Slant Magazine's Scores

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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:
  1. Positive: 4,349 out of 7775
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7775
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7775
7775 movie reviews
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  1. Dracula
    As Dracula wears on, its lack of focus starts to grate, while Radu Jude’s deployment of profane, disreputable dialogue and imagery starts to resemble a stylistic tic more than a genuine affront to his audience’s sensibilities.
  2. 100 Nights of Hero
    The film’s brand of feminism is as skin-deep as the narrative.
  3. Late Fame
    Its desire to resist easy storytelling paradigms around artists is admirable, but without punching up or down, the film feels like it’s pulling punches altogether.
  4. The Voice of Hind Rajab
    Watching actors interact with an authentic recording of a child on the brink of death is less an invitation to audiences to wrestle with the horrors of war and more with the ethics of the film’s creative choices.
  5. Christy
    Christy lulls us into complacency by deviating little from the standard inspirational sports-movie playbook.
  6. The Ugly
    The film plays a long game with audiences that frustrates far more than it illuminates.
  7. Primate
    If only the filmmakers had put the same care and thought into their human characters, then Primate might have been worth going apeshit over.
    • 70 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Last One for the Road
    The Last One for the Road gives itself over to an aimlessness that doesn’t so much reflect the characters’ lives as it does the script’s lack of commitment to interiority.
  9. Greenland 2: Migration
    Greenland 2 plays out as a much more generic thriller than its predecessor.
  10. The Moment
    Farce and sincerity make more odd bedfellows across Aidan Zamiri’s meta mockumentary about Brat Summer.
  11. Crime 101
    Like Mike’s modus operandi as a criminal, the film goes through all the pro forma motions.
  12. The Set-Up
    Robert Wise’s The Set-Up isn’t noir by any serious definition, its boilerplate fatalism undone by overbearing moralizing and the fact that Ryan’s boxer is too one-dimensionally good to register as tragic.
  13. In the Grey
    At some point before the truncated-seeming finale, the film is just chasing its own tail.
  14. WTO/99
    WTO/99 sets out to correct misrepresentation by corporate media about the aims of the movement, but that attempt is hampered by the recycling of much of the same news footage from news broadcasts.
  15. I Love Boosters
    Arrhythmic, unfocused, and forgetting to breathe, this overstuffed film feels like a circus act, a well-dressed elephant on a unicycle juggling a dozen balls. It’s an impressive feat of dexterity, if not grace.
  16. Billie Eilish - Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D)
    The film doesn’t totally succeed in capturing the show’s scope or thematic through line.
  17. I Want Your Sex
    The film gets too caught up in concern trolling about the sexual timidity of today’s youth.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    They Will Kill You
    This is a film that’s content to imitate its influences rather than build an identity of its own.
  19. Dolly
    One senses that Rod Blackhurst knows that Dolly is undernourished, but his attempts to jazz it up by splitting it into transparently titled chapters only calls further attention to that dearth of imagination.
  20. Over Your Dead Body
    Once it turns into a home-invasion thriller, the film becomes more sadistic than hilarious.
  21. Faces of Death
    For a film that’s so well versed not only in the genre but in its tendencies to recreate and recycle itself, it’s disappointing to see Faces of Death do so in such slavish fashion.
  22. Lady Sings the Blues
    It’s an amateur star performance-as-Stanislavski mail order catalog: a powerhouse of Method-ology (born more from a lack of acting experience than pop singers’ already refined sense of emotive abandon), complete with ingénue tics, a self-conscious display of age range, tentative ad-libs, flailing limbs, leaky eyes, precariously receding eyelids.
  23. Manas
    With one foot planted in documentary exposé and the other in coming-of-age drama, the film falls short of satisfying the demands of either genre.
  24. 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.
  25. The Walker
    Paul Schrader blends lethargic self-referentiality with anemic political jabs in The Walker.
  26. X-Men Origins: Wolverine
    The action is perfunctory and forgettable, albeit no more so than the script's range of clichés.
  27. Die Another Day
    The collection of clever quips on parade here are both tiresome and predictable.
  28. She Hate Me
    Most contracts are negotiated with John Hancocks, but in She Hate Me, deals are sealed with hot lesbian action. Spike, get a clue.
