Slant Magazine's Scores

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:
7775 movie reviews
  1. If Quirke’s film means to mimic the tunnel vision of its protagonist, it does so perhaps too effectively, losing its thematic potency as it travels on a predictable trajectory, involving spooky drawings and sisterly spats, all the while leaving the existential miasma sitting out of frame.
  2. Evil Eye is a feast of timidly undeveloped raw material.
  3. Supernova is so obviously structured that it often seems to be imposing meaning on its characters.
  4. After a dangerous, even personal, first half, Deep Water becomes crude in all the wrong ways.
  5. Sebastian Junger and Nick Quested’s prismatic look at a devastating new chapter in the War on Drugs lacks for cohesiveness.
  6. When The Beast Must Die is ripping off The Most Dangerous Game, it’s an amusing, if minor, genre offering.
  7. It’s difficult to shake that the film finishes saying what it has to say long before it staggers to the end.
  8. In Morris’s best films, such as The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman’s Portrait Photography, there’s a sense that the director is truly simpatico with his subjects. In My Psychedelic Love Story, though, Morris lets a fading never-quite-legend blather her way into a trap.
  9. Though the film touches on numerous hot-button topics and is packed with incident and humor, its self-aware style—from straight-to-camera narration to slow motion to visual tricks like the washing out of an entire background so a character will pop out in bright color—and simplistic characterizations deprive it of the chance to say much of anything.
  10. The film muddies its sense of moral righteousness by suggesting that violence and vengeance can only be defeated by more of the same.
  11. The problem with Earwig and the Witch has more to do with its confused plotting than its more or less serviceable animation.
  12. It’s at a certain point toward the finale that this Scream becomes almost as drearily repetitious as the reboot culture that it skewers.
  13. The film is most tragic and humorous when hints of the outside world break through the suffocatingly cheerful façade of the Villages.
  14. John Lee Hancock’s The Little Things blends two modes of the serial killer film, both of which have been shepherded by David Fincher.
  15. Reminiscence’s noir adornments inadvertently feel closer to parody than loving homage.
  16. The non-musical performances are shallow: Douglas is forceful but one-note, Day is as square and wholesome as a glass of milk, and Bacall purrs along in the same faux-bad girl performance she’s given for the past 60 years. But I suppose that’s fitting for a morality play this black and white, where wild jazz, liquor, and loose women cause the downfall of man.
  17. This tongue-in-cheek gorefest gives the impression of an only semi-coherent joke on the audience.
  18. Kevin Macdonald’s film never captures the spectrum of a life lived in unimaginable extremis.
  19. After a while, the film’s parade of contrivances subsumes the acutely observed friendship at its core.
  20. The film’s overtly non-specific title is surely meant to suggest some kind of pared-down elementality, but, in the end, it mostly just reflects the story’s lack of definable character.
  21. The film knows the words and tunes but, with rare exception, lacks the passion and the perspective to make them truly resonate.
  22. Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man is one passable joke stretched out over 98 minutes with nothing in the way of a real movie to support it.
  23. The film’s manic blend of gore and relentlessly cheeky comedy eventually leads to diminished returns.
  24. Hunted intends to make a show of our desensitization to predator-prey relationships, but the greater purpose of its self-awareness never quite comes into clear focus.
  25. Like Vice before it, the film too often uses satire as a tool of castigation rather than as a means of truly attacking the status quo.
  26. Guillermo del Toro's remake of Nightmare Alley is less a living and breathing movie than a fossilized riff on the idea of a movie, particularly the American noir.
  27. The particulars of the central mystery are mundane, to the point where the film itself doesn’t spend too much time digging into them.
  28. The film is at its most moving in those rare moments when it’s capturing the nourishing bonding ritual among a deaf family.
  29. Censor unfortunately pulls back from its social interrogation just when it’s working up a head of steam.
  30. Quentin Dupieux imbues a trite genre scenario with a Kafkaesque brand of comic existentialism.
  31. Recalling the ‘70s shaggy-dog stories of Makavejev, Ashby, and Schatzberg, Kusturica’s French-financed American venture deserved better than the neglect it suffered in the blockbuster age.
