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. Final Destination 5
    If the series really does end here, may this final installment be hailed as a triumph of poetic justice.
  2. Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    The third film in the series reliably delivers on the promise of both flamboyant showmanship and a steadfast refusal to adhere to more than just the rules of physics.
  3. The Marvels
    Only in the film’s climax, when the heroes are in the same confined area and can thus better calibrate their constant shifts in position, does the action attain a logical sense of movement and timing.
  4. All She Can
    The unconventional choice of extra-curricular activity for Luz sheds light onto the strange sport of powerlifting, in which teen girls are constantly weighed and sometimes told that they have 40 minutes to get three pounds off their bodies so they can compete.
  5. In Their Skin
    Winds up turning itself into just a rote thriller about psychos learning that, appearance notwithstanding, every family has dysfunctional problems.
  6. A Bag of Hammers
    Suffers from both an odd, ineffective structure and a low-key tone that jars uncomfortably with the subject matter and makes the film's stakes seem unnecessary low.
  7. Closed Circuit
    It fails as a critique of draconian security states and surveillance culture, moving too fast to properly consider any of the well-worn ideas it glosses over.
  8. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    Nothing more than an absurdist soap-opera bauble.
  9. Holidays
    Every short exudes a commercially slick anonymity that effectively flattens any potential excitement.
    • 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.
  11. Honkytonk Man
    Though the film is obviously coated with a veneer of nostalgic sentimentality, Eastwood never lets Honkytonk Man veer into maudlin territory.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Hit and Run
    Far more frustrating than the film's banally conventional plot structure is its characters' lack of depth.
  13. Freeheld
    The filmmakers, for better and for worse, stay out of the actresses' way, as Freeheld's artistry is so unadorned that the performances somehow feel more naked as a result.
  14. Miss Minoes
    After 30 long minutes, I stopped trying to make allowances for its varying ineptitudes, and Carice van Houten's work as the spunky human cat was the only reason I held out that long.
  15. Edge of Winter
    One comes to resent the film for how it thrills to the possibility of a father hurting his children.
  16. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure
    The thorough goofiness the film luxuriates in, as compared to the covert self-seriousness of nearly every teen comedy ever made, sets Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure apart and heads and tails above the glut of its ilk. Most triumphant, indeed.
  17. A Good Person
    The more that Zach Braff’s script tries to thematically tie its disparate threads together, the more that A Good Person comes to resemble the very same type of neat and tidy self-contained version of reality that it ironically skewers in its prologue.
  18. Jurassic World Rebirth
    There’s a grating meta-ness to Gareth Edwards’s Jurassic World Rebirth that speaks to the filmmakers’ knowledge that they’re at the mercy of pressures to bring something new to a franchise that’s now on its seventh installment.
  19. The Hunt
    The film was almost canceled for being too partisan, so it’s ironic to discover that it’s practically apolitical.
  20. Little White Lies
    The specific narrative handicaps throughout are mostly too banal to warrant exegesis, though the choice of vintage pop tunes for dramatic underscoring is particularly grating.
  21. War on Everyone
    The film is in love with the tropes it ridicules, and it doesn't take long for that love to dwarf any possibility of critique.
  22. Marius
    Daniel Auteuil's less exercising diligent homage than indulging troglodytic cinephilia.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 88 Critic Score
    Swamp Thing
    It all adds up to a surefire cult film in the making.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Equalizer 2
    Order and righteousness being the product of one great man, The Equalizer 2 is symptomatic of a confused time when people are collectively looking for invulnerable superheroes who don't so much as speak truth to injustice as beat the hell out of it, and its cathartic pleasures leave a bad taste.
  25. Life After Beth
    Jeff Baena's film, at heart, is just another overly familiar story of a boy struggling to get over his first love and who's rewarded for his troubles with a less volatile replacement model.
  26. Going Down in LA-LA Land
    Director Casper Andreas does a good job conserving a simultaneous sense of disgust and attraction for the way big-city dreams end up stripping off wannabes from everything but their bodies.
  27. i hate myself :)
    Few documentarians give themselves to their work as literally as Joanna Arnow.
  28. Here Comes the Devil
    The film is eventually revealed as less interested in subverting or playing off its influences than rigorously retracing them.
  29. The Ugly
    The film plays a long game with audiences that frustrates far more than it illuminates.
  30. Snow White
    This is a fairly paint-by-numbers exercise in updating a quintessential but unquestionably quaint property for modern consumption.
  31. Afternoon Delight
    Jill Soloway's film is dishonest in the way it attempts to mask self-pity as enlightened self-criticism.
  32. Skiptrace
    The film's bloated action-comedy machinery prevents any real chemistry from forming between Jackie Chan and Johnny Knoxville.
  33. Last Rampage
    Although Last Rampage's overarching narrative travels a well-tread road, it strikes a number of potent grace notes along the way.
  34. The Land
    Writer-director Steven Caple Jr.'s social-realist tendencies run up against some unconvincing genre elements.
  35. War Story
    Mark Jackson's direction strips much of the agency from any character's grasp by insisting that their dilemmas can only be revealed with stone-faced austerity.
