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. Book Club: The Next Chapter
    The film is devoid of serious conflict, yet it hits with unexpected feeling.
  2. Monica
    Monica is an unsentimental exploration of its main character’s search for personal fulfillment through human connection.
  3. Love Again
    The film is nothing but a chintzy promotional tool for Celine Dion.
  4. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
    The film undermines its initial sense of intimacy and momentum with a stop-and-start story structure that by and large exists to make as much room as possible for its characters’ banter.
  5. Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World
    The film stumbles sluggishly from one chapter in Foreman’s life to the next.
  6. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
    The sense that they don’t make mass entertainments like this anymore is palpable.
  7. Winter Boy
    Christophe Honoré’s film tackles grief in a subtle, intriguingly indirect manner.
  8. The Eight Mountains
    The film is a meditative, slow crescendo of wounded feelings and quiet epiphanies.
  9. Evil Dead Rise
    Lee Cronin serves up considerable gore with monotonous, po-faced earnestness.
  10. Trenque Lauquen Parte II
    Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.
  11. Trenque Lauquen Parte I
    Throughout the film, Laura Citarella emphasizes the liberating quality of following the rabbit hole as deep as it goes.
  12. Plan 75
    Because so much of Hayakawa’s film is given over to depictions of the procedures, formalities, and impersonal administration that define Plan 75, even the tiniest spark of feeling comes as a relief.
  13. Dry Ground Burning
    The film surprises by revealing deeper layers to both its subjects and social commentary.
  14. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    The film bangs the drum loudly on behalf of American exceptionalism.
  15. Other People's Children
    The film’s most authentic moments are those that leave its main character breathless, cutting her plans for making up for lost time short.
  16. Somewhere in Queens
    Many of the character actors occasionally elevate the film above some of the more clichéd family humor.
  17. Carmen
    By stripping the story back to its most elemental form, Benjamin Millepied makes it feel mythic, poetic, and captivatingly romantic.
  18. Renfield
    The film frustratingly shrouds Nicholas Cage’s manic intensity in thick blankets of winking irony.
  19. Beau Is Afraid
    With Beau Is Afraid, his third and easily most ambitious feature to date, Ari Aster traces, to more cosmic and absurd ends, how tragedy is birthed by, well, birth itself.
  20. Human Flowers of Flesh
    There’s an emptiness to Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh that no amount of striking cinematography, thematic suggestion, and allusions to Jean Painlevé can disguise.
  21. Suzume
    The film is consistently delightful, offering up an unrelenting supply of shimmering, sun-dappled visuals and a sweet, strange story about a young girl making peace with her past.
  22. Passion
    Passion already finds Hamaguchi Ryûsuke to be a superb orchestrator of moods and tones.
  23. Sick of Myself
    Kristoffer Borgli is unduly proud of himself for concocting his unlikable protagonists, and he marinates in their repulsive self-absorption.
  24. 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.
  25. Country Gold
    For all its formal playfulness, the film never loses its grip on the interior lives to its characters.
  26. Paint
    The film doesn’t have a clear opinion on its main subject and the scourge of misogyny in media.
  27. Joyland
    Joyland is full of extraordinary situations that prevent it from being defined by its topicality or tantamount to a badge of honor.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    The film feels like it’s content to check off to-do notes and scratch the viewer’s nostalgia itch.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    The overreliance on wisecracks and employing, and then mocking, clichés make it seem as if Honor Among Thieves is outright embarrassed by its source material and wants you to know it.
  30. In Viaggio: The Travels of Pope Francis
    The film unfolds at an excessive remove from its subject matter, and it becomes less an incisive thesis about the pope than an occasion for Gianfranco Rosi to flex his stylistic muscles.
  31. A Thousand and One
    The film brims with authenticity and the electrifying emotional intensity of the best melodramas.
  32. Tetris
    There’s a riveting story somewhere here about the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the stranglehold of capitalism on ’80s culture, but Tetris never quite locates it.
  33. Air
    Air is shot through with an infectious energy, but it’s more poignant for the way that it rhymes the histories of its actors in the public eye with all that Nike’s creatives were struggling to reconcile when they were chasing after Jordan.
  34. Arnold Is a Model Student
    Even at its most confrontational, the film maintains a carefully controlled deadpan tone.
  35. Tótem
    Tótem is a film of unexpected beauty, using its main character as a conduit for exploring the quandaries of a family navigating matters of love, heartbreak, class, innocence, and, perhaps most prominently, mortality.
    • 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.
  37. Tori and Lokita
    The film subjects its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Lost King
    The film, a shabby account of the story behind the story, muddles its themes and only superficially conveys the importance of the historical insights it contains.
