Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Come Out and Play
    Makinov's film expertly crafts a sense of dawning madness that hinges on its villains' unspoken fury at their elders.
  2. The King's Man
    The film is so caught up in its own idea of national exceptionalism that its tagline might as well be Make England Great Again.
  3. Lookin' to Get Out
    Lookin’ to Get Out, however, though pieced together with Ashby’s trademark character sympathy and technical aplomb, is one toke over the line: Unkempt and unconvincingly funny, the film is infused with the thin, despondent languor of a mourning man’s second-hand marijuana smoke.
  4. The Inbetweeners Movie
    Oh, the hilarious awkwardness of placing privileged white kids in a place where they don't belong.
  5. Foe
    At every turn, Garth Davis’s Foe not only fails to adequately redress or rework played-out tropes within its high-concept world, but its examination of marriage and identity is also hackneyed.
  6. Ricky Stanicky
    As a WWE superstar, Cena is a perfect casting choice for a larger-than-life character like the formerly imaginary Ricky. He rattles off jokes with the boundless energy of a man used to spending three nights a week catapulting himself across a ring, and he’s completely at ease as the absolute center of attention.
  7. Delivery Man
    The breadth of Vince Vaughn's gregarious persona has never been given free reign by any director and this certainly isn't the game-changer.
  8. Barely Lethal
    The film settles into a time-honored groove of so many forgettable juvenile comedies before it.
  9. Next Goal Wins
    Next Goal Wins feels like five different films, all of them failing to coalesce in an effective way because every 30 seconds the script thinks it has to crack wise.
  10. Five Time Champion
    A coming-of-age tale that, with every landscape cutaway and twinkling note from its xylophone-heavy score, begs to be taken as a dreamy slice of countryside profundity.
  11. Cut Bank
    If the film is meant only as a pulpy genre exercise, Matt Shakman's competence in various modes actually works to strip it of any sense of coherent vision.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    See No Evil, Hear No Evil
    Trapped inside its overwritten crime story is a breezy character study starring two men with genuine chemistry and a flair for both physical and verbal comedy. In the rare moments when Pryor and Wilder simply talk to each other, there’s the potential for a funny and poignant interracial two-hander like I’m Not Rappaport. It’s too bad that potential is squandered on a senseless murder plot.
  13. House
    House has a superb premise that begs for a more ambitious framework, both formally and psychologically.
  14. Planetarium
    Given all its clumsily executed genre detours and tonal fluctuations, Rebecca Zlutowski’s film suggests an amateur juggling act.
  15. Spinning Man
    The film is ultimately tethered to the strictures of a procedural thriller, as it's rife with functional dialogue and plotting as well as forgettable aesthetics, which cumulatively reduce the existential calisthenics to filler.
  16. Clean
    While its plot is strictly by the numbers, Clean is elevated by its stylistic flair and propulsive pace.
  17. Mortal Engines
    After a while, it all starts to feel like a showreel for the film’s special-effects team than an honest effort to tell a story.
  18. Dracula
    Not even a typically scenery-chewing Christoph Waltz can enliven the proceedings.
  19. Into the Storm
    There are many instances of questionable logic in Into the Storm, but the most persistent is the film's unexplained assumption that tornado-hunting is a growth industry.
  20. The Raven
    While full of welcome gore and blood spatter, it's bankrupt of any creative spark.
  21. Robin Hood: Men in Tights
    It should be said that this negligible absence of Brooks’s boundary hopping wit and untamed performances doesn’t quite render Men in Tights unwatchable. There’s an appropriate, albeit languid merriment to the proceedings kept alive by a few choice cameos (Dick van Patten, Dom DeLouise, Brooks himself) and a handful of gags that land on their feet.
  22. The Dancer
    Like Loïe Fuller's serpentine dance, the film is structured on repetition: spinning and spinning but never actually taking us nowhere.
  23. We're the Millers
    Though the cast partially eschews the family-friendly timidity that the film defers to in the end, this would-be wild thing remains little more than a rowdy endorsement of the status quo.
  24. The Hangover Part II
    If The Hangover was a boorish blackout fantasy for our binge-drinking age, The Hangover Part II is something like the contents of a fraternity house's toilet the morning after an insane kegger-namely, regurgitated elements of a more entertaining prior adventure.
  25. Hot Summer Nights
    Like the teenagers at its center, Hot Summer Nights tries too hard to look cooler than it ever could be.
  26. BearCity 2: The Proposal
    Doug Langway's film is often too cheesy to, well, bear.
  27. Hey Bartender
    Sadly, Douglas Tirola's documentary doesn't follow its subjects' advice regarding the refinement of technique.
  28. 100 Streets
    Throughout the film's three interconnected stories, Jim O'Hanlon favors the blunt, maudlin manipulations of Crash.
  29. Wolf Creek 2
    There are cheap shocks in the film, but there are also terrifying moments that poetically command our empathy.
  30. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City
    Johannes Roberts’s prequel ultimately remains buried by its indifference to unchecked corporate power.
