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. Monte Carlo
    Mistaken-identity shenanigans and gooey romance are Monte Carlo's prime commodities.
  2. Desperate Acts of Magic
    Tammy Caplan and Joe Tyler Gold's film gives off the alienating feel of an inside joke that you miss in the off chance you're not part of the professional magic business.
  3. Dark Phoenix
    The film is an all-too-fitting whimper of a conclusion to a franchise that never remotely fulfilled its potential.
  4. A Dog's Purpose
    Lasse Hallström's gooey film exists only to offer comforting reassurances about dogs' natural servility.
  5. Nitro Circus: The Movie
    While the Nitro Circus's many achievements are impressive, they pale in comparison to those of Knoxville and company's.
  6. Last Days
    Instead of delving into what lay behind John Allen Chau’s recklessness, the film scatters itself across multiple plot angles that confuse more than clarify.
  7. The Circle
    The film is a hokily melodramatic rise-fall-redemption story with a mostly unearned patina of greater significance.
  8. Death Note
    Whereas the more grounded scenes of Death Note anchor a startlingly bloody fantasy of power run amok, the scenes that fixate on super powers and code-busting seldom manage to rise above the realm of serviceable YA fiction.
  9. The Iron Orchard
    Director Ty Roberts’s film is unable to realize that its subject matter is that of a horror story.
  10. Backtrack
    The film is the cinematic equivalent of watching a Rubik's Cube noisily solve itself for 90 minutes.
  11. Glass
    M. Night Ghyamalan’s film is aimed at an audience from whom he cringingly craves fealty.
  12. Dealin' with Idiots
    The film is reduced to a series of unfunny mockery laid out so Garlin can display his trademark deadpan reaction.
  13. Into the Grizzly Maze
    David Hackl often shoots his bear in fashions that accent its lumbering, powerful grace, even during its death rattle.
  14. 47 Meters Down: Uncaged
    The film more or less keeps things efficiently moving, wringing white-knuckle tension less through jump scares than from the darkness of a seemingly infinite void.
  15. Anaconda
    Regrettably, the one star of Anaconda that gets the shortest shrift is the most important one: the snake.
  16. Cruising
    Its truly unnerving quality is that its existence is a brutal reminder from the past that homosexuality is not heterosexuality, and that any attempt to reconcile the difference will only breed resentment, confusion, and violence. Or perhaps it will only lead to more lame Hallmark movies of the week like Brokeback Mountain.
  17. Office Christmas Party
    Josh Gordon and Will Speck's Office Christmas Party generally smacks of trying too hard to earn its laughs.
  18. Snow Flower and the Secret Fan
    Despite gestures toward modernity and clumsy humanism, the film feels regressive, presenting a version of modern China that's as much of an anesthetized fairy tale as its costume-drama past.
  19. Stuber
    More than its violence, the film is defined by its vileness, its straight-faced attachment to outmoded ideas about masculinity and law enforcement.
  20. Swerve
    A confident and exciting genre film, and that's certainly not nothing, but it has a slight impersonality that marks it as either a calling card or a work for hire.
  21. The Divergent Series: Insurgent
    A Little Golden Book version of drastically simplified socialism accompanied with a healthy dose of warmongering bravado.
  22. Loving Pablo
    The film uncomfortably dwells in a murky middle ground where everything is overblown but meant to be taken at face value.
  23. Needle in a Timestack
    The film is too blinded by manufactured sentimentality to see the more compelling what-if scenario lying right in front of its eyes.
  24. I Know What You Did Last Summer
    Late in this reboot, a character states “Nostalgia is overrated,” and it feels like an indictment of the film we’ve been watching. Far from making a case for the original I Know What You Did Last Summer as one with its own identity and a legacy worth turning over, Robinson’s update is so cynically made and self-indulgent that it will at least leave you respecting the workmanlike scare-making that director Jim Gillespie brought to the 1997 film.
  25. Raising Cain
    Rather than clarifying, De Palma’s technique with Raising Cain effectively obliterates the audience’s bearings. Which gives the film’s final sequence—on the surface a shameless swipe from Dario Argento’s killer reveal at the climax of Tenebre—a nasty twist.
  26. The Adderall Diaries
    It's too busy skipping through subplots to do much more than gloss over such heady issues as the fundamental subjectivity of truth and self-identity.
  27. Locked Down
    Had the filmmakers taken a more easygoing approach, Locked Down might have landed in the realm of The Thomas Crown Affair.
  28. Won't Back Down
    One of its strengths is a knowledge of when to unfurl information, particularly for the strongest emotional effect.
  29. Transcendence
    If you programmed an algorithm to figure out how The Lawnmower Man might be retold by Snake Plissken at the conclusion of Escape from L.A., you'd still wind up with a more recognizably human effort.
  30. 24 Exposures
    Throughout, Joe Swanberg connects Generation Y's fetish for past pop-cultural kitsch to its attending sexual insecurities.
  31. Ironclad
    By making John such an unrepentant freedom-opposing monster, Ironclad denies itself any moral thorniness.
  32. The Internship
    Shawn Levy's occasionally uproarious, warm-hearted comedy is about different generations educating each other, but it never seems rote.
