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. The Kid
    Its scenes wildly escalate to a fever pitch at the drop of a hat, before then ending, more often than not, with abrupt violence.
  2. The Man with the Iron Fists
    The chop-socky wire-fu scenes are beautifully choreographed, but pretty crudely edited; despite its gourmet neo-grindhouse trappings, the film won't bring the heat like you've never seen before.
  3. Love
    Gaspar Noé's lack of self-investigation merely situates the film as a libidinal advertisement for a tantrum-prone filmmaker's delayed adulthood.
  4. Surge
    More than effective in visualizing its protagonist’s disorientated state of mind, the camerawork may leave viewers feeling like they just stepped off of a merry-go-round.
  5. Jack the Giant Slayer
    This epic waste of $190 million plunders the grab bag of overused plotlines, failing to put its own stamp on much of anything.
  6. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
    The difference between the film and its equally expensive contemporaries is Luc Besson's playful, childlike naïveté.
  7. Desierto
    Any perceptive dialogue or contemporary socio-political subtext is pummeled by Jonás Cuarón’s preference for empty genre thrills.
  8. Live From New York!
    Formally, it relies on a bevy of spectacularly funny clips and a plethora of talking heads, most of which fall back on plaudits rather than sage insights.
  9. A LEGO Brickumentary
    Here's a documentary so insidious, so comprehensively scrubbed clean, that it argues for the therapeutic powers of consumerism.
  10. Bird Box
    Many sections of Bird Box don’t hold up to a second’s scrutiny; the conceit’s silliness and convenient scare tactics make Shyamalan’s take on infectious-suicide horror seem downright subtle by comparison.
  11. Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
    Director Joe Berlinger essentially allows his subject to hijack the film for his own end.
  12. Think Like a Man
    Unfortunately, like so many women have prophesized regarding the weaker gender's lack of commitment, there's just not enough follow through.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Snitch
    Snitch is the latest in a long line of films whose sole purpose is to flatten a major social problem into a pulp ideal for self-serious spectacle.
  14. Project Power
    The film is an unwieldy array of muddled ideas that never gel together into a cohesive whole.
  15. We Can Be Heroes
    Robert Rodriguez’s film, like The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D, fundamentally lacks a sense of wonder.
  16. Fixed
    The balls-out shock value doesn’t detract from the fact that Fixed is more square than its makers probably think it is.
  17. Skyscraper
    Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is the true Tower of Babel, the movie star who with each film gets closer to God and whose films always come tumbling down around him.
  18. The Face of Love
    An almost offensively "tasteful" dud that remains irritatingly on the surface, more alive to the set design than the characters' motivations.
  19. God's Pocket
    Throughout, it becomes difficult to know whether we're meant to empathize with these characters or laugh at them.
  20. Taurus
    Taurus is in the business of self-aggrandizement, but this is a film that understands that stardom is inherently aggrandizing.
  21. Risen
    It's an episode of Without a Trace: Jerusalem presented with all the panache of a Trinity Broadcasting Network TV special.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Song of Names
    In the end, the film is unable to bridge the gap between the emotions it elicits and the messages it imparts.
  23. The Liberator
    It's sense of complexity is giving us masses of people moved by Simon Bolívar's words, and gorgeous sweeping vistas of the landscape backed by a stirring orchestra.
  24. Nobody Walks
    The whole thing comes out feeling kind of featureless, beaten flat by its own sense of fairness.
  25. The Song of Sway Lake
    Despite Ari Gold’s knack for visual flourishes that capture a sense of place seemingly outside of time, The Song of Sway Lake plays like several disparate melodies overlapping one another.
  26. The Grinch
    The film’s vision of Christmas is so insipid and lifeless, it’s hard to see why the Grinch would even bother to steal it.
  27. In Our Nature
    In Our Nature's visual style seems plastered on or allocated, not developed with any sort of authorial singularity.
  28. My Brothers
    An uncommon example of purely allegorical cinema, Paul Fraser's film foregoes plot almost entirely in favor of thematic resonance.
  29. That Demon Within
    It rarely feels like anything more than an effort to pander to the kind of audiences that enjoy Quentin Tarantino's films for all the wrong reasons.
  30. The Walker
    Paul Schrader blends lethargic self-referentiality with anemic political jabs in The Walker.
  31. 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.
  32. The Pill
    At the very least, The Pill could have been a pleasant exercise in screenwriting sharpness if Fred and Mindy's situation had been confined and (un-)resolved within the confines of its very promising first scene.
  33. 11 Minutes
    Jerzy Skolimowski's formal control over the material is so masterful that the textual particulars are revealed to be beside the point.
  34. Dumbo
    Tim Burton manages to put his stamp on this clunky behemoth of a film, but in the end, the Mouse always wins.
  35. Rough Night
    To some degree, Rough Night's attention to character detail compensates for its weaknesses as a comedy.
