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. Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody
    There are only clichés in this rise-and-fall material, with the sole distinctive wrinkle being the weight given to the rise versus the fall.
  2. 6 Month Rule
    The film is far too indulgent with its lead character to do more than hint at the ways that one form of male egotism can morph into another.
  3. Stuck in Love
    The movie aims for an admirable balance, but fatally upsets that equilibrium in its hurried resolutions.
  4. Puppet Master: The Littlest Reich
    It all feels cheap and looks cheap, a far cry from what S. Craig Zahler can do when overseeing both a film's words as well as its images.
  5. Life of Crime
    Down to its too-crisp rubber Nixon masks, Daniel Schechter's film revels in obnoxiously self-aware period detail.
  6. Il Futuro
    A counterproductively "literary" film with no satisfying payoffs, Rutger Hauer's blind recluse notwithstanding.
  7. The Ticket
    The Ticket abandons the potentially complex web of drama it initially sets up and moves toward a limp, shallow critique of superficiality itself.
  8. The Misfits
    The film is almost refreshing in its flightiness, even as it remains defiantly ignorant of the world in which it exists.
  9. Citizen Gangster
    Its commentary on our fascination with law-breakers is virtually nonexistent, except to the extent that the film itself revels in the doomed romanticism of its own protagonist.
  10. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare
    To Ritchie’s credit, he keeps his film moving along at a consistently brisk clip, but that breeziness is also the cause of its weightlessness, rendering its vision of historical events as outright cartoonish, down to the often clownish portrayals of Nazis and the flawless execution of nearly every element of March-Phillips’s plans.
  11. 14 Blades
    An immensely gifted physical performer, Donnie Yen isn't strong enough an actor to suggest an authentic inner life to his character beyond a vague sense of stone-faced dissatisfaction.
  12. Go for Sisters
    LisaGay Hamilton and Yolonda Ross play persuasively embody modern urban feminine strength, but they're eventually stranded in a recycled road movie.
  13. Six Minutes to Midnight
    Andy Goddard’s film clumsily superimposes a frenzied, completely fictional spy adventure onto a fascinating fragment of pre-war history.
  14. Divinity
    The story’s attempt at an excoriation of spectacle and empty pleasure comes off as little more than a reluctant swipe.
  15. Angel Heart
    It would all be laughable if the evil deeds and premature deaths and withered witch doctor hands led us to more than the protagonist’s unnecessarily messy self-discovery. As it is, it’s mostly just gratingly pointless.
  16. Much Ado About Nothing
    The film is nothing without the physicality of the performers, as Joss Whedon's script handles the transition of Shakespeare's language to modern day indifferently.
  17. Him
    The film leaves you wishing that the aspirational way the sport is presented in real life had been read for filth.
  18. Gladiator II
    Like so many latter-day Ridley Scott films, Gladiator II at once feels half-baked and overstuffed, and the lack of internal consistency robs its action of sustained tension and its comedy of bite.
  19. Hitler's Children
    The film drains its subjects of the shame forced on them by Nazi ancestors and yet has difficulty arriving at an effective, constructive thesis.
  20. I Love Boosters
    Arrhythmic, unfocused, and forgetting to breathe, this overstuffed film feels like a circus act, a well-dressed elephant on a unicycle juggling a dozen balls. It’s an impressive feat of dexterity, if not grace.
  21. The Gorge
    For a solid hour or so, the film is patient and tense, with just the right touches of levity and romance. Until, suddenly, it isn’t.
  22. Child's Play
    Child’s Play is only a shade more terrifying than Teddy Ruxpin.
  23. Take Me
    Schilling and Healy never quite overcome the fact that Take Me is a suspense comedy that simply isn't very suspenseful or very funny and, just as importantly, never finds a thematic through line.
  24. Hockney
    After a nearly virtuoso opening, it reduces passages of the painter's life into multiple montages of pop pabulum.
