Slate's Scores

  • Movies
  • TV
For 2,129 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 44% higher than the average critic
  • 3% same as the average critic
  • 53% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 1 point lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 64
Highest review score: 100 One Battle After Another
Lowest review score: 0 15 Minutes
Score distribution:
2129 movie reviews
  1. Good One is a quiet movie, not because it has little to say but because it wants you to listen, to pay as much attention to what’s left unsaid as to its meticulously crafted dialogue, and to the way silence can be a power as well as a punishment.
  2. Lee Isaac Chung’s reboot is a worthy successor to the original, a rollicking popcorn thriller with an appealing screwball romance in the eye of its fast-moving storm.
  3. Fly Me to the Moon’s foundational silliness could have been compensated for, and maybe even turned into the premise for a lightweight but charming romance, if not for two things: the failure to grapple with the larger historical implications of the fake-moon-landing subplot, and the fatal miscasting of Johansson and Tatum as oil-and-water opposites.
  4. Part road movie, part coming-of-age story, and part noir police procedural, the quietly confident Fancy Dance marks the feature debut of Erica Tremblay, a documentary filmmaker who also wrote and directed episodes of the FX series Reservation Dogs.
  5. Subtitled “A Fable,” Megalopolis can be read as a parable of what happens when you let artists take over the world, and while that may not run more smoothly, it’s a heck of a lot more interesting.
  6. For all its gritty genre elements, Hit Man is at heart a cozy hangout movie, a minor but thoroughly enjoyable entry in the Linklater canon.
  7. If it lacks the narrative compression and nonstop forward motion of Fury Road, Furiosa never skimps on the other main features one comes to a Mad Max movie for: deranged production design and thrilling action.
  8. Despite its impressive attention to craft—including exquisite motion-capture work by the groundbreaking digital-design studio WETA—Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes never fully establishes its reason for being.
  9. Challengers may not be this director’s most psychologically insightful movie—the characters can at times feel like chess-piece contrivances rather than fully rounded individuals—but it’s almost certainly his most entertaining and fastest-paced.
  10. Civil War often leaves the audience feeling trapped in an all-too-realistic waking nightmare, but when it finally lets us go, mercifully short of the two-hour mark, it sends us out of the theater talking.
  11. Sure, Música stomps its way into some cheesy pitfalls, but it’s also an unusually refreshing rom-com.
  12. Girls State’s most engrossing characters don’t wind up being those who prevail, but those who persist, who dust themselves off and find a way to keep going forward.
  13. It captures what it’s like to live in this chaotic and deadening world so well it might be the movie of the year, and last year, and next year too. If a visitor from the future wanted to know what it was like to be alive right now, this is what I’d show them.
  14. Wherever these two love-crazed lesbians’ poorly-thought-out plans take them, we’re along for the dizzying ride.
  15. To his great credit, Villeneuve has followed through on the task he set for himself in Dune’s moody, enigmatic, and expansive first chapter: He now returns to the world he so painstakingly established, ready to orchestrate the grand-scale conflicts that are about to tear it apart.
  16. It’s a travesty, a disaster, a blight on the history of superheroes and cinema itself. I enjoyed the hell out of it.
  17. Come for the skyline-destroying radioactive dino, stay for the delicately etched portrait of recovery and self-forgiveness. Or vice versa. Just don’t miss the chance to remind yourself why the world fell for Godzilla in the first place.
  18. The Zone of Interest is a movie about what you don’t see, and what you are forced to imagine.
  19. Poor Things is a feminist recasting of the Frankenstein myth, a gorgeously designed setting for the jewel that is Emma Stone’s lead performance, and not just my favorite Lanthimos movie I’ve seen yet but maybe the only one of his I’ve really liked.
  20. Life and death are two sides of the same coin; in embracing what it means to be mortal—and, by extension, human and imperfect—Beyoncé found a way, in this Renaissance era of hers, to celebrate life and liberation. She does it in a way that only a Beyoncé who has stepped down to earth from her pedestal after more than 20 years finally can.
  21. The Boy and the Heron may not have moved me emotionally as much as some of Miyazaki’s earlier classics, but it left me intellectually and aesthetically dazzled, and profoundly grateful for this late-life glimpse into the autobiography of one of film’s great living artists.
  22. Cooper’s sophomore film far outshines the common run of contemporary biopics in its artful construction and attention to emotional nuance.
  23. I don’t know how long the boys can keep tapping the well of their surreal imaginations before they become exhausting. But I do know that The Treasure of Foggy Mountain made me laugh so hard I missed a number of jokes.
  24. As it is now, Napoleon plays more like a hastily compiled highlight reel of a life than the full-fledged historical epic its director seems to have intended.
  25. For all its cutting dialogue and its initially off-putting protagonist, The Holdovers is a cozy cardigan of a movie.
  26. Killers of the Flower Moon is a cathedral of a movie, cavernously huge in ambition and scale, yet oddly intimate in its effect on the viewer.
  27. The fact that an indie director like Gerwig chose, for her third film, to make a lavish blockbuster tied to a major studio’s IP has unsurprisingly caused some to dismiss her as a sellout. But watching her flex her filmmaking skills on this grand a scale, and succeed at creating sparklingly original summer entertainment, has me excited to see whatever Gerwig does next, big or small.
  28. Despite its three-hour run time and the epic scale of its widescreen IMAX image, Oppenheimer is the most intimate movie the emotionally chilly Nolan has yet made.
  29. It’s all captured vérité-style by the filmmakers, who, like everyone else in this utterly sweet production, display great affection for the totally foolish theater kids (of all ages) who inhabit this world.
  30. Even at 163 minutes, it somehow moves with the no-nonsense briskness of a good airport thriller.

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