Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,788 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 6.2 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: 4,359 out of 7788
  2. Mixed: 1,495 out of 7788
  3. Negative: 1,934 out of 7788
7788 movie reviews
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  1. Deadfall
    None of Eric Bana's mildly rousing moments clearly rise above the laborious gobbledygook that Ruzowitzky builds up through the course of the film's 94-minute duration.
  2. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Oh, the hilarious awkwardness of placing privileged white kids in a place where they don't belong.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wild Horse, Wild Ride
    If this sounds like the premise of one of those tiresome Discovery Channel docu-tainments, it's because it essentially is, only heavily abbreviated to fit the feature-film format.
  4. Collaborator
    The banter is playful and brazenly self-aware, but the ideas are a bit stale and don't lead anywhere emotionally substantial or narratively spontaneous.
  5. Starbuck
    Yet another example of modern-family predicaments getting stuffed into the traditional-family-values message of conventional comedies.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Solomon Kane
    The fight choreography has a gracefulness bordering on elegance, and so it's a shame that these standalone thrills aren't better integrated into the film as a fully formed narrative whole.
  7. Klown
    An ostensible Danish "Hangover" that more closely resembles "Two and a Half Men" with nudity and unexpurgated dick jokes.
  8. Sushi: The Global Catch
    The documentary is ultimately a dry endeavor that feels closer in spirit to an Afterschool Special than a full-blooded movie.
  9. The Equalizer
    All this should build up to a moderately engaging battle of wits, but Richard Wenk's script has little interest in wit and no capacity for psychology.
  10. Why Stop Now
    Shifting between wacky situation comedy and somber familial drama, Why Stop Now? isn't invested enough in either mode to convincingly pull off its genre-hopping ambitions.
  11. Death by China
    Further confirmation that agitprop documentaries have become wedded to a template that undermines their very arguments.
  12. Rush
    Ron Howard's by-the-seat-of-your-pants aesthetic makes the slower, darker sequences feel hurried and bland, especially when stacked up next to the racing sequences.
  13. The First Time
    Sex and love are both novel experiences for two high schoolers in this talky affair that suggests a hybrid of Before Sunset and Some Kind of Wonderful.
  14. Promised Land
    Gus Van Sant's new film offends for how it views the struggles of the landowners at the heart of its story as subservient to their oppressor's triumph of the spirit.
  15. Quartet
    For a movie that aims to make four artists' last spotlit hurrah a revel-worthy moment, Quartet shouldn't urge the viewer to welcome the closing of the curtain.
  16. [REC] 3: Genesis
    If a fourth entry wasn't already in the works, [Rec] 3: Genesis could have easily represented the nail in the franchise's coffin.
  17. The Eye of the Storm
    This adaptation of a prize-winning Australian novel is a stodgy slog save for some sporadic moments of blunt force supplied by Judy Davis and Charlotte Rampling.
  18. Serving Up Richard
    After a promising entrapment scene that offers some casually eerie narrative details, the film collapses, lurching awkwardly between a variety of tones and intentions.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Snowman's Land
    A tonal hodgepodge ever at odds with itself, Tomasz Thomson's unctuous, tongue-in-cheek debut is far too self-satisfied with its jokes for any to really be funny.
    • tbd Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Mark Lombardi: Death-Defying Acts of Art and Conspiracy
    Feels like one of those thin, audio-visual supplements on an artist that you casually view as you browse a gallery show.
  21. Home
    Home's exposition is a mess of forced zaniness, which leaves the rest of the film with a Swiss-cheese foundation.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Admission
    The estrogenic elements prove widely ineffectual, but they're just pieces of this overlong, overloaded misfire whose double-entendre title ultimately just goads the jaded viewer to admit defeat.
  23. The Iran Job
    Though there's something refreshing, and disturbingly familiar, about Kevin Sheppard's spontaneity, he's certainly not the most interesting thing about the film.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Dark Skies
    Scott Stewart's Dark Skies is the definitive horror film for the Tea Party era.
  25. Smurfs: The Lost Village
    It's content to be the sort of film parents can throw on an iPad to ensure 90 minutes' worth of relative peace and quiet away from their antic children.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Decoding Deepak
    Unlike his father, Gotham Chopra is more interested in his own latent daddy issues than with questions of cosmic import.
  27. Janeane from Des Moines
    The film betrays its own fictions by overloading on cheap worst-case-scenario mythology.
  28. Special Forces
    The film walks a questionable line between Important Issue seriousness and antsy video-game machismo.
  29. Waiting for Lightning
    With Danny Way almost never weighing in directly, the film's attempts to portray his story as an inspirational tale of triumph over adversity scarcely registers.
  30. We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists
    The doc's straightforward and chronological structure is its own worst enemy.
