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. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Behind the self-awareness and the irony is merely a hollow emotional core, a lack of anything to say because saying something would require ambition rather than complacent winks and nods.
  2. Promised Land
    Gus Van Sant's new film offends for how it views the struggles of the landowners at the heart of its story as subservient to their oppressor's triumph of the spirit.
  3. Military Wives
    The film seems almost content to have you forget about everything that inspired it in the first place.
  4. The Croods
    The film takes more than a few pages from the James Cameron playbook.
  5. Trolls
    Trolls is a flashy, pre-fab product, but the animators are given just enough space to create moments of genuine artistry.
  6. Perfect Sense
    Visually glassy and smooth, Perfect Sense values the dynamic mood of each scene without being overly stylized.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Torn Curtain
    Torn Curtain, which was a commercial success because of the drawing power of its stars, is an artistic flop.
  8. Scatter My Ashes at Bergdorf's
    Matthew Miele has made a department store of a documentary, stocked to the hilt with an obscene inventory of storylines, talking heads, and utterly tasteless choices.
  9. Young Goethe in Love
    What unfolds is a predictably anguished story of true love thwarted by material circumstances, or in the terms dictated by the film, rationality triumphing over romance.
  10. Clandestine Childhood
    Benjamín Ávila structures the film as a series of precious moments, remembrances of a difficult year when the politics of patria and family got in the way of his puppy love.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Gate
    If you can get in touch with your inner 12-year-old, The Gate is a pleasant diversion.
  12. Little Pink House
    Courtney Moorehead Balaker's film is mostly a sobering dramatization of a true and controversial story in recent Connecticut history.
  13. Forsaken
    The film adheres to the dictionary definition of a classical genre without ever attempting to subvert it.
  14. The Current War: Director's Cut
    The film falls back on the myth of modernity being born in the laps of practical, native-born American ingenuity.
  15. Bitch
    Initially offbeat, Bitch awkwardly pivots toward a more inspirational story of regret and reconciliation.
  16. Wildcat
    By shooting the fiction sequences with the same dreamy fish-eye unreality as the scenes showing O’Connor’s real life, the film blurs the line between the two until it’s almost nonexistent.
  17. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    The film’s cumulative effect is utter exhaustion, the cinematic equivalent of chasing a toddler through a toy store.
  18. The First Time
    Sex and love are both novel experiences for two high schoolers in this talky affair that suggests a hybrid of Before Sunset and Some Kind of Wonderful.
  19. The Prom
    Ryan Murphy’s vibrant film adaptation makes a closer-to-seamless whole of the story’s disparate parts.
  20. The Lion King
    There’s something very cheap at the core of this overtly, ostentatiously expensive film, reliant as it is on our memory of the original to accentuate every significant moment.
  21. Frankie
    Only Marisa Tomei’s face can compete with Isabelle Huppert’s ability to turn even the sappiest of scenarios into a nuanced tour de force.
  22. Tusk
    It suggests the worst possible gene splice of a barbed Terrance and Phillip South Park appearance, Fargo's blithe condescension, and the smuggest of Quentin Tarantino pastiches.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    If this sounds like the premise of one of those tiresome Discovery Channel docu-tainments, it's because it essentially is, only heavily abbreviated to fit the feature-film format.
  24. The Decent One
    The Decent One operates under a discursive premise so presumptuous and flimsy that its attempted function as an experiential documentary proffers little more than a book-on-tape-on-film.
  25. Hard Labor
    The allegorical possibilities of a disintegrating wall point to a film that could have been.
  26. Dreamland
    The sense of a film school student doing movie karaoke with his influences is evident throughout Dreamland.
  27. Godard Mon Amour
    Michel Hazanavicius co-opts Jean-Luc Godard's personal life for cheap prestige-picture sentiment.
  28. Liberal Arts
    Liberal Arts provides a peek into what makes Josh Radnor tick, and what he cares about outside his mainstream-targeted sitcom.