  36. Lolo
    A curiously unsentimental director of romantic comedies, Julie Delpy sees romance for the work that it primarily is.
  37. Septien
    Like many films early in a director's career, it plays more as a sketchbook of intended future endeavors than as a cohesive and fully realized vision in its own right.
  38. Bloodsucking Bastards
    It evinces a qualified kind of courage in its anonymous convictions, parodying a world that barely ever existed by barely existing itself.
  39. The Vault
    The film misses the opportunity for a suspenseful interweaving of sports spectatorship and its characters’ high-stakes gambits.
  40. Lifeforce
    Watching Lifeforce now is to be reminded that even big-budget films were once allowed to be adventurous and idiosyncratic, even in the 1980s, and that American horror movies were once capable of being fun, sexy, and subversively empathetic.
  41. Going in Style
    No one in Going in Style seems to really know what the hell they’re doing or why. And even though that goes double for the filmmakers, at least no one succumbs to taking any of it seriously.
  42. The Zero Theorem
    Terry Gilliam has imposed a mix tape of his greatest hits, whose greatness was debatable to begin with, on a whiff of a story that might've flourished under the maxim "less is more."
  43. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    The film's tagline goes “Talk to the girl. Save the world,” but at no point does Earth's fate hang in the balance, and talking to Elle Fanning's Zan is no great challenge for anyone.
  44. Racer and the Jailbird
    The film comes to concern a selfless martyr before morphing, most absurdly, into a disease-of-the-week tearjerker.
  45. The Guilt Trip
    Mothers and sons deserve an amiable comedy they can share, but this one proves to be faulty long before the requisite freeway breakdown.
  46. American Ultra
    A Bourne movie turned just askew enough to be funny, American Ultra trains a bemused eye on a trope ripe for a ribbing.
  47. Into the Ashes
    Aaron Henry is prone to pulling back from any moment that might give greater depth to his revenge tale.
  48. Jungle Cruise
    Jaume Collet-Serra’s deft touches elevate what otherwise feels like another formulaic contemporary Disney blockbuster.
  49. The Boss Baby
    Every Republican regime gets the ludicrous devious-baby saga it deserves.
  50. Joan of Arc
    Bruno Dumont seems perpetually aware of the trap of familiarity, which may be why he indulges in some of his most inscrutable filmmaking.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Switch
    Switch is possibly the driest and most balanced documentary on the current energy crisis.
  52. The Night Eats the World
    Dominique Rocher reinvigorates the zombie film only to succumb to the strictures of the coming-of-age romance.
  53. Shoplifters of the World
    The film lacks for the empathy, curiosity, and sense of humor that are the defining characteristics of the Smiths’s music.
  54. Cobweb
    As tantalizing as the film’s ambiguity can be in certain moments, there comes a point where it starts to feel at once half-baked and a transparent means of delaying the inevitable.
  55. Boundaries
    Christopher Plummer brings a twinkly eyed insouciance to his character, but there's only so many times Jack can make a joke about, say, his adult diapers before it becomes thin and hollow.
  56. Trash
    Director Stephen Daldry, working from an exploitative script by Richard Curtis, opts for a full-on Slumdog Millionaire imitation.
  57. After the Wedding
    The film diverts us away from its hint of a social message using a series of tired twists and turns that don’t signify much of anything.
  58. Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken
    Sweet but narratively thin and didactic, the latest from DreamWorks Animation always seems as if it’s trying to find its footing.
  59. Champions
    As Champions tediously veers between the increasingly rote narrative beats of an inspirational sports story and a love story of opposites attract, it further stresses its own archaic qualities with a consciously anachronistic soundtrack that includes Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” EMF’s “Unbelievable,” and Outkast’s “Hey Ya.”
  60. The Campaign
    A lumpy spoof of electoral mudslinging that offers some bracing bipartisan contempt amid the lowbrow, labored slapstick.
  61. Ticket to Paradise
    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.
  62. 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.
  63. A Kind of Murder
    The film seems more interested in its art design then in fully developing the story's underlying sexual ethics.
  64. It Lives Inside
    The film views its main character’s culture, as well as her struggles to suppress her identity in order to fit into her suburban world, with a nonchalance that often scans as negligence.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Off-White Lies
    Elya Inbar is a surprisingly commanding screen presence, but she's contending with a screenplay plagued by contrivance--a battle few could win.
  66. Child of God
    James Franco's general aesthetic is ugly and ambling, not so much because of its brownish-gray monochrome, but because it registers like the jerky result of a college kid wielding a DV cam.
  67. My Salinger Year
    The film fails to effectively seize on how its main character’s life and work experiences have affected her as a person and artist.
  68. My Mother's Wedding
    Where Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married completely immersed viewers in the sometimes messy intimacies of family, My Mother’s Wedding feels more like a stage production that forgot to include its first act.
  69. Shit Year
    Shit Year is a thematic twin to Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard," both heightened fables about the slow disintegration of a retired actress mourning her now-dead career by retreating inward.