  31. Rifkin's Festival
    As Rifkin’s Festival drones on, the wastefulness grows offensive in a manner that’s unusual even for Woody Allen’s misfires.
  32. 13 Sins
    Daniel Stamm's film is solidly helmed, if expectedly over-reliant on unnecessarily grisly comeuppances that leave nothing to the imagination.
  33. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
    A sequel that functions as origin story, apologia, and harbinger of a second expanded universe of overpopulated action bonanzas.
  34. This Is Where I Leave You
    And the jury's still very much out over whether Shawn Levy is an inept comedy director masquerading as an opportunistically dramatic one, or vice versa.
  35. Cook County
    Unlike AMC's Breaking Bad, meth here doesn't reflect current, perilous economic realties; rather, it's just a low-rent drug used by degenerates whose lives say nothing about anything.
  36. Gut Renovation
    Due to the one-minded construction of the documentary, there's little to parse beyond impassioned harrumphs.
  37. 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.
  38. Police Story: Lockdown
    The film's subtitle is apropos, as this is a decidedly locked-down and lead-footed talk-o-rama.
  39. Mortal Kombat
    In spite of its occasionally engaging displays of gnarly brutality, the film too often feels like an adaptation of a player select screen.
  40. The Bronze
    The prevailing attitude behind the film can be boiled down to a simplistic idea: the cruder, the better.
  41. Bloodshot
    Given its hero’s imperviousness, the film’s chaotically edited action sequences tend to be devoid of suspense.
  42. Jobs
    Steered by a lead actor and director, Joshua Michael Stern, who are both way out of their respective leagues, Jobs is excruciating, failing to entertain and all but pissing on its subject's grave.
  43. Life Happens
    L!fe Happens wants us to believe its message is one of female independence and empowerment.
  44. Aftermath
    The film evokes nothing more strongly than a live-action adaptation of a Crate and Barrel catalog.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Lula, the Son of Brazil
    This insipidly inspirational biopic of the two-term Brazilian president is a safe, bourgeois vision of proletarian struggle.
  46. Killer Elite
    Killer Elite is pleasurable enough, but with a steadier hand, it could've been one for the books.
  47. Blood
    Themes of family ties, obsession, and morality, so dramatically realized in Conviction, are gracelessly and shapelessly strewn together here.
  48. The Giant Mechanical Man
    It's a simple story of simple people intentionally told in simple terms, and the only issues with which it's concerned are those of pure personal connection.
  49. The Prime Ministers: The Pioneers
    The documentary is dressed to the nines in pomp and patriotism, which seems meant to hide the fact that the film offers very little in the way of valuable reporting or insider information.
  50. 4th Man Out
    It's a bizarre and retrograde spectacle, as clueless and incurious about friendship as it is about the rudiments of composition and screenwriting
  51. Night Swim
    There’s an elegiac beauty to many of Night Swim’s pool scenes, but everything that surrounds them is leaden, from Wyatt Russell’s comatose performance to the baseball metaphors that have been unsubtly shoehorned into the impossibly routine narrative.
  52. The Drowning
    If there’s anything worth mulling over about The Drowning, it's the way it proffers the East Coast couple as an inevitably miserable institution without really meaning to.
  53. 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.
  54. Backwards
    Streamlines its busy set of plots and subplots into a 90-minute sprint, throughout which characters often confront and overcome their obstacles within the same scene.
  55. Step Up Revolution
    The film busts a fierce move but never relishes the unique cultural essence that its gentrifying baddie threatens to snuff out.
  56. Hunter Killer
    The film is a second-rate airport thriller that makes The Hunt for Red October seem like nonfiction by comparison.
  57. Jackpot
    Guy Ritchie may have creatively moved on from his Tarantino-inspired debut, but international crime cinema has not, as again evidenced by Magnus Martens's film.
  58. San Andreas
    In Brad Peyton's San Andreas, the biggest earthquake in recorded history is less natural disaster than divorce negotiation process.
  59. American Pastoral
    Ewan McGregor’s inert adaption smooths out the Philip Roth novel's eruptions of self-loathing and doubt.
  60. True Wolf
    The documentary veers between repetitive and didactic pronouncements of a call to inaction and more affectionately told stories about Koani's life as an "ambassador wolf" on the elementary school circuit.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Maggie Moore(s)
    The story’s center isn’t strong enough for the rest of its disparate parts to hold.
  62. The Vow
    Very fortunately, there's an alternate universe swirling in the eye of The Vow's synthetic storm, a place occupied only by Tatum and McAdams, where the link between them cuts down the filmmakers' bad instincts.
  63. Bob Marley: One Love
    This shaggy, disjointed film is less interested in the complexities of Marley’s personal or professional life than it is in presenting him as a hero and an inspiration.
  64. Antebellum
    This is a film that employs imaginative twists to illuminate the racism that’s entrenched in American history and society.
  65. The Angry Birds Movie
    The Angry Birds Movie is a lot of things, but none of them true to the app's appeal.