  29. The Good Liar
    An airport novel of a movie, Bill Condon’s The Good Liar is efficient and consumable, if a bit hollow.
  30. Hours
    The film's fealty to history is both unnecessary and a hindrance, pulling us out of a story that could have easily been set in an anonymous city hit by a nondescript hurricane.
  31. Everyday
    While the film charts its protagonist's gradual progression toward a renewed sense of agency and freedom, it rarely indulges in lengthy or even linear narrative arcs.
  32. 5 Flights Up
    Ira Sachs, for all the tenderness of feeling he brought to Love Is Strange, wouldn't have countenanced the stacked-deck sentimentality that lies at this film's heart.
  33. Anesthesia
    Tim Blake Nelson's film immerses itself into as many pain-induced (and painful) subplots as it possibly can.
  34. Song to Song
    The film is about floating along on currents of uncertain desire and excitement, overthinking your own indulgence in these whims, and then sometime later on down the road, through no clear constellation of reasons, recognizing that a real human connection was squandered in the haze of all that self-exploration.
  35. Mayhem!
    Whenever Mayhem! makes any attempt at character building, it feels as if we’re watching a trashy DTV movie, and as a result reveals itself as a run-of-the-mill revenge flick that practically crawls toward its preordained destination.
  36. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    The Eyes of Tammy Faye mostly plays out as a showcase for Jessica Chastain to bring as much emotional sturm und drang to the woman as she lurches between various states of turmoil.
  37. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    The film signals that Alejandro G. Iñárritu, perhaps, is unable to push the limits of his own artistic expression.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Institute
    A lazily constructed documentary that doesn't hide first-time director Spencer McCall's admitted lack of understanding for his subject.
  39. The D Train
    The film uses its male-on-male boundary-leaping to give the shopworn man-boy narrative a refresh.
  40. Old Goats
    Taylor Guterson's film offers thoughtful, if familiar, comments on friendship, self-doubt, and romantic angst.
  41. The Dolls
    Dolls is still ultimately minor-key Gordon, exhibiting nowhere near the level of ambition or invention of many of his hot-house splatter classics, but it has been rendered with an artisanal level of craftsmanship that distinguishes it as an almost-hidden horror gem, ready for rediscovery.
  42. Kindred
    It’s difficult to shake that the film finishes saying what it has to say long before it staggers to the end.
  43. Ichi the Killer
    Unhinged even for Takashi Miike, Ichi the Killer suggests a bloody and ejaculate-stained Rorschach inkblot, reveling in ultraviolence that can be interpreted to flatter any adventurous audience's sensibilities.
  44. The Adam Project
    Ultimately, the film tries so hard to do so much that it doesn’t end up doing any of it particularly well.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 100 Critic Score
    They Live
    It’s an effective ploy, forcing us to confront certain basic facts about the state of the world around us without sounding preachy, and it articulates a decidedly working-class anger in response to social iniquity without sounding self-righteous. And it does all of this while retaining the surface appeal of its B-movie origins, frequently (and entertainingly) indulging in the seductive spectacle of ghouls and guns in combat—though always with ulterior motives.
  46. Home
    Home's exposition is a mess of forced zaniness, which leaves the rest of the film with a Swiss-cheese foundation.
  47. Gun Hill Road
    Of the film's three principals, it's only teenage Michael--more than ably embodied by screen newcomer Harmony Santana--that writer-director Rashaad Ernesto Green seems to have much of a feel for.
  48. Hellraiser
    Any ambiguity over the veracity of the story’s events is quickly jettisoned to adhere to the demands of the leaden slasher-film plotting.
  49. The 33
    The film doles out a shock or hits a (usually hollow) emotional note every few minutes with mechanical precision.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Great Gatsby
    This is a film which takes classic source material and imbues it on screen with a sense of wonder commensurate to its prior form, perhaps offering an even more visceral impression of the possibilities inherent to this beautiful, tragic world.