  25. The Toxic Avenger
    Pulled awkwardly in so many directions, this Toxic Avenger all but comes apart at the seams.
  26. Lamb
    Though eerie and quietly deadpan, the film circles its grab bag of themes for so long that it also becomes tedious.
    • 60 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Christopher Robin
    Unlike the red balloon that Winnie the Pooh follows through much of the running time, Marc Forster's film lacks lightness.
  28. Cleopatra
    Cleopatra is, disappointingly, neither a visionary masterpiece nor a fascinating catastrophe, but something altogether more banal: an unusually intimate epic that falls very flat.
  29. Apostle
    The film's victims are simply pawns in a super-gory bacchanal, which is aesthetically striking but emotionally dull.
  30. Jane by Charlotte
    The film neglects to find a conceptual framework for its prolonged consideration of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s eventual revelation: “I have always loved you, but it’s much clearer to me now.”
  31. Manas
    With one foot planted in documentary exposé and the other in coming-of-age drama, the film falls short of satisfying the demands of either genre.
  32. The Rule of Jenny Pen
    The film single-mindedly sees its elderly characters as objects of disgust or receptacles for harm.
  33. Blitz
    Blitz is an earnest, broad-strokes portrait of a bustling city that occasionally succeeds in communicating the unprecedented sensory shock of modern warfare, but its uncritical craftsmanship and quarantining of past atrocities from present-day concerns also render the proceedings mostly lifeless.
  34. The Book of Life
    Jorge R. Gutierrez subsumes the film's darker themes in a relentlessly busy farrago of predictable kids'-movie tropes and annoying attempts at hipness.
  35. Django
    The film's most crucial shortcoming lies in its failure to illuminate both the inner life of its subject and his artistic genius.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Picture of Dorian Gray
    Picture of Dorian Gray isn’t awful, though it’s certainly an instance in which an outright debacle would have made a much more interesting film.
  37. Encounter
    In spite of the film’s troublingly naïve take on mental trauma, Riz Ahmed vividly and empathetically captures a man’s wounded soul.
  38. Crazy, Stupid, Love
    This schizophrenic conception of Gosling's character is indicative of the film's largely dichotomous view of romantic relationships.
  39. The Pink Cloud
    After a while, writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s boldly mundane take on forced isolation gives way to a regular sort of mundanity.
    • 78 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    In Between
    In Between is most affecting when its characters are at their least guarded, but as Nour, Salma, and Laila are hurt by those closest to them, Hamoud's film pulls back toward more formulaic expressions of conflict.
  41. The Empire
    Notable as it is for evoking a kind of cosmic banality, writer-director Bruno Dumont’s anti-space opera The Empire runs into same the pitfall as many parodies of its kind.
  42. Dear Evan Hansen
    The film works harder to fix the problems with its source material than to establish itself as an independent piece of art.
  43. Always Shine
    The film undermines the unity of its characterizations, redirecting into garish phantasmagoria.
  44. Earth
    With Earth, Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s visual strategy is to wow us with tangibility and data, though he doesn’t give up aesthetic experimentation altogether in this survey of Anthropocene calamities.
  45. Adult World
    The title of Scott Coffey's new film is a pretty obvious double entendre, but it does efficiently convey the good intentions behind this scattershot production.
  46. Battle of the Sexes
    Battle of the Sexes sacrifices some of its innate appeal by making ham out of the supposed relics of a less enlightened era.
  47. Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold
    It's an exercise in joviality, unflinching in its love for Joan Didion, and unwilling to be much more.
  48. The Happy Poet
    Like its sad-sack main character, whose closed-off personality makes him hard to fully understand or sympathize with, The Happy Poet is too reservedly rough around the edges.
  49. Handling the Undead
    For how committed it is to convincing the audience of the profundity of a rudimentary point, the film’s measured pacing comes to feel like a kind of torture.
  50. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    What saves the film from being simply a schematic mother-daughter reconciliation drama is both the reluctance and prickliness that Catherine Keener brings to her character.