  33. Overboard
    All of the broad physical humor in the world can't distract from the fact that the film is an endorsement of psychological exploitation.
  34. Mister America
    What’s so fascinating about the world of On Cinema is the way each creative outgrowth expands and deepens the lore, and Mister America’s universe-specific innovations renders the film indispensable in context.
  35. Lazer Team
    The premise thoughtlessly combines elements from Marvel comics, Men and Black, and a swath of '80s pop culture to curiously neutered effect.
  36. Aquaman And The Lost Kingdom
    The film hits its plot milestones as fast as humanly possible, cohesion or depth be damned.
  37. The Ice Road
    The film is a muddle of clichés and unremarkable action sequences that bleed together into a cacophony.
  38. Swiped
    Swiped’s story sits right at the center of so many vital issues, and a smarter, braver rendition of it—that is, one interested in actually probing beneath the surface of things—might have yielded a film truly worthy of comparison to The Social Network. Instead, we get a piece of corporate hagiography that sweeps all those issues aside to celebrate another tech billionaire.
  39. Total Eclipse
    Despite its fascinating subject matter, Total Eclipse is both unflattering and loveless. Holland seems to care very little for the way Rimbaud and Verlaine’s crass relationship was channeled into words. Worse than DiCaprio’s accent are his and Thewlis’s ludicrous sex scenes.
  40. Inferno
    It's impossible to even laugh at Inferno given how Ron Howard reduces the material to a dull spectacle of earnest puzzle-solving.
  41. The Confessions
    Director Roberto Andò takes the form of a classical whodunit and bludgeons it with naïve indignation and sanctimony.
  42. Stereo (Tile 3B of a CAEE Educational Mosaic)
    Even the director’s most rabid fans will find Cronenberg’s debut to be a tough sit.
  43. Captain America: Brave New World
    As the film explodes into numerous subplots that rapidly move far apart from one another, it necessitates constant leaps between characters and locations that only further disrupt the narrative flow of the proceedings.
  44. A Bird of the Air
    Naturally, given the film's somewhat precious air of spiritualism, the parroted phrase that speaks most clearly to Lyman is a quotation from the book of Ecclesiastes that gives the film its title and gives Fiona a chance to offer a blithely optimistic interpretation of that most dour of Biblical books.
  45. Breaking the Girls
    At the center of the film, festering like an open sore, is the stereotype of the psycho lesbian bitch.
  46. Burnt
    Everything in the by-the-numbers script signals that Adam must transform himself from and abusive tyrant in the kitchen to the head of a loving and fully functional family.
  47. Three Worlds
    A little too deliberately balanced in its depiction of its three leads, but it largely makes up the difference with its informed grounding in the economic and social terrain of contemporary France.
  48. Wild Mountain Thyme
    Jamie Dornan is a stiff whom Jon Hamm immediately upstages, and this dynamic underscores why the film is so tedious and unsatisfying.
  49. The Wolf Hour
    The film is all surface, and its depiction of trauma becomes increasingly exploitative and hollow as it moves along.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Parker
    Tonally, Parker's not so much broad or inclusive as weirdly schizophrenic, vacillating between flat comedy and spiked savagery, the product of a painfully slapdash script that also includes such laughable incidental dialogue as "pizza-I love that sh.t" and "beers and jewels, baby."
  51. Papi Chulo
    A shrill and insipid spectacle of cross-cultural communion, but don’t call it stupid, as that would suggest that it doesn’t know exactly what it’s doing.
  52. Holland
    The discomfort in watching Holland is not knowing if something is intended or, like the main character, you’re looking for things that aren’t there.
  53. Daddy's Home
    Though Will Ferrell has made a career out of his own debasement, the film quickly becomes too cruel to generate laughter for anyone who would empathize with him.
  54. Mighty Fine
    Debbie Goodstein-Rosenfeld's film seems oddly anemic when it deals with anyone but Chazz Palminteri's Joe.
  55. The English Teacher
    This is the second recent release—after The Great Gatsby, whose overwrought, on-screen text it even shares—that aims to channel great, time-honored storytelling without being able to tell a great story.
  56. Amityville: The Awakening
    Franck Khalfoun's Amityville: The Awakening is an elegant entry in a lame series of horror films.
  57. Viva la Libertà
    It ultimately lacks the vision and conviction to honestly and meaningfully dissect a contemporary political movement's deep-seated structural malaise.
  58. Harry and the Hendersons
    Unabashedly lefty sentiment colors the whole film.
  59. 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.
  60. xXx: Return of Xander Cage
    Quibbles dissipate in the face of the giddiness of the action, which builds to such a relentless head that even the serious stakes of the film’s motivation give way to a largely pleasant vibe.
  61. The Great Wall
    This is an often beautiful film, unmistakably the work of a great director but also a clearly compromised one.
  62. Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
    Several reels' worth of ugly, unshaped footage that wouldn't have been deemed fit for a movie's end-credit outtakes not so long ago.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Girlfriend
    Girlfriend doesn't present us with anything life-affirming, challenging, or expectation-beating about a lead character with Down's.
