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 Program
    The Program is flashier and more self-conscious than many biopics, but it's ultimately just as hollow.
  2. Ava's Possessions
    Jordan Galland confidently perches the film right on the razor’s edge separating absurdist comedy from horror.
  3. 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.
  4. Space Dogs
    The film draws us through its play toward darker, too-seldom-considered sides of human and doggy nature.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Don't Stop Believin': Everyman's Journey
    Sadly, those looking for any insight into Journey from Ramona Diaz's documentary are going to have to look elsewhere.
  6. Alita: Battle Angel
    Battle Angel is by some distance the most entertaining of the recent crop of would-be franchise starters, exciting on its own merits while leaving just enough of its world tantalizingly unexplored to actually fuel our interest in wanting to see where its characters go from here.
  7. The Book Thief
    Books themselves become the story's key symbol, representing the past and future, loss and possibility, of a place that's ground zero for some of history's darkest days.
  8. Delicacy
    Now that Zooey Deschanel has taken a detour into TV land, is Audrey Tautou the most insufferable pixy presence in cinema today?
  9. Aline
    Valérie Lemercier’s film feels at once like a vanity project for its maker and a glorified fan tribute.
  10. Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F
    It’s a film of familiar pleasures, but like Harold Faltermeyer’s still infectiously enjoyable synth-pop theme, they do remain highly pleasurable.
  11. ABCs of Death 2
    Irony is a popular pose struck throughout these shorts, which are less revealing of the existentialist despair that death often rouses than they are of their makers' prejudices.
  12. Knight of Cups
    It has the uncanny quality of an out-of-body experience, not a torn-from-the-heart confessional.
  13. The Immortalists
    Some voices of reason and skepticism do make an appearance to rebut and deflate Bill and Aubrey's monumental claims, but aren't allowed to fully elaborate on their arguments.
  14. Irrational Man
    Woody Allen and Joaquin Phoenix's collaboration on Irrational Man's antihero is the closest the film gets to a saving grace.
  15. My Art
    Laurie Simmons isn’t so much creating art as a means to explore cinema’s effect on identity as she is conducting an act of indulgence.
  16. Shaolin
    Only Jackie Chan, in a comedic supporting role as a Zen-trained cook who applies his culinary techniques on the battlefield (he "stir-fries" one enemy in a giant pot and "kneads" another like dough), provides any measure of relief.
  17. BMX Bandits
    Ignoring the fact that BMX Bandits is as intimate as a trip to Toys “R” Us, it has almost nothing to offer in the way of impressive stuntwork, carefree yuks, or semi-competent acting. Trenchard-Smith, a master at condescending to his audience, clearly diluted Hagg and Edgeworth’s already toothless concept; that said, there was probably no good way to dress up a line as dire as “You’re right in the poo now, sister” or even “Your little walkie talkies have gone walkies.”
  18. Inside
    Whether or not Vasilis Katsoupis’s film achieves escape velocity from genre limitations though overt sociopolitical commentary is questionable.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The film, hyper-aware of the shadow cast by the franchise’s history, struggles to both honor and redeem the past before everything comes to a close.
  20. The Art of the Steal
    An energetic but paper-thin genre exercise, filled with pleasant riffs on the standard heist flick, but ultimately lacking in payoff.
  21. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence
    A prisoner-of-war drama as fever dream, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence fascinates mostly for the hit-and-miss alchemy of its discordant elements: in performance, pop-star charisma versus British actorliness; in narrative style, genre expectations coming up against modernist psychosexual undercurrents.
  22. Honour
    Paddy Considine's benumbed ambiguity at least works against writer-director Shan Khan's reduction of honor killings to grist for the cheapest of pulpy thrills.
  23. Project Wolf Hunting
    There’s an admirably propulsive, single-minded sense of purpose to the film’s commitment to gore.
  24. The Color Wheel
    Much like the work of generational cohort Michael Robinson, Alex Ross Perry's films are steeped in a viscous cultural past.
  25. $ellebrity
    Comes off as little more than a feature-length trashing of colleagues who director and celebrity photographer Kevin Mazur feels are giving his profession a bad name.
  26. You Don't Need Feet to Dance
    Despite its title, there's actually very little dancing, or rhythmic flair, in You Don't Need Feet to Dance.
  27. My Friend Victoria
    The film disappoints in its refusal to allow for deeper articulations of racism beyond, well, visible and verbal displays of racism.
  28. Night Patrol
    Ryan Prows’s film comes across as just straight-up exploitative.
  29. Generation Wealth
    Into a broad-strokes picture of a culture in crisis, Lauren Greenfield attempts to incorporate autobiographical elements, which results in some awkward narrative pivots and jarringly clunky voiceover.
  30. Being Flynn
    If Robert De Niro knew what was good for him, he'd certainly distance himself from this director and find a new path.
