Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,769 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 6.5 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: 4,345 out of 7769
  2. Mixed: 1,491 out of 7769
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7769
7769 movie reviews
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  1. IF
    The most charitable read on John Krasinski’s IF is that using your imagination shouldn’t be bound by traditional story structure, so why should a film about unfettered imagination need the same?
  2. Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga
    The film attests to George Miller’s enduring aptitude for utilizing the ridiculous to achieve the sublime.
  3. The Strangers: Chapter 1
    This film’s approach to slasher film mayhem is liable to induce some serious déjà vu.
  4. 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.
  5. Gasoline Rainbow
    The film is rich in compositions that seem to cut to the essence of the characters’ yearnings.
  6. The Last Stop in Yuma County
    There are little moments of blackhearted comedy among the bloodshed, but through it all, The Last Stop in Yuma County makes sure that those gunshots resonate.
  7. Power
    Throughout Power, Yance Ford draws a startlingly clear line from the origins of modern policing as a slave patrol to its present-day iteration.
  8. 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.
  9. Jeanne du Barry
    Like the real Countess du Barry, it’s eventually caught up in the very pomp and splendor that it initially lampoons.
  10. Lost Soulz
    Lost Soulz is a road-trip movie driven by good vibrations and the joy of making music.
  11. Slow
    Slow steadfastly remains a character-driven piece, homing in on the intricacies of its protagonists’ psychologies and engaging with their subtle emotional shifts as they become more intimate with one another.
  12. Wildcat
    By shooting the fiction sequences with the same dreamy fish-eye unreality as the scenes showing O’Connor’s real life, the film blurs the line between the two until it’s almost nonexistent.
  13. Humane
    Caitlin Cronenberg vests her images with an eerie, confident power, but that’s more evident in her examinations of the frictions between the characters, and not so much in the tapestry of murder and mayhem that ensues.
  14. Mothers' Instinct
    Benoît Delhomme’s 1960s-set directorial debut can’t decide whether it wants to be considered camp or not, awkwardly pitching itself between a somber drama and antic melodrama.
  15. Art College 1994
    The precise contrast of stasis and flux, of the sublime and the quotidian, of simple personal dreams swallowed up by massive national ambitions, characterizes Liu Jian’s latest.
  16. 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.
  17. Terrestrial Verses
    The sense of repetition that the film leans into in order to acknowledge the inescapable grip of the state is as much a feature as it is a bug.
  18. 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.
  19. Boy Kills World
    If you’re looking for flash and snark, Boy Kills World has them in spades, but it’s too punch-drunk on its own juvenile grandiosity to bother offering even a whiff of substance.
  20. Abigail
    While there’s plenty to be said about Abigail’s impressively over-the-top scarlet mean streak, the hellride that the filmmakers take us on is all the more effective for the character groundwork laid prior.
  21. Blood for Dust
    The film is held together by the intensity of its haunted-looking cast and the dour atmosphere.
  22. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
    To Ritchie’s credit, he keeps his film moving along at a consistently brisk clip, but that breeziness is also the cause of its weightlessness, rendering its vision of historical events as outright cartoonish, down to the often clownish portrayals of Nazis and the flawless execution of nearly every element of March-Phillips’s plans.
  23. Egoist
    Though Egoist can sometimes feel overly tidy, there’s something refreshing about its straightforward approach. Consistent with its style, which is so free of ornament, it pursues its themes with a welcome directness.
  24. We Grown Now
    The film is held together by the universal strength of its performances, particularly James and Smollett, and the elegance with which it veers between dreamy interludes and poetic flourishes stemming from Malik’s imagination and the more quotidian presentation of the small world he lives in, warts and all.
  25. Back to Black
    The film presents Amy Winehouse’s demise with a sad shrug, as one of those tragic things that just sort of happens.
