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. Rob Peace
    The things that elevate Chiwetel Ejiofor’s film are those that elevated Rob Peace’s life overall.
  2. Exhibiting Forgiveness
    True to its name, the film puts the concept of forgiveness on display and asks us to spend some time in front of it and consider it from all angles.
  3. Girls Will Be Girls
    The film is one that fully recognizes the power of a lingering gaze, a suppressed smile, the slightest movement of the littlest finger, and one which uses them all to maximum effect.
  4. The Underdoggs
    There’s only so much that director Charles Stone III can do with the script’s “head held high” cornpone.
  5. Sujo
    Befitting the unseen forces that seem to drive the characters, writer-directors Fernanda Valadez and Astrid Rondero bring a haunted, dreamlike undercurrent to the film similar to sequences from their prior collaboration, Identifying Features.
  6. Realm of Satan
    The film isn’t designed to challenge what you think you know about the Church of Satan.
  7. The Seeding
    Ironically for a film that unfolds almost entirely in a single, contained location, The Seeding is all over the place.
  8. Eternal You
    The film approaches a new tech frontier with an objective, responsibly apprehensive, eye.
  9. How to Have Sex
    How to Have Sex winds up delivering on the promise of its title, as this is a truly instructive film about sexual politics, though a remarkable one for largely leaving emotions unresolved and relationships feeling messy.
  10. The Breaking Ice
    The Breaking Ice is fixated on intense in-between states that work to separate people from each other and from themselves, as if to say self-acceptance and love aren’t destinations so much as journeys, at once formidable and worthwhile.
  11. 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.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Public Speaking
    If you’re a longtime fan of the truly iconoclastic essayist...expecting to learn what makes her tick then Public Speaking, Martin Scorsese’s loving profile of the early bloomer who subsequently spent a decade with “writer’s blockade,” is certain to disappoint.
  13. The Beekeeper
    It’s not unlike a partially completed sketch whose occasional flashes of color only serve to remind us how incomplete and lazily constructed the rest of it is.
  14. Mean Girls
    If this Mean Girls thrives too much on its relationship to the original, more tribute with songs than independent adaptation, its enjoyability is also a testament to the original’s staying power, as well as to Fey’s decades-long faith in the recyclability of her own material.
  15. The Book of Clarence
    The film does keep the smirking undercurrent of the first half present in the more serious second, but, slowly but surely, it starts asking big questions about the nature of God, what measure of divinity lies in us all, and the value of basic humanity and grace in a world where God’s intervention isn’t a given.
  16. Self Reliance
    There’s never any danger of Self Reliance’s reach exceeding its grasp, but it gets a firm handle on the things it does want to achieve: tell good jokes, craft likeable characters, and strike a lighthearted tone that’s always just a little bit odder than you may be expecting.
  17. Night Swim
    There’s an elegiac beauty to many of Night Swim’s pool scenes, but everything that surrounds them is leaden, from Wyatt Russell’s comatose performance to the baseball metaphors that have been unsubtly shoehorned into the impossibly routine narrative.
  18. Mayhem!
    Whenever Mayhem! makes any attempt at character building, it feels as if we’re watching a trashy DTV movie, and as a result reveals itself as a run-of-the-mill revenge flick that practically crawls toward its preordained destination.
  19. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    The film hits its plot milestones as fast as humanly possible, cohesion or depth be damned.
  20. Rebel Moon Part 1: A Child of Fire
    The relative grace of A Child of Fire’s action direction only underscores how disjointed and generic the rest of the film is.
  21. Anyone But You
    Will Gluck’s rom-com doesn’t bother to create a compelling world around its charming leads.
  22. The Color Purple
    The film knows the words and tunes but, with rare exception, lacks the passion and the perspective to make them truly resonate.
  23. The Boys in the Boat
    The film doesn’t break a single mold, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s entirely the point.
  24. 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.
  25. The Crime Is Mine
    It draws on the giddily rules-trampling pre-war mood as Chicago. But while its protagonists are as driven by a desire for fame and money as the amoral starlets of the Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse musical, the film has more than grinning cynicism at its core.
  26. Memory
    The film reveals itself as a prototypical yet surprisingly tender love story between two damaged people re-learning how to move through a world that’s unable to adequately support them.
  27. The Iron Claw
    With scalpel-like precision, the film exposes the agonies of fathers, sons, and brothers.
  28. Leave the World Behind
    In the end, Leave the World Behind is content to blandly shrug in the direction of an amorphous calamity, reaching for a profundity that it fails to achieve.
  29. 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.
  30. Wonka
    Paul King again proves himself a masterful engineer of imaginary worlds, and it’s the meticulous attention to detail that makes Wonka so captivating.
  31. The Taste of Things
    The film views the love of food and romance as all one singular desire for everything beautiful and fleeting in life.
  32. American Fiction
    Without spoiling its increasingly ludicrous (and ludicrously believable) escalations, American Fiction ultimately gets off scot-free clinging doggedly to the middle ground.
