Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,775 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: 4,349 out of 7775
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7775
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7775
7775 movie reviews
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  1. The Conjuring 2
    The Conjuring 2 is a model of heightened tension and uneasy release, but the tropes propelling these night terrors grow stale pretty quickly.
  2. The Signal
    The titular signal refers to the Nomad hacker's taunts, though it may as well point to the film's nature as a self-styled calling card.
  3. The Retrieval
    Less old-fashioned than demure and passé, evoking the visual style and rhythms of a 1990s made-for-TV movie rather than a daring, revisionist independent feature.
  4. Just a Sigh
    When Jérôme Bonnell allows his two magnificent leads to work at the sparse dialogue, he invokes a powerful, elemental sense of frank, sexual discussion and high-end flirtation, imbuing the relationships with a maturity that's loathsomely rare in films today.
  5. Into the Storm
    There are many instances of questionable logic in Into the Storm, but the most persistent is the film's unexplained assumption that tornado-hunting is a growth industry.
  6. Lucky Them
    It labors under the illusion that an abundance of Sub Pop memorabilia is adequate substitute for the honest evocation of a creative subculture and the personalities of which it's composed.
  7. A Promise
    Patrice Leconte struggles to find a coherent rhythm, a problem exacerbated by a hurried running time that compresses some of the novella's more interesting socio-political nuances.
  8. The Hundred-Foot Journey
    The film is rife with tired food metaphors and plot twists so predictable you see them coming like travelers on the poplar-lined street that leads to the dueling restaurants.
  9. Gabrielle
    Writer-director Louise Archambault's neatly affirmative denouement is at odds with the more uncertain reality occurring at the edges of the film's drama.
  10. Who is Dayani Cristal?
    As informative, revealing, and occasionally poignant as some of the unearthed revelations are, the doc is ultimately hampered by a level of self-congratulation that nearly undoes its effectiveness as an activist polemic.
  11. Bicycling With Molière
    Even though the subtext about the past and modernity constantly being at odds throughout the setting's changing times is intriguing, the director presents this in a clunky, almost didactic fashion.
  12. Sisters
    A regurgitation of Apatowian formula, wherein ostensibly edgy humor hides a core of conservative moralizing.
  13. Mr. Jones
    That it half succeeds, in spite of its cloying self-seriousness, means that it's at best a convincing copycat of a definitive expression of ego and influence in art.
  14. London Has Fallen
    Like its predecessor, the film is content to dumbly relish in the inanity of Mike's rampage.
  15. Lullaby
    Garrett Hedlund's performance throbs with an anguish that's far more honest than the sentimental euthanasia subplot at the center of the film.
  16. Cyber-Seniors
    The film is too standard-issue in its making to probe beyond the rough outlines of a success story.
  17. Wolf
    The film ultimately leaves you feeling as if you're stuck watching your cousin's boring slideshow of his trip to Palookaville.
  18. The Life and Crimes of Doris Payne
    Even at 74 minutes, the documentary comes to feel arduous in its recycling of the same points and imagery, the filmmaking as plodding as its subject is polished.
  19. Macbeth
    Throughout, director Justin Kurzel's stagey pretensions clash with each of his aesthetic choices.
  20. Saint Laurent
    No matter how much Bertrand Bonello varies his split screens, triptychs, and geometric screen divisions, he forgets that one of the most fashionable virtues is knowing when to leave.
  21. Korengal
    The result is an alternately gripping and dully meandering patchwork of these soldiers' stay in the Korengal that pointedly shuns big-picture philosophizing.
  22. White God
    It affects a general air of artistically inclined realism, but it's mostly concerned with building tension via a steady accumulation of flatly conceived misery.
  23. Made in America
    What could have been a spirited dissection of Jay-Z's optimistic enterprise is instead merely an advertisement for it.
  24. Very Good Girls
    Most disheartening is how the female leads aren't given ample space to develop as dynamic characters beyond the most urgent confines of the script's scenarios.
  25. Friday the 13th
    It's a formula with no pretensions.
  26. Harry and the Hendersons
    Unabashedly lefty sentiment colors the whole film.
  27. The Untouchables
    Steeped in De Palma's glorious violence and sinuous cinematography, but stripped of his tricky sensuality and his anarchic self-reflective wit, The Untouchables boils down to a lot of talk.
  28. Beneath
    The film is impersonal and populated with wisps of characters who spend most of the running time wandering around in the dark yelling at one another.
  29. Exhibition
    There's considerable talent on display in Exhibition, but it's the kind of thing people mean when they use the term "art film" as a pejorative.
  30. Video Games: The Movie
    Jeremy Snead's doc comes off more as a commercial for a grand, overarching product that isn't finished being developed.
  31. Siddharth
    A well-intentioned story of an impoverished father searching for his missing child is muddled by an ambitious sociological agenda in Richie Mehta's film.
  32. Marius
    Daniel Auteuil's less exercising diligent homage than indulging troglodytic cinephilia.
