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. Marie's Story
    The film is unable to specify narrative urgency beyond a broad sense of "based on a true story" pathos that's by turns hollowly uplifting and tragic.
  2. 1001 Grams
    In the end, Bent Hamer's view of current international relations comes to down to a treacly rendition of "Kumbaya."
  3. The 33
    The film doles out a shock or hits a (usually hollow) emotional note every few minutes with mechanical precision.
  4. He Named Me Malala
    The effect of the film's animated sequences is to distance the viewer from real-life horrors--another misguided attempt at turning recent history into instant myth.
  5. L.A. Slasher
    It inflates the meta conceit (already borderline overblown) of a pop-obsessed, sex-negative serial killer to excessive but trite proportions.
  6. The Fate of the Furious
    The film finally tips the franchise over from modestly thoughtful stupidity into tedious, loud inanity.
  7. Legend
    Given how Legend's script is so bereft of insight into its characters' psyches, perhaps there's only so much even an actor of Tom Hardy's stature can do.
  8. Love
    Gaspar Noé's lack of self-investigation merely situates the film as a libidinal advertisement for a tantrum-prone filmmaker's delayed adulthood.
  9. Wild Horses
    Robert Duvall's evident admiration for his wife are typical of this film, in which so much seems touchingly sincere but clumsily expressed.
  10. Dark Was the Night
    The film may take the notion of implication over illustration a bit too far.
  11. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2
    As far as shameless excuses to rehash crowd-pleasing gags from the first film go, it doesn't particularly go about its duties cynically.
  12. What We Did on Our Holiday
    The underlying, redundant, and underwhelming theme of the film is the pursuit of family unity at all costs.
  13. Gabriel
    The film wants to reveal the anguish of mental illness and infiltrate the mind of its protagonist through constant affirmation of his pain.
  14. 3 Generations
    The main character is too often pushed to the sidelines so that the filmmakers can indulge tired family-drama tropes.
  15. The Wanted 18
    The eccentric artistry calls so much attention to itself as to make the subject of the film feel like an afterthought.
  16. Pitch Perfect 3
    Women deserve a better vehicle for demonstrating the power of female solidarity than this empty money grab.
  17. Big Significant Things
    Its anodyne tastefulness effectively lumps it into a big vat of likeminded Sundance-or-SXSW-endorsed offerings.
  18. Advantageous
    The dialogue is so disaffected it's as if humans were replicants even before going through the aforementioned twin-making procedure.
  19. The New Girlfriend
    François Ozon is never willing to fully engage with the ridiculousness of his material, resulting in an uneasy mix of wry distance and unearned emotion.
  20. Jenny's Wedding
    Tolerance in the film doesn't so much suggest a recognizably real epiphany as it does a moving Hallmark card.
  21. Beasts of No Nation
    Cary Joji Fukunaga’s artistry registers less as psychological imprint than as a measure of his professional bona fides.
  22. The Young Kieslowski
    Another effort to explain how difficult it is to be a young, white, smart, non-disfigured, upper-middle-class male.
  23. Addicted to Fresno
    The film's larger points essentially fall by the wayside in the name of black comedy that's largely without genuine edge.
  24. Paulo Coelho's Best Story
    Daniel Augusto relies on familiar tropes pertaining to the sexy, rebellious rock-star artist who does things his own way.
  25. Before We Go
    The setup is so familiar that frustration sets in before the title has barely faded from view.
  26. Stonewall
    At its worst, the film dangerously repackages the queer experience using language invented by those originally deployed to break it apart.
  27. Our Brand Is Crisis
    It only serves to validate George Clooney's devotion to showmanship as Hollywood's current reigning poster boy for blue-state morality.
  28. A Brilliant Young Mind
    The film focuses on Nathan's emotions and backstage dramas in ways that generally feel forced or inauthentic.
  29. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle
    The film is unable to reconcile a desire to ridicule its own artifice with constant attempts to foster genuine empathy and dramatic tension.
  30. The Star
    Director Timothy Reckart's The Star turns the greatest story ever told into just another kids' movie.
  31. Guidance
    The unapologetic lack of political correctness never goes beyond a one-dimensional and tentative provocation.
  32. Tab Hunter Confidential
    The film lacks perspective beyond a rather limited preoccupation with the details of Hunter's personal life.
