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. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    A choppy, feature-length progression of crude, predictable gags, the film plays like a variety show, and yet its main attraction is barely funny enough to warrant his own brief sketch.
  2. Hands of Stone
    The Panamanian-born Roberto Duran's story has all the makings of a fascinating film, but Hands of Stone isn't it.
  3. Goodbye Christopher Robin
    A sweet ode to childhood innocence turning sour upon its introduction to the public is an intriguing notion, but Simon Curtis incomprehensibly crams the events of Christopher’s early childhood stardom, his difficulty coping with the ubiquity of his namesake’s legacy, and his ultimate defiance of his father into less than one-third of the film.
  4. Gauguin: Voyage to Tahiti
    Gauguin represents for the film no less an ideal Romantic subject than the Polynesians represented for the painter himself: penniless, chronically ill, and living in self-imposed isolation—the very embodiment of the suffering artist.
  5. Stockholm
    Forget Dog Day Afternoon, as the film doesn’t even clear the bar set by F. Gary Gray’s tense and exciting The Negotiator.
  6. 12 Strong
    As Nicolai Fuglsig doesn't allow any complicated thoughts about war, colonization, and mortality to hover around his characters, 12 Strong inevitably proceeds as a jaunty imperial adventure through the wilds of northern Afghanistan.
  7. Already Tomorrow in Hong Kong
    The script labors to give the film a strong sense of place, but strange lapses confirm a sense that the city isn't a character here.
  8. Too Late
    All the narrative hopscotching is little more than a superficial ploy to gussy up a clichéd redemption tale.
  9. 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.
  10. All the Wilderness
    The images gorgeously embody both the fear and the beauty of James's exploratory experiments with socialization.
  11. Love Etc.
    Love is both a many-splendored and painful thing according to Love Etc., a multi-subject documentary about the various states of amour that, while never succumbing to glibness, also fails to rise above superficial geniality.
  12. Down the Shore
    Down the Shore suggests what might happen if TBS and Bruce Springsteen were to collaborate on a sitcom set in hell.
  13. Toad Road
    Writer-director Jason Banker finds the ironic beauty that arises from his characters' self-contemptuous and misplaced acts of destruction.
  14. Kid Cannabis
    The film works best when it shows Jonathan Daniel Brown's drug kingpin at his most inept and incapable, rather than elevating him to a pothead martyr.
  15. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days
    A half-hearted morality tale about taking responsibility for your actions as a sign of impending maturity.
  16. Bad Boys: Ride or Die
    The film plays out like it might be preparing us to let go of its big-name legacy leads.
  17. When Animals Dream
    The film is one long funereal slog in which the main character discovers something about herself that's almost immediately apparent.
  18. The Stepford Wives
    Forbes’s direction is uncluttered and makes excellent use of the long shot, and though the film threatens to run out of steam at each and every turn, it never runs out of ideas.
  19. Firebrand
    Ultimately, in trying to make Katherine both a historical girlboss and a near-martyr to a vaguely articulated cause, Firebrand’s meandering, under-baked screenplay manages to neither have its cake nor eat it too.
  20. Dear Mr. Watterson
    Though it begins by spending far too much time talking up the comic's quality, it gradually finds a groove as an incisive portrait of an insecure industry.
  21. LBJ
    By pairing down Lyndon Baines Johnson’s multifarious life and career to this one piece of legislation, the film fails to do justice to both the man and the fraught times he so fundamentally influenced.
  22. The First Purge
    Especially early on, Gerard McMurray often rejects the exhibitionist slaughter that James DeMonaco established as the Purge series’s modus operandi in favor of violence that’s rawer and realer.
  23. Cymbeline
    The source material, which is convoluted even by Shakespeare's narratively dexterous standards, is admittedly a tough nut for a filmmaker to crack.
  24. Night of the Living Dead
    So yeah, if you can’t tell already, my giddiness has by this point evaporated, but my staunch belief in this muddled little gem has not yet substantially wavered.
  25. Fairhaven
    The film plays coy with its quintessential indie-dramedy setup, eschewing narrative and tension in favor of convivial character interplay and master shots of wintry landscapes.
  26. Entanglement
    Ben doesn't deserve our sympathy, in part for how noxiously the film has imagined the female characters who surround him.
  27. Wasp Network
    The final product feels like more of an interesting and beautifully filmed anecdote than compelling political and human drama.
  28. What We Did on Our Holiday
    The underlying, redundant, and underwhelming theme of the film is the pursuit of family unity at all costs.
  29. False Positive
    False Positive threads classic horror-film tropes with a woozy, partially comic sensibility but doesn’t fully commit to this approach.
  30. Clip
    A raw, sophisticated, and stomach-turning look at what it means to be a young woman in Serbia, what it means to be a woman tout court.
  31. Eddie the Eagle
    It remains more committed to printing the uplifting legend of its title character than in actually examining the human beings underneath.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Star
    A threadbare, bargain-basement Sunset Boulevard, The Star features Bette Davis as Margaret Elliot, a washed-up actress hellbent on continuing her movie career.