  51. Daylight
    Daylight reaches an apex of terror that it never quite tops.
  52. Dayveon
    Shot in 4:3 with sliver-thin depth of field and a lush palette of swampy greens, Amman Abbasi's film is largely predicated on the idea of imparting a hyperreal sensuality to a region not often depicted on the big screen.
  53. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
    If it’s possible for a parable to be too simple to even qualify as a parable, the convincingly dim Snow White represents the dopey standard.
  54. Italian Studies
    During an amnesiac’s atmospheric nighttime ramble through Manhattan, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured.
  55. The Old Man & the Gun
    David Lowery has a carefree, bordering on insubstantial touch, which gives rise to several rank absurdities.
  56. Superintelligence
    The big disappointment of the film is that Melissa McCarthy’s performance is all Jekyll and no Hyde.
  57. Elevate
    Long on hopefulness but short on sobering realities, Elevate proves a compelling if superficial look at the arduous path traveled by Senegalese teens hoping to make it to America for a higher education and an NBA career.
  58. The Boys from Brazil
    Jerry Goldmsith’s ominous score is reminiscent of his Oscar-winning work for The Omen but The Boys From Brazil is pure pomp and circumstance.
  59. Digging Up the Marrow
    In the end, Adam Green reminds us that he's all to eager to go for the easy thrill.
  60. Cut Bank
    If the film is meant only as a pulpy genre exercise, Matt Shakman's competence in various modes actually works to strip it of any sense of coherent vision.
  61. Mirror Mirror
    For all its pomp and fabulosity, Mirror Mirror is actually Tarsem Singh's most minimalistic effort, a dialed-down game board of elaborate pieces that's akin to the human chess set captained by Julia Robert's evil Queen Clementianna.
  62. The Duke
    The film misses an opportunity to delve particularly deeply into the keenly relevant issues of inequality and social disconnection that so animate its protagonist.
  63. Bel Ami
    A coherent characterization of Robert Pattinson's striving schemer is nowhere to be found in this pedestrian period piece.
  64. Bad Moms
    The end-credits sequence shows up the rest of the film as the broad and incoherent live-action cartoon that it is.
  65. Creed II
    Creed II is absent of both the topically political atmosphere of Rocky IV and the bravura action of Ryan Coogler's Creed.
  66. Pulp: A Film About Life, Death & Supermarkets
    Florian Habicht unwisely shifts his focus from Sheffield and its unique denizens to the band's personal history, effectively turning the film into an episode of Behind the Music.
  67. The Dry
    The particulars of the central mystery are mundane, to the point where the film itself doesn’t spend too much time digging into them.
  68. Private Desert
    Aly Muritiba’s film is always telling the viewer that death-ness and trans-ness bear the intimacy of Siamese sisters.
  69. Manifesto
    The film’s visceral pleasures often work at cross purposes with the cerebral message of the manifestos.
  70. Pokémon Detective Pikachu
    At the very least, Ryan Reynolds’s casting perfectly splits the difference between the adorable and the absurd.
  71. The Mad Women's Ball
    The film capsizes in the absence of a compelling center for Mélanie Laurent to hang her directorial panache.
  72. Gerald's Game
    Mike Flanagan is an un-ironic humanist, which is rare in the horror genre. And this admirable quality trips the filmmaker up in the second half of Gerald's Game, which pivots on Jessie learning to stand up to diseased masculinity.
  73. Buster's Mal Heart
    Writer-director Sarah Adina Smith's film confuses narrative gimmickry for the sensitive evocation of an inner life.
  74. The Nowhere Inn
    The film is elevated by funny, cleverly staged sequences, but it too often hammers the notion that fame destroys authenticity.
  75. Belle
    The film is concerned largely with intellectual horrors and portrays the fight against slavery rather neatly as a growing feeling of internal guilt that slowly turns society toward the light.
