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. The Foreigner
    Even overlooking its fictionalized account of an inexplicable political resurgence, the film falters in its needlessly convoluted plotting.
  2. Bleed for This
    Any initial gestures toward acknowledging Vinny Paz's macho egotism are eventually downplayed as the film becomes just another formulaic triumph-over-adversity saga.
  3. The Seventh Fire
    The documentary renders poverty a mysterious entity instead of a curable malady of systemic exclusion.
  4. The People vs. Fritz Bauer
    Lars Kraume's tinkering with the historical record would be more welcome were he also shifting away from the standard biopic template.
  5. Notes on Blindness
    Its fatal mistake is to make up for blindness, instead of embracing it as something other than a liability.
  6. Kickboxer: Vengeance
    It relies less on in-camera stunts than editing that renders vague gibberish of the altercations.
  7. Autumn Lights
    The film is like a landlocked Bergman chamber drama divested of any ambivalence regarding human relationships.
  8. Gold
    The film finds no treasure of gleaming originality in its energetically told but crushingly clichéd anti-capitalist parable.
  9. Office Christmas Party
    Josh Gordon and Will Speck's Office Christmas Party generally smacks of trying too hard to earn its laughs.
  10. All I See Is You
    The longer things drag out, All I See Is You becomes every bit as amorphous as its protagonist's vision.
  11. Planetarium
    Given all its clumsily executed genre detours and tonal fluctuations, Rebecca Zlutowski’s film suggests an amateur juggling act.
  12. Little Sister
    The film's attempt at political insight and portrayal of social malaise are meant to give it the illusion of depth.
  13. The Girl with All the Gifts
    The film wants to have its flesh and eat it too, but even more damning is how little meat is on its bones to begin with.
  14. Born in China
    The film is neatly organized around not only the changing of the seasons, but a Disney-branded "circle of life" ethos.
  15. In Dubious Battle
    Bits of editorializing dialogue throughout James Franco's In Dubious Battle suggest the resonant film that might’ve been.
  16. Maudie
    Maud Lewis herself couldn’t paint a hurricane that would blow the film’s overburdened narrative off course.
  17. Darkest Hour
    The film reinforces only the most simplistic and patriotic vision of Churchill, its closed-off view of the man reminiscent of the many tracking shots that wind through the underground tunnels of the U.K.‘s war command, constantly peeking into rooms with classified meetings as doors are abruptly closed to keep them secret
  18. The Promise
    The Promise simply turns this historical tragedy into mere background noise for a flimsy romantic triangle.
  19. Wakefield
    Writer-director Robin Swicord's film seems content to merely carry out its absurdist premise until the bitter end.
  20. 37
    There's a fundamental lack of dramatic exigency in writer-director Puk Grasten's storytelling.
  21. Bilal: A New Breed of Hero
    The animation feels like the result of the cold calculus of an algorithm rather than a human director with a personal vision.
  22. The Circle
    The film is a hokily melodramatic rise-fall-redemption story with a mostly unearned patina of greater significance.
  23. Man Down
    Dito Montiel's silly plot machinations waste a solid performance from Shia LaBeouf.
  24. Pet
    The screenplay quickly loses this moral clarity as the plot twists pile up and the power balances shift.
  25. Burn Country
    For a film that warns against believing in a mirage, Burn Country seems all too comfortable perpetuating one.
  26. Dreamland
    The sense of a film school student doing movie karaoke with his influences is evident throughout Dreamland.
  27. Wilson
    Wilson lurches jarringly from poignant melancholy to cartoonish slapstick, unable to settle on a consistent tone.
  28. Gifted
    The grace notes are crowded out by the screenplay’s plot machinations and emotional manipulations.
  29. Hunter Gatherer
    A deliberately offbeat characterization of mental illness, Hunter Gatherer is ultimately a failed act of empathy.
  30. Downsizing
    Alexander Payne's defenders might call his often acidic touch Swiftian, though it comes off more toothlessly noncommittal.
  31. Ne Me Quitte Pas
    The entirety of the film seems increasingly constructed around ill-begotten attempts at dark humor.
  32. Before I Fall
    All the film has to show for its efforts are tired platitudes about the value of altruism and living each day as it if were the last.
  33. Everything, Everything
    The film's plot crux isn't romantic fatalism, but 2017's cutest manifestation of trendy gaslighting.
  34. Best and Most Beautiful Things
    It believes that the avenue to proving humanity is through banalizing gestures of quotidian significance.
  35. The War with Grandpa
    Only when left to their own devices do the film’s stars enter the less manic, more heartfelt realm of the book.
  36. Youth in Oregon
    Joel David Moore's film is too often distracted by irrelevant emotional grandstanding.
