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. Spiderhead
    By resolving its story around a mano-a-mano, the film narrows its understanding of a system in which exploitation is privatized.
  2. The Last Victim
    Distractingly indebted to No Country for Old Men, the film’s wild tonal swings mostly leave it feeling impossibly disjointed.
  3. Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams
    The focus on Ferragamo’s craft, and the very structure of manufacture, is exciting, but the narrative’s tendency to embody the opposite of his innovativeness feels lazy and contradictory.
  4. Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
    Even the director’s most rabid fans will find Cronenberg’s debut to be a tough sit.
  5. The Silent Twins
    Agnieszka Smoczyńska’s film is unwilling to really sit with the peculiarity of its protagonists’ unique psyches.
  6. Triangle of Sadness
    Writer-director Ruben Östlund’s pessimism ultimately leads the film toward a self-negating dead end.
  7. War Pony
    The filmmakers never effectively detail the characters’ relation to the various cultural, psychological, or historical intricacies of their milieu.
  8. Digger
    Georgis Grigorakis’s film may not revolutionize the western genre by transposing it to an unlikely setting, but it doesn’t dilute it either.
  9. Private Desert
    Aly Muritiba’s film is always telling the viewer that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters.
  10. My Old School
    The film is a perfectly entertaining retelling of an offbeat tale, but it’s also superficial and borderline exploitative.
  11. A Magnificent Life
    Sylvain Chomet provides only a scant sense of Marcel Pagnol’s creative inklings, such as the ideas and themes that fuel the films that he fights so vehemently to make.
  12. Sick of Myself
    Kristoffer Borgli is unduly proud of himself for concocting his unlikable protagonists, and he marinates in their repulsive self-absorption.
  13. Strange World
    While Strange World’s examination of generational tension is tender and inspiring, as well as nicely tied to its theme of the necessity of adapting to changing times, the film’s sci-fi elements and environmental message are more half-baked in their execution.
  14. She Will
    She Will can’t decide if its horror or comedy, nor does it strike the balance that would harmoniously hybridize them.
  15. Rounding
    A few scenes show glimmers of promise for what Alex Thompson can achieve when he’s more in his wheelhouse. It’s a shame that the horror and tension that make up the bulk of Rounding are so clearly outside of it.
  16. Pearl
    Pearl is ultimately an empty exercise in style masquerading as a character study, and for as fantastic as Mia Goth is, her performance mostly succeeds at making Ti West’s homages just a little bit easier to stomach.
  17. The Greatest Beer Run Ever
    When it decides to sober up, the film’s comedy lurches into awkward attempts at melancholy.
  18. Captain America: Brave New World
    As the film explodes into numerous subplots that rapidly move far apart from one another, it necessitates constant leaps between characters and locations that only further disrupt the narrative flow of the proceedings.
  19. Bones and All
    Both Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet are sadly at a disadvantage given how many of the older actors gnaw at the scenery like it’s a still-warm cadaver.
  20. The Inspection
    The film is too invested in treacly cinematic optimism for its character dynamics to feel sketched out beyond their basic narrative function.
  21. Empire of Light
    In Sam Mendes’s film, the power of the movies comes off feeling disappointingly like an afterthought to the script’s more romantic and socially oriented concerns.
  22. Evil Dead Rise
    Lee Cronin serves up considerable gore with monotonous, po-faced earnestness.
  23. The Good Nurse
    For a while, the work on the part of the performers is nuanced enough to distract us from the film’s implausibilities.
  24. Wendell & Wild
    Henry Selick’s flair for phantasmagorical sights is on full display, though Wendell & Wild’s excessively CGI-enhanced look is a far cry from the grounded tactility of much of his prior work.
  25. Women Talking
    For better and worse, writer-director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Women Talking is most noteworthy for its imagery.
  26. Raymond & Ray
    Rodrigo García’s film is fastidious, tidy, and lifeless, with every obligatory gesture in its place.
  27. Lady Chatterley's Lover
    However faithfully the film transposes the plot and themes of the source material, it struggles to capture the spirit, ironing out D.H. Lawrence’s modernity-skeptical modernism and losing sight of his poetic vision.
  28. Love Life
    Because we’re tasked with inferring so much about the characters, especially their pasts, so much of the film’s romance is unconvincing.
  29. Elemental
    Elemental does a whole lot of huffing and puffing but, at its core, feels no more grounded than a gentle wisp of air.
  30. Snow White
    This is a fairly paint-by-numbers exercise in updating a quintessential but unquestionably quaint property for modern consumption.
  31. Missing
    Humor for the sake of humor is a worthwhile pursuit, but Missing’s final act is more unintentionally funny than intentionally funny.
  32. Magic Mike's Last Dance
    By never committing to neo-screwball antics nor a more serious analysis of codependency, the film ends up stranded in emotional ambiguity.
  33. My Father's Dragon
    The hot streak for Irish animation studio Cartoon Saloon cools with My Father’s Dragon.
  34. Medusa Deluxe
    Few, if any, single-shot movies ever justify the conceit. In fact, most of them do their material a disservice through the distraction that emerges naturally from the trickery.
