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. A Man's Story
    A Man's Story does a major disservice to an artiste of fashion with a pretty amazing and prolific oeuvre by reducing him to a Bravo-like personality - a personality whose pettiness Boateng's work, though perhaps not his ego, clearly exceeds.
  2. Class of 1984
    No matter how much director Mark Lester attempts to hide his sermonizing behind sensationalistic-pedagogic terrorism, he does himself in whenever a jaded cop shrugs his shoulders and grunts, for the umpteenth time, What can we do, they’re juveniles?
  3. Loitering with Intent
    It's a comedy concerned with myopia that doesn't succumb to the self-obsessed pitfalls of that subject.
  4. Please Stand By
    Dakota Fanning's Wendy is less a truly thought-through character than a compendium of quirks.
  5. Jane's Journey
    Despite the fact that Goodall narrates the bulk of the material, there are scant details about her concrete contributions to animal and life science save for her observing of chimp-made tools.
  6. The Sacrament
    With The Sacrament, director Ti West has bitten off more of a premise than his classically modest barebones approach to horror movies can presently chew.
  7. Don't Look Up
    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.
  8. Body
    The filmmakers exhibit no interest in watching the story's central wolves wiggle out of the trap they've potentially set for themselves.
  9. Love Is in the Air
    The film is knowingly sarcastic in its self-awareness without falling back on the gawky meta-squealing of its American rom-com counterparts.
  10. Valley of the Dolls
    Look, fun is fun, and there’s plenty of the kitschy brand to be had from the riot of late-‘60s production design and lurid plot developments.
  11. Just Like Us
    Rather than a mature, multifaceted approach, the director's portraits of Dubai, Beirut, Riyadh, and Cairo are heavy on still-photo montages comprised primarily of smiling young people and spontaneous encounters with random jokesters.
  12. Raymond & Ray
    Rodrigo García’s film is fastidious, tidy, and lifeless, with every obligatory gesture in its place.
  13. One Direction: This Is Us
    Some of the film's most memorable moments involve Niall and Liam looking down on oceans of screaming devotees in the street, and controlling their cheers like orchestra conductors.
  14. Out of Blue
    Carol Morley’s film wants to blow our minds, but it succeeds only at rousing our boredom.
  15. Set Fire to the Stars
    At least it doesn't make the biopic mistake of attempting to check off every moment of a man's life over the course of a few hours' worth of running time.
  16. What Men Want
    This gender-swapped update of What Women Want doesn’t pass up the opportunity to undercut itself whenever it gets the chance.
  17. The Thing
    You can tell a lot about the film from its rough handling of the materials supplied by its predecessor, using these commonalities both to identify the bond between the two and signal how much further it's willing to push things.
  18. Love in Space
    The weightlessness that dominates the film is no special effect.
  19. Beyond the Black Rainbow
    Something like a trippy grindhouse homage whose familiar images are refracted through a prism of blacklight posters, Jodorowsky films, and even Rob Zombie's grungy psychotropic sensibility.
  20. The Fifth Estate
    The film is guilty of some of the same quick judgment it clearly doesn't endorse, exploiting Julian Assange's unmistakable appearance to help give itself a boogeyman.
  21. Den of Thieves
    Den of Thieves displays a reverence for the taut and moody tension-building tactics of Michael Mann's Heat, but without a single compelling character or backstory to speak of, it's unable to bring even a modicum of emotional resonance to action.
  22. Brigadoon
    At least the dancing is good, and Vincente Minnelli’s restless camera gooses a plodding story into liveliness.
  23. American Reunion
    Funnier than its prior two predecessors, if gratingly awash in demographic-pandering late-'90s alt-rock hits ("Closing Time," "Freshman"), American Reunion flounders with its earnest melodrama.
  24. Krampus
    At the center of the film is a conservative lesson that asks us to unquestioningly abide by society's capitalistic impulses.
  25. Desert Dancer
    The film's relentless turning of its characters' experience into platitudes and homilies is served for our too-easy consumption.
  26. The Best Offer
    It ascribes to the falsehood that a rarefied milieu inherently infuses a film with intelligence, as if inept execution can be covered up by pretty lensing.
  27. The Gray Man
    The Gray Man is a noisy, flashy spectacle that piles clichés atop ludicrous plotting and sprinkles it all with half-funny quips, all in the hope of bulldozing the audience into submission.
  28. Big Sur
    The viewer is informed of a world of chaos, obsession, and irresolution, but has no cinematic means of accessing or understanding it.
  29. Apartment 7A
    Rather than deepening or complicating the original work, Apartment 7A engages with it purely on franchise terms, as in how it foregrounds the Castavets for much of the runtime.
  30. People Like Us
    This dry-as-dust enterprise bogs down in an almost total lack of energy and imagination that no amount of faux earnestness can overcome.
  31. Texas Killing Fields
    Texas Killing Fields's mood is one of drowning in quicksand, though said atmosphere is the byproduct of both Ami Canaan Mann's often dreamy direction and an editorial structure that intermittently devolves into elliptical incongruity.
  32. Jane Got a Gun
    It constantly blunders into stylistic choices and narrative clichés that sabotage the sturdy two-hander at its center.
  33. Broken City
    Allen Hughes may suggest an air of pretty menace, but he does little to make the sequence work as a legible genre scene.
  34. The Miracle Club
    In the end, The Miracle Club is splintered at the seams between its desire to tell an uplifting story of forgiveness and a cheeky tale of patriarchal floundering, all the while doing both a tremendous disservice.
  35. Bohemian Rhapsody
    This charitable act of resuscitation for the benefit of Mercury’s admirers is something that the film as a whole ultimately fails to accomplish, as Bohemian Rhapsody mistakenly believes that simply trudging through a workmanlike overview of the Queen frontman’s life will allow it to arrive at something approaching intimacy.
  36. Ice Age: Continental Drift
    Caters almost exclusively to the remedial, Duplo Blocks demographic, leaving parents and guardians bored to distraction.
  37. Mary Shelley
    In its final act, the film abandons its fruitful investigation of belief systems in favor of a simplistic articulation of Mary's inspiration.
  38. A Rubberband Is an Unlikely Instrument
    It's as though the director, like his subjects, was too comfortable in the safe familiarity of the surface to find the place where it betrays us.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    La Rafle (The Round Up)
    Sentimentality may make the movie's agony more digestible, but its darkness resists any glossing over of what isn't only France's, but Europe's painful legacy.
  40. Bullet Train
    David Leitch’s film pulls off the notable feat of making human beings out of cartoonishly violent psychopaths.
  41. Y2K
    The big sequence where the year 2000 hits and everything from a toaster to a Tamagotchi goes homicidal is a chaotic blast, but once the film shifts into a broader comic gear, it never quite finds its heart again.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Daniela Forever
    Metaphysical implications about the nature of reality or the possibility of shared consciousness are left mostly unspoken, as the film spends more time developing a surface-level study of the desire for romantic possession and control.
  43. Amsterdam
    The film recalls nothing less than Inherent Vice in its use of a threadbare detective narrative to explore both human interactions and grander ideas about the American society of its time.
  44. Django
    The film's most crucial shortcoming lies in its failure to illuminate both the inner life of its subject and his artistic genius.
  45. Frankenstein's Army
    The found-footage gimmick mostly comes off as window dressing for what turns out to be yet another mad-scientist-run-amok romp.
  46. Downhill
    Downhill never makes much of an impact as it moves from one mildly amusing cringe-comedy set piece to the next.
  47. Words and Pictures
    At least the irony with which this transparently written and dispassionately aestheticized film so demagogically argues for the value of words and pictures is brutally convincing.
