Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,772 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: 4,346 out of 7772
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7772
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7772
7772 movie reviews
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  1. See You Next Tuesday
    The film is uproariously funny, but its laughs don't come with an aftertaste of cynicism so much as they are the aftertaste of cynicism.
  2. The Naked Room
    By eschewing even basic B-roll footage, it ends up feeling even more stripped down than Frederick Wiseman's patient inquisitions, yet nearly as complex overall.
  3. Naked Opera
    A film that outwardly wants its depiction of class privilege to be ridiculing and farcical, but lacks the ability to express these critiques in lieu of the means of the class on the chopping block.
  4. Gringo Trails
    Pegi Vail beautifully edited film somehow addresses a lot, but ultimately says nothing at all.
  5. Purgatorio: A Journey Into the Heart of the Border
    The film, although it positions itself in dialogue with contemporary debates about the border, eschews a clearly delineated historical narrative.
  6. Giuseppe Makes a Movie
    Adam Rifkin's documentary convincingly portrays the sense of community fostered by Giuseppe Andrews's crazed passion.
  7. Braddock America
    It's mercifully free of the ruin-porn shots that turn so many contemporary films about struggling cities into self-consciously arty exercises in the romanticization of decay.
  8. Songs from the North
    North Korean culture is lensed in part through a South Korean perspective, with the final chapter asking: “Is reunification possible?”
  9. Losing Ground
    The film is a patient exploration of the enlaced connections between professional and emotional sectors.
  10. Coast of Death
    It convincingly insists that the human figure is no more vital to the image than the rapidly shifting landscape it inhabits.
  11. A Year in Champagne
    The premise amounts to numerous raised glasses and classical music cues, but little of this schmoozing strikes a notable chord beyond the démodé back-patting engaged throughout.
  12. Lily & Kat
    It passive-aggressively seems to suggest that anyone who isn't exactly interested in monogamy may be some kind of selfish, intolerable sociopath.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Know How
    Overall, the film's educational prerogatives tend to overwhelm its more interesting formal properties.
  14. L.A. Slasher
    It inflates the meta conceit (already borderline overblown) of a pop-obsessed, sex-negative serial killer to excessive but trite proportions.
  15. The Japanese Dog
    It may be described as a Yasujirô Ozu drama done in the Romanian style; if only there was more to distinguish it beyond such extra-textual concerns.
  16. Guidelines
    It effectively implies that the subjects' troublemaking is the stuff of transience, a phase before they're ushered into the realm of adult responsibility.
  17. Welcome to this House
    If the documentary isn't quite dynamic in its revelations, it's considerably more so in its challengingly essayistic presentation.
  18. Final Girl
    The filmmakers never really answer inevitable questions: What's the point of these fussy allusions?
  19. Youth
    Tom Shoval, who eschews stylistic flourishes in order to focus on character, leaves the film's heavy lifting to the actors and his own screenplay.
  20. Barista
    It captures the frustration and the longing of forever wanting more and better at the expense of casualness of being.
  21. Tired Moonlight
    It's to Britni West's credit that she's yoked the film's experimental sequences with the hard reality of characters trying to figure things out.
  22. Wrecker
    Time and again, the filmmaker cuts the money shot meant to theoretically cap a sequence.
  23. Jason and Shirley
    Stephen Winter's film doesn't earn the gall it evinces by pissing on Shirley Clarke's masterpiece.
  24. Insiang (1976)
    Lino Brocka's portrait of familial treachery and societal abandonment channels its melodrama through the filter of neorealism.
  25. Everybody's Fine
    It joins its American cousin in the scrapheap of family dramedies that no one watches, unless by default out of boredom on TBS or TNT.
  26. The Blue Hour
    An initially intriguing attempt to splice together a gay romance and a horror film that ultimately shows little flair for either genre.
  27. Misconception
    The even-handedness of Yu's gaze throughout the first part of the film, alas, isn't sustained in the second and third chapters.
  28. Viral
    The film slightly reorients our perspective on the familiar tropes of both the teen and apocalyptic genres.
  29. A Beautiful Now
    Writer-director Daniela Amavia fails to link the lives of her characters to any deeper sense of meaning.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Game of Aces
    The characters' motivations are dictated less by the dynamics of their personalities and more by the needs of the screenplay.
  31. Homeland: Iraq Year Zero
    Throughout his nearly six-hour documentary, Abbas Fahdel is content with showing only the outer surface of people's lives.
  32. Happy Birthday
    It plays like it was written by a bro who just discovered the early films of Quentin Tarantino.
  33. Belle Épine
    Neither sentimentality nor nostalgia for reckless years gone by can be found in Rebecca Zlotowski's Belle Epine, which makes its tale of teenage rebellion in the face of overwhelming grief fall closer to a sobering character study than a classical youth film.
  34. Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead
    Don Coscarelli outdoes the humor of John Hughes in what feels like a more honest version of the gleeful sadism in Home Alone.