  51. The Bride!
    The Bride!’s aims to show that being good in a cruel world is as foolish as falling in love—as foolish as attempting to be out and proud freaks in a repressive society. Guillermo del Toro might be brave enough to let his monsters fight and fuck in their own defense, but Gyllenhaal and her monsters do it nastier, sloppier, and louder as an act of magnificent defiance.
  52. Fat Kid Rules the World
    People matter in Matthew Lillard's film; genre not so much.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Body Bags
    That Body Bags largely succeeds, despite the perceptible lack of novel material, can be attributed to the strength of the assembled performances as well as the filmmakers’ attention to the dynamics of visual storytelling.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Pact
    When The Pact descends, finally, from suggestion to explication, the scares regrettably slink away.
  55. Ponies
    Never distinguishes itself as engaging cinema apart from the main character's vile charisma and a few dynamic dialogue sequences.
  56. Passion
    Passion is a serpentine, gorgeously orchestrated gathering of all of De Palma's pet themes and conceits, a symphony of giddy terror where people perpetually hide behind masks, both literal and figurative.
  57. Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead
    Director Kiah Roache-Turner's film is an excitingly efficient and ultraviolent zomedy.
  58. Magic in the Moonlight
    A film of obvious characterizations and even more obvious plot machinations that render its moment-to-moment charms moot.
  59. The Reluctant Fundamentalist
    The laziest sort of political cinema, full of straw men and finger-pointing, wrapped up in an awards-friendly bow by its beautiful cinematography and a manipulative world music-y score.
  60. Psycho II
    Director Richard Franklin and screenwriter Tom Holland can’t seem to figure out if Psycho II should resemble a film from the 1950s or the 1980s, so they split the difference, and the result is a bland, meandering movie with no real look or tone at all.
  61. Assassination Nation
    Assassination Nation carelessly affirms the idea that all women should be able to fight back at will, and if they don’t, it’s on them.
  62. The Pirates of Somalia
    Writer-director Bryan Buckley's film is ultimately more interested in the journalist than his story.
  63. To Rome with Love
    "With age comes exhaustion," according to a rueful line late in the film, and it serves as a fitting diagnosis for Woody Allen's latest fallen souffle set in a European cultural capital.
  64. An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn
    The absence here of a joke is meant to be hilarious, or to at least congratulate the audience for willfully submitting to a denial of pleasure. Every element of the film is studiously, painstakingly random.
  65. Empire of Silver
    From overwrought flashbacks of Third Master and Madame Kang's initial meetings (and sexual encounter), to the present-day arguments and maneuverings of Lord Kang, Empire of Silver is so determined to stage its material with reverence that it embalms any flickers of passion or tension.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    V/H/S
    An anthology of found-footage horror shorts that exudes, sometimes extraordinarily, a neophyte's sense of courage and cluelessness.
  67. Cézanne et Moi
    The film barely even scratches the surface of the animating force of Cézanne and Zola's lives: their art.
  68. Puncture
    Puncture's story only moves forward thanks to Evans's charm. But a good lead performance can't single-handedly save thin material.
  69. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
    Ben Stiller's aesthetics blend overly manicured imagery with soaring rock songs that underline every emotion, lest the film's corporate logo-driven message-making didn't get the point across clearly enough.
  70. Marie's Story
    The film is unable to specify narrative urgency beyond a broad sense of "based on a true story" pathos that's by turns hollowly uplifting and tragic.
  71. Mood Indigo
    Michel Gondry bungles his adaptation of the Boris Vian novel by indulging in homespun craftwork at the expense of plot and character detail.
  72. Life
    Life, an incredibly square and familiar studio product, baits and switches on two disappointing propositions, moving swiftly from something expectedly cliché to something dismayingly derivative.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Luz
    It’s in the VR world that the film best conveys its themes of modern intimacy and alienation.
  74. Another Simple Favor
    The first film was divided against itself—half a typically broad Paul Feig comedy, half imitation Gone Girl—and the sequel doesn’t fare much better as a genuine thriller.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Keeper
    Osgood Perkins mistakes abstruseness for surrealism, and an oppressive atmosphere for palpable tension.