  33. Ashby
    The film displays little ability to utilize Ashby's violent actions for means other than high-concept fodder and out-of-place bloodshed.
  34. Love the Coopers
    Sloppy and haphazard where it should be calculatedly chaotic, it can't ever seem to settle on an appropriate tone.
  35. The 5th Wave
    The sense that children’s attitudes toward rampant militarization are being gradually normalized is the film's objectionable given.
  36. Jack Reacher: Never Go Back
    The visual blandness of Edward Zwick’s style and the simplistic, easily solved case is better suited for television.
  37. I Saw the Light
    A flaccidly directed film that basks for two hours in a carefully art-designed simulation of the past.
  38. Born to be Blue
    Robert Budreau strip-mines the life of an amazing musician for the purpose of mounting yet another comeback story.
  39. Wrecker
    Time and again, the filmmaker cuts the money shot meant to theoretically cap a sequence.
  40. The Childhood of a Leader
    Brady Corbet reaches for a dreary self-importance akin to Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon.
  41. Remember
    Atom Egoyan is only interested in using the Holocaust as fodder for carrot-dangling plot contrivances.
  42. Father Figures
    Father Figures, which finished shooting more than two years ago before spending endless months without a release date, is both meandering and bloated, suggesting the Frankensteinian result of brutal test screenings.
  43. The Forest
    The so-called suicide forest's cultural value is trivialized in the bum-rush to liberate the main characters from their agonies.
  44. The Emperor's New Clothes
    It's more about hyping Russell Brand as a constituent for the people than locating the means for sustained economic transformation.
  45. Fist Fight
    Over-stuffed and under-conceived, Fist Fight is a clumsy mélange of clashing comedic perspectives.
  46. Kingsman: The Golden Circle
    The hollow grandeur of the film's action only gives the proceedings a glib undertone that also undermines the rare occasions of earnestness that the heroes exhibit toward fallen comrades.
  47. 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.
  48. The Space Between Us
    The Space Between Us is simply disappointing when it isn’t trying to browbeat its audience into emotional submission.
  49. The Daughter
    It too often strains for a tragic gravity that its ultimately melodramatic characters never earn.
  50. Hard Labor
    The allegorical possibilities of a disintegrating wall point to a film that could have been.
  51. The Girl on the Train
    It forgoes its promise of twisty adult thrills in favor of a grimly deadpan lecture about messy truths and false perceptions.
  52. Lamb
    Ross Partridge seems flatly fascinated by Lamb’s pathology without trying to understand its formation from environmental factors.
  53. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    The overriding despair of Winter's War's imagery calls into question who, exactly, the film is for.
  54. Fifty Shades of Black
    An aimless, if sporadically clever, parody that tirelessly conceives of human sexuality as punchlines for its shortsighted cultural ribbings.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Wave
    It sketches an imperiled family worth caring about, but any goodwill is soon weathered by wave after wave of contrivance following the initial town-leveling event.
  56. Ma
    Celia Rowlson-Hall's Ma has had its subtext dragged kicking and screaming to the surface.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker
    The film, hyper-aware of the shadow cast by the franchise’s history, struggles to both honor and redeem the past before everything comes to a close.
  58. Fraulein
    Fraulein almost entirely shuns backstory, coloring around the lives of its characters with ostentatious style (in this case, fuzzy-wuzzy visual vibes and music tailored to each character’s generation) and hoping audiences won’t mind filling in the blanks.
  59. Sing
    In Sing, musical theater is simply an excuse for the filmmakers to deliver an animated version of American Idol.
  60. The Brand New Testament
    At first, the film’s dark humor is amusing, only for it to wear off once an actual plot kicks into motion.
  61. The Bye Bye Man
    Stacy Title’s film ends up succeeding most deftly as an advertisement for on-campus housing.
  62. Synchronicity
    Writer-director Jacob Gentry's film has the emotional fatuousness of uncertain softcore erotica.
  63. Dunkirk
    In devoting so much time to the dull, counterproductive mechanics of the action assembly, Dunkirk dispenses with nearly all other elements of drama.
  64. Intruders
    The film ultimately boils down to people bludgeoning one another in unimaginative close-ups.
  65. Forsaken
    The film adheres to the dictionary definition of a classical genre without ever attempting to subvert it.
  66. Backgammon
    The imagery fails to express either the characters' or the filmmakers' obsessions or synchronicities.