  33. Concrete Utopia
    This darkly comic and consistently revealing tale suggests that, without four walls around us to prop them up, most of our morals would crumble into dust.
  34. Origin
    Thanks to Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s unflappable performance, the theories that Isabel Wilkerson laid out in her book emerge with an emotional clarity that can be forceful, but the film’s often inelegant, choppy structure also works against that clarity.
  35. Waitress: The Musical
    The film accomplishes its principal goal of capturing Sara Bareilles’s spectacular take on Jenna Hunterson, especially in its close-ups of the singer-songwriter.
  36. Godzilla Minus One
    For all the unbridled destruction, Godzilla Minus One remains perversely light and fun, a Roland Emmerich-like disaster flick helmed by an actual talent.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Silent Night
    When Silent Night does finally kick into high gear, the action is as artful as anything that Woo has whipped up throughout his storied career.
  38. Your Lucky Day
    The film coasts far on the pleasant surprise of some sharp plotting.
  39. They Shot the Piano Player
    Unlike, say, Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, which takes advantage of rotoscoping to lend a unique style to the animation depending on who’s talking and about what, They Shot the Piano Player aims for more stylistic continuity than one would expect, given the free-wheeling soundtrack.
  40. Wish
    Wish plays out like the No Frills version of a Disney princess story.
  41. Monster
    Across the film, you can feel the push and pull between a master technician who built his career on the patient, delicate plucking at our heartstrings and his newfound desire to please a wide audience with the broadest of affective strokes.
  42. 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.
  43. Thanksgiving
    This Thanksgiving is a slasher for today, slickly made, coolly mean, and with a satiric bite.
  44. Next Goal Wins
    Next Goal Wins feels like five different films, all of them failing to coalesce in an effective way because every 30 seconds the script thinks it has to crack wise.
  45. Blue Beetle
    Blue Beetle plays out with all the revelry of a contractual obligation, hitting every note of the hero’s journey with no variation, murky action sequences, and little in the way of imagination, despite the titular object itself granting Jaime the ability to manifest anything that he imagines.
  46. The Strangler (1970)
    This 1970 psychological thriller was Paul Vecchiali’s self-conscious attempt during the waning years of the Nouvelle Vague to take the movement’s genre-defying sensibilities in a new direction.
  47. The Disappearance of Shere Hite
    With its determination to retrace the largely forgotten steps of a feminist trailblazer, The Disappearance of Shere Hite is an essential work of archival savvy, blending popular and academic conversations with ease and precision.
  48. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    The glue holding it all together is the same that gave the earlier Hunger Games films an edge over its YA brethren: the steadfast portrayal of the cynicism and emotional neglect required to regard other human beings as numbers and meat that have to be placated to be useful.
  49. The Stones and Brian Jones
    Via the film’s juxtaposition between footage of Jones performing in front of fawning crowds with the dark personal stories of those who knew him best, Nick Broomfield bitingly undercuts the rock star’s veneer of public adoration.
  50. 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.
  51. 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.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Eileen
    The film is a pulpy phantasmagoria of fear and desire, offering visions of queer ecstasy within the confines of multiple prisons.
    • 80 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    A Still Small Voice
    The film does a fine job of holding a mirror to the experience of therapeutic practice.
  54. The Marsh King's Daughter
    Once the film turns into a paranoid home-invasion thriller, there’s no ambiguity left to the tale.
  55. Beyond Utopia
    The searing images of various gulags, public executions, and private beatings will not be easily forgotten.
  56. The Bikeriders
    The sheer exuberance of the story and the stylistic brio of Jeff Nichols’s direction often compensate for the film’s lack of authenticity.
  57. Anselm
    Anselm is ultimately an extension of Kiefer’s “protest against forgetting,” as it reminds us that art is an act of remembrance.
  58. Pain Hustlers
    The excitement that the film tries to generate for its main characters is disturbingly glib.
  59. Freelance
    By its conclusion, what we’re left with is a cinematic Frankenstein, whose disparate genre elements have been cobbled together without much consideration or fuss.
  60. Five Nights at Freddy's
    Five Nights at Freddy’s has absolutely no idea what kind of ride it wants to be.
  61. 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.
  62. Rustin
    Organizing is thankless work, and even though the film, like others in its lineage, functions as an ode to the unsung workers for the revolution, it only turns that tedium to spectacle, rarely willing to truly think about organizing as, well, boring.
  63. Four Daughters
    A fascinating metacommentary courses beneath the film’s emotional storytelling surface.
  64. Ferrari
    That liminal space between the peaks and the valleys of a person’s life is what Michael Mann is most interested in exploring.
  65. Eureka
    The genre trappings are familiar, but this isn’t any old horse opera.
  66. When Evil Lurks
    Demián Rugna’s harrowing film spares no one from the cruelty of its world.
  67. The Killer
    David Fincher dabbles in the pleasures of genre without ever allowing the outlandish scenario to be treated with more respect than it deserves.