  32. Had the film trusted its self-imposed minimalism a little more, it might have been a lot more successful as a character study.
  33. The film doesn’t quite cut to the heart of the socially nurtured fantasies that splinter men from women.
  34. Tony Stone’s avoidance of emotional manipulation in dramatizing Ted Kaczynski’s terror campaign is admirable, but only up to a point.
  35. Andy Goddard’s film clumsily superimposes a frenzied, completely fictional spy adventure onto a fascinating fragment of pre-war history.
  36. Travis Stevens’s film is psychologically astute, until it gives itself over to turning subtext into extremely legible text.
  37. Johannes Roberts’s prequel ultimately remains buried by its indifference to unchecked corporate power.
  38. Ultimately, the film’s most impactful terrors have nothing to do with things that go bump in the night.
  39. The film’s tendency to over-explain, over-intellectualize, and over-script events leaves little room for spontaneity and doubt.
  40. The film works harder to fix the problems with its source material than to establish itself as an independent piece of art.
  41. The film undermines its initial sense of intimacy and momentum with a stop-and-start story structure that by and large exists to make as much room as possible for its characters’ banter.
  42. False Positive threads classic horror-film tropes with a woozy, partially comic sensibility but doesn’t fully commit to this approach.
  43. The film is almost refreshing in its flightiness, even as it remains defiantly ignorant of the world in which it exists.
  44. Not even Alvin Ailey’s peers can articulate the innovations and soulfulness of his choreography half as well as his work itself.
  45. The solemnity of Josef Kubota Wladyka’s film is at odds with the gratuitousness of its violence.
  46. During an amnesiac’s atmospheric nighttime ramble through Manhattan, the seeds of a narrative are sewn but never nurtured.
  47. As an exploration of the misogyny that drove Bundy’s crimes, Amber Sealey’s film mostly falls short of its potential.
  48. After a while, the film’s elaborate, often breathtaking special effects come to feel like it’s only source of complexity.
  49. Though eerie and quietly deadpan, the film circles its grab bag of themes for so long that it also becomes tedious.
  50. For all of the film’s somberness, its depiction of an era of rigid class divisions and incalculable loss still comes through the hazy, soft-focus goggles of nostalgia.
  51. France indecisively utilizes a news personality’s crocodile tears as a symbol of the bad faith that pervades news discourse.
  52. Against the Current’s style imposes a generic visual language onto a subject who’s anything but generic.
  53. We Need to Do Something mainly succeeds at suggesting a more compelling film beyond its bathroom walls.
  54. The film doesn’t leave us with a complex sense of Hayden Pedigo as a person and political candidate trying to take on an unjust system.
  55. 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.”
  56. Rarely do the filmmakers show people mutually affecting one another in cycles of pain and control, rather than blaming phantom figures.
  57. For a while, Olivia Colman’s expressive performance carries the film, with little narrative distraction or stylistic conspicuousness.
  58. The film capsizes in the absence of a compelling center for Mélanie Laurent to hang her directorial panache.
  59. Ridley Scott’s tale of greed and revenge practically begs for melodramatic excess.
  60. This is an engaging, no-frills entertainment that still fails to justify its reason for being.
  61. The film feels like a missed opportunity to interrogate society’s fervent need to make pariahs out of people for their past mistakes.
  62. For too much of its running time, Panah Panahi’s film is untethered from any kind of captivating narrative purpose.
  63. The film circles a thorny premise, which makes it all the more disappointing that it results in a conventional clinch.
  64. As is typically the case with Joe Wright's films, one is left both exhilarated and exhausted, wishing that he had been more interested in the material at the center of his house of flourishes.
  65. In spite of the film’s troublingly naïve take on mental trauma, Riz Ahmed vividly and empathetically captures a man’s wounded soul.
  66. 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.