  36. Criminal Activities
    The actors have the showmanship to chew the lurid, shopworn material up to bits, savoring it like a Royale with cheese.
  37. Peter Rabbit
    Peter Rabbit plays like a country cousin to Paul King's Paddington films, similarly balancing slapstick, absurdism, and a touch of gross-out humor, though without King's transcendently oddball sensibility.
  38. Late Phases
    Adrián García Bogliano ends up merely toying with the death-steeped concerns of his characters, and taking the furious and bitter perspective that powers the narrative's ponderous dramatic core for granted.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    What Just Happened
    Generally, the film is a compelling portrait of Hollywood egoism, though it suffers from this very egoism itself. It’s hard to tell where the film is representing reality, and where it is representing a caricature of reality.
  40. Mademoiselle C
    It's to Carine Roitfeld's own credit and director Fabien Constant's funky and frenetic pacing that the doc feels neither like a corporate hagiography nor like mere fashionista masturbation material.
  41. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    The film is a curiously anodyne affair that proposes the distinctly unenlightening idea that the medicine against despair is just a little R&R.
  42. Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre
    Promising but failing to deliver the colorful characters and winding, breakneck plot of a caper, Operation Fortune may itself be a ruse, but it’s not a convincing one.
  43. 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.
  44. Private Peaceful
    By modestly embracing its inherent minimalism and finding the emotions underlying even the most schematic of scenarios, the film taps into something unmistakably human.
  45. A Man Called Otto
    The film is so toothless that its protagonist is ultimately about as forbidding as a warm hug.
  46. Me Before You
    It punks its impressionable audience into believing a lie, then punishes them for their foolishness.
  47. The Woman in the Yard
    The film is a slow-burning tale of very real traumas suffered by a woman far out of her element and forced to process a tragedy on top of it all.
  48. Izzy Gets the F*ck Across Town
    Christian Papierniak manages to get a tricky tonal balance more or less right, capturing the false sense of superiority that Izzy projects over her environment without allowing the film itself to revel in said superiority.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Barbarella
    A rambling, shaggy-dog structure as an excuse to flagrantly foreground softcore sexual hijinks tinged with a pungent whiff of social commentary.
  50. Pretty Lethal
    The film is lean, mean, and feisty, even if it doesn’t quite stick the landing.
  51. The Accountant
    The film juggles a “follow the money” procedural with corporate espionage thriller, producing two competing tones that never reconcile into one fluid narrative.
  52. Trolls World Tour
    At its best, the film doesn’t just privilege altered states of consciousness, it is an altered state of consciousness.
  53. My Blueberry Nights
    Every shot is painstakingly thought out, but less emphasis is placed on the human face than on the surfaces that reflect it and the objects that obscure it, and the overall effect is close to that of fetish art.
  54. White Bird in a Blizzard
    Gregg Araki's film suggests a hothouse melodrama that's been drained of the hothouse, the melodrama, and any other discernably dramatic stakes.
  55. Naples '44
    It’s far too scattershot, bouncing from one topic to the next with the carelessness of someone flipping through a book and reading from a random page.
  56. Liberté
    Though betraying the markings of its original form in its small revolving ensemble, single location, and frequent tableau staging, Liberté conjures a sustained ambiance and eroticism that’s unique to the language of cinema.
  57. Yves Saint Laurent
    For all of the supposed passion and anguish in Saint Laurent's clothing and relationships, Jalil Lespert consistently neglects to imbue the film with such a comparable level of ambition or desire.
  58. A Little Chaos
    Alan Rickman's film is consistently, and often dispiritingly, mired in the quaint tradition of the classy costume drama.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace
    It's difficult to discern precisely where this all went wrong, and even more difficult to speculate about possible improvements.
  60. Walk Away Renee
    It's Jonathan Caouette's insistence in going back to his nightmarish old footage, or the old footage that he purposefully renders nightmarish, that seems more interesting.
  61. Ender's Game
    Gavin Hood relays a vague sense of what it's like to live in duty, and yet at a distance from one's home, but this vision of the future never rouses, never asks to be remembered.
  62. Half of a Yellow Sun
    It falls into the trappings of middlebrow literary adaptation by finding only sporadic means to convincingly adjudicate the trauma and anguish of its transitory epoch.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Gentlemen
    The London of this film is practically a match for Guy Ritchie’s filmmaking: a characterless mockery of its former glories, smooth and bland and just a bit more monied than before.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Expendables 2
    It plays out like a series wet-dream scenarios, performed by a cast of vintage action figures battered and broken from overuse, bleached and slightly molted from sitting in the sun too long.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Lord of the Rings
    Not even the Dark Lord Sauron would want to put his name to this movie.