  29. In Praise of Love
    A sniveling diatribe from a great director beginning to resemble someone's senile grandfather.
  30. The Secret in Their Eyes
    Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.
  31. Don't Be Afraid of the Dark
    Does Katie Holmes's hubby get script-doctoring rights even on her own film projects? That would explain why Troy Nixey's inane Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, co-written and produced by Guillermo del Toro, at times suggests an anti-Rx PSA.
  32. Fast Five
    From unique to generic, it's a gear-shift that may prolong the franchise's life (a mid-credits coda confirms that a sixth installment is on its way), but, in the process, also renders it redundant.
  33. The Dictator
    Its dolly- and crane-operated polish points toward an acquiescence to Tinseltown mores, which until now Baron Cohen hovered cheekily above.
  34. Friends with Benefits
    For a film that had once made some pretense toward exposing such dangerously submissive attitudes toward Hollywood romance, Friends with Benefits's conclusion can't help but seem more than a wee bit disingenuous.
  35. X-Men: First Class
    Despite his apparent comfort with F/X-heavy projects, the obligations of duty to the brand are too much for Matthew Vaughn's strange, singular voice, which rarely has the chance to shape the film unmolested by a curiously bland script.
  36. The Smurfs
    Like the show, this boring, lazy, clumsily staged, overly lit, unnecessarily 3D-ed contraption even culminates with some half-hearted moral hectoring-in this case, the togetherness of the Smurfs works to validate heteronormative values.
  37. Bad Teacher
    Despite aping its title in order to suggest quality by association, Bad Teacher has nothing in common with "Bad Santa" -- including, alas, a genuinely nasty sense of humor.
  38. The Sitter
    An ugly rendering of an infantile script that constantly exploits stereotypes for cheap guffaws, and employs the hollow trend of hoping ultra-specific, zeitgeisty lingo will distract from inert, derivative storytelling.
  39. 30 Minutes or Less
    Watching 30 Minutes or Less, a proudly stupid action comedy that's awfully lethargic for all its slam-bang propulsion, it's tough to pinpoint who exactly Ruben Fleischer thinks he is.
  40. Contagion
    A germophobe's worst nightmare, Contagion touches on all the dramas big and small, mostly big, we've come to associate with catastrophes such as this, and does so as if it were hurriedly going down and adapting a list of bullet points, never lingering on any one drama in a particularly meaningful fashion.
  41. 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.
  42. Straw Dogs
    Despite Lurie's part-time efforts to lend the film some sense of place, the impulse to hot-ify everything from Peckinpah's considerably more earthbound original ultimately outpaces his meager good intentions.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bernie
    A surprisingly shapeless true-crime farce which never creates a convincing context for the odd relationship between a pious East Texas mortician and his sugar mama.
  44. The Future
    Of all the vaguely philosophical, calculatedly left-of-center dialogue that peppers Miranda July's The Future, no line is more telling than the writer/director/star's late-film declaration, in the guise of her character Sophie, that "I'm saying okay to nothing."
  45. 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.
  46. Brighton Rock
    Brighton Rock never brings its baby-faced hood antihero, the scarfaced Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley, pouting and hunched in the late-DiCaprio manner), into a semblance of human plausibility.
  47. The Raven
    While full of welcome gore and blood spatter, it's bankrupt of any creative spark.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    What's Your Number?
    Watching Faris's reactions to the bizarre material that makes up this film is like witnessing someone with a weird sense of humor make a string of jokes that no one's even catching.
  49. Johnny English Reborn
    As ticklish as one might find the idea of an equivalent Mr. Bean character occupying the driver's seat of a James Bond parody, it's likely that even a competent manifestation of such a scenario would pale in comparison to what Mike Myers and Jay Roach pulled off with apparent ease in their Austin Powers films.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Prometheus
    It aspires to Stanley Kubrick's "2001", but in its maddeningly unresolved plot threads and cornball cosmic mysticism, it lands closer to "Mission to Mars" -though Prometheus lacks any action set piece as gripping as the Brian De Palma film's sentient sandstorm.
