Sherlock Holmes
    As a work of fictional imagination, Holmes is simply fascinating, and Young Sherlock Holmes attempts to unlock the source of that fascination. The film re-imagines the first encounter between Holmes and Watson from within the dusty honeycombs of a boarding school buried deep within the folds of Victorian London. What one finds there are fascinatingly incomplete portraits.
  54. Vivarium
    This a parable about adulthood boasts deeply cynical takes on home, community, and childrearing.
  55. The Many Saints of Newark
    The juxtapositions between backroom politicking, intimate family drama, and the occasional lurches into action often give the impression of a TV season’s worth of content crammed into two hours.
  56. Rebecca
    The film is a pretty bauble of a thing that ticks off the story’s shock revelations in an efficient, if not particularly surprising, fashion.
  57. Come Away
    The film can’t seem to decide whether it’s fantasy or allegory and whether its characters are fan fiction or flesh and blood.
  58. The Nest
    Sean Durkin’s sweated-over filmmaking tediously lifts a familiar tale of domestic dysfunction to the level of myth.
  59. Charm City Kings
    The film looks for an emotional payoff by continually upping the stakes of its main character’s self-destructive short-term thinking.
  60. The Nowhere Inn
    The film is elevated by funny, cleverly staged sequences, but it too often hammers the notion that fame destroys authenticity.
  61. A White, White Day
    There’s a moving study within the film of a man in emotional paralysis learning to redirect his love from the past to the present, but it’s too often obscured by a muted revenge yarn that’s no less banal because it’s tastefully directed.
  62. Herself
    Phyllida Lloyd’s film cannot escape its own somewhat mundane self-set contours.
  63. Uncle Frank
    When the distance between uncle and niece shortens, Uncle Frank ceases to be a tender portrait of outsider kinship and transforms into a histrionic road movie with screwball intentions.
  64. Nine Days
    Writer-director Edson Oda never really puts a unique spin on the familiar story of otherworldly figures peering in on the lives of the living.
  65. The Wretched
    The filmmakers don’t examine the psychological terror, the bitterness, and lust that gave rise to many of the works they cherish.
  66. Stillwater
    Stillwater gives itself over to drastic plot twists that derail what was already a film over-stuffed with narrative incident and ideas.
  67. After Yang
    Kogonada’s film doesn’t trust us to recognize the legitimacy of the other’s being without filtering it solely through the lenses of the ruling class.
  68. The Old Guard
    Though it smartly prioritizes the bond of relationships over action, the film is in the end only somewhat convincing on both counts.
  69. Extraction
    Chris Hemsworth’s hyperbolically skilled soldier is borne of childish fantasies about the order of the world.
  70. The Trouble with Being Born
    In the end, the film suffers from the same issue as its moody androids: enervation borne out of repetition.
  71. Sea Fever
    Writer-director Neasa Hardiman’s film is undone by earnestness.
  72. The Quarry
    Only Michel Shannon’s off-kilter timing brings The Quarry to sporadic life.
  73. The Secret Garden
    In lieu of pluming the emotional states of the characters, the film resorts to a whimsical, otherworldly fantasy element as an easy resolution.
  74. 52 Pick-Up
    52 Pick-Up loses its sense of social texture in the last third when everyone begins to die by decree of formulaic three-act screenwriting, and its indifference to the plight of Harry’s wife (Ann-Margret) is unseemly, but the film is an often nightmarish gem awaiting rediscovery.
  75. Eaten Alive
    With an enviable, well-stocked cast of character thespians and a carefully dilapidated motel set, Eaten Alive is all ingredients, no recipe.
  76. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    Peninsula feels like the work of an artist who misunderstood his past triumph, squandering his talent for the sake of a pandering, halfhearted encore.
  77. The Marvels
    Only in the film’s climax, when the heroes are in the same confined area and can thus better calibrate their constant shifts in position, does the action attain a logical sense of movement and timing.
  78. Lipstick
    It’s Lifetime. It’s camp. It’s seriously confused, and it should speak directly to drag queens in straight relationships everywhere.
  79. Who You Think I Am
    Unlike the novel, the film ultimately trades its main character’s account of her own suffering for her therapist’s pathologizing assessment.
  80. The Infiltrators
    The film is never more compelling than when relying on footage of the real radical DREAMer group the National Immigrant Youth Alliance.
  81. Elvis
    The protracted rubbernecking at Elvis’s inexorable decline epitomizes a film that regularly backs away from its keenest observations about the icon to merely, and superficially, bask in his star power.
  82. 7500
    Convenient plot twists undermine its early pretense that it’s aiming for something other than to exploit our deepest, most regressive fears.
  83. Come Play
    While it can be expected that high-concept horror movies will often be sewn together from the premises of recent genre successes, it’s much too easy to see the stitches in writer-director Jacob Chase’s Come Play.
  84. Ron's Gone Wrong
    The film celebrates individuality even as it suggests that everyone needs their own A.I. tech to validate everything they like and think.
  85. You Should Have Left
    David Koepp is a fatally un-obsessive craftsman, one who’s fashioned a horror film that resembles a tasteful coffee table book.
  86. The One and Only Ivan
    The charitable representation of Bryan Cranston’s character greatly diminishes the emotional resonance of the film’s dramatic turns in the final act.
  87. Europa
    Von Trier and his three cinematographers fashioned a handmade, retro pastiche with a small, dried-out heart.
  88. The Beach House
    The character drama becomes afterthought as it’s superseded by action.
  89. Summer of 85
    François Ozon’s paean to nostalgia wraps tragedy and obsession in a whimsical bow.
  90. Sputnik
    Sputnik’s third act is a rush of formulaic action meant, perhaps, to compensate for the interminably repetitive and impersonal second act, which is mostly concerned with reinforcing a set of foregone conclusions.
  91. Spider-Man: No Way Home
    There’s no attempt to hide that the film is pure fan service, a greatest-hits mashup of Spider-Man’s cinematic legacy.
  92. I Used to Go Here
    The film is almost sadistically driven to turn a woman’s trip down memory lane into fodder for cringe humor.
  93. The Seventh Seal
    The Seventh Seal, assisted by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer’s richly overexposed images, operates as though it contains the undiluted essence of life’s fueling dialectic formula. Occasionally it does, most notably in the terrifying arrival of the self-flagellants to a weak-willed village. But the road-trippers in Bergman’s follow-up, Wild Strawberries, achieve a far greater grace and clarity with only a fraction of the heavy lifting.
  94. Silent Running
    While the drones are still cuter than Ewoks, Lowell remains a cloying representation of a ‘70s acid freak shoving his save-the-trees mantra down your throat.
  95. Words on Bathroom Walls
    The film reeks of the extremely idealistic notions of young love that plague many a YA adaptation.
  96. The Boys in the Band
    This new Boys in the Band is a Matryoshka doll of period piecery, a flashback of a flashback of a flashback.
  97. The Calming
    Song Fang’s latest moves glacially along in a largely unchanging emotional register, always keeping us at a distance.
  98. Apples
    The film's rendering of the interplay of memory, identity, and grief is disappointingly vague.
  99. The Duke
    The film misses an opportunity to delve particularly deeply into the keenly relevant issues of inequality and social disconnection that so animate its protagonist.
  100. The World to Come
    The film presents a world that too often feels as if it’s a product of the present day.
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