  76. Thor: The Dark World
    Superhero movies aren't going anywhere, nor is their standard, on-to-the-next-fight structure, so it's heartening to see a gem that grandly and amusingly fills in the blanks.
  77. The Riot Club
    The thinly sketched characters of the film are numerous and inconsequential, with director Lone Scherfig giving sparse attention to humanizing or deepening them.
  78. The Last Stand
    One of its most refreshing aspects is its acceptance of both western and action-film conventions on their own terms, refusing to regard itself as operating outside of or superior to the genre.
  79. Thanks for Sharing
    Is an exploration of sex addiction, in all its different manifestations, the new flavor of the week in contemporary American cinema?
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Tales from the Darkside: The Movie
    Each mini-movie has the same tally of moments of greatness, grossness, and dullness, giving Tales from the Darkside: The Movie an even-handed feel.
  81. Spiderhead
    By resolving its story around a mano-a-mano, the film narrows its understanding of a system in which exploitation is privatized.
  82. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    The film could be taken as an intentional travesty of the superhero genre, if only it weren’t so tortuously tedious.
  83. I Am Not a Serial Killer
    The film comes unsettlingly close to being an apologia for the kind of violence that stems from adolescent disaffection.
  84. Joe Bell
    The tired, tasteless gimmick at the center of the film inadvertently reveals its entire problem of perspective.
  85. The Voyeurs
    It’s hard to deny that Michael Mohan’s preposterous fable doesn’t exert the dark pull of voyeurism itself.
  86. Sleepless Nights Stories
    A freeform, New York-based variation on the Arabian Nights tales by Jonas Mekas is both a pan-narrative and a disarming portrait of its sweetly curious maker.
  87. Kung Fu Panda 4
    The film is a good time, and it doesn’t exactly betray any of Kung Fu Panda’s strengths, but it also exhibits the telltale signs of a series struggling to justify its existence.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Zombie
    Taken on its own terms, it works quite agreeably as a visceral blow to the breadbasket, with one of the most outrageous and apocalyptic final scenes in the entirety of the subgenre.
  89. Jersey Boys
    However messy this overextended and oddly compelling work feels from moment to moment, the end result evokes the life of working artists without sentimentality or undue grandeur.
  90. Effie Gray
    It spins the narrative of one of the Victorian art world's most mysterious marriages into a study of life lived and life merely examined, a fecund fairy tale in reverse.
  91. 4:44 Last Day on Earth
    It's only natural that Abel Ferrara's vision of the end of the world should take corporeal form as a quasi-autobiographical hangout movie.
  92. He's Way More Famous Than You
    It would have been nice if the film had surrendered to its lunacy more blatantly, more carelessly.
  93. Free to Run
    The doc's caginess is a weakness that results from an inherently nostalgic sense of reverie.
  94. Anatomy of a Male Ballet Dancer
    Lost, or at least merely glossed over, throughout this hagiographic documentary portrait is the miraculous story of an effeminate Brazilian boy who was actually allowed to blossom through dance and who, because of such permission, has managed to survive his queer childhood a little more unscathed.
  95. Blessed Child
    Filmmaker Cara Jones offers a poignant testament to the baggage and insecurities hounding her own life.
  96. All Is Bright
    All Is Bright remains engaging, for the most part, but most of the big narrative turns feel both predictable and forced, and at odds with the natural charms of the cast.
  97. The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim
    The film combines cutting-edge Japanese animation with the audiovisual language established by Peter Jackson’s original trilogy of films.
  98. Ricki and the Flash
    Director Jonathan Demme grasps the well of feeling of Diablo Cody's script and eventually harnesses it in his own image.
  99. Save the Date
    What's worst about the film is how it appropriates its main character's noncommittal selfishness to support its own quaint, anti-establishment themes.
  100. Sparkle
    Whitney Houston's death is just about the only thing that gives the film real, albeit mostly unintentional, life.
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