  26. Omen
    The patchwork structure of Omen is suited to the complexity a setting where characters switch between French, Swahili, and English depending on who they want to keep in the dark. Yet it’s difficult to shake that there are too many threads for a film of this length to do them justice.
  27. Challengers
    Challengers is an intoxicating showcase for the beauty and excitement of bodies in motion.
  28. Arcadian
    Even as the shotgun shells start flying, it makes time for the quiet dramatic moments that carry its family drama forward amid the carnage.
  29. Monkey Man
    Monkey Man is in no rush to get where it’s going and Dev Patel puts a lot of trust in his audience to stick with him to see where it arrives.
  30. The First Omen
    Pulsating in the film’s veins is an eerie eroticism and a tactile awareness of the way the Church is controlling the bodies and minds of its women.
  31. 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.
  32. Chicken for Linda!
    However pleasurable and pretty Chicken for Linda may be in its individual scenes, it doesn’t so much achieve harmony through its balancing of contrasting elements as it fully surrenders to childlike whimsy.
  33. Coup de Chance
    The film is at once among Woody Allen’s most economical works and one of his most free-spirited.
  34. The Old Oak
    If Ken Loach has always erred on making his political views impossible to misconstrue, he also knows how to keep his dramas from spiraling too far outside of plausibility.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The People's Joker
    Throughout The People’s Joker, Drew lampoons comedy institutions as freely as she does superhero hegemony, in effect mounting an impassioned argument for the vitality of art made at the margins regardless of classification.
  36. Blackout
    As in his prior work, the far-reaching curiosity and fascinatingly conflicted nature of Fessenden’s perspective is still his greatest strength.
  37. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    The last 20 minutes live up to the promise of bludgeoning viewers with plenty of rock-‘em-sock-‘em combat and demolished human landscapes, but what any of it is actually for will be forgotten even before the dust begins to settle.
  38. DogMan
    Dogman seems outwardly enamored with cosmic possibilities of meaning, but Luc Besson’s script remains earthbound and unimaginative.
  39. Asphalt City
    Shove everything into the meat grinder of cynicism and, in the end, your insights come to feel purely incidental.
    • 95 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World
    The film further confirms Radu Jude as one of the most idiosyncratic, uncompromising, and intellectually vigorous of living filmmakers.
  41. Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
    There are protracted moments of humor, fright, and pathos in Frozen Empire, but as it’s all so scattershot and disconnected, the film ends up being defined by its lack of conviction when it comes to exploring its ideas to the fullest.
  42. Limbo
    The cinematography solidifies the film’s status as a noir grappling with corruption and probing moral grey areas, while at the same time echoing visually the stark divisions between white and Indigenous people in Australian society.
  43. The American Society of Magical Negroes
    There are versions of this premise relevant to a modern world, but the film’s point of view on the state of race relations feels stuck somewhere around 1954.
  44. Civil War
    Frightening, even-tempered, and disarmingly humane, Civil War is intelligent precision filmmaking trained on an impossible subject.
  45. Shirley
    In the end, this sub-Sorkin-esque political potboiler sidelines Chisholm's most meaningful community work to the fact that she tried and failed to run for president.
  46. Immaculate
    The film’s final act contains some of the most twisted, gory violence this particular subgenre of horror has seen in years, ultimately recalling nothing less than the films of the ultra-violent New French Extremity movement.
  47. Babes
    By turns tender and raucous, Pamela Adlon’s feature-length directorial debut, Babes, spins the uneasy, unwelcome, weirdly cool corporeal realities of pregnancy into heartfelt comic gold.
  48. 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.
  49. Y2K
    The big sequence where the year 2000 hits and everything from a toaster to a Tamagotchi goes homicidal is a chaotic blast, but once the film shifts into a broader comic gear, it never quite finds its heart again.
  50. Road House
    Not quite a grim-dark reimagining of a cult favorite, this Road House is still a needlessly un-nice rework that takes the business end of a broken beer bottle to the soul of the original.