  64. Reincarnated
    Essentially 90-minute promo video carefully orchestrated by the artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg and his handlers.
  65. The Family
    A film whose only distinguishing characteristic is how big a mess it makes of its already meager ambitions.
  66. Albatross
    Albatross is simply a compendium of bad ideas.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Crooked Arrows
    Although it adheres to the tried-and-true sports-movie formula of an underdog team striving to overcome their limitations to become winners, Crooked Arrows lacks captivating emotional momentum.
  68. Opus
    The film takes dozens of different anecdotes about cults and celebrities and manages to render them pedestrian, unoriginal, staid.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Cold Turkey
    While featuring much screaming, accusations, collision of agendas, and the exhuming of dirty secrets, the film remains emotionally tone deaf.
  70. Transformers: Dark of the Moon
    While I still protest Bay's too-hasty cutting (many shots are good enough to warrant a few extra seconds), his set pieces, and his sets, are magnificently entertaining.
  71. Clown
    Jon Watts does nothing with the scarily funny notion of a respectable professional who suddenly refuses to shuck a party costume.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    Madea's Witness Protection
    The film remains buoyed by the same open heart that makes Tyler Perry's best work so endearing.
  73. Lost River
    The story, more a tangle of violent, symbolic gestures, regards economic exploitation with fetishistic, impossibly overdetermined abandon.
  74. Breaking In
    James McTeigue's Breaking In is the sort of incompetently constructed thriller that gives B movies a bad name.
  75. Devil's Knot
    Atom Egoyan is a much better director when he drops the art-film fanciness and wrestles directly with his inner voyeuristic weirdo.
  76. Guns Akimbo
    Writer-director Jason Lei Howden’s humor might have been tolerable if his film was at least reasonably imaginative.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Mental
    Given the film's garrulous multitude of characters, one wishes they would all just shut up and sing.
  78. Two Tickets to Greece
    The film can never quite decide to what extent it wants to be either a light-hearted raunchy comedy or a darker comedic assessment of contemporary life.
  79. Voice from the Stone
    In none of its manifestations is grief as tidy and meticulously arranged as in Eric D. Howell's film.
  80. #Horror
    A blunt satire of the dehumanization inherent in social media that also gets off on said detachment.
  81. Good People
    It only overcomes its deficiencies and gains a modicum of entertainment value precisely when it commits to its illogical storylines and exaggerated plot twists.
  82. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter
    The script leaps forward with an absurdity almost as great as Lincoln's own strength.
  83. The Beast Within
    An ambitious monster movie that attempts to explore the metaphorical ghosts lingering over the atrocities committed by the residents of a small, noxiously chummy Southern town, and whose collective closets obviously symbolize the troubled historical legacy of the American South at large.
  84. Persuasion
    The film proves again that the modern-day veneration of Jane Austen as the patron saint of the rom-com is also an act of simplification.
  85. The House That Jack Built
    The film becomes an even broader consideration of individual fascinations and follies, of ways of responding to art without the boundaries of morality and reason.
  86. Bel Ami
    A coherent characterization of Robert Pattinson's striving schemer is nowhere to be found in this pedestrian period piece.
  87. Julian Schnabel: A Private Portrait
    The film is intended to be placed at the altar of Julian Schnabel, an artist so singular that words simply fail.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    The Decoy Bride
    The film recognizes how resolutely derivative it is, and it deigns to relish rather than efface that quality. The result is a trifle, but a fairly amusing one.
  89. The Roads Not Taken
    The film is an unending source for the worst possible clichés and most overdone series of graphic matches in the history of film editing.
  90. Jem and the Holograms
    It's the screenwriting equivalent of Ryan Adams sucking the pop vitality out of Taylor Swift's deliriously produced tunes.
  91. 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.
  92. The Star
    Director Timothy Reckart's The Star turns the greatest story ever told into just another kids' movie.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Burning
    Notable mostly for its prime-era Savini bloodshed and a few quick glimpses of a young Holly Hunter (uttering about as many lines of dialogue as won her an Oscar a dozen years later for The Piano), returning to The Burning three decades later is like contemplating any summer at camp: Peel away your nostalgia, and you’ll be left with 20-second sex bouts and insect bites.
  94. Halloween Kills
    As far as improvements go, Michael Myers’s revitalized brutality is arguably the only successful one that Halloween Kills makes.
  95. Arthur Newman
    Throughout Dante Ariola's film, the expressions of the false-identity theme are multitudinous, and about as subtle as the Colin Firth character's choice for a new last name.
  96. Deception
    With his Deception, Arnaud Desplechin renders one of a great author’s slighter works titanic by comparison.
  97. Suburbicon
    Suburbicon sees a bunch of candidly left-leaning movie stars doing their best to out-awful each other.
  98. Courageous
    Even the logos for the companies involved in its making (Sherwood Films and Affirm Films) and distribution (TriStar Pictures) scream that this will be a message from on high.
  99. The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death
    The film ends up cheapening its sense of empathy in its final mad rush to subject audiences to every incarnation of the jump scare imaginable.
  100. King Arthur: Legend of the Sword
    For all the attempts to update King Arthur to be cool and sexy, neither the character nor the film around him musters any spark.
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