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. Yogawoman
    It's less a film than an unimaginatively assembled series of talking heads.
  2. The World Made Straight
    The moody lighting and the ubiquity of deciduous trees provide a canvas for bracing drama, but the film undoes itself by its desire to impart revelatory history lessons.
  3. Morgan
    The film's makers lose trust in the intellectual heft of their material and chose to prioritize empty sensation instead.
  4. The Catechism Cataclysm
    The film is an 80-minute shaggy-dog story about the seductive power of storytelling and the weird places it can transport us; too bad writer- director Todd Rohal doesn't take us any place worth going.
  5. Haunted Mansion
    The film handily invokes the campiness of the iconic Disneyland attraction, if not its kinetics.
  6. Lee Cronin's The Mummy
    In lieu of any competently developed drama, we get a blitzkrieg of scares and gooey body horror that can best be described as arbitrary.
  7. Special ID
    The audience becomes conditioned to expect the action a few moves before the film makes them, which quickly renders the story tedious.
  8. Being Charlie
    Most of the film's characters are unconvincing, flattened out by Charlie's self-focused lens.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    An Encounter with Simone Weil
    Ultimately, the film doesn't feel like it ever left Julia Haslett's head, leaving us a little cold.
  10. 3 Generations
    The main character is too often pushed to the sidelines so that the filmmakers can indulge tired family-drama tropes.
  11. The Marsh King's Daughter
    Once the film turns into a paranoid home-invasion thriller, there’s no ambiguity left to the tale.
  12. Sonic the Hedgehog
    Throughout, any and all subtext is buried under the weight of Jim Carrey’s mugging.
  13. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
    With this film, nuance seems to have disapparated from the wizarding world altogether.
  14. Hunted
    Hunted intends to make a show of our desensitization to predator-prey relationships, but the greater purpose of its self-awareness never quite comes into clear focus.
  15. RED 2
    An awfully expensive and grossly extended Cialis commercial.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    MIS Human Secret Weapon
    The documentary necessitates a degree of respect and sensitivity that makes it difficult to stress how bad it is.
  17. Railroad Tigers
    Despite its energetic, intricately climax, Railroad Tigers is at its most entertaining when merely observing Chan’s smaller movements.
  18. Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb
    This third and supposedly final edition in the franchise is nothing more than an uncomfortably transparent contractual obligation.
  19. Noma: My Perfect Storm
    Too much of Noma is composed of gorgeous pillow shots, which grow static and fussy, appearing to exist almost apart from the subject matter.
  20. In the Heart of the Sea
    The narrative is helplessly adrift, a yarn that extols vague grit and determination with no discernible through line.
  21. The M Word
    Like a number of cult directors to emerge in the 1970s, Henry Jaglom values a party atmosphere at the expense of narrative cohesion.
  22. Closer to the Moon
    Writer-director Nae Caranfil oddly forgoes the abundant elegiac aspects of his film's factual material for a tone approaching the ebullient.
  23. Funny Bunny
    Alison Bagnall and her talented leads appear to effortlessly achieve a tone that's tricky to sustain, one that abounds equally in absurdism and empathy.
  24. Convoy
    At its best, the film finds Peckinpah moving into a new poetry of non-violence, of movement associated with explicit, actualized harmony, but the director doesn’t trust himself, mistaking change of form for impersonal commercial stewardship.
  25. The Tunnel
    The film lacks for the methodically escalating stakes that makes the best examples of the genre so entertaining.
  26. 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.
  27. Jimpa
    Jimpa’s exploration of non-binary identity ultimately proves superficial.
  28. Dog Days
    Aside from the occasional idiosyncratic comic beat, Dog Days remains committed to coloring within the lines of established tropes in the animal-centric family film.
  29. A Cure for Wellness
    Most gratifying throughout A Cure for Wellness is the moment-to-moment anticipation of where Gore Verbinski will put his camera next.
  30. Restless
    Gus Van Sant's cinema, which of late has been fixated on immersing viewers in particular times and spaces, takes a detour into excruciating quirkland with Restless.
  31. AGGRO DR1FT
    It may indeed be the perfect cinematic representation of our current media landscape, adapting to our collective brain rot from being terminally online instead of fighting against it.
  32. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    The visual blandness of Edward Zwick’s style and the simplistic, easily solved case is better suited for television.
  33. The Dressmaker
    The frequent contemptuousness the film displays toward its characters keeps the audience at arm's length.
  34. Monster Hunter
    Paul W.S. Anderson has simply combined the established iconography of the popular Capcom game franchise with prefab movie moments.
  35. Young Ones
    It avoids the typical trappings of the genre pastiche by utilizing its clear indebtedness to numerous other films as merely a starting point, rather than an end.
  36. Lisa Frankenstein
    Even as the film revels in violent, necrophiliac delights, the dialogue keeps everything grounded with its humor.
  37. Halloween Ends
    Just as David Gordon Green seems to have finally unshackled his legacyquel trilogy from the dead weight of the past, the film loses the courage of its convictions.
  38. Wish
    Wish plays out like the No Frills version of a Disney princess story.
  39. Asphalt City
    Shove everything into the meat grinder of cynicism and, in the end, your insights come to feel purely incidental.
  40. Cargo
    Cargo can feel like a "film about human trafficking" from beginning to end.
  41. All In: The Poker Movie
    The film has a shambling charm that actively disputes an unspoken notion that a documentary must be well-structured in order to effectively land its points.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    The Young Racers
    The Young Racers mostly succumbs to the streak of pretension strongly felt beneath the hubristic surfaces of more than a few Corman features.
  43. Midway
    In the film, the Battle of Midway suggests something out of a photorealistic animated film.
  44. I Saw the Light
    A flaccidly directed film that basks for two hours in a carefully art-designed simulation of the past.
  45. Parked
    The film takes dramatic material that sounds fairly standard-issue to begin with and proceeds to uncover precious little of genuinely fresh intrigue within it.
  46. The Hitman's Bodyguard
    Because it so consistently fails to meld its comic sensibilities and love stories with its generic action premise into a seamless whole, The Hitman's Bodyguard sometimes just appears to be parodying the sort of mess it ends up being.
  47. Mob Land
    John Travolta’s scenes are islands of tranquility in a jittery sea of rote crime-movie pyrotechnics.
  48. Poltergeist
    It's the cinematic equivalent of a pat on the back accompanied by a slap in the face.
  49. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    The film simply limps to predetermined truths that hypocritically advocate the maintenance of placid family values.
  50. Hercules
    The film fluctuates haphazardly between semi-serious reverence and tongue-in-cheek camp, with no shortage of opportunities for the inevitable Rifftrax accompaniment.
  51. The Evening Hour
    In spite of the film’s strikingly lived-in sense of place, the script’s melodramatic storytelling works against that verisimilitude.
  52. 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.
  53. Irresistible
    These are desperate times, but if Jon Stewart wants to tack toward a more Frank Capra vein, that’s just fine. We already have one Adam McKay.
  54. Boy Kills World
    If you’re looking for flash and snark, Boy Kills World has them in spades, but it’s too punch-drunk on its own juvenile grandiosity to bother offering even a whiff of substance.
  55. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny
    Sword of Destiny has an appealingly inventive, unruly genre party streak running down its figurative back.
  56. Masterminds
    Jared Hess's film turns out to be a succession of failed jokes punctuated by a few cathartic laughs.
  57. Shock and Awe
    Rob Reiner's film rests on broad, sweeping proclamations about the importance of factual reporting.
  58. Project Almanac
    The film delivers the same misogynistic, faux-modernistic jolts of trashy humor and labored plotting that typify the work of co-producer Michael Bay.
  59. Fists of Legend
    The film is so generous in its characterizations that it's easy to overlook the fact that its hot-topic drama (bullying, economic marginalization, etc.) amounts to little more than padded lip service.
  60. Corner Office
    The film goes to show that humanism and absurdism are often two expressions of the same face.
  61. Mammuth
    The movie's deathblow is the casting of poet-artist Miss Ming as Mammuth's affectless niece, whose twee verse and sculpture make Miranda July seem like a bearer of gravitas.
  62. What Happened to Monday
    Tommy Wirkola’s film squanders an evocative premise in favor of rote gun-fu carnage.
  63. The Ardennes
    It predictably lurches toward acts of extreme violence with little interest other than the instant titillation such moments afford.
  64. The Great Gilly Hopkins
    Glenn Close's face teems with a flawlessly controlled gravitas that’s completely at odds with the film’s ordinariness.
  65. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    The last 20 minutes live up to the promise of bludgeoning viewers with plenty of rock-‘em-sock-‘em combat and demolished human landscapes, but what any of it is actually for will be forgotten even before the dust begins to settle.
  66. The Seeding
    Ironically for a film that unfolds almost entirely in a single, contained location, The Seeding is all over the place.
  67. Maniac
    Its audio-visual overload testifies to a group of filmmakers' belief that some films are made to be remade.
  68. Open Windows
    Timidity and perhaps fear, of visual confinement, of lingering emotional engagement, closes Nacho Vigalondo's most promising windows.
  69. Heaven Is for Real
    Heaven Is for Real is by Christians, for Christians, and deliberately, if subtly, antagonistic toward everyone else.