  31. Unmade in China
    Not even its problematically touristic gaze is enough to derail the fascination of this absurd tale's many nightmarish twists and turns.
  32. Unfriended: Dark Web
    The film is preposterously conceived, but writer-director Stephen Susco so tightly, excitingly executes it that you hardly notice.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Bang Gang (A Modern Love Story)
    Eva Husson's controversy-courting debut is neither as lewdly subversive or as raucously debauched as its provocative title.
  34. Burning Man
    Say what you will about Burning Man, but writer-director Jonathan Teplitsky can't be accused of spoon-feeding his audience.
  35. Annabelle Comes Home
    The film is at least as likely to elicit laughs as shrieks, and certainly unlikely to leave a lasting impression.
  36. The Emperor's New Clothes
    It's more about hyping Russell Brand as a constituent for the people than locating the means for sustained economic transformation.
  37. Donnybrook
    The film knots several strands of new-millennium despair into something that very nearly approximates greatness in its first half.
  38. The Mauritanian
    Kevin Macdonald’s film never captures the spectrum of a life lived in unimaginable extremis.
  39. Richard Garriott: Man on a Mission
    Oh, the things that money can buy.
  40. Broken
    It's the rare coming-of-age narrative that manages to respect the tricky ambiguities of shifting perceptions.
  41. Aladdin
    Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake is content to trace the original’s narrative beats with perfunctory indifference.
  42. A Regular Woman
    Where When We Leave built to simple outage, this one concludes with a rush of complex, conflicting emotions.
  43. John Dies at the End
    The frantic, grotesque imagery ironically only highlights Don Coscarelli's inability to truly cut ties with the constraints of accepted storytelling.
  44. The Forever Purge
    As it strives for a grander metaphor of life in America, The Forever Purge resorts to sweeping generalizations that make the prior films in the series feel like pinnacles of subtlety.
  45. Ma
    In the end, the filmmakers settle for stigmatizing victimhood, abusing Sue Ann almost as much as her former tormentors.
  46. Jungleland
    Director Max Winkler truly seems to believe that he’s cutting to the heart of the boulevard of broken dreams.
  47. Downtown Express
    The movie's final act tries, somewhat admirably, to consolidate the plot's myriad interpersonal conflicts.
  48. Master
    The film is seemingly terrified of boring us, offering one elaborate montage of catch and release (or of survey and flee) after another.
  49. Race with the Devil
    Fonda might have been able to look good in most everything he was in, but even he can’t save a turd like Race with the Devil.
  50. Palmer
    After a while, the film’s parade of contrivances subsumes the acutely observed friendship at its core.
  51. Let Fury Have the Hour
    On a political level, the film is far from a Godardian dialectic, so the view of history that emerges is, to say the least, blinkered.
  52. Lilo & Stitch
    Here, “ohana” doesn’t just mean family but community, and the film does moving and spirited work in showcasing how crucial it is for us to lift each other up.
  53. She Came to Me
    The fatal flaw of the film is that it genuinely believes in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.
  54. Flag Day
    Flag Day is little more than a near-two-hour montage of tear-streaked faces shouting blandly melodramatic lines at each other.
  55. Hysteria
    Hysteria's happy ending isn't the type that calls for a cigarette, and it certainly isn't the one the film deserves.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Split: A Deeper Divide
    As an election-season reminder that our democratic system isn't functioning, it serves as a welcome wake-up call
  57. Penguins of Madagascar
    It does well to put more focus on delivering a plethora of jokes, imitations, zippy repartee, and sight gags than its plot's familiar machinations.
  58. The Better Angels
    Even taking into consideration the fact the A.J. Edwards edited To the Wonder, it's hard to recall a film so immensely and reductively in thrall to the work of another director.
  59. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    The narrative doesn't want for ambition, but Marc Webb proves unwilling, or incapable, of making this unwieldy story feel like anything but a deluge of backstory.
  60. Knock Knock
    There's satiric potential here, but Eli Roth's sense of humor abandons him when his hero isn't about to get down with the get down.
  61. Private Romeo
    Private Romeo feels more like a side project from the producers of Glee than some kind of novel queering of Shakespeare's text.
  62. Chagall-Malevich
    When the appeal of the film's whimsy wears off, the fogginess of its historical perspectives comes to the fore.
  63. On a Magical Night
    Christophe Honoré deposits all his chips on the comedic premise at the expense of character study and gravitas.
  64. Beyond Outrage
    If Takeshi Kitano does go forward with the rumored third volume, hopefully he'll conceive of some fresh angle on this increasingly dry material.
  65. Humor Me
    Sam Hoffman respects his characters and evinces curiosity about their lives—and these qualities aren't to be taken for granted. But he isn't willing to disrupt his familiar and tightly structured plot.