  33. The Critic
    It’s only the winking malice of Ian McKellen’s title character that prevents the film from imploding entirely, dirigible-like, as the haywire plot begins to nosedive.
  34. M3GAN 2.0
    Imagine John Waters at the helm of a Terminator 2 remake and you have an inkling of just how wild a pivot M3GAN 2.0 is from its predecessor.
  35. Seberg
    Throughout, the filmmakers occlude the most fascinating and potentially powerful elements of Jean Seberg’s history.
  36. Saturday Fiction
    The hegemony of history is rigid, but Lou Ye is still able to disrupt it in the form of its representation.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Forgotten Space
    If you think of Wall Street as capitalism's symbolic headquarters, filmmakers Allan Sekula and Noël Burch more or less show us in The Forgotten Space how the sea is capitalism's global trading floor writ large.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Redlegs
    Redlegs may be "raw," but it's meaningless. That's something Cassavetes would have never abided.
  39. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
    The expansion has the unintended and unfortunate effect of doing exactly the same thing to Alexander he accused his family of doing in the first place: marginalizing him.
  40. Captive State
    The film might have better performed if it consisted of more than a smattering of good but relatively isolated ideas.
  41. My Son
    The film seeks to elevate genre clichés by slowing down the speed with which they’re typically offered.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Oblivion
    Absent of any sense of self-awareness, Oblivion seems only self-serious, a ponderous mess both misguided and unaware.
  43. The Girl
    Uses the perils of immigrating to this country without papers as a backdrop for a poor white American woman's bumpy path to enlightenment.
  44. The Boys in the Boat
    The film doesn’t break a single mold, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s entirely the point.
  45. Greta
    Neil Jordan’s deft control of pace and tone elevates Greta past mere gimmickry, resulting in a comic thriller whose goofy humor only compounds its mastery of suspense.
  46. The Berlin File
    The film is a sporadically entertaining, modestly ambitious shoot 'em up that frequently succumbs to spelling out its subtext.
  47. Orphan: First Kill
    William Brent Bell’s film proves that not every horror concept has the potential to be franchised.
  48. A Little Help
    Michael J. Weithorn's direction underlined its understatement via self-consciously patient camerawork and a doleful score, all in order to further the mournful mood.
  49. Draft Day
    The cruelly obvious third act congeals the film as a wet-eyed monument to the Kevin Costner character's particular brand of American manliness, one that values gut instinct, it's implied, over cold and ruthless calculations.
  50. Camp X-Ray
    Peter Sattler's film feels quintessentially Sundance: an expensively mounted treatise on important issues that's terrified to dig in obsessively, yet so ramrod-stiff with indignation that it never comes anywhere near compelling entertainment.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Downtown 81
    This time capsule of bohemian New York distorts its representation of the city for reasons more loving than lazy.
  52. American Made Movie
    The documentary's refusal to challenge the comfort zones of its target audience is apparent throughout.
  53. Profile
    Timur Bekmambetov’s Screenlife film is more fluff piece than hard-hitting news story.
  54. Boogie
    The film’s characters hardly possess a sense of a history or an interior life to adequately convey racism’s psychic toll.
  55. Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu
    Mandalorian and Grogu is, basically, four Mandalorian episodes wearing an IMAX trench coat.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cocaine Bear
    Cocaine Bear starts running on fumes almost immediately and peters out before the second brick of cocaine is even devoured.
  57. Evil Eye
    Evil Eye is a feast of timidly undeveloped raw material.
  58. The Magnificent Seven
    As passably entertaining as the film is, it never surrenders to the abandon of its action, and as such never feels like it shifts out of first gear.
  59. The Taste of Money
    For all the revelations about the way the rich operate, there's little juicy pleasure to be had in the proceedings.
  60. Sympathy for the Devil
    With copious scenes of Nicolas Cage going buck wild, it can hardly be faulted for failing to give audiences what they want.
  61. Echo Valley
    A story that might have been benefited by being allowed to breathe over a six-episode arc instead feels rushed and schematic rather than lived-in.
  62. Elizabeth Harvest
    Sebastian Gutierrez's film creates an incestuous atmosphere that's reminiscent of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
  63. The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
    The glue holding it all together is the same that gave the earlier Hunger Games films an edge over its YA brethren: the steadfast portrayal of the cynicism and emotional neglect required to regard other human beings as numbers and meat that have to be placated to be useful.
  64. The Little Things
    John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things blends two modes of the serial killer film, both of which have been shepherded by David Fincher.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Fullmetal Alchemist: The Sacred Star of Milos
    Manages to be an entertaining and faithful expansion on the original material while being inconsequential to it.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Tomorrow, When the War Began
    It's one thing to defer to archetypes, but Tomorrow is so full of stock types and clichés it makes "The Breakfast Club" look like "Nashville."
