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. Whatever Works
    As it unfolds, Whatever Works assumes an increasing note of poignancy, becoming a quasi-optimistic story about securing whatever little love you can in this fakakta world.
  2. Girl in Progress
    Girl in Progress operates like a training-wheels melodrama for genre-uneducated tweens.
  3. 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.
  4. Berlin 36
    Excepting a momentary late-film lapse into eye-rolling double-exposure tomfoolery, the film is as aesthetically bland as a film could conceivably be, the perfunctory camerawork imbuing the proceedings with an ugly, indistinctive gloss.
  5. Jack and Diane
    Scenes of the pair staring longingly into each other's eyes go on for so long that they become devoid of meaning, not unlike the film's alchemical fusion of genres.
  6. Peace, Love, & Misunderstanding
    What saves the film from being simply a schematic mother-daughter reconciliation drama is both the reluctance and prickliness that Catherine Keener brings to her character.
  7. DogMan
    Dogman seems outwardly enamored with cosmic possibilities of meaning, but Luc Besson’s script remains earthbound and unimaginative.
  8. 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.
  9. Colombiana
    Zaldana is such a sultry and surprisingly heartfelt executioner that she often finds a way to make this by-the-numbers genre retread feel, if not fresh, then at least sporadically electric.
  10. 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.
  11. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    Intended as the cinematic equivalent of an orgasm, this tirelessly hyped insta-blockbuster is loaded with OMG developments (marriage! Sex! Baby!) and seemingly regarded by everyone to include the most epic and gratifying scenes of romantic release in modern movie history.
  12. Finding Joe
    Finding Joe maintains that every person should, as Joseph Campbell wrote, "find your bliss," a potentially valuable nugget of wisdom that this film manages to reduce to 80 minutes of celebs giving themselves hugs.
  13. Five Nights in Maine
    Maris Curran never reconciles the film's impulse to interiority with its weakness for hothouse melodrama.
  14. Kill Your Friends
    Thanks to a strong performance by Nicholas Hoult, all reptilian sinew and heroin-chic vacuity, it keeps threatening to become more dynamic and self-critical than its final result.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Happy Life
    First-time writer-director Michael M. Bilandic's tongue-in-cheek, bare-knuckles approach to his ultra-low budget paean to a dying breed is a welcome piece of independent filmmaking.
  16. Come What May
    Christian Carion's film shamelessly wrings excitement from the recreation of violent ideological conflict.
  17. The Possession
    Remarkable only in how brazenly it embraces the tired yet proven formula that these modern ghost tales deal in.
  18. By the Sea
    If it stumbles when it seeks our sympathy, it thrives when it's exploiting our fascination with the surface of things, and all that's unknowable underneath.
  19. A Minecraft Movie
    There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.
  20. The Paperboy
    The Paperboy deserves to be seen for its pulpy, well-executed excess, but as a filmmaker, Lee Daniels seems ignorant of how the shocks distract from the story.
  21. Unforgettable
    The truly depressing thing about a thriller as undercoocked as Unforgettable is its failure to fly on dark fantasy.
  22. The Last Ride
    A typical wax-museum reproduction of the American South in which every detail is Southern in bold all caps, and not a single scene over the course of the film's 102 minutes rings true.
  23. Digging Up the Marrow
    In the end, Adam Green reminds us that he's all to eager to go for the easy thrill.
  24. There's Someone Inside Your House
    The film feels like a missed opportunity to interrogate society’s fervent need to make pariahs out of people for their past mistakes.
  25. The Leisure Seeker
    No matter how likable Sutherland and Mirren are, they're still stuck in little more than an upbeat wish-fulfillment fantasy.
  26. Blood Ties
    What Lumet or Cassavetes often showed with a look, an image, a movement, Canet chooses to tell, and often at length, with the most heavy-handed dialogue imaginable.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    A Liar's Autobiography - The Untrue Story of Monty Python's Graham Chapman
    Graham Chapman's story, frankly, is better served by his Wikipedia page.
  28. Upside Down
    The highlight of the film is the moment Jim Sturgess's Adam inadvertently pisses on the ceiling.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Taken 2
    Some of the basic pleasures of the original remain intact (nobody shoots up a small room of bearded Eastern European men like Neeson), but ultimately the film feels compromised.
    • 45 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Detention
    High school students (the jocks, the brains, the princesses, the criminals, the basket cases), long the favored prey of serial killers, somehow manage to fight back from the brink yet again in Detention, a bright, witty new genre mash-up.