  35. Phantasm IV: Oblivion
    The freewheeling atmosphere of dread more than make up for the incoherence, but Phantasm IV: Oblivion at times feels like an expensive, 35mm home movie made by some kids in their backyard.
  36. Lost and Beautiful
    When he's not busy lamenting a bygone past, Marcello more broadly and usefully reminds us of a world beyond our own and a time beyond the present, all of which can be easy to forget in a country as full of political and economic turmoil as present-day Italy.
  37. Ghostland: The View of the Ju/’hoansi
    The film’s nagging representational problem stems from its reductive sense of place and portraiture of emotional displacement, which gradually phases out the possibility of thornier revelations.
  38. The Institute
    The Institute seems constantly on the verge of dipping into spoof, though of what exactly is difficult to say.
  39. The Island Funeral
    The film rolls political commentary into the template of a “lost highway” horror film by forgoing ironic distancing.
  40. Paraguay Remembered
    Like most great essay films, Paraguay Remembered is driven by associations not just with art works with which it shares a kinship, but a stream-of-conscious relationship between word and image.
  41. Les Hautes Solitudes (1974)
    Trading on the already-resonant associations engendered by a famous face, Garrel's film responds by forging a new, deeper connection between an actress and her public, resulting in that rare moment of cinematic alchemy where the line between fact and fiction has not only blurred, but ceased to matter entirely.
  42. The Dreamed Path (Der traumhafte Weg)
    That the film adheres, upon close scrutiny, to the rough shape of a classical romantic tragedy—a seemingly intuitively understandable genre—only confirms the extreme degree to which Schanalec’s idiosyncratic manner of storytelling skirts and frustrates expectations.
  43. Ta'ang
    The film follows its refugee subjects closely but with a physical and narrative distance that respects their independence.
  44. The Recall
    Mauro Borrelli's The Recall has the look of a SyFy original movie and the self-seriousness of Ridley Scott's recent Alien films.
  45. Autumn, Autumn
    The film is a record of everyday spaces and the emotionally charged human dramas that pass through them.
  46. M.F.A.
    Natalia Leite's ambition and accompanying uncertainty give the film its unruly and resonant energy.
  47. Antiporno
    Sion Sono, allergic to subtlety, is terrified that we won't notice his detonation of Nikkatsu's sexploitation traditions.
  48. Beast of Burden
    The film’s flashbacks, which are either too clipped or excessively scored, effectively step on the actors’ toes.
  49. The Competition
    The will-they-won't-they of the film is a non-starter, and as such the film's climax is stripped of suspense and even the most basic of dramatic payoffs.
  50. Nana
    The film flattens Maryla's personal story into hazy generalities about tolerance and the value of remembrance.
  51. A Family Tour
    Ying Liang’s film is righteously and vigorously angry about injustices committed by the Chinese government.
  52. 9 Fingers
    Despite all its confoundments, 9 Fingers works as a unified whole thanks to F.J. Ossang's playful sense of humor.
  53. Electro-Pythagorus: A Portrait of Martin Bartlett
    Luke Fowler allows us to access some of the intimate details of Bartlett’s life in intriguingly indirect ways.
  54. The Unicorn
    The documentary illuminates how art and artists live together in a symbiotic existence, each giving as well as taking.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Manta Ray
    Manta Ray functions as an oblique portrait of writer-director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng’s anger about the Rohingya refugee crisis in Thailand.
  56. Wall
    So much of the film is given over to highlighting David Hare’s confusion as a tourist in a conflict he can never fully comprehend.
  57. Hyenas
    Djibril Diop Mambéty’s 1992 film resonates primarily for its lacerating comedic writing and pacing.
  58. The Garden
    Derek Jarman’s 1990 film isn’t without hope that we can regrow a paradise.
  59. A Bigger Splash
    Jack Hazan’s portrait of David Hockney stands between documentary and fictional film, reality and fantasy.
  60. Ága
    Milko Lazarov seems driven to record the inner workings of a singular slice of Inuit culture before it goes the way of the reindeer.
  61. The Miracle of the Little Prince
    In a world increasingly resistant to cultural exchange, the miracle of The Little Prince is how it’s become so universally beloved, and Boonstra’s film is a worthy homage to its passionate translators who’ve been so inspired by Saint-Exupery’s story .
  62. Say Amen, Somebody
    Throughout, artists intermingle in scenes that have been rendered with an Altman-esque sense of personal panorama.
  63. Duet for Cannibals
    Susan Sontag’s debut film serves as an intriguing cinematic extension of her more well-known written work.
  64. Empty Metal
    The film is greater in its confrontational force than the sum of a dozen festival breakthroughs lauded for their fearlessness.
  65. Just Don't Think I'll Scream
    This intimate found-footage memoir is driven by a frantic internal monologue that will feel painfully familiar to many cinephiles in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.