  31. Saving Mr. Banks
    A tale of memory and redemption that does little to linger in the mind and even less to decry P.L. Travers's claim that Disney turns everything it touches into schmaltz.
  32. The Fitzgerald Family Christmas
    Edward Burns certainly doles out his fair share of family turmoil, but he admirably doesn't make lunatics out of his characters.
  33. Pusher (2012)
    Do we really need another cautionary tale about an ambitious drug dealer dramatically falling from grace?
  34. 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.
  35. Ride Along
    The film refuses to openly engage the isolationism and hardened cynicism that's often part and parcel of being a career police officer.
  36. 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.
  37. 28 Hotel Rooms
    We're supposed to take their self-pity at face value, an impression that's emphasized by a grinding monotonous humorlessness.
  38. Barrymore
    Director Erik Canuel fails to deliver us from the inevitable hermeticism of the material.
  39. My Brothers
    An uncommon example of purely allegorical cinema, Paul Fraser's film foregoes plot almost entirely in favor of thematic resonance.
  40. The Purge
    A rote home-invasion thriller afraid to be seen as just another rote home-invasion thriller, the film turgidly grasps for profundity by framing bloodlust as patriotic duty.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Delhi Safari
    A much better way to strike home the same green message, while also having more fun, would be to just skip this movie and take your kids to a national park.
  42. The Art of Flight 3D
    An aesthetic showcase whose repetitive nature winds up diminishing the excitement of its breathtaking feats of mountainous flight.
    • 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.
  44. 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.
    • 37 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Allegiance
    Michael Connors does a fine job of not passing judgment on his characters, yet his depiction of his main character's dilemma is about the only thing he handles correctly.
  46. The Baytown Outlaws
    This schlocky piece of ultra violence plays like a pop-culture pastiche without a stable thematic foundation.
  47. Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues
    The film's half-hearted plea for responsibility and ethics in the news, after joyfully rolling around in its corruption for the majority of its runtime, smacks of plain pandering.
  48. Greenwich Village: Music That Defined a Generation
    Director Laura Archibald's approach is fatally safe, often turning poets into self-congratulatory windbags.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Call
    Brad Anderson's film is defined by an often frustrating combination of cleverness and stupidity.
  50. The Iceman
    Michael Shannon has no interior to play with, since the film seems intent on ridding Richie of any emotion other than love for his family, and also no catharsis to build toward.
  51. The Pirogue
    Moussa Touré's worldview, like Ousmane Sembene's, is characterized by the feeling that, at the end of the day, some degree of loss or defeat is inevitable.
  52. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
    Purports to tell the true story of the titular imprisoned, controversially outspoken death-penalty opponent, but eventually degenerates into an orgy of congratulation.
  53. 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.
  54. As Luck Would Have It
    Álex de la Iglesia's film hammers home the opinion that family is more important than celebrity or wealth.
  55. 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.
    • 59 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Hava Nagila: The Movie
    The documentary can at times feel like you're wasting your time on a subject you might wish you had only accidentally crossed paths with briefly on Wikipedia.
  57. Shanghai Calling
    If you prefer your social commentary in the form of a glorified sitcom with broad humor and even broader caricatures, look no further.
    • 21 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Saving Lincoln
    Under even the best of circumstances, Saving Lincoln would have to inevitably face the scrutiny of potential redundancy.
    • 38 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Almost in Love
    The film spoils the charm of its concept in the way it confuses the wish to be a Woody Allen-Julie Delpy lovechild with a cramping formalism that borders the theatrical.
  60. The Company You Keep
    A would-be thriller masquerading a long, dry monument to the reliability and comfort of community, blindly cocooned by its own nostalgic self-regard.
  61. Rubberneck
    The film takes on high-concept ideas that it can't sustain, and which only make its other problems more obvious.
  62. The Condemned
    It adds up to a methodically bland, intellectually sluggish exercise in guilt-tripping that's nonetheless still more interested in its rich and sexy characters than the supposed unfortunates.
  63. The Way, Way Back
    Praises the electric carelessness of teenage angst while depicting it as if it were ultimately no more exciting, though no less pleasant, than an hour in the wave pool.
  64. 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.
    • 67 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Sapphires
    Wayne Blair isn't interested in historical complexity or subtext, just the seamless flow of Hollywood-style storytelling that lazily connects one musical number to the next.
  66. Gut Renovation
    Due to the one-minded construction of the documentary, there's little to parse beyond impassioned harrumphs.
  67. Transcendence
    If you programmed an algorithm to figure out how The Lawnmower Man might be retold by Snake Plissken at the conclusion of Escape from L.A., you'd still wind up with a more recognizably human effort.
  68. Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom
    A cursory history lesson with no interest in probing the deeper or more complex implications of Mandela's positions and their relationship to his country's shifting landscape.