  39. A Good Person
    The more that Zach Braff’s script tries to thematically tie its disparate threads together, the more that A Good Person comes to resemble the very same type of neat and tidy self-contained version of reality that it ironically skewers in its prologue.
  40. Smoking Causes Coughing
    Smoking Causes Coughing isn’t just an anti-superhero superhero film, but, thanks to Tristram Shandy-like levels of discursivity, something akin to an anti-film.
  41. Polite Society
    From the first blow to the last, Polite Society is a charm offensive that simply doesn’t let up.
  42. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    The film fails to build on the whimsical foundation of the first film in any way.
  43. Boston Strangler
    While the film’s determination to spotlight the women who brought down the Boston Strangler over the killer himself is admirable, it leaves a hole in the middle of the film that nothing else really manages to fill.
  44. John Wick: Chapter 4
    In the gradual development and expansion of the Wickaverse, the filmmakers seem to have lost the thread of what makes the first and, at times, second film in the series work so well.
  45. Stonewalling
    Stonewalling is an attentive, engaged character study, an uncommonly candid (for China) women’s picture, and a film of dense and considered sociopolitical implications.
  46. 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.
  47. Chevalier
    Chevalier doesn’t match the revolutionary spirit of Joseph Bologne’s life, but there’s still a lot of enjoyment to be taken from seeing a towering figure, long forgotten by history, returned to his rightful place at center stage.
  48. Champions
    As Champions tediously veers between the increasingly rote narrative beats of an inspirational sports story and a love story of opposites attract, it further stresses its own archaic qualities with a consciously anachronistic soundtrack that includes Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” EMF’s “Unbelievable,” and Outkast’s “Hey Ya.”
  49. Revoir Paris
    The film is a quietly gutting ode to Paris’s resilience in the post-Bataclan era.
  50. The Five Devils
    The film is a thorny exploration of how individuals’ personal ordeals can quickly merge into an impenetrable thicket of irreparable relationships.
  51. The Innocent
    The innocent, it turns out, isn’t a single character but the person inside us all, playing at the version of ourselves we’d rather be.
  52. On the Adamant
    Unwilling to risk subjectivity or authorial input, and also lacking in the forensic detail that might have provided a more in-depth analysis of the Centre de jour l’Adamant and its functioning, On the Adamant ultimately feels half-formed.
  53. Music
    Initially, more than mere fun, Angela Schanelec’s approach to storytelling is surprisingly affecting, but once you’ve figured out how to play, the game begins to feel a bit, well, ancient.
  54. Sansón and Me
    Sansón and Me has a way of frustratingly pulling focus away from its ostensible subject.
  55. Gods of Mexico
    If Gods of Mexico harkens back to certain traditions of visual representation, Helmut Donsantos’s counterintuitive recombination of what would seem to be mutually exclusive inspirations, each with its own temporal framework, allows him to offer for our contemplation a vision uniquely his own.
  56. in water
    Connoisseurs of Hong Sang-soo’s cinema will no doubt be fascinated by the transcendent minimalism of the film, which suggests Picasso knocking off a sketch on a piece of paper in a matter of seconds.
  57. The Origin of Evil
    The Origin of Evil recalls Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness for how its prolonged, soft-peddled skewering of the wealthy seems convinced of its Buñuelian irreverence.
  58. The Worst Ones
    Part of what makes The Worst Ones tick with a pace close to that of a thriller is its self-reflexive relationship to genre and knack for referentiality.
  59. Hunt Her, Kill Her
    Hunt Her, Kill Her simply isn’t tight enough to maintain the tension that it seeks to create.
  60. 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.
  61. Afire
    Afire builds a story that begins as a hangout comedy with a sad-sack at its center but gradually becomes a slow-motion conflagration that offers no easy answers.
  62. The Teachers' Lounge
    While Ilker Çatak’s The Teacher’s Lounge makes full use of the dramatic possibilities inherent in its setting, it doesn’t exceed its remit by turning the story into a referendum on society.
  63. The Survival of Kindness
    An epic adventure in the guise of an arthouse flick, The Survival of Kindness makes up in visual power and moral clarity what it lacks in subtext.
  64. Femme
    Femme fascinatingly taps into the radical possibilities of the sartorial as narrative device, exploring the tabooed nuances of queer subjectivity and muddying the lines between gay and trans in the way that lived experience tends to do.
  65. #Manhole
    Kumakiri Kazuyoshi counters the comic absurdity with a genuinely discomfiting sense of the manhole’s atmosphere, and threads of intrigue that are already mostly spun by the time you see them.
