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. Turkey Bowl
    Well acted and wise enough to not excessively linger in its atmosphere of genial camaraderie and underlying regret and nostalgia, Turkey Bowl accomplishes its small-scale goals with aplomb.
  2. My Piece of the Pie
    Cédric Klapisch settles for a mixture of bland obviousness and crudely manufactured drama.
  3. Madame Bovary
    Sophie Barthes neglects to thoroughly conceive of Emma's plight, instead making only sporadic gestures to it.
  4. An Ordinary Man
    Yes, deep down, even brutal war criminals like the one played by Ben Kingsley are people too.
  5. Materna
    Rarely do the filmmakers show people mutually affecting one another in cycles of pain and control, rather than blaming phantom figures.
  6. After the Hunt
    While its desire to question absolutes is admirable, there’s a hollowness at the film’s core that prevents it from having a more pointed impact beyond surface provocation.
  7. A Girl Missing
    Kôji Fukada adores stray textures that stick in the proverbial throat and free-associatively affirm his characters’ rootlessness.
  8. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    It doesn't take long to realize that Ridley Scott's adaptation is only aiming for certain forms of credibility, and callously eschewing others.
  9. Heleno
    The film hints at a kicky, impressionistic style that director José Henrique Fonseca never effectively employs to actually communicate Heleno de Freitas's demons.
  10. The Contractor
    The film’s rote action-movie plotting is calibrated in a ponderously straight-faced way so as to give it some semblance of gravity.
  11. The Devil's Double
    The film's first act is wholly concerned with the juxtaposition of physical similarities and ideological opposites, and Tamahori spends entire sequences upending the balance between the two.
  12. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald
    The Crimes of Grindelwald gets more comedic and emotional mileage out of Newt’s interactions with his various creatures, particularly the adorable platypus-like one with a nose for gold, than most of its human-centered scenes.
  13. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2
    Characters are better employed; emotions are, for once, palpable; and the selfishness of Bella, author Stephenie Meyer's avatar, is finally somewhat squelched.
  14. Ragnarok
    In the end, any and all potential B-movie fun is extinguished by Ragnarok's depressingly listless anonymity.
  15. Breathless
    Much like Body Heat, which valorized noirish archetypes instead of examining their original social contexts, Breathless simply has a hard-on for Hollywood lore, as convertibles, rockabilly, and monochromatic lighting are utilized to enshrine dominant legacies rather than invert or, at least, probe them.
  16. National Champions
    As a peek into the relationship between sports, media and capitalism, National Champions feels like a beginner’s playbook.
  17. We Are the Giant
    It ironically reveals its intent to suture shut any remote ambivalence regarding its own gung-ho ethos, in effect engaging the same sort of oppressively dogmatic tactics it so outwardly denigrates.
  18. Waiting for the Barbarians
    Ciro Guerra never quite finds an imagistic equivalent to the novel’s apocalyptic mood and subtly hallucinogenic atmosphere.
  19. The Christmas Chronicles
    The film Despite its weird flourishes, the film succumbs to the tropes and emotional contrivances of the family melodrama at its core.
  20. A Working Man
    David Ayer’s film proceeds as an unambiguous celebration of its hero’s vigilantism.
  21. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    There's an appealingly shaggy buddy comedy hidden somewhere inside of The Spy Who Dumped Me, but good luck finding it amid all the desperate poop jokes, lifeless action sequences, and lazy plot mechanics.
  22. Nicky's Family
    This is a powerful chapter in our human history, but it's made melodramatic and dull through Matej Minac's indulgence of hokey reenactments and sound-augmented archival footage.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A Horrible Way to Die
    The adventitious use of loud and strange blasts of music may theoretically make sense to heighten the film's creepiness, but here, like everything else, they don't exactly make a perfect fit and serve more as the final nail in the coffin for the film's lack of tonal cohesion.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Tall Man
    Illustrates the problem of class mobility with a dark, troubling premise that holds a harsh light up to our own assumptions and expectations.
