Slant Magazine's Scores

For 7,767 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 6.2 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:
7767 movie reviews
  1. The film’s reminder of the fragility of agrarian traditions in the face of a merciless profit motive is delivered with tact and subtlety.
  2. The film is stirring when it really dives into specificity.
  3. When the film’s actors are given space to etch their characters’ feelings, they turn in strikingly naturalistic performances.
  4. Sean Durkin’s sweated-over filmmaking tediously lifts a familiar tale of domestic dysfunction to the level of myth.
  5. Throughout, J Blakeson crafts sharp, curt dialogue that makes a fashion statement out of contempt.
  6. The film refrains from any dubious moral calculations by giving King’s personal deceptions the same weight as his public morality.
  7. The film is ultimately too tidy to embrace anything truly startling or unexpected, either stylistically or narratively.
  8. Every moment in The Devil All the Time is meant to be a galvanic, preachifying high point, and so the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot. One can scarcely imagine a duller lot of sacrificial lambs.
  9. As much as the film seeks to understand how such major cultural figures navigated a political minefield, it nonetheless never takes its eyes off of its characters as people.
  10. By the time the credits roll on the film, we realize we’ve been watching not so much a sketch of the lives of farm animals as a threnody for their deaths.
  11. Song Fang’s latest moves glacially along in a largely unchanging emotional register, always keeping us at a distance.
  12. The film is a celebration of oral traditions as a means of giving purpose to even the most hopeless of lives.
  13. The film draws us through its play toward darker, too-seldom-considered sides of human and doggy nature.
  14. The final product feels like it would have been most appropriate as a video presentation for the Democratic National Convention.
  15. Hong Sang-soo invests the ironic, despairing theme of the film with humor and empathy—an empathy that he suggests he cannot extend to the women of his life.
  16. Chaitanya Tamhane gives full dimension to the rich, complex, and sometimes contradictory nature of the relationship between disciple and guru.
  17. By juxtaposing beautiful vistas filled with promise, a rotted social safety net, and the scrappy itinerant workers navigating the space in between, Zhao generates a gradually swelling tension underneath her film’s somewhat placid surface.
  18. Even when the plot occasionally falters, Enola’s continuous invitations to complicity renew the film’s momentum.
  19. It reminds us in eminently cinematic ways that behind the numbers and procedures of a court case are actual lives existing in actual, human time.
  20. Its provocations can seem savage at a glance, but they emerge from an observational tranquility that is uniquely Frederick Wiseman’s own.
  21. American Utopia feels as much like a balm as it is a surprisingly direct call to political action and social betterment.
  22. John Hyams’s film refutes the frenetic clichés of so modern American thrillers.
  23. Jia Zhang-ke’s film is a quietly reflective, intermittently rambling rumination on an explosively momentous period in Chinese history.
  24. This is a film that employs imaginative twists to illuminate the racism that’s entrenched in American history and society.
  25. The film’s experiential approach emphasizes that the fragments of life it captures aren’t impersonal events on a timeline.
  26. Its few nutty ideas demonstrate how little distance Unpregnant manages to put between itself and a standard high-school comedy.
  27. It’s in its depiction of the communist party’s response to a peaceful demonstration that Andrei Konchalovsky’s latest is at its most effective.
  28. Maïmouna Doucouré has a remarkable grasp of the irrationality and volatility of middle-school social dynamics.
  29. Walt Disney’s Mulan remake perfunctorily recycles the worst aspects of the 1998 animated version and roundly fails to convincingly execute the few deviations that it does attempt.
  30. That Maite Alberdi’s camera itself is present in The Mole Agent as a quasi-ethical concern suits the way Sergio, as he shuffles through the home’s hallways, gradually comes to be uncomfortable with his own surveillance.

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