  66. The Adults
    The Adults affectingly captures the uniquely American ennui provoked by the banalities of a hometown and the lost utopia of childhood.
  67. Disco Boy
    Lack of clarity, it turns out, is what makes Disco Boy so enjoyable, and imbues it with gravitas.
  68. Luther: The Fallen Sun
    The film defaults to the most pedestrian narrative turns imaginable when it’s not just recycling bits from the series.
  69. Creed III
    The film comes down to a draw between its flashes of brilliance and its missed opportunities.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cocaine Bear
    Cocaine Bear starts running on fumes almost immediately and peters out before the second brick of cocaine is even devoured.
  71. Passages
    While there’s much acute pain in this compact but resonant drama, it can also be funny in a way that smacks of self-deprecation.
  72. Inside
    Whether or not Vasilis Katsoupis’s film achieves escape velocity from genre limitations though overt sociopolitical commentary is questionable.
  73. Manodrome
    While John Trengrove’s skill is apparent in the slow build of tension, it also stands out in the arguably more impressive way that he holds Ralphie’s view of the world separate from that of the film’s.
  74. Past Lives
    Diverging from romances in which lovers are expected to move heaven, earth, and themselves in order to make a moment of love last forever, Past Lives asks us to embrace the changes that come with time.
  75. BlackBerry
    By emphasizing the people in its tech tale, and the comedic possibilities in their mismatch, rather than the gee-whiz factor, Matt Johnson frees BlackBerry from the need to convince its audience how important the invention at its center was.
  76. The Quiet Girl
    The Quiet Girl earns its most emotionally powerful scenes because of the way that it so gracefully convinces us that it wasn’t even building toward them in the first place.
  77. She Came to Me
    The fatal flaw of the film is that it genuinely believes in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.
  78. Of an Age
    The ambivalence with which the film treats its main character’s revelation proves rich with complication and offers a new intervention into a genre we thought we’d fully internalized.
  79. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    Quantumania feels less the start of a new phase of Marvel films than a tired retread of adventures we’ve already been on.
  80. Emily
    The film takes advantage of the leeway for speculation afforded by its subject’s reclusive nature.
  81. Marlowe
    Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is an homage so riddled with noir clichés that one may initially take it for a genre parody, except that the jokes never arrive.
  82. Sharper
    A fumbled ending lets the air out of what is otherwise a fun and quietly stylish caper.
  83. 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.
  84. Godland
    The film’s unifying theme is the egocentrism and inevitable violence of masculinity.
  85. The Blue Caftan
    The film is best experienced by simply wallowing in the lushness of its fabrics, sartorial and symbolic alike, refusing the temptation to unspool its poetic parallels.
  86. The Outwaters
    With The Outwaters, the found-footage horror film has unexpectedly found its trippy, unmooring, ultraviolent answer to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the free-associative barbarity of A Page of Madness.
  87. Huesera: The Bone Woman
    The film is a sensitive character study disguised as an unnerving exercise in body horror.
  88. Consecration
    Consecration ends up not just gimmicky but derivative of Christopher Smith’s own prior work.
  89. Knock at the Cabin
    The film takes its time delving into its characters' headspaces, to the point that it becomes less of a thriller than an unorthodox character study, especially as its expertly deployed use of flashback slowly forms the emotional core of the story.
  90. Baby Ruby
    The film’s depiction of the fear and uncertainty of motherhood gives in to monotony.
  91. Magazine Dreams
    Magazine Dreams melds the alluring and the horrific in an unsettling mixture suited to its account of the peril of pursuing physical perfection.
  92. Rye Lane
    Rye Lane’s antic energy and caricatured portrait of England’s capital city fail to make its central romance truly resonate.
  93. The Civil Dead
    Clay Tatum’s film is wholly and refreshingly uninterested in tugging at the heartstrings.
  94. Full Time
    Full Time doesn’t have much to say about organized labor, or labor in general, other than that work can be really stressful.
  95. Talk to Me
    The film has a free-floating, nearly intangible sense of unease that greatly serves it.
  96. 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.
  97. Shortcomings
    Shortcomings is a mostly comedic but fitfully insightful examination of a character type familiar to indie cinema: the solipsistic guy who fills the gap left by emotional underdevelopment with intense opinions delivered at bad times.
  98. 20 Days in Mariupol
    At its core, 20 Days in Mariupol is a testament to the citizens of Mariupol.
  99. Sometimes I Think About Dying
    The film is an imperfect but affecting portrait of social isolation that captures both the pain and the warmth that comes with finally letting others in.
  100. Iron Butterflies
    Roman Liubyi’s documentary is nothing if not self-consciously obsessed with its own making.
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