Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,775 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: 4,349 out of 7775
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7775
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7775
7775 movie reviews
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  1. Desert Dancer
    The film's relentless turning of its characters' experience into platitudes and homilies is served for our too-easy consumption.
  2. The Liberator
    It's sense of complexity is giving us masses of people moved by Simon Bolívar's words, and gorgeous sweeping vistas of the landscape backed by a stirring orchestra.
  3. About Alex
    However self-aware the film may be, its characters and moods and conflicts are too over-determined and familiar to linger in the memory very long after the credits roll.
  4. Under the Electric Sky
    Just as queerness is conspicuous by its absence, so is any serious consideration of the drug use that often pairs with extended tastings of EDM.
  5. Honour
    Paddy Considine's benumbed ambiguity at least works against writer-director Shan Khan's reduction of honor killings to grist for the cheapest of pulpy thrills.
  6. The Tribe
    The film is more interested in performance and symbolism than in the meaning of its characters' words or their substitutive gestures.
  7. Annabelle
    It's all a far cry from James Wan's The Conjuring, which embraced the thrill of the paranormal even as it respected its frazzled, earthbound characters.
  8. The Calling
    The premise of faith-based assisted suicide as a motivating factor for a madman's killing spree is initially intriguing, but quickly revealed as solemn window dressing.
  9. Escobar: Paradise Lost
    Benicio Del Toro's performance is showy, a great actor's parade of indulgences that occasionally sets the deranged camp tone that should have been the narrative's starting point.
  10. Uncharted
    The games are fixated on the idea of honor among thieves, but you wouldn’t know that from the antic, meaningless depiction of the betrayals that play out across the film.
  11. My Old Lady
    Israel Horovitz's film is basically a three-character play without a single character you can believe in.
  12. Cam2Cam
    Lost in this barely coherent and clichéd hugger-mugger is the initial killer-website conceit and the attending erotic dread, which is retrospectively revealed to be an illusory siren call.
  13. The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them
    The film abounds in excruciatingly obvious, often precious, articulations of grief, where armchair philosophizing volleys back and forth with punishing abandon.
  14. The Transporter Refueled
    The titular Transporter is now but a blank slate serving the characters and mayhem surrounding him, a walking metaphor for a franchise that's run out of gas.
  15. Revenge of the Green Dragons
    Like Better Luck Tomorrow, it tries to cut cool-movie poses under the pretense of providing an alternative racial viewpoint to typical genre tropes.
  16. Saban's Power Rangers
    Power Rangers is so concerned with launching a mature teen-targeted franchise that it often forgets to have some fun.
  17. A Merry Friggin' Christmas
    Whereas "Bad Santa" was nastier and riskier, as well as more mischievously winsome, A Merry Friggin' Christmas is as curiously timid as it is morally dubious.
  18. Rudderless
    It unnecessarily hampers itself for over an hour for the sake of a gotcha moment before finally allowing its actors to explore something more than generic grief.
  19. The Canal
    Unlike David Lynch, Ivan Kavanagh isn't interested in catching ideas like fish, of linking the degradation of film to the degradation of consciousness.
  20. Metro Manila
    Sean Ellis doesn't so much understand Filipino society as merely sees it as grist for standard genre fare, perhaps hoping that the foreign setting will somehow automatically make the clichés feel fresh.
  21. Krampus
    At the center of the film is a conservative lesson that asks us to unquestioningly abide by society's capitalistic impulses.
  22. Kelly & Cal
    A romantic drama complicated by a stroller and a wheelchair, and its first mistake is in assuming some kind of equity between the two vehicles.
  23. Pride
    The film the tough true story has spawned is as formulaically cheery, didactically "uplifting," and fundamentally false as a Disney sports movie.
  24. Autómata
    Much like a spate of recent summer blockbusters, there's a tiring sense that every single facet of the narrative has to be rendered with truculent solemnity.
  25. Exists
    In the wake of Bobcat Goldthwait's Wolf Creek, Exists's metaphorical ambitions are as under-realized as its story-circumscribing use of found footage.
  26. Naked Opera
    A film that outwardly wants its depiction of class privilege to be ridiculing and farcical, but lacks the ability to express these critiques in lieu of the means of the class on the chopping block.
  27. Days and Nights
    The drama over dinner comes in small analgesic portions, and the secrets feel canned and the dialogue is too pretty to be believable.
  28. Once Upon a Time Verônica
    The film is simply too conscious of its form and its global-market ambitions to ever feel honestly interested in the themes it purports to cherish.
  29. Felony
    It reveals itself to be a profoundly cynical movie posing as a work of idealism, and it's all the more insidious because it's otherwise so bland and forgettable.
  30. The Man on Her Mind
    The film suggests an ineffectual mishmash of Ruby Sparks-ish high concept and modern Elizabethan comedy.
  31. Now You See Me 2
    The sheer amount of people and incident indifferently presented throughout this film suggests only an obligation to quota-filling.