  66. Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away
    The movie is something of a compositional nightmare, worlds away, one might say, from the artistry so associated with Cirque.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Call
    Brad Anderson's film is defined by an often frustrating combination of cleverness and stupidity.
  68. Free the Mind
    Phie Ambo deftly captures her subjects' sense of paranoia and helplessness without encroaching on their brave candor.
  69. Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle
    While the film’s perception of the politics of the jungle is often profound, the same cannot be said of its take on the human world.
  70. Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates
    Much like with Neighbors 2, Mike and Dave’s obvious ace in the hole is its commitment to gender parity.
  71. Papillon
    This remake proffers the sort of cinematic nowhere place that's all too common of an increasingly corporate, globalized cinema.
  72. Day Shift
    Day Shift’s first half is an unexpectedly focused, consistent pleasure, while the second sags under the weight of recycled set pieces.
  73. The Bad Seed
    The Bad Seed might not have the lurid veneer of Oedipal conflict that turned The Good Son into a supreme guilty pleasure, but it’s got more false-façade performances than you could ever hope for.
  74. Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life
    Unimaginatively directed and indifferently shot, the film never establishes a distinctive voice for itself.
  75. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula
    Peninsula feels like the work of an artist who misunderstood his past triumph, squandering his talent for the sake of a pandering, halfhearted encore.
  76. 21 Bridges
    It’s difficult to imagine a worse time to release Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges than the present.
  77. Lovelace
    Lost in the music, mustaches, and furniture of the early '70s, this docudrama of a porn star's exploitation isn't nearly painful enough.
  78. Marry Me
    Marry Me plays out as the logical culmination of a multi-hyphenate icon’s indiscriminate commercial voracity.
  79. Hardcore Henry
    The film's unbelievably precise choreography of action seeks to tap into a universal feeling of powerlessness.
  80. Parkland
    The Peter Landesman film's overt politics are minimal, aside from defaulting to the myth of John F. Kennedy as a martyr for...something.
  81. John Carter
    As film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once wrote, to paraphrase, art often blooms in the most hostile soil. No such luck here.
  82. Misery Loves Comedy
    Commingling industry shoptalk with introspective insights and wrangling testimonials, the film casts an incredibly wide net, but doesn't reveal much of anything.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Mermaid
    Ultimately, Mermaid shows how loneliness can un-anchor a person, and it makes you understand how any lost sailor might fall for the first thing, no matter what it is, that breaks it.
  84. Anonymous
    Anonymous leaves one bereft of any meaningful knowledge of these personages or the theatrical energy of their age, and earns the obscurity it figures to acquire even if the war between Team Edward and Team William blazes on.
  85. Jack Reacher
    The film is as incompetent, manipulative, safe, and disposable as any number of nickel-and-dime actioners, but goes to great, unconvincing lengths to insist it's different.
  86. Romeo Is Bleeding
    Romeo Is Bleeding projects an aura of obsessive self-consciousness that occasionally suggests the superior film that eluded its creators.
  87. 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.
  88. Clerks III
    Kevin Smith toys with death in Clerks III as a shortcut to bring emotion to a film that otherwise has no meaningful hook.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Human Scale
    While there's no doubt that a city's walkability is important, the film would have benefitted from either stats or testimonials in favor of its central premise.
  90. Partisan
    Ariel Kleiman fashions an erotic atmosphere of dusty sensuality that complicates our judgement of this world, but he takes shortcuts.
  91. Studio 666
    The film’s funny and shocking gore too often plays second fiddle to meandering comedic bits revolving around the band’s recording sessions.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wolf Man
    Wolf Man neither embraces the fundamentals of the werewolf folklore from which it draws nor convincingly reinvents them.
  93. Dog Sweat
    With six protagonists serving as a cross-section of Tehran's youthful population, director Hossein Keshavarz's Dog Sweat is a somber, minor-keyed debut feature about the daily manifestations of oppression in contemporary Iran.
  94. 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.
  95. True Story
    If the film's copycat visual artistry illuminates nothing, at least its script is sincerely devoted to probing Finkel and Longo's odd partnership.
  96. I Give It a Year
    Much of the film's attempted laughs come from the comedy-of-discomfort school, with an endless array of situations that milk awkwardness to a degree that makes these scenes far more unpleasant than humorous to watch.
  97. Maze Runner: The Death Cure
    Emotional complication is what this film, so abundant in last-minute getaways, fake-outs, and half-hearted nods to the franchise's greatest hits, needed so as to elevate it out of its programmatic torpor.
  98. Happy Feet Two
    There's something about these films, something about the working-over these songs suffer--a wrongness that's intangible but inescapable, like the unseen menace of a bad dream.
  99. Last Christmas
    Clarke works hard to make the messy, perpetually flustered Kate relatable, but the film surrounds the character with a community as kitschy and false as the trinkets she sells in Santa’s shop.
  100. 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.
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