  51. That's My Boy
    That's My Boy lazily exists in a fantasyland of Adam Sandler's perpetual adolescence, even as it generates some moderate comic friction from Sandler and Andy Samberg's testy back-and-forth.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Total Recall (2012)
    Len Wiseman's Total Recall's a trifling mess, as superfluous as a third breast.
  53. The Croods
    The film takes more than a few pages from the James Cameron playbook.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wreck-It Ralph
    Nothing but broad, pandering indexes tailored to appeal to the arcade wistfulness the film never even bothers to convincingly evoke.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Life, Above All
    By the time the narrative winds toward its key revelation, even the most earnest viewer is numbed and emotionally desensitized by the unfathomable bleakness already overcrowding the screen.
  56. 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.
  57. Trollhunter
    Injecting some down time to intimate a vast internal life is one thing, but needlessly approximating patches of wasted time is another, and Trollhunter's dully drawn characters suggest that the latter is closer to what André Øvredal came up with.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Viva Riva!
    The near-slapstick escapes sit uneasily with the raw bits of very adult sex and cringe-worthy close-ups of brutality that dominate the rest of the proceedings.
  59. Buck
    Life lessons abound in Buck, most of them tied to endlessly reiterated comparisons between man and horse.
  60. Conan O'Brien Can't Stop
    Can't mask that, at heart, it's merely a trifling tour documentary that gives further excessive attention to the late-night star's 2010 ouster as The Tonight Show host.
  61. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    Despite gestures toward modernity and clumsy humanism, the film feels regressive, presenting a version of modern China that's as much of an anesthetized fairy tale as its costume-drama past.
  62. The Perfect Host
    Although it fancies itself as rigidly complex as a well-played chess match, Nick Tomnay's The Perfect Host is really a game without any rules, one where characters and situations exist in total thrall of the next shocking twist.
  63. Martha Marcy May Marlene
    The film seems almost to have been produced spontaneously, by gears of a larger system as they mesh together right this instant, culled from the ether with the words "Customers Who Also Liked Dogtooth and Winter's Bone Liked This…"
  64. Lucky
    The film is a collection of consciously quirky indie tropes in place of any meaningful narrative, and you can practically see the notebook the filmmakers may have written in during a brainstorming session in a college screenwriting seminar.
  65. Sarah's Key
    Sarah's Key becomes a musing ("meditation" would be too generous) on the importance of uncovering the past that fails to honestly contemplate why such an act is significant.
  66. The Best and the Brightest
    Writer-director Josh Shelov (working with co-writer Michael Jaeger) is trolling in fertile, easy territory, but rather than mine the subject for what it's worth, he resorts to depressingly cheap mistaken-identity shenanigans and raunchy "he-milk" gags.
  67. Dirty Girl
    There's a girl, and she's prone to dirty acts, but that's just one patch of this arbitrarily stitched quilt of white-trash, Bible-Belt transgression, which flattens under the weight of a truckload of half-realized ambitions.
  68. Seven Days in Utopia
    God bless Robert Duvall. An American cinematic institution, our greatest living actor makes the fortune-cookie bromides of Matthew Dean Russell's Seven Days in Utopia sound like Yates.
  69. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Avoids funny one-liners like the plague, choosing in their place to deliver only squishy faux-outrageousness that, like Sudeikis's one-note stud, exudes an unwelcome air of self-satisfaction.
  70. The Devil Inside
    The film's contradictory and nullifying dilemma of wanting to be both scripted and vérité at once, a plight that affects so much contemporary TV, is temporarily quelled in heated scenes of curse-laden levitation and Linda Blair contortion, which dutifully deliver the scares.
  71. Man on a Ledge
    The script is a hot mess of the highest order, taking some of the stalest chestnuts in the long, venerated legacy of the framed-cop-trying-to-clear-his-name genre and somehow f---ing it up, in scene after scene after scene.
  72. Upside Down
    The highlight of the film is the moment Jim Sturgess's Adam inadvertently pisses on the ceiling.
  73. The Artist
    The Artist neatly sidesteps this unsolvable dilemma by ignoring everything that's fascinating and memorable about the era, focusing instead on a patchwork of general knowledge, so eroded of inconvenient facts that it doesn't even qualify as a roman à clef.