  51. In the Summers
    One of the film’s great strengths resides in Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio’s confidence in her details to speak for themselves, without the need of plot gimmickry.
  52. Dahomey
    Mati Diop’s captivating, fabulistic documentary Dahomey confronts the reality of how modernity has been shaped by the West’s theft of cultural heritage.
  53. Spaceman
    Spaceman seems to want to be an allegory about men’s emotional unavailability and its impact on heterosexual relationships, but instead of coming across universal, the film’s human characters, along with much of the drama, are mostly empty space.
  54. The Animal Kingdom
    The soft-pedaled approach to its narrative strands gives the film the feel of an extended TV pilot.
  55. High & Low: John Galliano
    The film shamelessly announces from the very start that it’s an attempt at atonement for disgraced designer John Galliano.
  56. Imaginary
    The film never thinks to lean into the blatant silliness that its premise invites.
  57. Damsel
    At its best, Damsel suggests a dark fantasy riff on Neil Marshall’s The Descent.
  58. Kung Fu Panda 4
    The film is a good time, and it doesn’t exactly betray any of Kung Fu Panda’s strengths, but it also exhibits the telltale signs of a series struggling to justify its existence.
  59. Ricky Stanicky
    As a WWE superstar, Cena is a perfect casting choice for a larger-than-life character like the formerly imaginary Ricky. He rattles off jokes with the boundless energy of a man used to spending three nights a week catapulting himself across a ring, and he’s completely at ease as the absolute center of attention.
  60. Problemista
    The film doesn’t lock on a target long enough for it to work up a head of steam as satire about the art world and how it thrives on nepotism, let alone one about the frustrations of the immigration process.
  61. Sasquatch Sunset
    What we’re confronted with in the film may be less the quaint idiocy of four dull simians and more our own inability to loosen up and just live.
  62. Another End
    Despite its initially familiar trajectory, Another End disarmingly and purposefully sweeps us away on a wave of apathy not unlike that which plagues its main character, challenging our sense of who we fundamentally are as humans.
  63. Langue Étrangère
    The film finds its profundity in moments where not much is said and nothing is intellectualized, when language is stripped to its bare bones.
  64. A Different Man
    The film’s overarching dramatic irony leaves one to ponder the deliberately discomfiting question of whether it’s possible to extricate the experience of disability from the way spectators define its essence.
  65. Drive-Away Dolls
    In the classic queer punk tradition of Bruce LaBruce, John Waters, and Gregg Araki, Ethan Coen’s film knows when to pay homage and when to move to its own rhythm.
  66. Dune: Part Two
    Denis Villeneuve’s film, like its predecessor, offers an object lesson in the visual splendor made possible by meticulously storyboarded minimalist maximalism.
  67. Concrete Valley
    Concrete Valley reveals itself as a thrilling example, both in form and content, of the way that the fostering of community allows us to regain some measure of control over life’s adversities.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Invisible Fight
    Writer-director Rainer Sarnet’s deliriously weird The Invisible Fight would be irksome if it weren’t crafted so lovingly and with a charming earnestness.
  69. Stopmotion
    The film falters when it attempts to mold its best instincts into a discernible narrative shape.
  70. Cuckoo
    One may wish that the absurdity of the conceit had been matched by a bit more irreverence in the script and audacity in the imagery.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Arcadia
    Yorgos Zois’s film banks on juxtaposition alone without quite delving into more fertile terrain.
  72. Love Lies Bleeding
    In the end, it’s a memorably girthy, if not evenly muscled, ode to the treacherousness but ultimate value of romantic love.
  73. I Saw the TV Glow
    The film is a mesmeric but frequently muddled exploration of transgender self-actualization.
  74. Suspended Time
    Olivier Assayas’s film is a gently smart and warm-spirited look at love as the core term of human existence.