  31. Brimstone
    Its bid for social correctness does nothing to make the juvenile and numbing fixation on brutality any more palatable.
  32. The Lie
    At the heart of Veena Sud’s film is the raw material for a potentially ingenious satirical domestic thriller.
  33. Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World
    The film stumbles sluggishly from one chapter in Foreman’s life to the next.
  34. Flower
    Flower is a sentimental work of faux nihilism, pandering to children who’re just discovering alienation.
  35. Blood Glacier
    The film straddles a very awkward line between creature feature, conspiracy thriller, and domestic drama, all without novelty or suspense.
  36. 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.
  37. The Prodigy
    The filmmakers fail to realize that the darkest horror here doesn’t lie in the triumph of true evil, but in seeing how far a regular family will go to protect itself before doing the right and necessary thing, however hard or horrible it might be.
  38. Craigslist Joe
    As hard as he tries, we never truly believe there's a lot at stake for Garner, who seems to cruise through America like a gringo taking a favela tour in Rio.
  39. The 15:17 to Paris
    One misses the prismatic structure of the 15:17 to Paris book, which fuses multiple points of view and which is reduced by Dorothy Blyskal's script to cut-and-pasted bromides.
  40. Two Night Stand
    It's attempt at conveying a candid portrait of contemporary hookup culture and the dishonesty of online dating profiles, but the film's sentiments are all past their expiration date.
  41. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
    The juxtaposition of courtship and violence is the film's one true coup, but Pride and Prejudice and Zombies still mistakes weaponry for agency.
  42. The Rhythm Section
    The film’s occasional gestures toward pseudo-feminist empowerment only compound the hollowness of its protagonist.
  43. England Is Mine
    England Is Mine is a tour ride through a legend’s formative years that’s more concerned with the familiar signposts than the intricacies of the scenery along the way.
  44. Intrigo: Death of an Author
    The film evinces neither the visceral pleasures of noir nor the precision to uncover deeper thematic resonances.
  45. Mayday
    The film circles a thorny premise, which makes it all the more disappointing that it results in a conventional clinch.
  46. Snatched
    The mother-daughter relationship ostensibly at the film’s heart is largely reduced to tired jokes about how moms can be overprotective and don’t understand how to use Facebook.
  47. I'm Not Here
    Throughout, J.K. Simmons invents the film with a primordial physicality of loneliness and self-loathing.
  48. Lila & Eve
    Charles Stone III's film ultimately succeeds as a convincing social plea, but fails as compelling cinema.
  49. Don't Knock Twice
    The film's storylines fail to inform or intensify each other in any theme-deepening or character-developing ways.
  50. Paint
    The film doesn’t have a clear opinion on its main subject and the scourge of misogyny in media.
  51. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
    Though flattering through and through, the film is ironically removed from the charms of the worshipped original.
  52. Outside the Wire
    The film’s arguments against endless war end up seeming more than a bit disingenuous, especially given how much time it spends glorifying the actions and morality of those who help buoy ongoing American occupation of foreign nations.
  53. 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.
  54. 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.
  55. Preggoland
    Throughout, Sonja Bennett embodies slackness as an affectation, not a raw response to a culture of authenticity-killing productivity.
  56. Prescription Thugs
    It's symptomatic of the one-man-show form of polemical exposé that's come to dominate, and deteriorate, documentary practice.
  57. Sand Castle
    Unwittingly perhaps, the film reveals itself as a microcosm of America's foreign policy in the Middle East.
  58. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me
    A torrid journey through the subconscious of a little girl lost, Fire Walk with Me is also a cautionary tale of sorts, the sad chronicle of a sleepy town trying to rid itself of its dirty laundry.
  59. Angel Has Fallen
    The film seems to have cobbled its set pieces together from a series of close-ups edited as if by random selection.
  60. Seance
    Simon Barrett imbues his narrative with a purplish emotionality that the Urban Legend movies didn’t even think to bother with.
  61. Rampage
    Unlike 2014’s Godzilla, which benefited from director Gareth Edwards’s patience with the Jaws-style slow burn, RAMPAGE is all noise without crescendo.
  62. Fisherman's Friends
    The script doesn’t contain many lines that ring true, and a few clang wildly off-key.
  63. She's Funny That Way
    Familiar as its art/life paralleling may be, it's all fueled by a filmmaker with an intimate relationship to his subject matter.