  25. Tai Chi Zero
    Essentially a live-action anime, it sweats rivulets of Tarantino-era digital anxiety from all pores--every kick, punch, pan, and zoom exaggerated for maximum impact.
  26. A Fierce Green Fire
    The director avoids all manner of stylistics, opting instead for the formulaic doc trifecta of first-person interviews, archival material, and news footage.
  27. Ping Pong Summer
    A heartfelt retro flashback littered with pop-culture iconography and much slang, it focuses on the importance of friendship and loyalty rather than social standing.
  28. The Young Kieslowski
    Another effort to explain how difficult it is to be a young, white, smart, non-disfigured, upper-middle-class male.
  29. Jamaica Inn
    Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn would have been better titled The Gangs of Jamaica Inn, since the film is thoroughly concerned with groupings, allegiances, and the ways class standing relates to moral obligation.
  30. Every Day
    Throughout, the film raises metaphysical issues of physical and psychological autonomy only to gloss over them, probably because addressing them could too quickly shut down the romance.
  31. Casa de mi Padre
    You know a film isn't going to be considered high art when the guy to your left at the press screening is a reporter from Extra and the guy to your right lets out a loud "That's awesome, man" after each scene.
  32. 300
    Snyder attaches no larger significance to his arresting visuals. He’s only intent on eliciting “Whoa, dude!” reactions, of which there are fewer and fewer once it becomes clear that there’s nothing sustaining the centerpiece razzle-dazzle sequences except awful dialogue and no-dimensional characters.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Life of a King
    Any potential flights of invention or creativity are subordinate to the plain and emphatic delivery of life lessons.
  34. Miss Lovely
    The women of the film certainly deserve better, as they're often relegated to the role of victim, harmed or murdered simply to propel the plot along.
  35. Carrie Pilby
    The film is essentially an exercise in forcing a female genius back into her proper place of dependence on both the father figure and the Prince Charming.
  36. X-Men: Apocalypse
    The issue with X-Men: Apocalypse is that Bryan Singer suggests so many possible directions to go in and still chooses the least interesting one.
  37. Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder
    Christopher Felver is too reverent to properly convey the invigoratingly profane, angry messiness of the sense of community that Lawrence Ferlinghetti and his peers too briefly brought to life.
  38. 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.
  39. No Man's Land
    No Man’s Land mostly suggests a performance of allyship on the filmmakers’ part.
  40. The Monuments Men
    George Clooney's film boils a big, messy maelstrom of theft and uncertainty down to a digestible, faintly appetizing mush.
  41. Rudderless
    It unnecessarily hampers itself for over an hour for the sake of a gotcha moment before finally allowing its actors to explore something more than generic grief.
  42. Felony
    It reveals itself to be a profoundly cynical movie posing as a work of idealism, and it's all the more insidious because it's otherwise so bland and forgettable.
  43. Critters
    Slap together a modestly budgeted horror film with an unmistakable resemblance to a recent hit film (Gremlins) and a notable inversion of another popular film’s ending (Poltergeist), insert just enough Podunk camp to ensure Joe Bob Briggs would catch its scent and you’ll guarantee yourself the birth of a franchise.
  44. On the Come Up
    Jamila C. Gray lends credibility to Brianna Jackson, who happens to be searching for just that. She plays the damn role.
  45. Beckett
    It’s thanks to a kind of tug of war between background and foreground that Beckett succeeds as a piece of entertainment.
  46. Triple 9
    It arrives prepackaged with suggested comparisons to Michael Mann's Heat that it never earns because of its dreary literal-mindedness.
  47. Everything, Everything
    The film's plot crux isn't romantic fatalism, but 2017's cutest manifestation of trendy gaslighting.
  48. Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards
    Michael Roberts's documentary is an unabashed exercise in deifying its subject matter with superlatives and hyperbole from the mouths of talking heads, which ultimately results in the cheapening of the artist.