  37. The Ardennes
    It predictably lurches toward acts of extreme violence with little interest other than the instant titillation such moments afford.
  38. Blind
    At one point, the film makes a bold but foolish move by getting in the ring with Tolstoy, analogizing itself to Anna Karenina in a self-seriously laughable attempt to pass its schmaltzy and contrived romance narrative off for something significantly grander.
  39. A Bad Moms Christmas
    The pressures of Christmas prove too great to fight off and the need for feel-good holiday cheer inevitably veers the film toward half-hearted, sentimental drama that seems purely obligatory to its seasonal milieu.
  40. Cézanne et Moi
    The film barely even scratches the surface of the animating force of Cézanne and Zola's lives: their art.
  41. The Dinner
    The film is shrilly, luridly, dully, and unremittingly ugly, preaching to a choir that it also demonizes.
  42. Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul
    The film's problem isn't so much the grossness of its humor as the laziness with which it's executed.
  43. The House
    The House's limp comedic pieces are only sporadically enlivened by a game cast.
  44. 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.
  45. Alpha
    It reduces the domestication of wolves to a series of simplistic interactions that don’t exactly convey the difficulties of a wild animal overcoming millennia of instinct.
  46. Victoria and Abdul
    By privileging the white characters in its narrative, Victoria & Abdul exposes itself as insidiously hypocritical.
  47. Claire in Motion
    Throughout, writer-directors Lisa Robinson and Annie J. Howell's film buckles under the weight of its symbolism.
  48. Megan Leavey
    Everyone here, from fellow marines to Iraqis, is merely a supporting player in Megan Leavey's emotional journey.
  49. Hotel Transylvania 3: Summer Vacation
    There are only so many monster-centric jokes to be made before they become toothless, and only so many ways to preach tolerance before it sounds more like blunt moralizing.
  50. Icarus
    A routinely assembled mélange of provocative material consistently undone by its maker's perplexing need to foist himself into the center of every conversation.
  51. Wind River
    When Taylor Sheridan is left to his own devices, his work seems more abrupt and shallow, no more so than when he resolves all of this film's lingering questions in one unremittingly nasty sideswipe of a flashback.
  52. Daddy's Home 2
    The film portrays parenting as the death of manhood, a final surrender to the castrating effects of domesticity.
  53. Viceroy's House
    The only thing that offsets the film's self-negating revisionism are the scenes involving Gillian Anderson vicereine.
  54. Sand Castle
    Unwittingly perhaps, the film reveals itself as a microcosm of America's foreign policy in the Middle East.
  55. 47 Meters Down
    Like Lisa and Kate’s pendular swings between hope and despair, Johannes Roberts’s film can’t help alternating between the genuinely terrifying and the just plain dumb.
  56. School Life
    School Life is unfortunately committed to keeping its subjects, especially Headfort’s students, at arm’s length.
  57. Little Boxes
    The film's default mode is to lazily skewer suburbanites as cartoonishly privileged yuppies.
  58. Naked
    Right from the very beginning of Rob’s cruel cycle that sees him repeatedly returning to the floor of that elevator every time the church bells at his wedding begin to ring, Naked besmirches the reasons that Groundhog Day's Möbius-strip construction worked.
  59. Private Life
    Instead of offering a probing, nuanced view of the burgeoning technologies and sciences involved in this relatively new outgrowth of the OBGYN industry, though, Tamara Jenkins uses her setting as fodder for lame and discomfiting physical comedy.
  60. Skyscraper
    Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson is the true Tower of Babel, the movie star who with each film gets closer to God and whose films always come tumbling down around him.
  61. The Current War: Director's Cut
    The film falls back on the myth of modernity being born in the laps of practical, native-born American ingenuity.
  62. Wish Upon
    The only wish that ends up satisfyingly granted is, in Wish Upon's final and utterly predictable tableau, the audience's.
  63. Suburbicon
    Suburbicon sees a bunch of candidly left-leaning movie stars doing their best to out-awful each other.
  64. UglyDolls
    What’s self-worth in the 21st century without a dollar amount attached to it, and what value does UglyDolls have if kids aren’t walking out of the theater nagging their parents for toys of their favorite characters?
  65. 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.
  66. Goodbye Christopher Robin
    A sweet ode to childhood innocence turning sour upon its introduction to the public is an intriguing notion, but Simon Curtis incomprehensibly crams the events of Christopher’s early childhood stardom, his difficulty coping with the ubiquity of his namesake’s legacy, and his ultimate defiance of his father into less than one-third of the film.
  67. Dark Phoenix
    The film is an all-too-fitting whimper of a conclusion to a franchise that never remotely fulfilled its potential.