  64. 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.
  65. Chasing Mavericks
    The filmmakers' kinship to Moriarity is obvious, and it makes for a tone of unflinching hope and optimism, though it leaves little room for grit or nuance.
  66. Queenpins
    The film’s largely painful humor is informed by the mistaken belief that the main characters’ criminal enterprise is inherently quirky.
  67. 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.
  68. The Incredible Burt Wonderstone
    The film is overtly suspicious and critical of the new and only serviceably romantic about the old.
  69. Off Label
    Sincerely angry about the crisis in polypharmacy, this narrative suffers from a documentarian form of A.D.D.
  70. Cherry
    Though the film touches on numerous hot-button topics and is packed with incident and humor, its self-aware style—from straight-to-camera narration to slow motion to visual tricks like the washing out of an entire background so a character will pop out in bright color—and simplistic characterizations deprive it of the chance to say much of anything.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Treasure
    Because the casually observational moments of Julia von Heinz’s film are so rich, its thematic contrivance becomes harder to accept.
  72. Patagonia Rising
    Director Brian Lilla alternates between talking heads and animated graphics to elucidate first how dams work and, obligatorily, to put a human face on those who would be affected.
  73. Salt and Fire
    Salt and Fire is a doodle, suggesting an assemblage of ecological riffs and fantasias that Werner Herzog may have entertained while making Into the Inferno.
  74. 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.
  75. Miracles from Heaven
    Situations and people are sketched out too lightly to leave an emotional trace.
  76. Saban's Power Rangers
    Power Rangers is so concerned with launching a mature teen-targeted franchise that it often forgets to have some fun.
  77. Mapplethorpe
    In Mapplethorpe, the ultimate purpose of the film seems to be the reductive portrayal of the artist as yet another tormented queer destroyed by his tendencies toward vice.
  78. Oz the Great and Powerful
    An amorphous melange of ill-fitting reference points and misappropriated aesthetics, a lumbering family blockbuster both tiresome and wholly indistinct.
  79. Joyful Noise
    Joyful Noise certainly has its demographics covered.
  80. A Million Ways to Die in the West
    All the whiny point-scoring is such an explicit appeal for audience sympathy that the dialogue feels derived from a malnourished stand-up routine.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Hammer of the Gods
    An unbearably stupid exercise in gore that deserves to die the same cruel, soulless death that nearly every character does at some point in the film.
  82. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
    Like far too many modern horror films, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane flaunts its knowledge of classic genre fundamentals but fails to do anything very clever or surprising with them.
  83. Bushwick
    Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott's Bushwick is a genre film with a refreshing sense of political infrastructure.
  84. Unicorn Store
    Brie Larson’s directorial debut is nothing so much as a series of quirks.
  85. 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.
  86. 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.
  87. 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.
  88. Kidnap
    Ultimately, Kidnap is an efficient vehicle for the delivery of some lean action that's frequently weakened by a scarcely whip-smart script.
  89. Dear Dictator
    The potential comic absurdities of the premise are squandered as soon as the film settles into a tepid coming-of-age tale.
  90. Pacific Rim: Uprising
    Steven S. DeKnight's film lacks for Guillermo del Toro's visual acumen, but it makes up for that with an energetic sense of chaos throughout its front-and-center skirmishes, and in the end hedges closer to the nightmarish intensity of such inspirational texts as Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion.
  91. Heart of Stone
    The cinematography looks striking enough throughout the various set pieces, but little happens in them to elevate Heart of Stone past its hackneyed foundation.
  92. 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.
  93. Hyena Road
    Paul Gross situates the film's events somewhere between violent, militaristic fantasy and gentler, anti-war lament.
  94. 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.
  95. Brightburn
    The way the film shuttles through its 90 minutes, it’s as if it’s been stripped of its most crucial narrative parts.
  96. A Good Old Fashioned Orgy
    Avoids funny one-liners like the plague, choosing in their place to deliver only squishy faux-outrageousness that, like Sudeikis's one-note stud, exudes an unwelcome air of self-satisfaction.
  97. Churchill
    The film simplifies Winston Churchill's legacy for the dubious purposes of narrative momentum and emotional lift.
  98. The Belko Experiment
    The film's characters are stock types without enough satirical texture to fulfill their function in the narrative.
  99. Pain Hustlers
    The excitement that the film tries to generate for its main characters is disturbingly glib.
  100. 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.
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