  66. Equals
    The Drake Doremus film all comes down, simplistically and repeatedly, to “feelings make us feel alive.”
  67. The Girl in the Spider's Web
    Fede Álvarez’s film suffers from a compulsion to be capital-C cool, and all of its ostensibly stylish shots are untethered to any semblance of a sustained reality.
  68. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    In transforming folk metaphors into utilitarian attributes of an action hero, Disney exposes the emptiness of their product.
  69. Shelter
    The characters' marginalized social standing is less indicative of a real-life epidemic and more akin to window dressing.
  70. 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.
  71. My Best Enemy
    This twist-heavy World War II drama would play as an absurdist comedy if the director wasn't so dead set on excluding just about any trace of humor from his self-serious project.
  72. A Family Affair
    Ultimately, Richard LaGravenese’s rom-com is a little too packed with soul-searching speeches.
  73. Wish I Was Here
    It's hard to see the fiscal woes at the center of Zach Braff's second feature as anything more than a fashionable depiction of first-world problems.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Total Recall (2012)
    Len Wiseman's Total Recall's a trifling mess, as superfluous as a third breast.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The ABCs of Death
    Tellingly, this horror anthology's finest entries convey how real horror comes in more than shades of red, and how it lives inside us all.
  76. The Brass Teapot
    Imbued with a buoyant mysticism, the film is more gag-friendly than idea-based, primarily relying on the considerable charm of its leads to ground its supernatural conceit.
  77. The Lady
    The goings-on can rarely be called truly compelling, even if they're almost always generally pleasant.
  78. Death by China
    Further confirmation that agitprop documentaries have become wedded to a template that undermines their very arguments.
  79. Vita & Virginia
    The film frequently falls back on the stately demeanor of countless other historical biopics and period pieces. Read our review.
  80. 360
    Directed by Fernando Meirelles from a dusty script by Peter Morgan, 360 is all superficial stimulation, hollow and stiff as it beats the dead horse of we're-all-connected narratives.
  81. The Strangers: Chapter 1
    This film’s approach to slasher film mayhem is liable to induce some serious déjà vu.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Doctored
    Bobby Sheehan doesn't just squander his objectivity, he drowns it out with bleating strings.
  83. Where the Crawdads Sing
    The film spins a soapy yet dramatically inert and often tone-deaf yarn about societal rejection and female empowerment in the wetlands of North Carolina.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Bleeding Steel
    A film so brazen in its desire to reach a wide audience that it plays like a compilation of disparate action set pieces, each shamelessly stolen from successful Hollywood franchises.
  85. Black Butterfly
    Its incoherent turn of events attempts to stupefy us into mistaking its deeply flawed internal logic for ingenuity.
  86. Violet & Daisy
    A twisted, spirited exercise in stark juxtaposition, a grindhouse fairy tale of sorts that pairs the sugary sweet with the nastily violent.
  87. The Aftermath
    The film’s threads of personal loss and cultural friction are all but lost amid the tawdry romantic entanglements.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bad Fever
    In Bad Fever, Dustin Guy Defa's sad-sack indie drama about loneliness and urban ennui, a stand-up routine becomes an outlet for personal pain, the stage a place to unload baggage.
  89. Stephen King’s A Good Marriage
    It could have used far more of King's mordant humor, which might have imbued the metaphorical autumnal proceedings with a much-needed jolt of pop anarchy, or even pathos.
  90. Vincent N Roxxy
    Its gory conclusion is presented with an ostentatious grandiosity that the rest of the film simply doesn’t justify.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    The film cloyingly asks us to embrace the sincerity of its impersonal romance.
  92. Good Deeds
    Simultaneously both archetypal Tyler Perry and another step in the direction of nuance and thoughtfulness for the filmmaker.
  93. In Dubious Battle
    Bits of editorializing dialogue throughout James Franco's In Dubious Battle suggest the resonant film that might’ve been.
  94. Machine Gun Preacher
    Marc Forster regards the real-life Childers's evolution from heroin-addicted, wife-beating (implied), gun-toting oblivion to born-again do-gooderism with motorized aloofness.
  95. I Do... Until I Don't
    It’s hard to tell who’s being lampooned and who’s being treated with sincerity at any given point.
  96. Retribution
    Without a compelling reason for us to care about the people inside the car, a reasonably diverting journey never accelerates into an outright thrill-ride.
  97. Back to Black
    The film presents Amy Winehouse’s demise with a sad shrug, as one of those tragic things that just sort of happens.
  98. Like Sunday, Like Rain
    Frank Whaley never gives these characters a humanizing moment outside of their default personalities, which turns them into cartoon impressions of the worst of each class.
  99. The Takedown
    The Takedown’s supposedly inclusionary, pro-immigrant messaging is constantly undermined by puerile and dated humor.
  100. Miss Meadows
    Perhaps Karen Leigh Hopkins's intent was to subtly suggest the surreal aspects of the story, but ultimately she underplays her hand.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »