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 6.4 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. Stuffed
    Erin Derham’s unadventurous aesthetic inoculates her from taxidermy’s subversive spirit.
  2. The Art of Flight 3D
    An aesthetic showcase whose repetitive nature winds up diminishing the excitement of its breathtaking feats of mountainous flight.
  3. Reuniting the Rubins
    Yoav Factor can't decide whether he wants to play his broad scenario as an exaggerated farce or as a heartwarming testament to blood ties.
  4. The Lady in the Van
    The film's annoying glibness is neatly summarized by the line: "In life, going downhill is an uphill job."
  5. This Is Our Land
    Throughout the film, Lucas Belvaux sidelines the emotional textures that might complicate all his sermonizing.
  6. The Darkest Minds
    The Darkest Minds never communicates the overwhelming horror of a society whose children are either dead or in the process of being exterminated, or the hopelessness of kids discovering that every potential benefactor may have ulterior motives.
  7. She Came to Me
    The fatal flaw of the film is that it genuinely believes in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.
  8. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    The film’s cumulative effect is utter exhaustion, the cinematic equivalent of chasing a toddler through a toy store.
  9. Guns Akimbo
    Writer-director Jason Lei Howden’s humor might have been tolerable if his film was at least reasonably imaginative.
  10. Kidnapping Mr. Heineken
    For all the thematic emphasis the script ultimately places on the allegedly thick bonds among these men, it's surprising how often they communicate solely through exposition.
  11. Dance First
    Rather than grappling with the mind and soul of the man who birthed bizarre, fatalistically funny and existentially unsettling works like Waiting for Godot, James Marsh’s film seems content to merely adapt the “Personal Life” section of Samuel Beckett’s Wikipedia page.
  12. Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story
    The film curiously steers toward surmising Hedy Lamarr's psychological state as it pertained to love and pleasure.
  13. 24 Hours to Live
    Brian Smrz never contrasts the film’s violence with stillness, allowing the audience to enjoy a sense of foreboding escalation.
  14. Megan Leavey
    Everyone here, from fellow marines to Iraqis, is merely a supporting player in Megan Leavey's emotional journey.
  15. The Choral
    This is a historical drama with a handsome enough period setting and a couple of pleasant musical moments but whose roteness keeps it from resonating.
  16. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    The film is inspirational only in the sense that it may inspire an uptick in Amazon searches for running gear.
  17. Mayor Pete
    The film’s approach is completely subsumed by the importance of the Mayor Pete persona as the means and ends of the candidacy.
  18. Felony
    It reveals itself to be a profoundly cynical movie posing as a work of idealism, and it's all the more insidious because it's otherwise so bland and forgettable.
  19. Fist Fight
    Over-stuffed and under-conceived, Fist Fight is a clumsy mélange of clashing comedic perspectives.
  20. The Patience Stone
    While Atiq Rahimi's film may peel away the many layers of its female lead like an onion, the end result is still just an onion.
  21. The Pale Blue Eye
    The film often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart.
  22. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    The key to good, or at least effective, agitprop (and Oliver Stone and Michael Moore know this) is that, yes, it must simplify matters, but it necessitates canny presentation so that it may truly get into viewers' blood streams and rile them.
  23. Beasts of No Nation
    Cary Joji Fukunaga’s artistry registers less as psychological imprint than as a measure of his professional bona fides.
  24. Norman
    Alternately maudlin and snarky, Norman just doesn't risk enough, and can be consigned to the status of what the school drama geek would call "some contemporary, obscure, teen-angst thing."
  25. Concussion
    The tacky and loose means by which the platitudinous screenplay dances around what ails the story's football players is just one cog in a whirligig of pat representations.
  26. Anonymous
    Anonymous leaves one bereft of any meaningful knowledge of these personages or the theatrical energy of their age, and earns the obscurity it figures to acquire even if the war between Team Edward and Team William blazes on.
  27. Saturday Church
    Writer-director Damon Cardasis follows a rather didactic approach to his 14-year-old's protagonist's plight in Saturday Church.
  28. Stowaway
    By paring their story down so much, the filmmakers only end up highlighting just how little it contains.
  29. Five Time Champion
    A coming-of-age tale that, with every landscape cutaway and twinkling note from its xylophone-heavy score, begs to be taken as a dreamy slice of countryside profundity.
  30. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
    The reality of Nazi Germany and its looming atrocities feels as if it exists only beyond the edges of the film’s frame.
  31. I Saw the Light
    A flaccidly directed film that basks for two hours in a carefully art-designed simulation of the past.
  32. Mary
    With the filmmakers unwilling to explore a kinky, psychosexual bond between a man and his demonic lady ghost-boat, Mary comes to feel as if lacks a through line, collapsing into a series of disconnected horror-movie beats.
  33. Hold the Dark
    Hold the Dark's ludicrous seriousness comes to feel like a mask for what's essentially a genre story of murder and mayhem.
  34. Shame
    Shame articulates a shallow, even mundane, understanding of an uninteresting man's sex addiction-in a vibrant city rendered dull and anonymous.
  35. Lucky
    The film is a collection of consciously quirky indie tropes in place of any meaningful narrative, and you can practically see the notebook the filmmakers may have written in during a brainstorming session in a college screenwriting seminar.
  36. Private Life
    Instead of offering a probing, nuanced view of the burgeoning technologies and sciences involved in this relatively new outgrowth of the OBGYN industry, though, Tamara Jenkins uses her setting as fodder for lame and discomfiting physical comedy.
  37. My Neighbor Adolf
    The film at once wrings this premise for whimsical absurdism and slow-burn suspense, on each side vulgarizing the memory of the Holocaust.
  38. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
    The unvaried register of the filmmaking leads the narrative to feel aimless and dramatically inert.
  39. 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.
  40. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
    The film essentially indulges in the same act of willful distractedness as Ted Bundy’s admirers.
  41. The Strangers: Chapter 1
    This film’s approach to slasher film mayhem is liable to induce some serious déjà vu.
  42. Guidance
    The unapologetic lack of political correctness never goes beyond a one-dimensional and tentative provocation.
  43. The Tender Bar
    The film insists so forcefully that J.R. has lived a topsy-turvy, singular life that it abandons a potentially more rewarding approach of foregrounding how relatable many of his moments of self-discovery really are.
  44. 30 Minutes or Less
    Watching 30 Minutes or Less, a proudly stupid action comedy that's awfully lethargic for all its slam-bang propulsion, it's tough to pinpoint who exactly Ruben Fleischer thinks he is.
  45. Love the Coopers
    Sloppy and haphazard where it should be calculatedly chaotic, it can't ever seem to settle on an appropriate tone.
  46. The Wedding Ringer
    This big, brash, occasionally clever, but mostly dumb comedy is so gallingly derivative that watching it feels like playing a game of basic-cable bingo.
  47. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    The film simply limps to predetermined truths that hypocritically advocate the maintenance of placid family values.
  48. Blood Glacier
    The film straddles a very awkward line between creature feature, conspiracy thriller, and domestic drama, all without novelty or suspense.
  49. Final Score
    To observe that the Dave Bautista-starring action flick Final Score is yet another Die Hard knockoff may be tiresome, but it's not as if the film gives one much of a choice, as it offers up a ceaseless barrage of scenes lifted from the John McTiernan classic.
  50. The Dancer
    Like Loïe Fuller's serpentine dance, the film is structured on repetition: spinning and spinning but never actually taking us nowhere.
  51. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    Nothing more than an absurdist soap-opera bauble.
  52. Voyeur
    It's hard to come away from the film feeling anything but disdain and a twinge of embarrassment toward Gay Talese.
  53. The Unholy
    Writer-director Evan Spiliotopoulos barely capitalizes on the luridly sacrilegious implications of the film’s premise.
  54. Maleficent
    We may have all wanted to know the story behind those famed horns, but the mystery was far preferable to having Maleficent de-fanged and de-clawed in the process.
  55. Southpaw
    Each battle scar in the film is a testament to a vaguely but nonetheless forcefully defined notion of masculinity.
  56. 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.
  57. The Equalizer
    All this should build up to a moderately engaging battle of wits, but Richard Wenk's script has little interest in wit and no capacity for psychology.
  58. Burke and Hare
    Broadness this indolent hardly even stirs one to antipathy.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Approaching the Unknown
    The film fails to lay down the character foundation that might have elevated the third-act histrionics.
  60. The Young Kieslowski
    Another effort to explain how difficult it is to be a young, white, smart, non-disfigured, upper-middle-class male.
  61. Black '47
    As the historical specificity embedded in the film’s more expansive opening act is abandoned, the more predictable, archetypal trappings of a revenge narrative begin to take hold.
  62. Carnage Park
    The film covers "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" by way of Rob Zombie, Quentin Tarantino, and Ti West.
  63. Tanner Hall
    Francesca Gregorini and Tatiana von Furstenberg's film is episodic, but the episodes don't achieve any kind of cumulative effect.
  64. Addicted to Fresno
    The film's larger points essentially fall by the wayside in the name of black comedy that's largely without genuine edge.
  65. This Is Where I Leave You
    And the jury's still very much out over whether Shawn Levy is an inept comedy director masquerading as an opportunistically dramatic one, or vice versa.
  66. The Baytown Outlaws
    This schlocky piece of ultra violence plays like a pop-culture pastiche without a stable thematic foundation.
  67. American Meat
    Despite the intensity of its scope and research, American Meat is a decidedly soft-hitting display of an overweening good faith that, frankly, just can't jibe with the times.
  68. He Named Me Malala
    The effect of the film's animated sequences is to distance the viewer from real-life horrors--another misguided attempt at turning recent history into instant myth.
  69. Fort Bliss
    The complicated psychological realities of army personnel require a tougher directorial treatment than the maudlin melodrama presented here.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The film, hyper-aware of the shadow cast by the franchise’s history, struggles to both honor and redeem the past before everything comes to a close.
  71. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    It careens from carnage to group therapy so wildly that the action never gets to build and the conversations just repeat themselves.
  72. Inside
    At best competently mounted and at worst a case study in watering down chaos for an American market.
  73. It Lives Inside
    The film views its main character’s culture, as well as her struggles to suppress her identity in order to fit into her suburban world, with a nonchalance that often scans as negligence.
  74. Ender's Game
    Gavin Hood relays a vague sense of what it's like to live in duty, and yet at a distance from one's home, but this vision of the future never rouses, never asks to be remembered.
  75. Ice Age: Collision Course
    If Ice Age: Collision Course gleefully fails at being a history lesson, at least it offers an energetic recess from reality.
  76. Tab Hunter Confidential
    The film lacks perspective beyond a rather limited preoccupation with the details of Hunter's personal life.
  77. V/H/S: Viral
    One need go no further than the film's first segment to grasp how little interest the latest entry in the anthology series has in generating chills from the lo-fi.
  78. ATM
    If both good and evil characters don't behave in ways that make sense vis-à-vis their circumstances, any sense of terror quickly dissipates.
  79. Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    Great auntie to waking nightmare movies about distaff insanity as diverse as Images, 3 Women, A Woman Under the Influence, and Mulholland Drive, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death spends 90 minutes tapping lightly but incessantly on its heroine’s fragile sanity, as though it were some sort of Fabergé S&M model egg.
  80. Johnny English Reborn
    As ticklish as one might find the idea of an equivalent Mr. Bean character occupying the driver's seat of a James Bond parody, it's likely that even a competent manifestation of such a scenario would pale in comparison to what Mike Myers and Jay Roach pulled off with apparent ease in their Austin Powers films.
  81. Exists
    In the wake of Bobcat Goldthwait's Wolf Creek, Exists's metaphorical ambitions are as under-realized as its story-circumscribing use of found footage.
  82. Legend
    Given how Legend's script is so bereft of insight into its characters' psyches, perhaps there's only so much even an actor of Tom Hardy's stature can do.
  83. Krampus
    At the center of the film is a conservative lesson that asks us to unquestioningly abide by society's capitalistic impulses.
  84. Going in Style
    No one in Going in Style seems to really know what the hell they’re doing or why. And even though that goes double for the filmmakers, at least no one succumbs to taking any of it seriously.
  85. Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope
    Morgan Spurlock has little to say about Comic-Con other than that its attendees value it on a par with Christmas.
  86. Blackbird
    The film is, like its main character, too naïve to understand or, at least, to deploy the reparative powers of camp.
  87. Big Game
    The rambling conversations and endless wandering through nature could let the film pass for a filler episode of Lost.
  88. The Childhood of a Leader
    Brady Corbet reaches for a dreary self-importance akin to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.
  89. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    Like Better Luck Tomorrow, it tries to cut cool-movie poses under the pretense of providing an alternative racial viewpoint to typical genre tropes.
    • 16 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Silent Hill: Revelation 3D
    Silent Hill: Revelation fundamentally misunderstands the appeal its source material.
  91. Adult Life Skills
    The film uses the grieving process to lend the proceedings a sense of unearned emotional gravitas.
  92. You're Cordially Invited
    By the time You’re Cordially Invited finds the correct mode to operate in, it’s about five minutes before the end credits roll.
  93. Fast Five
    From unique to generic, it's a gear-shift that may prolong the franchise's life (a mid-credits coda confirms that a sixth installment is on its way), but, in the process, also renders it redundant.
  94. X-Men: First Class
    Despite his apparent comfort with F/X-heavy projects, the obligations of duty to the brand are too much for Matthew Vaughn's strange, singular voice, which rarely has the chance to shape the film unmolested by a curiously bland script.
  95. Mid90s
    Jonah Hill constantly falls back on providing vague justification for his characters' behaviors, along with spoonfuls of sentiment to let the more dour moments go down easier.
  96. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    Mark Felt is a kind of hagiography, and it leans toward whitewashing its subject's legacy, which extends even to the man's illegal break-ins and wire-tapping of the leftist activist group the Weather Underground.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wander Darkly
    What could have been a profound study of grief and psychological trauma is diluted with needless structural and stylistic obfuscation.
  98. Michael
    The film turns the realities of a tragic, deeply complicated life into a sanitized popcorn film.
  99. Damsel
    It's well established by now that the mythic Old West was always a trope written and controlled by men, and that there's really no bottom to which men won't stoop when women are a scarce quantity. In its mad rush toward performative allyship, the film exhausts every possible means of conveying those bombshells.
  100. Red Lights
    That all the good things--and there are several--Red Lights has going for it are ultimately in service of an ending that might even make M. Night Shyamalan cringe represents one of the year's biggest missed opportunities.
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