    • 54 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Big Boys Gone Bananas!*
    The issue remains that this variety of faux-populism seems better suited to the soapbox than the silver screen.
  68. Flex Is Kings
    Putting aside the generic human interest, the film turns out to be shockingly deficient in its on-screen depiction of flexing.
  69. Closer to God
    The end result suggests Re-Animator as told through an airless CNN report.
  70. The Wrong Light
    The divide between meaningful journalism and ethical filmmaking seldom seems as wide as it does in The Wrong Light.
  71. Blame
    In attempting to grapple with issues of bullying, mental health, burgeoning sexuality, and pedophilia, the film bites off more than it can chew.
  72. Allure
    Evan Rachel Wood and Julia Sarah Stone have a natural chemistry together that brings a feverish and unsettling intensity to their characters' tumultuous relationship, but there's no reprieve from the dour tone of the film.
  73. Knox Goes Away
    As Knox Goes Away motors steadily toward redemption and family reconciliation, it leaves all opportunity for real moral reckoning in its rearview mirror.
  74. Everything's Going to Be Great
    The human struggles at play are too dire and relatable for us to say that these people don’t deserve that level of grace, but making the audience generally sympathize with them doesn’t make spending time with them particularly pleasant either.
  75. 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.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Terminator: Dark Fate
    The film is good enough to redeem the bad taste that lingered from its predecessors but too uninspired to make one want more.
  77. Felt
    A hollow bit of violence exposes the film's sense of empowerment as nothing more than a harmless sheep masquerading in wolf's clothing.
  78. Black and Blue
    The film's command of action defuses concerns about whether it offers a thorough social critique.
  79. Swim Little Fish Swim
    It subtly counteracts the cliché that creative expression can save your life by making its protagonist a hipster Peter Pan whose creative expression is an excuse not to grow up.
  80. The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best
    The film has, at its source, a pool of affectations that so often constitute, or plague, American indie films--and, perhaps, American culture more generally.
  81. 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.
  82. Some Velvet Morning
    To watch the film is to wonder once again why Neil LaBute was ever taken seriously as a so-called dramatist of the gulf between the sexes.
  83. Empire of Light
    In Sam Mendes’s film, the power of the movies comes off feeling disappointingly like an afterthought to the script’s more romantic and socially oriented concerns.
  84. Now, Forager
    Boasts an evocative sense of environment and the feel of working with one's hands, but otherwise rummages around in search of substance and subtlety.
  85. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    There are only so many monster-centric jokes to be made before they become toothless, and only so many ways to preach tolerance before it sounds more like blunt moralizing.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Silent Night
    When Silent Night does finally kick into high gear, the action is as artful as anything that Woo has whipped up throughout his storied career.
  87. A Single Shot
    Content to faithfully hew to convention, A Single Shot rarely surprises, but its portrait of foolishness and fallibility, and its atmosphere of inevitable doom, remain sturdy and captivating.
  88. Hong Kong Trilogy: Preschooled Preoccupied Preposterous
    Throughout, Christopher Doyle acknowledges that time and reality are often marked by a slippery subjectivity.
  89. The Dead Don't Die
    In Jim Jarmusch’s film, what starts as a subtle undercurrent of knowing humor curdles into overt self-referentiality.
  90. Adopt a Highway
    Viewed charitably, Logan Marshall-Green’s sketchy protagonist and vague atmosphere are meant to achieve the effect of a parable.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Red Dawn
    What if Reagan’s America got a taste of her own interventionist foreign policies? Apocalypse, wow.
  92. Sinister
    Ellison's fascination with celluloid to solve a crime recalls Antonioni's "Blowup," but Scott Derrickson is unable to conjure an aura that isn't as transparent and weightless as a ghost.
  93. A Wrinkle in Time
    The film may involve the instant movement among unfathomable distances and the shattered limits of space and time, but it’s only Storm Reid's character who feels multidimensional.
  94. The Beekeeper
    It’s not unlike a partially completed sketch whose occasional flashes of color only serve to remind us how incomplete and lazily constructed the rest of it is.
  95. The Big Year
    Director David Frankel can't lend the inflated sitcom dilemmas of the characters any life, and most mysteriously screenwriter Howard Franklin, whose work in the '90s frequently had appealing quirk and flavor, gets the dubious credit for adapting a 1998 nonfiction book about these hobbyists' pursuit of pink-footed geese and Northern Shovelers.
  96. Book Club
    It’s been said that casting is 90% of directing, and it seems to be 90% of the writing in Bill Holderman's film.
  97. Wrinkles the Clown
    The film’s mid-act about-face lends a refreshing sense of complexity to an otherwise superficial depiction of Wrinkles.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Anemone
    Anemone is unable to tell a family story that lives up to its visual splendor and enigmatic atmosphere.
  99. Prisoners of the Ghostland
    The film is a profound disappointment in part because it feels so overdetermined to live up to Sion Sono and Nicholas Cage’s respective brands.
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