  33. Black Mass
    Like any crime saga without a more potent thematic hook, the film's relentlessly insular script dwells on themes of loyalty and fraternity.
  34. Behaving Badly
    Falls back on the trappings of the film's innumerable teenage gross-out forefathers with tiresome vulgarity and rote misunderstandings in place of genuine insight.
  35. The Green Prince
    The proceedings have such a rigidly determined structure, amplified by chapter titles, that the power and conviction in their recountings deteriorate into a placid series of back-and-forths.
  36. A Five Star Life
    The director diligently keeps her heroine's ego in check, and that's awfully principled of her, but her audience may feel as if they've inadvertently booked a trip with no destination.
  37. Horns
    For a story so unconventional, it's executed without director Alexandre Aja's typical commitment to anarchic awe.
  38. War Story
    Mark Jackson's direction strips much of the agency from any character's grasp by insisting that their dilemmas can only be revealed with stone-faced austerity.
  39. The Maid's Room
    Drina is less of an individual, and one whom we wish to see avenged, than a transparent martyr for the collective sins of the wealthy few.
  40. 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.
  41. The Martian
    The film goes in for the idea of texture and tics and human behavior, but there's no conviction, and no real push for eccentricity.
  42. Paper Towns
    To hose down the white elephant in the room right off the bat, yes, it falls into place as a coming-of-age spin on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype.
  43. ABCs of Death 2
    Irony is a popular pose struck throughout these shorts, which are less revealing of the existentialist despair that death often rouses than they are of their makers' prejudices.
  44. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows
    Its openly mercenary ethos initially scan as a bracing lack of pretense in a market crammed to the gills with insidious faux-sentimentality, but its overstuffed relentlessness proves almost equally tedious.
  45. The Age of Adaline
    Less a sincerely kooky elegy to lost time than a slightly off-kilter acting out of familiar rom-com bona fides about commitment-phobes missing out on life.
  46. Winter in the Blood
    Its offbeat aesthetic largely flaunts for appeal, suffocating character and thematic ambition underneath its flashiness.
  47. Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead
    By formally acknowledging the material's inherent silliness ad nauseam, the filmmakers have distanced themselves from the spirit of the parody, robbing it of its gruesome pleasures.
  48. Stephen King’s A Good Marriage
    It could have used far more of King's mordant humor, which might have imbued the metaphorical autumnal proceedings with a much-needed jolt of pop anarchy, or even pathos.
  49. Miss Meadows
    Perhaps Karen Leigh Hopkins's intent was to subtly suggest the surreal aspects of the story, but ultimately she underplays her hand.
  50. Open Windows
    Timidity and perhaps fear, of visual confinement, of lingering emotional engagement, closes Nacho Vigalondo's most promising windows.
  51. McFarland USA
    If there's a general air of emotional authenticity woven throughout all this garden-variety, faith-in-family hokum, it's in the racing scenes.
  52. Last Days in Vietnam
    For American viewers who don't know, the doc will be a worthy footnote to a long bout of deliberate cultural amnesia, but it's too telling that the Vietnamese remain in the background.
  53. Lilting
    Lilting doesn't have any momentum or any sense of ambiguity, once the setup has been established.
  54. Kundo: Age of the Rampant
    The film's attempt at political commentary amounts to a half-baked treatise on good governance in the face of tyranny and socioeconomic exploitation.
  55. At the Devil's Door
    An accumulation of dread in search of a properly fleshed-out screenplay to sustain it, the film plays like a show reel for writer-director Nicholas McCarthy's considerable craft.
  56. Triple 9
    It arrives prepackaged with suggested comparisons to Michael Mann's Heat that it never earns because of its dreary literal-mindedness.
  57. The Look of Silence
    If The Look of Silence still remains a gripping, vital, consequential documentary, it's in spite of its approach rather than because of it.
  58. The Gambler
    The filmmakers delve into a fantasyland of luxe coastal casinos and neon-lit bathhouses--as shrug-worthy a stab at picturing the contemporary black market as could be requested.
  59. Cake
    The film is a study of grief that drowns in a cold bath of grim self-pity.
  60. Jackie & Ryan
    The film comes undone in its clumsy attempts to transform its story into a parable of economic distress.
  61. The Keeping Room
    Director Daniel Barber uses a bleak and unresolved portion of American history to justify indulging typical genre-film nihilism.
  62. The Last Five Years
    The film mostly skirts any connection to musical theater as though it were faintly embarrassed.
  63. A Little Chaos
    Alan Rickman's film is consistently, and often dispiritingly, mired in the quaint tradition of the classy costume drama.
  64. While We're Young
    Noah Baumbach lobs jokes with hectic editing and a Sturgesian velocity, but much of this cross-generational comedy is frantic and wearisomely superficial.
  65. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    The film ends up cheapening its sense of empathy in its final mad rush to subject audiences to every incarnation of the jump scare imaginable.
  66. Wolves
    The cinematographic approach of the film suggests some unholy hybrid of the aesthetic and genre indulgences of Michael Bay and the hyper-literalist plot construction of Christopher Nolan.