  70. As I Lay Dying
    James Franco's readiness in approaching famously abstract source material certainly doesn't translate well into his directorial formalism, or, more appropriately, lack of formalism.
  71. Lovely Molly
    The film's inconsistent, largely bankrupt style is second to how hard and tackily it leans on the horror of child abuse to goose audiences.
  72. Now You See Me
    There's nothing behind all this sturm und drang but a lineup of insubstantial ciphers, all false fronts and empty words in a pretend world not quite conducive to emotional investment.
  73. Witchboard
    Some of the period action set pieces are spirited in their staging, while the film doesn’t lack for gruesome and elaborate kill sequences, which is almost enough to distract from the screenplay’s patchiness and insipid characterizations.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Dark Skies
    Scott Stewart's Dark Skies is the definitive horror film for the Tea Party era.
  75. The American Society of Magical Negroes
    There are versions of this premise relevant to a modern world, but the film’s point of view on the state of race relations feels stuck somewhere around 1954.
  76. Bel Borba Aqui
    There's no pointing toward something other than the work itself, no poetic digression, no suggestion of a conceptual dimensionality to the work being produced.
  77. 28 Hotel Rooms
    We're supposed to take their self-pity at face value, an impression that's emphasized by a grinding monotonous humorlessness.
  78. Halloween III: Season of the Witch
    That plot gives you an idea of how casually insane this movie is, but if you’re able to radically suspend your disbelief (the story is an illogical shambles), the film offers a number of modest pleasures.
  79. Nobody's Hero
    The film goes from biting satire to broad farce and back as Alain Guiraudie fills it with both social observation and ludicrous incident.
  80. Society
    Society never entirely decides whether it’s a plot-centric horror-mystery or an imagistic fantasy; the film’s self-conscious emptiness drains the incestuous conceit of its shock value, defanging a nervy gross-out.
  81. Elles
    The film is ultimately draining because of the way it handles Anne, stranding a potentially dynamic character in two dueling scenarios, both of which are drab and unsurprising.
  82. Cowboys & Aliens
    Brandishing a literal-minded title as laughable as the rest of its action, Cowboys & Aliens mashes up genres with a staunch dedication to getting everything wrong, making sure that each scene is more inane than the one that preceded it.
  83. The Purge: Anarchy
    DeMonaco may doubly, sometimes triply, underline the story's governing theme of social power and how it's exchanged, but the rage and lucidity of these ideas resonate.
  84. The Tribes of Palos Verdes
    The unvaried register of the filmmaking leads the narrative to feel aimless and dramatically inert.
  85. Summer of Goliath
    Nicholas Pereda shows nothing short of immense promise here, especially in his enigmatic framing and collaborative effort with his regular DP, Alejandro Colonado.
  86. Things Heard & Seen
    Ultimately, the film’s most impactful terrors have nothing to do with things that go bump in the night.
  87. The Mighty Macs
    The Mighty Macs is a film from another planet, where stories are told, obliviously, in cryptic, nonsensical code, and people talk to each other in sugarplum proverbs no earthbound adult would ever inflict on another, not even on the set of a Hallmark Original Movie.
  88. Space Station 76
    As a space-opera lampoon, it's incoherent primarily because it's never clear what the filmmakers are attempting to spoof.
  89. Black Christmas
    The filmmakers’ overly simplistic depiction of good and evil is mitigated to some degree by the presence of Landon (Caleb Eberhardt).
  90. Wilson
    Wilson lurches jarringly from poignant melancholy to cartoonish slapstick, unable to settle on a consistent tone.
  91. Half Magic
    The film displays a sprightly tone and blissful sense of liberation in charting the exploits of characters seeking to live by their own feminine-centric rules.
  92. Don't Let Go
    Would that Jacob Estes had kept the particulars of his murder mystery as intricate as the sci-fi of his main characters’ communion.
  93. Escape Plan
    A dim anti-privatization parable that preaches a familiar strain of cynical, unchallenged self-righteousness in the face of widespread abuse of civil liberties.
  94. Paradise Hills
    Alice Waddington’s sci-fi fantasy never finds a cohesive story wrapper for its themes.
  95. Kidnapped
    Its scenario and criminals devoid of any representational depth, and without any substantial ideas underlying its carnage, the film ultimately just assumes the sadistically pragmatic POV of its one-dimensional thugs, pitilessly doling out brutality as a practical means to an end.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Special Treatment
    A portrait of gender-and job-transcending ennui, Special Treatment paints a vulgar picture of two apparently interwoven professions: prostitutes and shrinks.
  97. Starbuck
    Yet another example of modern-family predicaments getting stuffed into the traditional-family-values message of conventional comedies.
  98. Enemies Closer
    JCVD may not say it best, but he does say it aptly, when his manically cartoonish baddie caps one murder with the assertion that "shit happens."
  99. Georgetown
    It’s an occasionally amusing and insightful beltway satire that’s ultimately undone by its conventional mise-en-scène and predictable plot.
  100. All I Wish
    Writer-director Susan Walter's film seems almost determined to disprove the causality of social phenomena.
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