  68. Killers of the Flower Moon
    Killers of the Flower Moon is a three-hander on an epic canvas, a corrosive analysis of America’s colonialist and capitalist excesses as refracted through a marital melodrama in the vein of George Cukor’s Gaslight or Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion.
  69. Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus
    Under Sora Neo’s direction, each number becomes a mini-study of Sakamoto and the grand piano he plays on.
  70. Menus Plaisirs - Les Troisgros
    With Menus-Plaisirs Les Troisgros, Frederick Wiseman proves again to be the master poet of micro textures that speak to the macro of social infrastructure.
  71. The Shadowless Tower
    The characters’ generational angst humanizes the film’s view of a nation at a crossroads.
  72. In Our Day
    For Hong Sang-oo, In Our Day is a gesture toward recognizing the beautiful, awful, and uncanny.
  73. Divinity
    The story’s attempt at an excoriation of spectacle and empty pleasure comes off as little more than a reluctant swipe.
  74. Once Within a Time
    The film proposes that, in the search for viable alternatives to techno-fascism and climate apocalypse, we might look to the margins of our world, to unfulfilled experiments (including those of cinema) and cultures supposedly left behind by history.
  75. Janet Planet
    Annie Baker’s spare dialogue style remains intact, with each line revealing of character and mood.
    • 88 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Pictures of Ghosts
    As always with Kleber Mendonça Filho, to reflect reality isn’t enough, as cinema has to find its own truth, even if it takes some imagination to get there.
  77. Green Border
    The journeys that Jan and Julia undergo feature such obvious narrativization that they cannot help but feel a bit out of sync with the more observation segments featuring the refugees.
  78. 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.
    • 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.
  80. Dicks: The Musical
    In the instances where it’s not going hard, Dicks is a surprisingly flaccid affair.
  81. The Burial
    This flashy legal melodrama is fitfully stirring but too flabby to deliver the walloping blow that it needs.
  82. Poor Things
    As imaginative as the film’s comedy can be, its greatest asset is Emma Stone’s ability to situate Bella Baster first as jester, then as the emotional foundation upon which the whole of Poor Things is built.
  83. Totally Killer
    It might not be quite as incisive a piece of genre dismemberment as Wes Craven’s Scream or Drew Goddard’s Cabin in the Woods, but it has a lot of fun poking at the tricks and tropes of slasher movies all the same.
    • 82 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Hit Man
    Many of Richard Linklater’s films are united by their celebration of the pretentious in its etymological meaning of “playing pretend.” With Hit Man, he and Glenn Powell take this further by demonstrating that acting isn’t just entertainment or art—it’s also a fundamental part of our lives.
  85. Priscilla
    Priscilla’s delicate mystique struggles to free itself from an oppressive mood board imposed from without by six decades of history.
  86. The Exorcist: Believer
    The film is a mélange of tired normcore horror tropes indistinguishable from any film in the Conjuring universe.
  87. The Settlers
    The film is a blistering laceration of the contradictions and hypocrisies of European racism.
  88. Orlando, My Political Biography
    Orlando, My Political Biography languishes in an undefinable interstitial space, floating between fiction and essay film.
    • 86 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    May December
    The film examines real-world events through the lens of mass media with a wry humor that masks profoundly complex and painful undercurrents of emotion.
  90. The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
    In its own way, the film is as suitable a final work as a culminating magnum opus.
  91. Foe
    At every turn, Garth Davis’s Foe not only fails to adequately redress or rework played-out tropes within its high-concept world, but its examination of marriage and identity is also hackneyed.
    • 91 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Boy and the Heron
    The true tragedy of The Boy and the Heron seems not to be that the blemishes of its fantasy mirror those of its reality, but that any one person should think themselves capable of sanitizing either.
  93. Saw X
    The film mostly makes you wish that a Saw film would finally let Amanda be the one that audiences worship.
  94. The Sweet East
    Sean Price Williams’s solo feature directorial debut is pretty fuzzy on what it wants its national tour of brainless dogma to mean.
  95. The Human Surge 3
    While its globe-trotting sense of wonder shows the joys of offline existence to be as profound and vivid as they ever were, its simultaneous sense of boundless possibility and stagnant futility recalls nothing so much as the chaotic, alienating realm of cyberspace that both birthed and shaped it.
    • 92 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    The Zone of Interest
    The soundtrack of the Hösses’ daily lives is a reminder of the nightmare taking place just beyond the wall outside their home, and these sounds, relentless in their sense of evocativeness, give an extra layer of the uncanny to Höss’s already unsettling character.
  97. The Royal Hotel
    In this film of clammy anxiety, the potential of male violence is made to feel as scary as the actual article.
  98. The Creator
    With The Creator, Gareth Edwards finally finds the balance between arresting images and grounded emotional stakes.
  99. All of Us Strangers
    Andrew Haigh’s film always feels perched on the precipice of unlocking a deeper register.
  100. Flora and Son
    Flora and Son is far more invested in making its characters likable and cute rather than risking audience sympathies.
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