  76. Nerve
    By merely transposing its generic high school clique drama onto an augmented reality platform, Nerve sacrifices most of its novelty, but the filmmakers demonstrate a marginal interest in how this mediated environment warps the perspectives of its characters.
  77. Naples '44
    It’s far too scattershot, bouncing from one topic to the next with the carelessness of someone flipping through a book and reading from a random page.
  78. Puss in Boots
    For all the fuss, it dissolves almost immediately upon contact.
  79. The Crash
    The film may be too preposterous to take seriously, but at least writer-director Aram Rappaport trains his sights on the right enemies.
  80. The Monuments Men
    George Clooney's film boils a big, messy maelstrom of theft and uncertainty down to a digestible, faintly appetizing mush.
  81. Georgetown
    It’s an occasionally amusing and insightful beltway satire that’s ultimately undone by its conventional mise-en-scène and predictable plot.
  82. The Boogeyman
    Ultimately, The Boogeyman is like so many other modern horror films that prioritize mood above all else.
  83. Boy
    Less concerned with rendering the specifics of its setting (a small Maori town on the New Zealand coast) than in calling on bouts of whimsy and superficial cultural signifiers to approximate the headspace of its central characters.
    • 73 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975
    Simply put, the documentary is full of cool talking heads pontificating rather than taking physical action.
  85. The Moment
    Farce and sincerity make more odd bedfellows across Aidan Zamiri’s meta mockumentary about Brat Summer.
  86. Honkytonk Man
    Though the film is obviously coated with a veneer of nostalgic sentimentality, Eastwood never lets Honkytonk Man veer into maudlin territory.
  87. Young Bodies Heal Quickly
    Its lack of dramatic specificity places it in a precarious middle ground between exacting character study and ethereal parable.
    • 40 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Domino
    The film goes through its motions too quickly for its imagery to convey the irrepressible force of provocation.
  89. Brigadoon
    At least the dancing is good, and Vincente Minnelli’s restless camera gooses a plodding story into liveliness.
  90. Sylvie's Love
    The film never finds the spark that would imbue the love affair at its center with a sense of passion or urgency.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    High Tech, Low Life
    As far as its subject matter goes, the documentary only scratches the surfaces, only reaffirming the simple idea that Internet censorship in China is prevalent and unfair.
  92. Bless Me, Ultima
    The film's interest in social themes remains background fodder within a far more generic good-versus-evil narrative.
  93. Futuro Beach
    It masks depleted drama under a progression of long takes, various music cues, and a three-chapter structure that grows successively tedious.
  94. Jungle Cruise
    Jaume Collet-Serra’s deft touches elevate what otherwise feels like another formulaic contemporary Disney blockbuster.
  95. Materna
    Rarely do the filmmakers show people mutually affecting one another in cycles of pain and control, rather than blaming phantom figures.
  96. The Seventh Seal
    The Seventh Seal, assisted by cinematographer Gunnar Fischer’s richly overexposed images, operates as though it contains the undiluted essence of life’s fueling dialectic formula. Occasionally it does, most notably in the terrifying arrival of the self-flagellants to a weak-willed village. But the road-trippers in Bergman’s follow-up, Wild Strawberries, achieve a far greater grace and clarity with only a fraction of the heavy lifting.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crooked Arrows
    Although it adheres to the tried-and-true sports-movie formula of an underdog team striving to overcome their limitations to become winners, Crooked Arrows lacks captivating emotional momentum.
  98. The Rum Diary
    The Rum Diary, Bruce Robinson's amorphous hodgepodge of a film, wants to be many things: period recreation, social commentary, morality play, romance, an insider look at the newspaper game.
  99. $ellebrity
    Comes off as little more than a feature-length trashing of colleagues who director and celebrity photographer Kevin Mazur feels are giving his profession a bad name.
  100. Black Out
    The film's various references to other stylistic touchstones, while thematically apt, rarely carry any sort of critical inquiry.
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