  70. 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.
  71. Alice
    Alice plays as an inadvertent parody of contemporary liberalism’s fascination with and fetishization of ‘70s black radicalism.
  72. Fanny
    The characters, the sets, and the scenes all exist to propagate the notion that pleasure derives from repetition and remediation.
  73. Blair Witch
    It doesn't suggest documentary footage found in the woods so much as a haunted-house version of Hardcore Henry.
  74. Hotel Transylvania
    Yet another instance of a decent, potentially thorny premise bogged down in a mess of treacly sentiment and tedious moralizing.
  75. Rock of Ages
    If the Adam Shankman film's debasement of its subject into campy kitsch is the unavoidable fate of all culturally dangerous art, that doesn't make it any less palatable.
  76. A Teacher
    We're only allowed an insufficient glimpse of the anxiousness and curiosity that drive these creatures, a tactic which feels suspiciously like hesitance masquerading as enigma.
  77. Gunpowder Milkshake
    The fundamental ineptness of Gunpowder Milkshake appears to be a consequence of the exponentially swelling glut of streaming options.
  78. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    Disney draws a big fat bullseye on the fast-growing infertile-couple demographic with this airless misfire.
  79. The Witches
    This is a sleek-looking vehicle that’s eager to be scary but not comfortable being ugly.
  80. 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.
  81. Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things
    Made on the cheap and inspired by early Romero, this zombie flick doesn’t even have the dead rise until the final half-hour. Until then, we’re stuck with an amateur theater troupe chattering away as they venture out to an abandoned island for a goofy séance.
  82. Kate
    Kate will leave you wishing that its narrative possessed the same attention to detail as its elaborately violent action set pieces.
  83. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    The film fails to build on the whimsical foundation of the first film in any way.
  84. Until Dawn
    The film is far from original, but it successfully translates game logic to the big screen.
  85. Interior. Leather Bar.
    With Travis Mathews's help, James Franco's persona forms a kind of symmetry: 1980's dubious homophobia against 2013's risible homophilia.
  86. Before I Disappear
    Even at its most compelling, it remains inconsistent and superfluous, a lesson that sometimes a movie can feel more fully formed in 19 minutes rather than 90.
  87. At the Devil's Door
    An accumulation of dread in search of a properly fleshed-out screenplay to sustain it, the film plays like a show reel for writer-director Nicholas McCarthy's considerable craft.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Bobby Deerfield
    Bobby Deerfield is not so much a failed vanity project as it is a groping, often sensitive and rather death-obsessed character study based on Erich Maria Remarque’s fatalistically titled novel Heaven Has No Favorites.
  89. Nostalgia
    Mark Pellington's Nostalgia is less a living, breathing film than a presentation of sentiments revolving around a pat question: Are the objects of our lives merely detritus, or are they vital to our identities?
  90. In Secret
    A broad, crude mutilation of Emile Zola's noirish romance Thérèse Raquin that prioritizes heavy petting over plot.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Secret Admirer
    It’s relatively good. Of course, “relatively good” in the mid-‘80s teen-movie genre often means “not unwatchable,” and Secret Admirer doesn’t quite qualify as fresh or unpredictable...But it also has a handful of gratifying moments and nuances you don’t expect from the genre, starting with girls who eat and curse like boys.
  92. Black Rock
    Layered conflicts mount as this lean film treks on, and they're not limited to gender politics.
  93. 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.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Thing Called Love
    Such strained touches notwithstanding, The Thing Called Love charms and touches, not the least for revealing Bogdanovich as a rare filmmaker still interested in human behavior, keeping the action mostly in medium shots and extended takes to better catch the emotional nuances from character to character.
  95. Gringo
    The circuitous narrative of Nash Edgerton's Gringo is such that it never allows for a character or storyline to develop in a particularly efficient way, as every few minutes an abrupt twist or turn sets things off in a new and unexpected direction.
  96. Wonder Wheel
    The tone throughout vacillates wildly from silly comedy to classic Hollywood melodrama, and all of it feels as artificial and unsatisfying as the cotton candy twirling in a vending cart.
  97. Now You See Me 2
    The sheer amount of people and incident indifferently presented throughout this film suggests only an obligation to quota-filling.
  98. The Little Death
    It's perched uneasily on a fence separating a rote comic sketch film from something weirder, stranger, and less engaged with offering reassuring domestic homilies.
  99. The Last Movie Star
    The film is a collection of old-fogey clichés, with a narrative that mixes a career retrospective with a road trip.
  100. Red Tails
    Where Spielberg has made WWII a venue for his sanctimonious side, a platform to convince viewers that war is indeed hell, Lucas is still in a state of pre-adolescent fascination with the conflict.
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