  68. Flower
    Flower is a sentimental work of faux nihilism, pandering to children who’re just discovering alienation.
  69. Camera Obscura
    The filmmaker has a bad habit of dropping the psychological inquiries to dully go through the genre motions.
  70. Welcome To Marwen
    The whole endeavor feels like a disservice to Mark Hogancamp’s story, in no small part because no one in the film feels human, even outside doll form.
  71. Whitney: Can I Be Me
    It's no surprise that Nick Broomfield finds little use for the moments of unabashed triumphalism in Houston's life, as he's doggedly fixated on the humiliating swan dive.
  72. The Midwife
    If not for its performances, the film would belong in the category of Hallmark Channel tearjerkers.
  73. 24 Hours to Live
    Brian Smrz never contrasts the film’s violence with stillness, allowing the audience to enjoy a sense of foreboding escalation.
  74. How to Talk to Girls at Parties
    The film's tagline goes “Talk to the girl. Save the world,” but at no point does Earth's fate hang in the balance, and talking to Elle Fanning's Zan is no great challenge for anyone.
  75. The Breadwinner
    Cross-dressing in the story is merely a tool for survival, but such border-crossing is inevitably rife with unintended consequences beyond narrative ones.
  76. My Friend Dahmer
    The film wants to treat Jeffrey Dahmer like a character, but it invariably frames him like a specimen.
  77. 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.
  78. Forever My Girl
    Forever My Girl makes one wonder if Bethany Ashton Wolf actually thinks this is what true love is like.
  79. The Boy Downstairs
    Endeavoring to give us a post-mumblecore spin on Annie Hall, writer-director Sophie Brooks seemingly fails to understand what made Woody Allen's film so appealing: its rich, multi-faceted characterizations.
  80. Bobbi Jene
    Elvira Lind's film is closer to an advertisement for Bobbi Jene Smith than a film about the contemporary dancer.
  81. Ava
    The film's constant cruelty is so inescapable that it starts to feel unfair not only to the protagonist, but to Iran itself.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Charlie's Angels
    All the feminist virtue-signaling in the world can’t conceal the film’s creative conservatism.
  83. Gabriel and the Mountain
    The film seems to think that the mere recognition of Gabriel as a narcissist sufficiently complicates the character's sense of entitlement.
    • 68 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Song of Granite
    It's funny that the film spends so much time caught up in Joe Heaney's feelings of displacement, because it produces a similar sensation in viewers by forgoing the work of narrative and character development in favor of a stark, elliptical style that becomes tiresome.
  85. First Kill
    Lacking any vibrancy, wit, or formal rigor, First Kill is not only as bland and leaden as its über-generic title suggests, it's downright sloppy to boot.
  86. The Upside
    The film becomes overrun by an increasingly preachy and tiresome series of life lessons about race, class, and love.
  87. White Boy Rick
    By treating its main character as exceptional, Yann Demange's film validates the punitive system it seeks to criticize.
  88. Proud Mary
    Babak Najafi’s Proud Mary is a so-so action melodrama with an insulting whiff of generic blaxploitation stylistics.
  89. Souvenir
    Huppert is such a master of her craft that even the silliest sequences give way to tour-de-force moments.
  90. Roman J. Israel, Esq.
    Throughout the film, a promising character study is smothered beneath lazy genre machinations.
  91. Pilgrimage
    The film remains too uncompromisingly black and white as a character study and a story of the conflicts of faith.
  92. Gemini Man
    Whatever new technology facilitated its genesis, the film is just another assembly-line reproduction.
  93. Molly's Game
    There's a blank space at the core of Molly's Game that the protagonist cannot fill, unable as she is to represent anything beyond her esoteric narrative of unorthodox self-actualization.
  94. The Wrong Light
    The divide between meaningful journalism and ethical filmmaking seldom seems as wide as it does in The Wrong Light.
  95. Fun Mom Dinner
    The film is lazily content to simply put its female characters through the potty-mouthed, gross-out comedy ringer.
  96. Lemon
    Self-absorption is Janicza Bravo’s focus, though—as in other smug and mock-ironic comedies—it’s a topic that’s less examined than indulged.
  97. Where'd You Go, Bernadette
    The film is a curiously anodyne affair that proposes the distinctly unenlightening idea that the medicine against despair is just a little R&R.
  98. The Good Catholic
    Despite The Good Catholic‘s interesting macro approach compared to other films of its ilk, it’s far less successful on a micro level.
  99. Mister Universo
    The film eventually replaces the captivating smallness of everyday life with an inconsequential drama.
  100. The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
    One may wish that the entire film had restaged the entirely of Tchaikovsky's ballet rather than reimagine it as an ultimately lifeless epic fantasy.
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