  49. Epic
    And that's the thing with Epic: It's something close to an animated masterpiece, provided it's watched on mute.
  50. Paul, Apostle of Christ
    The film's simple, redundant, but valuable moral lesson to its audience finds comfortable enough expression in an aesthetic that's banal but impressively consistent.
  51. Bloody Hell
    The film’s manic blend of gore and relentlessly cheeky comedy eventually leads to diminished returns.
  52. The Last Thing Mary Saw
    The film comes to feel like a parody of a possession flick rather than a straightforward replication of the genre’s tropes.
  53. Safe House
    It'd be unwise to dismiss Safe House as merely a clone of Tony Scott's manically inclined vision.
  54. Janie Jones
    First thing to get out of the way: No, David M. Rosenthal's third feature, Janie Jones, has nothing to do with the famous song by the same name that opens the Clash's self-titled 1977 debut album. Perhaps that might have made this film far more interesting film it is.
  55. Peeples
    Tina Gordon Chism's film collapses into a series of clumsy improvisatory sketches, tied up in cheap, risibly sentimental catharsis.
  56. Hit So Hard
    P. David Ebersole so busy flitters from one point of interest to another that Hit So Hard never coheres into anything other than a collection of rock-star clichés.
  57. Bilal: A New Breed of Hero
    The animation feels like the result of the cold calculus of an algorithm rather than a human director with a personal vision.
  58. Labor Day
    A better film would have had the gumption to maintain the poetic bleakness, rather than steer toward what ultimately feels like safe compromise.
  59. The Hunger
    Scott’s film scarcely has its pulse on the encroaching conservatism of the nation. In the end, it’s just a shallow lesbian fantasy so aggressively spit and polished as to suggest a 96-minute White Diamonds commercial. Of course, that’s not to say that it isn’t fun.
  60. One Chance
    David Frankel crams his story with predictable developments, yet he matches his subject in spirit, pushing something into the spotlight that, however unlikely, elicits irresistible glee.
  61. The Interview
    It essentially uses a major global issue to cheaply dress up what is two hours of hit-and-miss erection jokes.
  62. RoboCop
    Ultimately the film is, like the Faux News programming it caricatures at face value, a deck-stacking simulation of a dialogue it isn't even remotely interested in opening.
  63. 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.
  64. Boris Without Béatrice
    The film offers an oxymoronic parable that’s been utilized countless times by cinema, in loose reiterations of A Christmas Carol: The protagonist must learn humility after learning that the world revolves around him.
  65. Linsanity
    The interpolations of "heavenly" sequences of Jeremy Lin playing basketball against CGI backdrops offer a hokey visual analogue for the intersection of faith and sports in his life.
  66. Beautiful Creatures
    Beautiful Creatures basically spits in the face of a legacy of literature founded on feelings of exclusion and social alienation.
  67. Cockneys vs Zombies
    Matthias Hoene allows the cockney swears to flow as deliriously as the truly convincing blood splatter, offering a few unexpected gut-busters along the way.
  68. Nothing Bad Can Happen
    A film so comprehensively miscalculated in its desire to be a batshit think piece that it potentially creates a new category of offense.
  69. The Intern
    Nancy Meyers is unquestionably committed to her auteurist signature of giving her female protagonists their cake and letting them eat it too.
  70. 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.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    96 Minutes
    Director Aimee Lagos seems to be at odds with her own film, like a well-meaning but controlling parent hell-bent on choosing a child's college, major, and fraternity for them.
  72. Girls of the Sun
    With its naked celebration of self-sacrificial combat and idealization of the soldier as an avenging angel, it strikes a tone redolent of old-school war propaganda.
  73. Final Cut
    Unlike One Cut of the Dead, Michel Hazanavicius’s similar ode to low-budget resourcefulness often rings false.
  74. 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.
  75. Hello, Dolly!
    The choreography, the performances, the set decoration, the dialogue, everything about Hello, Dolly! is played directly to the back row of the theater, which would be fine on the stage, but on anamorphic widescreen close-ups tends to be more frightening than mirthful.