  67. Marguerite
    Xavier Giannolli consistently glosses every sequence with a stagey kind of humor, and at the main character's expense.
  68. Everybody's Fine
    It joins its American cousin in the scrapheap of family dramedies that no one watches, unless by default out of boredom on TBS or TNT.
  69. Desierto
    Any perceptive dialogue or contemporary socio-political subtext is pummeled by Jonás Cuarón’s preference for empty genre thrills.
  70. Frank & Lola
    The film occasionally benefits from the weird energy shared between Michael Shannon and Imogen Poots.
  71. Miracles from Heaven
    Situations and people are sketched out too lightly to leave an emotional trace.
  72. Fast X
    Being as this is the first of a possibly three-part finale, Fast X’s sense of fun is constantly deflated by all the table-setting.
  73. Five Nights in Maine
    Maris Curran never reconciles the film's impulse to interiority with its weakness for hothouse melodrama.
  74. A Hologram for the King
    Remarkably faithful, except in how it rather boldly transforms Dave Eggers's drama into a broad comedy.
  75. Hands of Stone
    The Panamanian-born Roberto Duran's story has all the makings of a fascinating film, but Hands of Stone isn't it.
  76. Going in Style
    No one in Going in Style seems to really know what the hell they’re doing or why. And even though that goes double for the filmmakers, at least no one succumbs to taking any of it seriously.
  77. Holy Hell
    It hopes to jolt audiences with OMGs instead of edifying them about the empty lure of Buddhafield's cult mentality.
  78. The Meddler
    Writer-director Lorene Scafaria's film is an unconvincing character study that plays like a painfully unfunny sitcom.
  79. The First Monday in May
    Andrew Rossi pays sporadic lip service to recognizing cultural specificity before returning to his star-gazing ways.
  80. Holidays
    Every short exudes a commercially slick anonymity that effectively flattens any potential excitement.
  81. Special Correspondents
    Ricky Gervais's film hopscotches through a variety of premises, looking for jokes that never arrive.
  82. Clown
    Jon Watts does nothing with the scarily funny notion of a respectable professional who suddenly refuses to shuck a party costume.
  83. Standing Tall
    The film quickly devolves into a contemptible, exploitative presentation of sociological matters.
  84. Puerto Ricans in Paris
    The film simply limps to predetermined truths that hypocritically advocate the maintenance of placid family values.
  85. Pelé: Birth of a Legend
    The beautiful game, as Pelé called football (or soccer to us Americans), has never felt like such a sedate slog.
  86. Cell
    The film insufficiently connects the book's prophecy with its present-day, real-world forms of realization.
  87. American Pastoral
    Ewan McGregor’s inert adaption smooths out the Philip Roth novel's eruptions of self-loathing and doubt.
    • 53 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Approaching the Unknown
    The film fails to lay down the character foundation that might have elevated the third-act histrionics.
  89. Bridgend
    The film, with its dark-blue-hued cinematography and murky music, is all foreboding atmosphere.
  90. Amateur Night
    The film is peppered with interesting true-life details, but these are overwhelmed by frantic comedic sequences.
  91. Dog Eat Dog
    Paul Schrader's film scrambles for contemporary relevance and finds only nihilistic hollowness.
  92. The Unknown Girl
    This is a left-footed and clumsily insistent work, exposing the worst aspects inherent to the Dardennes' style.
  93. Rules Don't Apply
    Warren Beatty's portrayal of Howard Hughes has the overly polished feel of an anecdote that's been told too often.
  94. The Assignment
    Walter Hill and Michelle Rodriguez seem to share Frank’s confusion over the precise difference between cosmetic and biological reality.
  95. The Final Master
    The film is a seemingly endless series of convoluted double-dealing, backstabbing, and factional realignment.
  96. Carnage Park
    The film covers "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" by way of Rob Zombie, Quentin Tarantino, and Ti West.
  97. Atomic Blonde
    The tediously forestalled twists suck away time from what should be the film's focus—its action—and leaves only two scenes worthy of celebration.
  98. Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru
    Director Joe Berlinger essentially allows his subject to hijack the film for his own end.
  99. All Eyez on Me
    The tension between verisimilitude and economy of storytelling dictates everything in All Eyez on Me.
  100. Adult Life Skills
    The film uses the grieving process to lend the proceedings a sense of unearned emotional gravitas.
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