  74. General Orders No. 9
    Under the modern mannerisms lies a rather clumsily Romantic -- one might say Wordsworthian -- rant that juxtaposes urbanity against a nebulous, fictitious past.
  75. 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.
  76. Gone
    Nearly a year has passed since the release of Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood, and Amanda Seyfried is still crying wolf.
  77. In the Land of Blood and Honey
    When does intensity and commitment supersede historical understanding?
    • 70 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    !Women Art Revolution
    Unlike Pamela Tanner Boll's truly inquisitive "Who Does She Think She Is?", which delves deeply and personally into the lives of a handful of working artist moms, Hershman Leeson introduces us only superficially to her dozens of pioneering friends.
  79. Hunter Killer
    The film is a second-rate airport thriller that makes The Hunt for Red October seem like nonfiction by comparison.
  80. Programming the Nation?
    A pseudo-investigative documentary shakily committed to the subject of subliminal messaging in America, but curiously indulgent about giving the singer of Queensryche time to spout off about whatever enters his head.
  81. The Lone Ranger
    The movie, of course, barrels toward climax upon climax, and while possibly better photographed, the crashes, bangs, and booms are no less numbing than anything else you've seen in this summer of garbage blockbusters.
  82. Man of Steel
    All its faux-patriotism isn't played for satire, but instead utilized to align the film with an idyllic, unquestioned vision of goodness.
  83. Savages
    While his classic hyperbolic visual style is back in force, Stone can't bother to muster any of his usual righteous anger, instead mischanneling his discontent into a kind of zen acceptance of these perpetually tiresome main characters.
  84. Despicable Me 2
    The script's jumble of plot asides and family-friendly pandering is enough to make you want to root for a hero.
  85. Halloween
    For all of the film’s attempts to get back to the sinisterly sidling Michael of the first Halloween, his stealth movements no longer terrify because his fixations are less unthinkingly instinctual, more compulsively mortal.
  86. The Family Tree
    A few trite race and religion jokes goose up what's mostly a sentimental story of a dysfunctional family suddenly and magically learning to function again.
  87. R.I.P.D.
    R.I.P.D. devotes far more energy to concept than execution, leaving most of the promising aspects high and dry.
  88. Ironclad
    By making John such an unrepentant freedom-opposing monster, Ironclad denies itself any moral thorniness.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Girlfriend
    Girlfriend doesn't present us with anything life-affirming, challenging, or expectation-beating about a lead character with Down's.
  90. Hood to Coast
    Hood to Coast mostly suffers from an incessant soundtrack that stuffs the film with a peppiness that blocks the tragedy of its characters from view, as well as their overcoming it.
  91. Love in Space
    The weightlessness that dominates the film is no special effect.
  92. 3-D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy
    For a film so proud of its trail-blazing status ("the first 3D erotic movie"), 3d Sex and Zen is certainly driven by the same good old symptoms.
  93. Granito: How to Nail a Dictator
    The key to good, or at least effective, agitprop (and Oliver Stone and Michael Moore know this) is that, yes, it must simplify matters, but it necessitates canny presentation so that it may truly get into viewers' blood streams and rile them.
  94. Cook County
    Unlike AMC's Breaking Bad, meth here doesn't reflect current, perilous economic realties; rather, it's just a low-rent drug used by degenerates whose lives say nothing about anything.
  95. This Is 40
    It certainly suffers from the staleness of its off-the-cuff, improv-inspired mode of comedy, which prizes free-form riffing over organically constructed comedic scenarios.
  96. Mr. Peabody & Sherman
    The film spent roughly a dozen years in development, and the moronic, corporate detritus from that long time warp is strewn about like so many improbable history lessons.
  97. Fire in Babylon
    Perhaps because the Caribbean serves as its main setting, Fire in Babylon simply can't help but take it easy.
  98. Burke and Hare
    Broadness this indolent hardly even stirs one to antipathy.
  99. True Adolescents
    Glomming conceits and situations from a vast range of similarly themed films, it ambles along in a lethargic, good-natured manner, fitfully amusing but never approaching substantial.
  100. Good Neighbors
    Good Neighbors basically runs on the assumption that Montreal is the last place you would ever want to live.
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