  67. The film is initially distinguished by its poetic understatement, only for it to eventually succumb to staleness.
  68. Whatever satire of white elite society is intended by The Forgiven has been blunted by monotony.
  69. Dashcam is nothing if not consistent, as it’s every bit the empty provocation as the troll at its center.
  70. Zürcher spins byzantine webs of audiovisual stimuli from an ultimately modest dramatic core, and not only is the larger narrative design unclear before it’s finally revealed, it’s easy to get stuck dwelling on the minutia along the way.
  71. Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill are adept enough at setting up rich, evocative horror concepts, but they don’t always know what to do with them once they’re in place.
  72. Like all Aaron Sorkin-penned characters, this film’s version of Lucille Ball is a mouthpiece for his brand of smarmy, know-it-all sarcasm.
  73. The film loses its satiric edge as it begins to melodramatically detail how Maurice Flitcroft inherited the mantle of folk hero.
  74. The film is a slickly produced but soulless spectacle whose jokey banter and space-opera action drowns out the story’s emotional beats.
  75. The Bad Guys is a heist film that steals all of its moves.
  76. The Lost City is proof that star power and chemistry can only take a film with a mediocre script so far.
  77. Blue Beetle plays out with all the revelry of a contractual obligation, hitting every note of the hero’s journey with no variation, murky action sequences, and little in the way of imagination, despite the titular object itself granting Jaime the ability to manifest anything that he imagines.
  78. After a while, writer-director Iuli Gerbase’s boldly mundane take on forced isolation gives way to a regular sort of mundanity.
  79. Throughout Last Looks, the filmmakers tend to a conventional mystery that could have benefited from more satiric intention.
  80. The film consistently fails to underline the risks and pressures faced by the women in an underground abortionist network in Chicago in the late ‘60s.
  81. Avoiding excessively heightened melodrama, Thirteen Lives doesn’t substitute it with much that one couldn’t already find in the copious amount of available coverage of the real-life incident.
  82. After a while, you want to know what line of inquiry the film is pursuing—what greater paths it’s wandered to.
  83. The film’s funny and shocking gore too often plays second fiddle to meandering comedic bits revolving around the band’s recording sessions.
  84. Windfall has a difficult time landing on the right tone or getting a bead on its characters.
  85. Men
    Men is ultimately about as deep as its title, a swipe at the multi-faceted terribleness of its titular subject that rarely gets beyond being a mere catalogue of the different ways that guys can be irritating around and dangerous toward women.
  86. Quentin Dupieux’s latest endlessly draws out every stilted interaction for maximum deadpan effect.
  87. Leonora Addio is a wrestling with memory and history through a deeply personal, if at times indulgent, lens.
  88. The film drops any interest in the blurring of fact and fiction as it settles into a rote account of a contemporary oil rig catastrophe.
  89. Ultrasound never quite figures out how to keep going once its mysteries have been unraveled.
  90. Not only does Infinite Storm lack for a complete vision, it’s all too comfortable in settling for mawkishness.
  91. The Innocents adopts a slasher-esque vibe that, however airlessly aestheticized, feels lurid for the sake of being lurid.
  92. Keating’s film forgets the cardinal rule of good pastiche: that if you’re not building something new from familiar pieces then you’re just regurgitating old ideas.
  93. Not Okay doesn’t make any points that, now over a decade into the ubiquity of social media, aren’t painfully obvious.
  94. The film doesn’t quite live up to its promising premise and handful of clever camera gimmicks.
  95. Cleansed of all risk and personality, Spin Me Round subsides, as though with a sigh, into the reheated sauce of mediocrity.
  96. George Clooney’s and Julia Roberts’s undimmed charisma brings enough grace notes to Ticket to Paradise that you could easily be taken in by its low-stakes frivolity.
  97. For as potent as the film’s shocks can be in the moment, it’s difficult to shake off that the screenplay lacks for the breadth of variety that’s necessary to make more than just a restaurant’s tasting menu take flight.
  98. Many of the character actors occasionally elevate the film above some of the more clichéd family humor.
  99. This unfocused, awkwardly paced film never quite gets off the ground and, as a result, will do little to change perceptions of the Korean War as the “forgotten war.”
  100. The original Brian and Charles short focused entirely on its titular characters, and it’s clear that was for the best.

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