  76. Woman Walks Ahead
    As a character, Catherine Weldon suffers the same fate as Sitting Bull, having been reduced to a signifier of the filmmakers' retroactive political correctness.
  77. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
    J.A. Bayona's gothic flourishes suggest opioid hallucinations, and they're a welcome escape from the doldrums of the writing, but they seem at odds with the rest of the film.
  78. You're Cordially Invited
    By the time You’re Cordially Invited finds the correct mode to operate in, it’s about five minutes before the end credits roll.
  79. How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr Foster?
    Lionizing a world-class architect without tipping into hagiography, this documentary performs a graceful cinematic dance around his works.
  80. Sassy Pants
    Sassy Pants has a slightly ludic atmosphere akin to another tale of teen alienation, Dear Lemon Lima, but it unfolds like a fable in which only Bethany doesn't feel like a canned caricature.
  81. The Sheik and I
    The film is ultimately more concerned with Caveh Zahedi's attempts to pursue a variety of dull passing fancies than with any larger agenda.
  82. Age of Uprising: The Legend of Michael Kohlhaas
    Greatly cognizant of the revenge genre's penchant for hypocritical demagoguery, director Arnaud des Pallières unsettles the audience's usual feelings of vicarious blood lust.
  83. The Short Game
    This window into the world of youthful competition almost entirely disposes of social awareness in favor of routine drama.
  84. Rabid Dogs
    There's no reason for Rabid Dogs to exist, as even character identity and motivation receives little attention.
  85. The Neon Demon
    The simmering insinuations of Nicolas Winding Refn's film eventually flower into full-on exploitation.
  86. Oh Mercy!
    Arnaud Desplechin evinces a glancing touch with showing how social tension and need inform law and crime.
  87. The Last Full Measure
    The film largely evades any perspectives that might question the institutions that put our soldiers in harm’s way.
  88. The World is Full of Secrets
    Graham Swon undermines our expectations of horror-movie conceits, attempting to tap the primordial manna of oral storytelling.
  89. Contraband
    Heist, swindle, and other like-minded genre films thrive or flounder on the mechanics of their story's dangerously elaborate scheme, a fact ably proven by Contraband, a tale of high-seas smuggling without a clever thought in its leaden, derivative head.
  90. Breathe
    The film is an easily digestible replica of the truth, bathed in honeyed cinematography and sentimentalized adulation.
  91. Death of a Unicorn
    Death of a Unicorn taps into the anti-capitalist strain in late-20th-century monster movies from Alien to Jurassic Park by tracing a clever through line from the unicorns of antiquity to the present.
  92. Cesar Chavez
    Not unlike Michael Peña's prior supporting roles, Chavez is marked by an explosive anger kept under a cherubic, sweet-natured mask, providing the surprise lacking in the story's text.
  93. Leviathan
    A mediocre, quasi-diverting B movie.
  94. The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
    Like its predecessor, the film is a charming example of what great actors can do with mediocre material.
  95. 3, 2, 1... Frankie Go Boom
    The film never really goes soft, as Jordan Roberts never loses sight of the fact that these toxic nincompoops are authentically bad for one another.
  96. Next Door
    Unlike Malcom & Marie, Daniel Brühl’s feature-length directorial debut proves to be authentically self-castigating.
  97. Five Dances
    It's the moments when director Alan Brown stops worrying about clarifying plot and character motivation and lets the performances bring those into being that makes this an authentic project.
  98. Trust Me
    Almost none of the film's characters or scenarios escape feeling contrived under writer-director-star Clark Gregg's bizarro tonal shifts and plot developments.
  99. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    Of greatest damage to the doc's coherence is its wholehearted belief that its subjects are offering firsthand reports worth hearing.
  100. For the Plasma
    The film, whose disparate narrative threads unsurprisingly never connect, drowns in weirdness for its own sake.
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