  75. Madame Web
    Madame Web grinds to a halt as it gets bogged down in scene after scene of characters, both good and bad, standing around explaining their backgrounds, hang-ups, and desires.
  76. Bob Marley: One Love
    This shaggy, disjointed film is less interested in the complexities of Marley’s personal or professional life than it is in presenting him as a hero and an inspiration.
  77. Io Capitano
    The film builds on a docudrama realism while also reaching toward the mythological.
  78. Lisa Frankenstein
    Even as the film revels in violent, necrophiliac delights, the dialogue keeps everything grounded with its humor.
  79. The Promised Land
    Even when it’s painting its story in broad strokes, the film plays expertly to audience emotion.
  80. Girls State
    For chafing against existing systems designed by and for men, the storytelling structure of the film befits the female experience in American politics.
  81. Thelma
    It’s the balance of comedy and existential drama that truly elevates Thelma.
  82. Out of Darkness
    Shot in the Scottish Highlands, Out of Darkness draws on the eerie atmosphere of a place that still feels ancient and steeped in mystery.
  83. The Monk and the Gun
    The film pulls off something truly bold: taking what are perhaps the most emotionally and symbolically loaded items in existence and subverting their meaning completely to end on a note of peace, joy, and hope for the future.
  84. Black Box Diaries
    The film leaves on a razor’s edge between hope and despair, encouraged on the one hand by the passion with which justice is being demanded and, on the other, depressed by the widespread indifference with which these demands are met.
  85. Veni Vidi Vici
    The film’s humor is a clenched-fist assault on runaway greed and systemic corruption.
  86. Seeking Mavis Beacon
    The film proves itself incapable of or unwilling to follow through on its ideas to an ultimate conclusion.
  87. Argylle
    And the more each new twist is revealed and summarily falls flat, the faster the next one is slotted into place to get ahead of the story’s anticlimax, leading to a spiral in which the plot becomes even more meaningless.
  88. Handling the Undead
    For how committed it is to convincing the audience of the profundity of a rudimentary point, the film’s measured pacing comes to feel like a kind of torture.
  89. Kneecap
    Much of Rich Peppiatt’s film isn’t about respectability, but rather debasement, and sugar-coating Kneecap’s widespread antics isn’t on the menu.
  90. Between the Temples
    A wealth of contrasting stimulation gives the film a singular and intimate atmosphere, in which scenes can last little eternities while still leaving you feeling as if you’re struggling to keep up with a stream of secrets and in-jokes.
  91. Stress Positions
    The film is an insightful look at modern discontent and the pandemonium that it breeds.
  92. She Is Conann
    Decadent, hermetic, and gleefully hostile to realism, Bertrand Mandico’s film is the cinematic equivalent of a French Symbolist poem.
  93. Skin Deep
    Though as fresh and conceptually far-reaching as a David Cronenberg film, it traffics in body ambivalence more than body horror, striking an eerie, wistful tone.
  94. Dario Argento Panico
    It’s Argento who consistently makes the most compelling and incisive on-screen presence throughout Simone Scafidi’s documentary.
  95. Good One
    The film instinctively and lucidly shows how sometimes a coming of age can be thrust upon a person against their will.
  96. The Remarkable Life of Ibelin
    There’s considerable emotional truth on display throughout Benjamin Ree’s documentary.
  97. Brief History of a Family
    The film’s pregnant foreshadowing is revealed to be misdirection, the promise of a thriller offered as candy to lure us into a consideration of the tensions that can cast a pall over family life.
  98. Love Me
    The further Love Me develops its scenario, the less plausible it becomes, even by lovelorn sci-fi standards.
  99. A Real Pain
    The film is levitated by a truly joyful sense of humor that puts up a good fight against the story’s darker moments without trying to joke them into irrelevance.
  100. Suncoast
    Suncoast spends much of its runtime trafficking in tiresome coming-of-age tropes, until the resulting crowd-pleaser has snuffed out much of what’s so singular about its central story.
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