  69. Haute Cuisine
    Offers all the ingredients for a great feast of enticing visions and thematic concerns, only to have them be prepared, plated, and served with the grace of Elmer Fudd.
  70. Rapture-Palooza
    Its views on organized religion are so halfhearted and perfunctory as to make Kevin Smith's Dogma seem like a veritable master's class in theistic studies.
  71. K-11
    It careens from one tonal extreme to the next, uncertain about whether it wants to be a gritty drama, camp artifact, or violent prison-sploitation flick.
  72. Down the Shore
    Down the Shore suggests what might happen if TBS and Bruce Springsteen were to collaborate on a sitcom set in hell.
  73. Jupiter Ascending
    The film is ntermittently inventive in its visual and physical effects, but its politics are unthinking and obvious, a cheap anti-authoritarian tantrum imbedded in an intergalactic action-melodrama.
  74. 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.
  75. Murph: The Protector
    One wonders if the filmmakers ever asked themselves who their film was intended for, or if it was at least a consciously self-serving effort from the outset.
  76. Salinger
    An outsized A&E Biography episode coursing with the strident urgency typical to anyone convinced they have something new to say on a long since played-out topic.
  77. Renoir
    A long string of picnics, portrait sessions, elaborate dinners, and countryside rituals, filtered through a svelte aesthetic pleasantness that ultimately corrodes its larger interests.
  78. 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.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bert Stern: Original Madman
    Rote, rushed, and utterly uninterested in the power of Stern as an innovator of image, making it effectively the opposite of the output of the artist it attempts to document.
  80. No One Lives
    Ryuhei Kitamura's latest genre bloodbath is par for the course, in spite of the occasionally flourish of interesting subtext.
  81. The Legend of Hercules
    Given its virtuous subject matter and the relative bloodlessness of its violence, perhaps Renny Harlin means for this film to be a means of atoning for his previous cinematic sins.
  82. Aftershock
    There's plenty of gore, but none of it is particularly inventive, nor does it engender any visceral or emotional reactions beyond jaded disgust.
  83. American Meat
    Despite the intensity of its scope and research, American Meat is a decidedly soft-hitting display of an overweening good faith that, frankly, just can't jibe with the times.
  84. Don Jon
    Joseph Gordon-Levitt's directorial debut does for porn-dependence what Shame did for sex addiction by offering a surface-level look at the effects of its specific pathology on its lead male character.
  85. The Patience Stone
    While Atiq Rahimi's film may peel away the many layers of its female lead like an onion, the end result is still just an onion.
  86. Evidence
    One wishes it had spared us the remedial theorizing on media culture and artistic representation and license and less apologetically acted the part of a straight-up horror film.
    • 27 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Stranded
    It may suggest an Alien incarnate, but once you get past its exterior, it's as empty as outer space.
  88. 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.
  89. Blended
    The filmmakers only bother to lay out comedic set pieces that are simply family-friendly big-budget variations on Jackass stunts.
  90. Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?
    Arvin Chen's Taiwan is dominated by eccentricity in tone and atmosphere, but in a very careful, pronounced way, as to never really run the danger of being truly strange.
  91. Think Like a Man Too
    That this retrograde "straight talk" somehow managed to emerge on screen as a reasonably genial ensemble comedy speaks to the strength of its performers.
  92. When the Game Stands Tall
    Jim Caviezel commits only to the level of God-like omniscience that Mel Gibson whipped into him a decade ago, and as such his character often seems less a teacher than an appropriately shadowy figurehead of authority.
  93. Tammy
    Ben Falcone's film is an almost plotless doodle, with low stakes made even lower thanks to the bratty passivity of its titular antiheroine.
  94. Deliver Us From Evil
    A jump scare isn't just a jump scare in the films of Scott Derrickson, which isn't to say this wannabe master of horror has entirely perfected the art of sudden dread.
  95. 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.
  96. Assault on Wall Street
    Uwe Boll's insistence on plugging genre tropes into his imagined idea of populism returns us to the same cynical place as Postal, except with none of the sizzle.
  97. The Guillotines
    Despite the multitude of cinematic tricks the prolific Andrew Lau has up his sleeve, the film is a disappointingly rote entry in the wuxia pantheon.
  98. Lone Survivor
    Like his prior "The Kingdom," Peter Berg's film pretends to dabble in a frothy moral ambiguity, swiftly betraying its true aims with trigger-happy jingoism.
  99. The Angry Birds Movie
    The Angry Birds Movie is a lot of things, but none of them true to the app's appeal.
  100. The Other Woman
    The film is clearly wary of either being too saccharine or taking itself--or the notion of compulsive infidelity--too seriously, though its schadenfreude is unwavering.
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