  67. Reach Me
    Yell the word "independent" loud and long enough and people might forget that they're seeing the same old, patronizing Hollywood clichés, recycled, rebranded, and regurgitated for their gullible, eager consumption.
  68. The Water Diviner
    In straining for the profound, the film ultimately loses its way in a veritable no-man's land of ill-conceived stylistic choices and narrative switchbacks.
  69. The Night Before
    It aims to foster a spirit of giddy anarchy in order to tie a ribbon around its shambolic script and rickety pacing.
  70. E-Team
    There's edifying information in the documentary, but it's tainted by forced dramatic tactics.
  71. Point and Shoot
    In abandoning a more vigorous discussion of class and race-based senses of entitlement, Marshall Curry reveals his goals to be less critical or rigid than passively honorific.
  72. Ex Machina
    In the end, more than just the machine remains an enigma.
  73. Avengers: Infinity War
    Infinity War is all manic monotony. It's passably numbing in the moment. And despite the hard-luck finish—something an obligatory post-credits sequence goes a long way toward neutering—it's instantly forgettable.
  74. Captain Marvel
    The film doesn't pay nearly enough attention to Danvers’s crucial emotional metamorphosis from dual-identity self-doubter to fearless warrior battling to keep Earth safe.
  75. The Finest Hours
    A square journey through choppy waters, it boasts a Greatest Generation nostalgia so thoroughgoing it might as well be called Boys Becoming Men.
  76. The Tower
    As the psychology of the characters hardly connects with their distinctive milieu, the film merely suggests a conventional family drama littered with empty pot-shots at governmental authority.
  77. Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain
    The film places its characters in a reflexive historical continuum that dooms them to be mere demonstrative types from start to finish.
  78. 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.
  79. The Color of Time
    If The Tree of Life was a contemplation of the universal mysteries and verities of life, The Color of Time is an hour spent scrolling through a stranger's family album.
  80. Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles
    Director Chuck Workman's simply compiles Welles's greatest moments, offering little in the way of an authorial point of view.
  81. If You Don't, I Will
    The actors play off one another beautifully, but the film bottoms out just as it's getting warmed up.
  82. Little Boy
    It conveys life experience to such a sentimentalized degree that the world comes to resemble only the sham of a Norman Rockwell painting.
  83. Woman in Gold
    The film evades all but the most careful commonplaces about the relationship between the viewer and the work of art at its center.
  84. Kidnap
    Ultimately, Kidnap is an efficient vehicle for the delivery of some lean action that's frequently weakened by a scarcely whip-smart script.
  85. The Jungle Book
    Jon Favreau draws heavily on his film's animated predecessor for plot, characterizations, and more, but doesn't know how to fit these familiar elements into his own coherent vision.
  86. Tracers
    The lusterless camerawork keys itself almost empathetically to the drab reality of the film's spaces, settled and unsettled alike, but it can't enliven the hackneyed plot.
  87. The Mountain Between Us
    Hany Abu-Assad’s film is notable for the way it fixates on its characters’ rush toward survival, homing in on the intimacy that they achieve without ever suggesting that there’s any actual romance in their future.
  88. The Other Man: F.W. de Klerk and the End of Apartheid
    The material being offered has been edited, composed, and made sentimental with the rigor of a political ad campaign.
  89. The Purge: Election Year
    Its greater focus on disreputable genre thrills comes at the expense of making coherent points about class inequalities, political exploitation, or man's inhumanity.
  90. The Wrecking Crew
    Overall, the documentary comes off as a solipsistic, uncritical look at an incredible moment in the history of American music.
  91. Pete's Dragon
    It abandons its subtlety en route to becoming a moralistic screed about the preservation of the nuclear family.
  92. Manny
    An informative, if largely deferent, biographical documentary that tritely explains the ascendancy of Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao.
  93. Bloodsucking Bastards
    It evinces a qualified kind of courage in its anonymous convictions, parodying a world that barely ever existed by barely existing itself.
  94. Digging Up the Marrow
    In the end, Adam Green reminds us that he's all to eager to go for the easy thrill.
  95. Dope
    Dope is a mess of styles and mixed signals, a pulp fiction that mostly tend to its loyalties to other cine-odysseys through the streets of Los Angeles.
  96. The Overnight
    The film's Buñuelian potential for harpooning the bourgeoisie is quickly dashed in favor of mumblecore antics.
  97. Grandma
    Writer-director Paul Weitz's proudly boisterous star vehicle for Lily Tomlin has about as many ambitions as it does delusions.
  98. Knock Knock
    There's satiric potential here, but Eli Roth's sense of humor abandons him when his hero isn't about to get down with the get down.
  99. Slow West
    A pageantry of pseudo-art poses, a self-consciously cool reorientation of the western as silly symphony.
  100. Unexpected
    It suggests that Kris Swanberg has taken notes on what a film concerned with pregnancy should include without actually making it.
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