  35. A Haunting in Venice
    In the end, any attempts that A Haunting in Venice makes at connecting post-war trauma to Halloween and the ability to commune with the dead are non-committal, and the script doesn’t do enough to communicate why any of that matters.
  36. Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes
    By the time the demands of big-budget spectacle take over in the final act, a film that initially stands out from the pack in imagining a different perspective of the world ends up looking all too disappointingly like everything else in the current mega-budget cinema landscape.
  37. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
    Some pleasingly odd visuals and a sustained off-kilter mood will likely please many animation fans who haven’t had any exposure to the source material, but Pierre Foldes’s film ultimately fails to create any clear identity of its own.
  38. Missing
    The film ties itself into many knots as it chases the superficial sugar high of a big reveal.
  39. Sharper
    A fumbled ending lets the air out of what is otherwise a fun and quietly stylish caper.
  40. Infinity Pool
    If David Cronenberg seems almost indifferent to his audience, Brendon Cronenberg is so fixated on freaking people out that he can sometimes neglect to do much else.
  41. Scream VI
    It simply picks up the baton from the previous film, relying on a series of increasingly nasty, and at times exciting, kills to thrill audiences, while leaving everything in between to feel as fake as its vision of the Big Apple.
  42. The Old Town Girls
    The Old Town Girls never seems to have a strong enough sense of the kind of film it wants to be to pull together its more interesting elements into a coherent whole.
  43. Life Upside Down
    The film could aim with a bit more precision at the price of its characters’ evident comfort.
    • 87 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt
    Comparisons to the work of Terrence Malick and Julie Dash are inevitable, but Raven Jackson’s search for the sublime lacks both the rich philosophical inquiries of the former and the dense, lived-in specificity of the latter.
  45. Iron Butterflies
    Roman Liubyi’s documentary is nothing if not self-consciously obsessed with its own making.
  46. Theater Camp
    The film feels like sitting through extended acting exercises where everyone is giving it 110% every take.
  47. Rye Lane
    Rye Lane’s antic energy and caricatured portrait of England’s capital city fail to make its central romance truly resonate.
  48. The Boogeyman
    Ultimately, The Boogeyman is like so many other modern horror films that prioritize mood above all else.
  49. Gladiator II
    Like so many latter-day Ridley Scott films, Gladiator II at once feels half-baked and overstuffed, and the lack of internal consistency robs its action of sustained tension and its comedy of bite.
  50. Society
    Society never entirely decides whether it’s a plot-centric horror-mystery or an imagistic fantasy; the film’s self-conscious emptiness drains the incestuous conceit of its shock value, defanging a nervy gross-out.
  51. Kandahar
    Where Kandahar is most intriguing is in the oddly even-handed depiction of both American and Middle-Eastern characters as largely exasperated professionals going about their grisly work because they’re too old to pivot to a different job.
  52. A Family Affair
    Ultimately, Richard LaGravenese’s rom-com is a little too packed with soul-searching speeches.
  53. The Plough
    The sort of gravitas that seems necessary for the most satisfying of French clichés to amount to playful reworkings, not tired repetitions, only makes a few appearances throughout the film.
  54. Ballerina
    Sans a mythology of its own, or any substantive ties into where the John Wick films go chronologically after this, Ballerina is just another 87Eleven joint.
  55. The Night of the 12th
    The film wants for deeper characterizations or a closer detailing of criminal procedure.
  56. Haunted Mansion
    The film handily invokes the campiness of the iconic Disneyland attraction, if not its kinetics.
  57. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    Sweet but narratively thin and didactic, the latest from DreamWorks Animation always seems as if it’s trying to find its footing.
    • 79 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV
    The film might have benefited from taking a page out of Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film and slowed down its flow.
  59. The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
    The film is an object lesson in what can result when a work of art subordinates itself to a message.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Star
    A threadbare, bargain-basement Sunset Boulevard, The Star features Bette Davis as Margaret Elliot, a washed-up actress hellbent on continuing her movie career.
  61. Peyton Place
    This was hot stuff in the mid-’50s, but beneath the sleazy coating covering the film (camp aficionados take note) is an unabashed and moderately retrograde plea for community openness.
  62. Napoleon
    More times than not, the film’s bursts of humor clash awkwardly with the far more frequent attempts at gravitas that the filmmakers strive for when our protagonist is in battle or engaged in political discussions.
  63. Brigadoon
    At least the dancing is good, and Vincente Minnelli’s restless camera gooses a plodding story into liveliness.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Maggie Moore(s)
    The story’s center isn’t strong enough for the rest of its disparate parts to hold.
  65. Falcon Lake
    The inadvertent effect of the oppressive, almost overbearing gloom that shrouds Falcon Lake is that it manages to sap the life out of its initially carefree depiction of young people’s emotional lives.
  66. Perfect Days
    The film’s details collectively grow absurd and pompous.
  67. Sympathy for the Devil
    With copious scenes of Nicolas Cage going buck wild, it can hardly be faulted for failing to give audiences what they want.
  68. Eric Larue
    While the film features a strong performance from Judy Greer, it’s essentially a patchwork of broad strokes that rarely feel like they’re bringing its world to credible life.