  48. Stars in Shorts
    Generally, these shorts do little to advance their own arguments, but then again, they don't need to; if the short film is the arena of students, amateurs, and small-timers, then these are overdogs from frame one, coming off every bit as expensive and banal as their makers allow them to be.
  49. Adult Life Skills
    The film uses the grieving process to lend the proceedings a sense of unearned emotional gravitas.
  50. The Catcher Was a Spy
    As the film proceeds, the appeal of its nostalgia wears thin and you may notice that there isn't much beyond the window dressing.
  51. Little
    Its most amusing moments are in the interplay between the central characters as they adjust to an abruptly shifting reality.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cheerful Weather for the Wedding
    The Donald Rice film suffers most from an excessively blunt approach.
  53. V/H/S/2
    A welcome contrast to the first film's snuff-y atmosphere and general mean-spiritedness, featuring more humor, fewer hateful characters, and occasional twinges of relatable human emotion.
  54. The Wannabe
    The film is less a revisionist take on the circumstances of John Gotti's 1992 indictment than a tedious love child of Bonnie and Clyde and Goodfellas.
  55. Insidious: The Last Key
    The fourth film in the Insidious franchise, directed by Adam Robitel, is lazy and sometimes even loathsome.
  56. Reminders of Him
    Vanessa Caswill’s film feels reverse engineered to maximize emotional impact.
  57. Stuck in Love
    The movie aims for an admirable balance, but fatally upsets that equilibrium in its hurried resolutions.
  58. When Comedy Went to School
    It confuses nostalgia for earth-shaking cultural upheaval, never really expounding on the actual effect of the Borscht Belt circuit's influence.
  59. Last Looks
    Throughout Last Looks, the filmmakers tend to a conventional mystery that could have benefited from more satiric intention.
  60. Riddick
    For a film about a killing machine who can see at night, it's fittingly ironic that the film itself is, both narratively and visually, a dark, muddled mess.
  61. Cooties
    It makes an occasionally spirited pretense of injecting the tensions of the United States's educational system into a familiar zombie-siege scenario.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Everybody Has a Plan
    Ana Piterbarg's handsome, if uninvolving, film privileges mood over narrative and dumb brooding over character.
  63. Welcome to the Punch
    The sheer wastefulness of Eran Creevy's Welcome to the Punch is off-putting enough, but the film is also falsely painted-up as a crime epic.
  64. Mark Felt: The Man Who Brought Down the White House
    Mark Felt is a kind of hagiography, and it leans toward whitewashing its subject's legacy, which extends even to the man's illegal break-ins and wire-tapping of the leftist activist group the Weather Underground.
    • 49 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    How to Make a Killing
    John Patton Ford cultivates an old-school flair while keeping one finger on the pulse of the current moment
  66. Stalingrad
    Its blind reverence toward the Russian mythos is so grandiose that it becomes impossible to rescue it from self-importance, and as such President Putin would likely give it two big thumbs up.
  67. One Track Heart: The Story of Krishna Das
    The overall product doesn't reveal anything about its subject that a Wikipedia page couldn't do just as well.
  68. Lola Versus
    A year in the life of a young woman unhappy in love and uncertain in career, Lola Versus could easily be faulted for the narrowness of its worldview.
  69. The Promise
    The Promise simply turns this historical tragedy into mere background noise for a flimsy romantic triangle.
  70. My Kingdom
    If this oddly delineated narrative often falls between two stools, then the replacement of brightly bombastic opera battles with dimly lit, more conventional action sequences is a similarly unwelcome development.
  71. The Persian Connection
    Daniel Y-Li Grove adeptly creates an icy, über-hip atmosphere of sleek clubs, pulsating synths, and woozy opium trips, a style which has the unfortunate effect of draining much of the cultural specificity from his story.
  72. Thérèse
    Claude Miller's swan song not only shares its main character's name but also her tempered disposition.