  66. 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.
  67. Hellbound?
    Fitfully engaging, but the documentary turns into a touchy-feely isn't-it-wonderful-we're-all-saved love fest as soon as the universalists begin to dominate the interview segments.
  68. Free Samples
    An angry indie that favors hollow ridicule over credibility.
  69. Renfield
    The film frustratingly shrouds Nicholas Cage’s manic intensity in thick blankets of winking irony.
  70. Free State of Jones
    After its bracing opening, the film begins to indulge the worst impulses of well-meaning liberal cinema.
  71. Sharp Stick
    Sharp Stick shows that Lena Dunham’s preference for solipsistic protagonists with boundary issues has its limitations.
  72. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    If you're wondering where the Jim Carrey of "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Dumb and Dumber" fame went, don't look to Mr. Popper's Penguins for answers.
  73. The Killer Inside Me
    The result isn't drama so much as a waking nightmare of play-acting and predestined doom.
  74. Resistance
    The film functions as a handsomely mounted biopic that tells a little-known story with considerable passion.
  75. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    One can never fully shake the feeling that the sense of unease the filmmakers rouse, every act of seduction, infiltration, and vengeance they orchestrate, is borrowed.
  76. The Tender Bar
    The film insists so forcefully that J.R. has lived a topsy-turvy, singular life that it abandons a potentially more rewarding approach of foregrounding how relatable many of his moments of self-discovery really are.
  77. Bachelorette
    This nearly pitch-black comedy is better than its tiresome use of '90s pop references, no matter how much they illuminate what the gals bonded over back in the day.
  78. Dog Eat Dog
    Paul Schrader's film scrambles for contemporary relevance and finds only nihilistic hollowness.
  79. 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.
  80. Café de Flore
    It's a pretty tired proposition to complain about movies being manipulative, but Café de Flore sets the bar especially low.
  81. Wanderlust
    Wagging a limp dick at a host of up-to-the-minute issues, Wanderlust, manages to feel current, and relatively funny, without ever becoming particularly pointed, resulting in a floppy but satisfactory middlebrow comedy.
  82. Hypnotic
    The film is a pointlessly complicated house of cards that crumbles due to its own hollowness.
  83. The Moment
    Farce and sincerity make more odd bedfellows across Aidan Zamiri’s meta mockumentary about Brat Summer.
  84. Surrogate Valentine
    The relationship between the two leads neither deteriorates nor seriously improves and last-minute romantic developments don't so much as give shape to the narrative as play as perfunctory gestures of closure.
  85. The Pretty One
    The film is a quiet, tender triumph that leaves you feeling as if you've been embraced without you feeling had.
  86. Ejecta
    The cogent character study nestled inside all the bombast remains crafty for its rare commingling of artful storytelling and genre nonsensicality.
  87. Five Feet Apart
    In the film, hardly any fact about cystic fibrosis is raised without being doubly, even triply, underlined for viewers.
  88. Deep Water
    After a dangerous, even personal, first half, Deep Water becomes crude in all the wrong ways.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    High Tech, Low Life
    As far as its subject matter goes, the documentary only scratches the surfaces, only reaffirming the simple idea that Internet censorship in China is prevalent and unfair.
  90. [REC] 4: Apocalypse
    Whatever scant insight the prior films offered into Spain's waning Catholic belief has now been entirely replaced by fascist, cartoonish shows of wish-fulfillment prevarication.
  91. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    At the very least, Ryan Reynolds’s casting perfectly splits the difference between the adorable and the absurd.
  92. Rid of Me
    At once hopelessly amateurish and given to desperate assertions of auterist "virtuosity."
  93. The Quarry
    Only Michel Shannon’s off-kilter timing brings The Quarry to sporadic life.
  94. Jig
    Jig doesn't twist itself into the self-important, exploitative think piece on youth ambition that Spellbound was, but it does convincingly suggest that its subjects are in it for more than sport.
  95. Bridgend
    The film, with its dark-blue-hued cinematography and murky music, is all foreboding atmosphere.
  96. Earth to Echo
    The constant foregrounding of so much well-executed incident only works to shortchange the heroes' yearnings and anxieties.
  97. Demons
    Demons is a coffee-table book of a horror movie, reveling in a purity of transcendent revulsion that marks it as something that’s really only suitable for the truest and most devoted of aficionados. It’s a snob’s objet d’art, disguised as a blood offering.
  98. Big Game
    The rambling conversations and endless wandering through nature could let the film pass for a filler episode of Lost.
  99. Samba
    Even as Samba struggles to hold onto his identity, the film becomes entangled in an identity crisis of its own.
  100. Viceroy's House
    The only thing that offsets the film's self-negating revisionism are the scenes involving Gillian Anderson vicereine.
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