  69. I.S.S.
    The film is in such a rush to get to the bloodshed, deception, and panic that most of the fertile ground of its premise goes unexplored.
  70. Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget
    With none of the satisfying aesthetic appeal or narrative potency of the original, Dawn of the Nugget is happy to plod along as a functional joke vehicle fueled mostly by fond memories of its acclaimed predecessor.
  71. Cobweb
    As tantalizing as the film’s ambiguity can be in certain moments, there comes a point where it starts to feel at once half-baked and a transparent means of delaying the inevitable.
  72. Retribution
    Without a compelling reason for us to care about the people inside the car, a reasonably diverting journey never accelerates into an outright thrill-ride.
    • 11 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dungeonmaster
    The Dungeonmaster is little more than a fitfully entertaining calling card meant to showcase Empire’s talented in-house special effects artists and stop-motion animators.
  74. Two Tickets to Greece
    The film can never quite decide to what extent it wants to be either a light-hearted raunchy comedy or a darker comedic assessment of contemporary life.
  75. Mutt
    That Feña suffers so that other trans people won’t have to may be edifying to some, but it also reduces Mutt to an Afterschool Special.
  76. The Underdoggs
    There’s only so much that director Charles Stone III can do with the script’s “head held high” cornpone.
  77. Saltburn
    Be it sexuality, gender, class, age, or race, there’s scarcely a hot-button issue of identity that Emerald Fennell won’t invoke to amplify the stakes of an obvious metaphor.
  78. El Conde
    The film never really leans into the farcical possibilities of its premise nor its earnest appraisal of Augusto Pinochet’s legacy.
  79. Maestro
    With Maestro, Bradley Cooper has essentially reduced Leonard Bernstein’s boundary-pushing life and legacy to the sum total of its most accessible (read: audience-friendly) elements: his interpersonal relationships.
  80. Nyad
    As the film wears on, Diana’s personal motivations are increasingly blurred, and to the point that she comes to be defined almost exclusively by the adversity over which she triumphs.
  81. Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver
    The Scargiver feels like a loosely threaded series of grand ideas and sincere emotional beats that require so much more connective tissue to thread together into an actual narrative worth investing in.
  82. The Marsh King's Daughter
    Once the film turns into a paranoid home-invasion thriller, there’s no ambiguity left to the tale.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Dead Don't Hurt
    Ultimately, the didacticism of Viggo Mortensen’s film lets it down.
  84. The Burial
    This flashy legal melodrama is fitfully stirring but too flabby to deliver the walloping blow that it needs.
  85. Knox Goes Away
    As Knox Goes Away motors steadily toward redemption and family reconciliation, it leaves all opportunity for real moral reckoning in its rearview mirror.
  86. Divinity
    The story’s attempt at an excoriation of spectacle and empty pleasure comes off as little more than a reluctant swipe.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Ezra
    The film gets within striking distance of new territory for its subject matter but stalls out due to its pat storytelling.
  88. Society of the Snow
    J.A. Bayona rarely lets his images speak for themselves, which is frustrating given his obvious gift for poetic, almost surreal succinctness.
  89. The Seeding
    Ironically for a film that unfolds almost entirely in a single, contained location, The Seeding is all over the place.
  90. Shoshana
    It’s possible that a kind of objective moral ambiguity was the goal here, but given the sensitive nature of the material, it’s difficult to shake the feeling that the film’s vagueness is the calculated strategy of those unwilling to take a side.
  91. The Toxic Avenger
    Pulled awkwardly in so many directions, this Toxic Avenger all but comes apart at the seams.
  92. Stopmotion
    The film falters when it attempts to mold its best instincts into a discernible narrative shape.
  93. Wish
    Wish plays out like the No Frills version of a Disney princess story.
  94. Anyone But You
    Will Gluck’s rom-com doesn’t bother to create a compelling world around its charming leads.
  95. Infested
    If Infested had given us a little more reason to invest in its human specimens than in the blunt mechanics of its genre trappings, then maybe some of the commentary would have clung to us like the webs do to the spiders’ victims.
  96. Housekeeping for Beginners
    In spite of the too-muchness of their performances, the actors wrestle for expressiveness and subtlety against the script’s more obvious and schematic telegraphing of not-quite-nuclear discontent and, ultimately, reconciliation.
  97. The Convert
    All of the time spent on Thomas Munro’s various campaigns for reconciliation and harmony between two Māori tribes hampers the film, which would have been better served had it expounded on the grander conflicts that it only superficially acknowledges.
  98. The Empire
    Notable as it is for evoking a kind of cosmic banality, writer-director Bruno Dumont’s anti-space opera The Empire runs into same the pitfall as many parodies of its kind.
  99. Blast of Silence
    Haunting, remote, and workmanlike, Blast of Silence may be the only film I’ve ever seen with a trip on the Station Island Ferry in which I expected a tumbleweed to flit across the deck.
  100. The Fall Guy
    Whenever its main characters are pulled apart, the movie magic, in every sense of the phrase, dissipates, leaving us with a bland, derivative action-comedy that’s never quite as funny or thrilling as it thinks it is.
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