  73. Despicable Me 3
    If all this wackiness is only occasionally laugh-out-loud funny—the ‘80s references feel particularly played out—it’s nonetheless executed with good-natured breeziness.
  74. 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.
  75. 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.
  76. The Happy Sad
    Ken Urban, adapting his own play, fumbles at injections of urban, and decidedly not urbane, levity, in addition to telegraphing entire subplots.
  77. Resident Evil: The Final Chapter
    The Resident Evil films are so unconcerned with traditional character and narrative that they suggest either abstract art or the fevered brainstorming of a child at play.
  78. Venom: Let There Be Carnage
    The title isn’t only a promise of so much destruction to come, but also inadvertently an assurance that its most action-packed sequences will be defined by loudness, incoherence, and pointless cruelty.
  79. Silent House
    Silent House dies a sudden and egregious death when the amateur players in Olsen's company, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens, as her character Sarah's father and uncle, respectively, open their traps.
  80. The Best of Enemies
    The Best of Enemies may be based on a true story, but in so stubbornly turning the spotlight away from Atwater and the radical, grind-it-out community activism that took on the racism that Ellis helped to foster as a segregationist, it more accurately resembles an all-too-familiar Hollywood tall tale.
  81. The Happy Poet
    Like its sad-sack main character, whose closed-off personality makes him hard to fully understand or sympathize with, The Happy Poet is too reservedly rough around the edges.
  82. Protektor
    Engendering an experience both visually slick and narratively sprawling, the apropos-of-nothing professionalism of Protektor often feels more like branding than filmmaking.
  83. The Greater Good
    The intersection between drug-company profiteering and lobbying, and governmental and private-sector desires to protect people from deadly diseases, is navigated too cursorily by the documentary.
  84. Firebird
    There are clichés and then there are only clichés, and Firebird is suffocated by them.
  85. Gold
    The film finds no treasure of gleaming originality in its energetically told but crushingly clichéd anti-capitalist parable.
  86. Army of Thieves
    Matthias Schweighöfer’s film puts itself in a box, consistently failing to justify why its story deserves our attention more than the spectacle of the recently deceased rising to feast upon the flesh of the living.
  87. Son of a Gun
    The film has the requisite iconography of a crime thriller, but no investment in any of it.
  88. Griff the Invisible
    Director Leon Ford displays a wonderful empathy in his examination of Griff and Melody's lonely environments, allowing their fringe perspectives to flower organically from the mise-en-scène.
  89. 7 Days in Entebbe
    The conflation of historical complexities makes for cheap pathos throughout, complete with weeping mothers and the seemingly endless dredging up of the terrorists' obvious moral equivalence.
  90. The Tomorrow Man
    The film is content to peddle the naïve notion that love is the panacea for all that ails you.
  91. Greenland 2: Migration
    Greenland 2 plays out as a much more generic thriller than its predecessor.
  92. The Front Room
    If there’s any food for thought in The Front Room, it’s the ongoing portrayal of old folks in the A24 catalog.
  93. Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter 1
    The film is all table-setting, with the stories lacking in polish and dramatic momentum and the characters never developed beyond archetypes.
  94. Souvenir
    Huppert is such a master of her craft that even the silliest sequences give way to tour-de-force moments.
  95. Rio 2
    The net effect is a shapeless would-be diversion in which things just happen independently, a string of effects missing any cause.
  96. Haunter
    Vincenzo Natali emphasizes technically impressive shots in the service of predictable, boring expository beats, at the expense of elaborating on his main character's growing feelings of isolation and torment.
  97. Live by Night
    There's nothing at the center of Live by Night, no foundation of drama to ground the convoluted mash-up of so many genre tropes.
  98. Oldboy
    Spike Lee's version loses the one thing that really worked in the original, the sense of moral complication emerging out of the intertwined action of two men hell-bent on retribution.
  99. Devil's Pass
    As Renny Harlin's career progresses, it seems more and more that his early gems were merely happy accidents.
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