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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    • 74 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Trials of Muhammad Ali
    Bill Siegel has made more of a Ken Burns-esque history book--that is, a medium more dry and factual--than a film.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Spark: A Burning Man Story
    The doc doesn't take the time to examine why Burning Man inspires such a level of fanaticism, overshadowing human interest with a gluttony of B roll.
  3. Winnie Mandela
    The film's tonal inconsistencies speak less to the struggles of its titular subject than to its own grasp-exceeding ambitions.
  4. 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.
  5. Paradise: Faith
    A shallow film that leaves us knowing exactly what we're seeing, and able to predict what the characters will say to each other in the mostly uninspired and overtly familiar dialogue.
  6. Ted 2
    The film is a redundant showcase for Seth MacFarlane's racy, dick-centric sense of humor.
  7. 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."
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Muslims Are Coming!
    Despite their supposedly good intentions, the comedian-filmmakers broach the doc's central subject with crass and offensive standup routines that wouldn't be out of place on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.
  9. American Made Movie
    The documentary's refusal to challenge the comfort zones of its target audience is apparent throughout.
  10. We Are What We Are
    Jim Mickle plays the scenario deadly straight and unintentionally exposes all of its attendant absurdities, leaving the cast stranded.
    • 56 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    La Maison de la Radio
    Whether or not you consider this a banal topic, it's plain to see that the puttering documentary doesn't achieve magnificence.
  12. The Short Game
    This window into the world of youthful competition almost entirely disposes of social awareness in favor of routine drama.
  13. Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie
    In the theater, whenever Mike, Crow or Tom Servo flub a punchline or resort to a fart joke, you almost want to lean forward and shush them.
  14. Stonehearst Asylum
    In the wake of the ostentatious atmospherics summoned by the likes of Shutter Island and American Horror Story: Asylum, the film feels unnecessarily restrained.
  15. Mr. Nobody
    The only truly graspable notion the film can be said to put forth is one of increasingly tedious sci-fi-romantic genre busy-ness.
  16. Bad Words
    The meager comeuppance and hasty notes of sweetness that end the film feel pre-approved rather than organically realized.
  17. Devil's Knot
    Atom Egoyan is a much better director when he drops the art-film fanciness and wrestles directly with his inner voyeuristic weirdo.
  18. The Double
    Whatever the film's interest may be in the marginalized, writer-director Richard Ayoade never alludes to what would even be worth fighting for in this nightmarish industrial landscape.
  19. What If
    Right up to its simplistic ending, the film is pleased to regurgitate the contrived tropes of the genre without ever honestly addressing the ethics of romantic boundaries.
  20. Big Sur
    The viewer is informed of a world of chaos, obsession, and irresolution, but has no cinematic means of accessing or understanding it.
  21. Zero Charisma
    It's a pity that it hews to sitcom-like formula rather than using this bank of knowledge and sympathy to create something more original.
  22. Sal
    It functions under the delusion that subtext will magically appear if you linger on a character long enough, and the significance of most of its scenes is nothing if not inscrutable.
  23. Maggie
    Its only claim to uniqueness becomes running the standard zombie narrative through a Hallmark-card filter.
  24. Argento's Dracula 3D
    The film is dispiriting because there's virtually no sign of Dario Argento in it, nor of any novel motivation to mount yet another version of an oft-told tale.
  25. Inuk
    The film can boast of an exotic locale and rare potential, but in Mike Magidson's hands the filmmaking is disappointingly shopworn.
  26. Charlie Countryman
    An egregious entry into the pantheon of films about white Americans traveling to exotic lands in search of identity and soul-searching adventure.
    • 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.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Medora
    It feels as if it set out to be an inspirational tale about underdogs beating the odds, but instead of giving color to the story, the filmmakers presented it with black-and-white ideas.
  29. Victor Frankenstein
    Victor Frankenstein is the movie version of a carnival sideshow, all smoke and mirrors, presenting a litany of human freaks and animal monstrosities to distract from the superficiality of its psychological and intellectual concerns.
  30. Open Grave
    Individual moments linger, but Gonzalo López-Gallego's film is merely a rough draft of a thriller.
  31. Reaching for the Moon
    Bruno Barreto's insistence that this pass for a product that Hollywood might have spawned smoothens a journey built on sharp edges.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Cold Turkey
    While featuring much screaming, accusations, collision of agendas, and the exhuming of dirty secrets, the film remains emotionally tone deaf.
  33. Twice Born
    Sergio Castellitto's film quickly turns out to be more interested in reveling in the secrets of its storyline than in its sentiments.
  34. 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.
  35. Passengers
    Monogamy, Passengers seems to suggest, is tantamount to existing in a world where nothing else matters outside of the bond you and your partner share.
  36. Paul Verhoeven's Tricked
    Nothing more than an absurdist soap-opera bauble.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Best Night Ever
    The filmmakers make sure their female protagonists constantly look immature and irresponsible, and are intent on punishing them for wanting to have a good time.
  38. Sabotage
    There's no sense of visual artifice to match the ludicrous pitch of the script, and subsequently, the film comes off as awkward and uncertain.
  39. Regression
    It spends a lot of time considering the fear of knowing, which may explain why Alejandro Amenábar didn’t seem to know what kind of film he was making.
  40. This Is Where I Leave You
    And the jury's still very much out over whether Shawn Levy is an inept comedy director masquerading as an opportunistically dramatic one, or vice versa.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Merry Christmas
    The conceit has the potential to be amusing, but the role-playing is never as funny or immersive as it could be, and the characters' repartee often feels more stilted than witty.
  42. Draft Day
    The cruelly obvious third act congeals the film as a wet-eyed monument to the Kevin Costner character's particular brand of American manliness, one that values gut instinct, it's implied, over cold and ruthless calculations.
  43. The Wedding Ringer
    This big, brash, occasionally clever, but mostly dumb comedy is so gallingly derivative that watching it feels like playing a game of basic-cable bingo.
  44. 1,000 Times Good Night
    It's difficult to swallow the premise of yet another tale of a heroic white Westerner with good intentions trying to give hope to Middle-Eastern misery.
  45. San Andreas
    In Brad Peyton's San Andreas, the biggest earthquake in recorded history is less natural disaster than divorce negotiation process.
  46. Self/less
    The film's corporate blandness is almost as dispiriting as its disinterest in exploiting the inherent saliency of the material.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Life of a King
    Any potential flights of invention or creativity are subordinate to the plain and emphatic delivery of life lessons.
  48. Pan
    Whatever drugs director Joe Wright may or may not have been on when he wrestled Pan to the ground, pulverizing the material into a quivering mound of monkey-bread dough, you can trust that they were synthetic. Not a single emotional moment in this entire origin story for J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Captain Hook, and Neverland feels organic.
  49. Nymphomaniac: Volume II
    The sex in Nymphomaniac is inhuman, mechanical, boring, and predictably viewed through the (male) scrim of someone who characterizes women solely as withholders.
  50. Ice Age: Collision Course
    If Ice Age: Collision Course gleefully fails at being a history lesson, at least it offers an energetic recess from reality.
  51. The Wait
    By the end, audiences will most likely feel as if they've been locked out of the drama that's presumably unfolding right in front of them.
  52. Exodus: Gods and Kings
    It doesn't take long to realize that Ridley Scott's adaptation is only aiming for certain forms of credibility, and callously eschewing others.
  53. Lost River
    The story, more a tangle of violent, symbolic gestures, regards economic exploitation with fetishistic, impossibly overdetermined abandon.
  54. The Gunman
    The lack of any visual ingenuity, reflexivity, or awareness of genre tropes diminishes the intermittent pleasures of the action's slightly involving kineticism.
  55. Big Eyes
    In style as in content, it offers neither the granular detail of more subtle period pieces nor enough of Tim Burton's spirited eccentricity to register as anything other than what one character derides as "that representational jazz."
  56. The Giver
    The internal crisis of its protagonist amounts to the flicking of an on/off switch rather than the ebb and flow of a consciousness being born.
  57. Trainwreck
    The script doesn't revel in Amy's quite harmless flaws, or at least examine them in the spirit of benevolence.
  58. 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.
  59. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2
    It careens from carnage to group therapy so wildly that the action never gets to build and the conversations just repeat themselves.
  60. The Interview
    It essentially uses a major global issue to cheaply dress up what is two hours of hit-and-miss erection jokes.
  61. Tusk
    It suggests the worst possible gene splice of a barbed Terrance and Phillip South Park appearance, Fargo's blithe condescension, and the smuggest of Quentin Tarantino pastiches.
  62. Love & Air Sex
    Whatever predictable plot the film tries to unfold never lives up to the excitement of its conceptual gimmick.
  63. God's Pocket
    Throughout, it becomes difficult to know whether we're meant to empathize with these characters or laugh at them.
  64. 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.
  65. The Better Angels
    Even taking into consideration the fact the A.J. Edwards edited To the Wonder, it's hard to recall a film so immensely and reductively in thrall to the work of another director.
  66. Camp X-Ray
    Peter Sattler's film feels quintessentially Sundance: an expensively mounted treatise on important issues that's terrified to dig in obsessively, yet so ramrod-stiff with indignation that it never comes anywhere near compelling entertainment.
  67. The Returned
    It proves that the zombie narrative is still capable of subversion, but does so with the laziest, Lifetime-grade intimations of social relevance.
  68. Maladies
    It borders on parody as it tries to portray its hero as martyrdom-bound genius, which makes the film feel as if it was made by Franco's vain, art-fetishizing character from "This Is the End."
  69. The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature
    Though it may clear the low bar set by the first film, The Nut Job 2 still suffers from many of the same problems.
  70. A Walk Among the Tombstones
    All of Scott Frank's thematic concerns are little more than window dressing for a run-of-the-mill detective story in line with '90s thrillers like The Bone Collector.
  71. Brick Mansions
    Only the very charitable would characterize this strain of providence as anything other than dumb, or at least incredibly forgetful.
  72. A Long Way Down
    An inept trifle, Pascal Chaumeil's film reduces Nick Hornby's novel of the same name to a series of smug self-help gestures.
  73. Lucky Bastard
    In the end, considering the numerous ways the film goes limp, it seems credibility still eludes the found-footage genre.
  74. 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.
  75. The Legend of Tarzan
    The film's action sequences are a jumble of movement and cuts that have no discernible relation to the actual motion of the characters.
  76. Haunt
    Mac Carter repeatedly compromises his intuitive, and often elegantly framed, glances at his main characters' teenage blues by too busily going through amateur-night gesticulations of spooking his audience.
  77. The Brothers Grimsby
    The film doesn't do much to satirize the spy genre, instead using its flimsy plot mostly as a scaffolding for a barrage of jokes.
  78. Focus
    The film turns out to instead be a strained trumpeting of the return of the proverbial king of the box office.
  79. The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part
    The deconstruction of corporatized play culture gets run through the sequelizer machine, with predictably acrid results.
  80. The Strange Color of Your Body's Tears
    One can never fully shake the feeling that the sense of unease the filmmakers rouse, every act of seduction, infiltration, and vengeance they orchestrate, is borrowed.
  81. Hotel Transylvania 2
    It risks offense by putting a typically Adam Sandler-ian twist on a tired familial trope, though such risks can often be the only thing enlivening forced franchise installments like this one.
  82. Hateship Loveship
    It ultimately offers little more than another opportunity for famous actors to indulge their fetishistic, inadvertently condescending impressions of "everyday" people.
  83. Refuge
    The problem with the film isn't the contrivance of its premise, it's that writer-director Jessica Goldberg doesn't know it's contrived.
  84. 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.
  85. Alien Abduction
    A few jolting scares are deployed throughout, but more difficult to shake is how the story's overacting lambs walk a rather programmatic path toward slaughter--or at least anal probing.
  86. Flex Is Kings
    Putting aside the generic human interest, the film turns out to be shockingly deficient in its on-screen depiction of flexing.
  87. Blood Glacier
    The film straddles a very awkward line between creature feature, conspiracy thriller, and domestic drama, all without novelty or suspense.
  88. Hank and Asha
    As the film is focused solely through the lens of the titular characters' cameras, this limits the exploration of the story's worldview outside of Hank and Asha's perspective.
  89. A Monster Calls
    A Monster Calls is both governed and straitjacketed by director J.A. Bayona’s competent impersonality.
  90. The November Man
    Roger Donaldson embellishes an already overly plotty scenario with hollowly attractive genre superfluities.
  91. 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.
  92. All Cheerleaders Die
    Frontloaded with a surprising amount of plot, the film takes forever to get going, but it's the filmmakers' hypocrisy that really grates.
  93. Deepsea Challenge 3D
    Less explored in all the ensuing back-patting is the question of whether Cameron is, in fact, sincerely interested in learning more about the world around him or whether this mission is merely intended to stroke his own ego.
  94. The Grand Seduction
    Like many films that contrast the simplicity of a rural community against the confusion of city life, The Grand Seduction exhibits a patriarchal, xenophobic attitude.
  95. V/H/S: Viral
    One need go no further than the film's first segment to grasp how little interest the latest entry in the anthology series has in generating chills from the lo-fi.
  96. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
    The film exists resolutely outside of salience and doggedly within the comfort of escapism.
  97. Good People
    It only overcomes its deficiencies and gains a modicum of entertainment value precisely when it commits to its illogical storylines and exaggerated plot twists.
  98. The Salvation
    The film achieves nothing more than hollow caricature, too caught up in dumb dress-up pageantry to accomplish anything else.
  99. The LEGO Ninjago Movie
    The film’s cumulative effect is utter exhaustion, the cinematic equivalent of chasing a toddler through a toy store.
  100. Max
    It hits its Red State beats so hard that its target audience likely won't notice they're being not only condescended to, but insulted outright.
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