  32. Hungry Hearts
    Throughout, Saverio Costanzo hypocritically drapes his scenes in a cloak of faux-empathy.
  33. Love & Mercy
    Bill Pohlad seems never to have met a metaphor he couldn't bludgeon into its most rudimentary and literal interpretation.
  34. The Riot Club
    The thinly sketched characters of the film are numerous and inconsequential, with director Lone Scherfig giving sparse attention to humanizing or deepening them.
  35. Still Alice
    Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart's artful consideration of familial friction acerbated by disease, and vice versa, nearly saves Still Alice from the banality of its Lifetime-movie execution.
  36. Black or White
    Kevin Costner scowls and darts around the dubious thin line between "racism" and un-sugarcoated "truthfulness" that only anti-P.C. wingnuts actually believe exists.
  37. Fort Bliss
    The complicated psychological realities of army personnel require a tougher directorial treatment than the maudlin melodrama presented here.
  38. Extraterrestrial
    A knowing mélange of recognizable genre tropes bordering on shopworn cliché, with little else introduced to the equation to justify its existence.
  39. Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials
    Every set piece brings to mind an Epcot Center attraction built from borrowed parts, geared toward reinforcing the young audience's belief that adults just don't understand them.
  40. 21 Years: Richard Linklater
    Of greatest damage to the doc's coherence is its wholehearted belief that its subjects are offering firsthand reports worth hearing.
  41. The Decent One
    The Decent One operates under a discursive premise so presumptuous and flimsy that its attempted function as an experiential documentary proffers little more than a book-on-tape-on-film.
  42. Catch Hell
    The story allows for Ryan Phillippe to indulge in a self-deprecating brand of satire, but he can't work up enough courage to ever make his character--and, by extension, himself--the brunt of any of the film's barbs.
  43. Deepwater Horizon
    The film should have been a cautionary tale, but in Peter Berg's hands, it's a hollow account of the resilience of the human spirit.
  44. Justice League
    When the film's tone slides so firmly back into the murk, it's hard not to see DC's notion of heroism as borderline nihilistic.
  45. Aquaman
    Often divertingly colorful and busy to a fault, the film seems to dare us to mock the world of comics' most risible superhero.
  46. Antarctica: A Year on Ice
    Anthony Powell's vision as a filmmaker is frustratingly limited to an information-style presentation that doubles as an enthusiastic advert for the transcendental qualities of the terrain.
  47. Avengers: Endgame
    Every serious narrative beat in the film is ultimately undercut by pro-forma storytelling, or by faux-improvised humor.
  48. Hangar 10
    It's easy to see how Daniel Simpson's desire to return the found-footage genre to its roots resulted in cheap imitation.
  49. Goodbye to All That
    If Junebug focused on quieter moments of extended family dynamics, with its city-meets-country clashes delving into resonant, region-specific sensibilities, Angus MacLachlan never goes beyond signpost sentiment.
  50. The DUFF
    The film deposits its heroine and everyone in the audience looking toward her for image-maintaining guidance back at square one.
  51. Son of a Gun
    The film has the requisite iconography of a crime thriller, but no investment in any of it.
  52. 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.
  53. Unfinished Business
    The whole point of Vince Vaughn's cinematic existence is that he's a paragon for reformed chauvinism. He's an irrepressible but highly tamable id. Not so here.
  54. Southpaw
    Each battle scar in the film is a testament to a vaguely but nonetheless forcefully defined notion of masculinity.
  55. Wild Card
    The action-movie pyrotechnics succeed only at reinforcing Simon West's macho bona fides and condescendingly forcing Jason Statham back into his wheelhouse.
  56. Everly
    Yet another boring ode to heavy breathing that's offered under the hypocritical pretense of celebrating female empowerment.
  57. The Revenant
    What pushes the film, at long last, into the icy river, is its very design, as a monument to slick, mercenary grandeur.
  58. [REC] 4: Apocalypse
    Whatever scant insight the prior films offered into Spain's waning Catholic belief has now been entirely replaced by fascist, cartoonish shows of wish-fulfillment prevarication.
    • 61 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Taking of Tiger Mountain
    Cheery and happily empty-headed, the present-day subplot adds little but sentiment to a film shot through with cliché characters, a predictable plot, and undisguised reverence.
  60. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip
    In the film, Alvin and the Chipmunks proudly align themselves not with Dr. Demento, but with Kidz Bop.
  61. Alien Outpost
    The film splits its time evenly between half-heartedly pretending it's an allegory for our current war on terror and pretending that it's not.
  62. Kill Me Three Times
    The affectionate humanism that typically laces Simon Pegg's postmodern self-awareness is missing from Kriv Stenders's film.
  63. Let's Kill Ward's Wife
    Any pretense of satire collapses by the film's midpoint, leaving only the contempt.
  64. Dark Summer
    The cacophony of visions, broken mirrors, and mutilations only points to the ghost in the machine respecting The Craft as its spirit animal.
  65. Preservation
    Chockablock with instances of characters not shooting, running, attacking, or sneaking away when they can or should, this thriller comes off like the world's most rigged game.