  66. Come and See
    It suggests that a war’s horrors were the ultimate unassimilable experience of the shadowy depths of the human mind.
  67. The Trouble with Being Born
    In the end, the film suffers from the same issue as its moody androids: enervation borne out of repetition.
  68. Saudi Runaway
    Camera, character, and cameraperson are one throughout, and the effect is exquisitely suffocating.
  69. The Carnivores
    The characters don’t exist solely to affirm the film’s various themes, and as a result, their humanity gets under your skin.
  70. Days of Cannibalism
    The film ultimately depicts a world in which people are left with no other option but to devour their own.
  71. Nafi's Father
    The film vibrantly articulates all that’s lost when people are held under the draconian decree of warlords.
  72. Slaughter High
    Despite the pretense of commentary, the film asks no underlying questions about the society that produces slasher films and revels in its narrative’s basic premise to numbing ends.
  73. Picture of His Life
    Amos Nachoum has a vulnerability that he manages to locate in animals without diminishing their capacity for violence.
  74. The Calming
    Song Fang’s latest moves glacially along in a largely unchanging emotional register, always keeping us at a distance.
  75. Blood on the Wall
    Sebastian Junger and Nick Quested’s prismatic look at a devastating new chapter in the War on Drugs lacks for cohesiveness.
  76. Atarrabi & Mikelats
    A challenge inherent to a parable of this sort is that evil, being so seductive, can make good seem dull or prissy by comparison.
  77. Survival Skills
    While mostly pulling off this tricky balancing act of humor and real-life horror, the film doesn’t quite go far enough in its critiques.
  78. Fear of Rain
    The film portrays mental illness with all the nuance and insight of Jared Leto in Suicide Squad.
  79. A Shape of Things to Come
    The film suggests a fusion of an eco-doc and acid western, and this disparity between genres results in a mysterious tension.
  80. Funhouse
    Throughout, it’s difficult to sort the contrivances that writer-director Jason William Lee is parodying from those he’s indulging.
  81. Short Vacation
    The film, lacking in conflict and danger, is guided by the poignant belief that there’s no end to the world.
  82. Friends and Strangers
    The film’s tonal and situational shapeshifting doesn’t go to the surrealist lengths of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, but James Vaughan similarly indulges in burlesquing upper-middle-class complacency.
  83. The Ancient Woods
    The film brings us somewhere where we aren’t, and probably could not be, but nevertheless feels tangibly real.
  84. Against the Current
    Against the Current’s style imposes a generic visual language onto a subject who’s anything but generic.
  85. Kid Candidate
    The film doesn’t leave us with a complex sense of Hayden Pedigo as a person and political candidate trying to take on an unjust system.
  86. Softie
    Writer-director Samuel Theis’s film is a noteworthy repurposing of the coming-of-age social drama.
  87. Bruno Reidal, Confession of a Murderer
    Vincent Le Port’s grim morality tale depicts a society caught between differing norms of discipline, punishment, and sex.
  88. 499
    The film raises pertinent questions about Mexico’s mixed cultural heritage and the contested representation of reality.
  89. What We Left Unfinished
    Mariam Ghani’s documentary spurs audiences to consider the politics that underlies any artistic activity.
  90. Broadcast Signal Intrusion
    Jacob Gentry’s film punches through all the layers of homage to arrive at a place of true horror.
  91. Dug Dug
    The film is marked by an empathetic understanding of the inkling of belief that can be exhumed from even the most rational of minds.
  92. The First 54 Years: An Abbreviated Manual for Military Occupation
    The film persuasively sheds light on the grievances of the Palestinian people that have long fallen on deaf ears.
  93. El Gran Movimiento
    Writer-director Kiro Rosso’s sociological, pseudo-documentary film suggests a mosaic resolving out of innumerable shards.
  94. The Sleeping Negro
    Though often abstract in its imagery, the film’s blistering commentary remains firmly rooted in our present reality.
  95. Expedition Content
    The issue of racism sits nestled under both this sequence and the field of anthropology as a whole, giving Expedition Content a nakedly ontological dimension that interrogates how images are produced and who produces them.
  96. Leonora addio
    Leonora Addio is a wrestling with memory and history through a deeply personal, if at times indulgent, lens.
  97. That Kind of Summer
    That Kind of Summer never quite resolves into any one stance on its subjects, an equanimity that’s to its credit.
  98. Los Conductos
    A collage-like tale of vengeance told with an often impressionistic elusiveness, the film can also be bewildering in its juxtapositions.
  99. They Came Back
    It’s rather amazing how far the film is able to coast on its uniquely fascinating premise, even if it isn’t much of a stretch for its director: Campillo co-authored Laurent Cantet’s incredible Time Out, a different kind of zombie film about the deadening effects of too much work on the human psyche, and They Came Back is almost as impressive in its concern with the existential relationship between the physical and non-physical world.
  100. Missing
    The film ties itself into many knots as it chases the superficial sugar high of a big reveal.
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