  66. It's All So Quiet
    There's literally no way to miss the memo that It's All So Quiet is about dealing with the encroachment of death, as it's there in every scene.
  67. The Greatest Showman
    The Greatest Showman‘s spectacle is overshadowed by its archaic and misguided notions of American exceptionalism.
  68. The Boss
    The incongruity between Melissa McCarthy's eagerness as a performer and her character's total lack of compassion makes the film somehow both restless and tedious.
  69. Jason Bourne
    One of the more admirable traits of the original Bourne trilogy is how little pleasure it takes in its violence, but Jason Bourne revels in its vicious action sequences.
  70. Kidnapping Mr. Heineken
    For all the thematic emphasis the script ultimately places on the allegedly thick bonds among these men, it's surprising how often they communicate solely through exposition.
  71. Queen and Country
    The film lacks an ability to construct significant instances of character drama as symbolic of larger concerns pertaining to nationalist dilemmas.
  72. The Boss Baby
    Every Republican regime gets the ludicrous devious-baby saga it deserves.
  73. Concussion
    The tacky and loose means by which the platitudinous screenplay dances around what ails the story's football players is just one cog in a whirligig of pat representations.
  74. Me and Earl and the Dying Girl
    It unites a mélange of teen-film tropes into a narrative overburdened with cultural references and framing devices, and undermined by a lack of attention to character.
  75. Sleeping with Other People
    This is exactly the kind of movie at which David Wain took aim with his sublime rom-com parody They Came Together.
  76. Z for Zachariah
    The film squanders the promise of its scrutiny into how people recalibrate their sense of morality in times of crisis.
  77. Don Verdean
    If the film is any indication, Jared and Jerusha Hess remain committed to clotting up the screen with ostensibly charming "eccentricity."
  78. Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Story of the National Lampoon
    It mistakes touch-and-go navel-gazing for comprehension, as if speaking to as many subjects as possible produces an inherently compelling take.
  79. Take Me to the River
    It's difficult to believe in Ryder's gullibility, if not willingness to be caught in his uncle's strange web of provocations.
  80. Ten Thousand Saints
    Even when tragedy strikes early on, the revelation is just another "growing up is hard" dot on the grid.
  81. Mr. Holmes
    Bill Condon ignores the delights and hardships of becoming an artist in lieu of simply presenting the long-touted liberating effects of art.
  82. Blackbird
    The film is, like its main character, too naïve to understand or, at least, to deploy the reparative powers of camp.
  83. The Lady in the Van
    The film's annoying glibness is neatly summarized by the line: "In life, going downhill is an uphill job."
  84. Secret in Their Eyes
    Billy Ray unfurls the parallel time structure with the same flat, procedural monotony applied by Juan José Campanella to the original film.
  85. The Danish Girl
    In so clearly viewing Lili through the lens of 21st-century political correctness, the film only blunts the resolve of her struggle.
  86. Hyena
    The Gerard Johnson film's blanket cynicism is its most shopworn quality of all.
  87. Big Game
    The rambling conversations and endless wandering through nature could let the film pass for a filler episode of Lost.
  88. The Forger
    A sluggish, obvious fusion of a disease-of-the-week tearjerker with a comedic family crime romp that abounds in stiflingly over-emphasized Boston-crime-movie details.
  89. Lily & Kat
    It passive-aggressively seems to suggest that anyone who isn't exactly interested in monogamy may be some kind of selfish, intolerable sociopath.
  90. Our Man in Tehran
    Never is there an Iranian perspective on the proceedings, giving the documentary the jingoistic bent its title implies.
  91. The Founder
    Michael Keaton's powerful performance in The Founder is marooned in a wishy-washy story.
  92. Brand: A Second Coming
    Ondi Timoner's documentary about Russell Brand basically gives the English comedian turned "activist" a free pass.
  93. Ardor
    It broods along as if it's expressing something monumentally important with each slow-as-molasses camera move.
  94. Bravetown
    The filmmakers attempt to acknowledge the pain of warfare within the framework of a redemptive story that lends it an unforgivably patronizing sense of closure.
  95. Learning to Drive
    Instead of using the titular metaphor as a means to seek deeper, darker ends, Isabel Coixet proceeds to restate it over and over again.
  96. Youth
    As ever, Paolo Sorrentino ironically cuts the legs out from under his protagonists' wistfulness with grotesquerie.
  97. Aloft
    The film's images, so continually heartrending so as to never become redundant, effectively function as visual proselytizing.
  98. The Gallows
    The film is sstrictly a high-tech spin on one of those Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
  99. Maze Runner: The Death Cure
    Emotional complication is what this film, so abundant in last-minute getaways, fake-outs, and half-hearted nods to the franchise's greatest hits, needed so as to elevate it out of its programmatic torpor.
  100. Dirty Weekend
    Even if the title is meant to be ironic, the latest from writer-director Neil LaBute is a frustratingly stilted vision of middle-aged repression unleashed.
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