Slant Magazine's Scores

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For 7,775 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: 4,349 out of 7775
  2. Mixed: 1,493 out of 7775
  3. Negative: 1,933 out of 7775
7775 movie reviews
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  1. Destroyer
    The filmmakers treat their material sternly and humorlessly, as if there's some great moral lesson to be imparted from Erin's inexhaustible blotto jerkiness.
  2. The Oath
    Even while it asks us to recognize ourselves in a world not too distant from our own, The Oath seems to say that the worst part of a full-fledged American dystopia would be the ruined holiday dinners.
  3. The Front Runner
    The film quickly reveals that the only angle it’s interested in is the one that most sympathizes with Gary Hart.
  4. Gloria Bell
    The film’s open-ended narrative tends to be undermined by the simplicity of its thematic signifiers.
  5. Out of Blue
    Carol Morley’s film wants to blow our minds, but it succeeds only at rousing our boredom.
  6. Amityville II: The Possession
    Supremely awful.
  7. Black '47
    As the historical specificity embedded in the film’s more expansive opening act is abandoned, the more predictable, archetypal trappings of a revenge narrative begin to take hold.
  8. Night Hunter
    The film is so clichéd and scattershot as to make Copycat look like Peeping Tom by comparison.
  9. Lords of Chaos
    Jonas Åkerlund’s breezy approach to this material not only cheapens the music, but also has the effect of downplaying the severity of the scene’s truly unsavory politics.
  10. Antlers
    In Antlers, the big bad is never supposed to be as scary as society’s collective wrongdoing.
  11. Oliver & Company
    Oliver & Company is as out-of-touch as anything the studio ever made.
  12. Robin Hood
    If Robin Hood’s charmingly sh**ty animation comes damn close to redeeming the film from utter vapidity, it’s a damn shame they couldn’t manage to supply a villain with the balls of an Ursula, a Cruella, or a Maleficent.
  13. The Intruder
    The film is ostensibly about the war for the soul of a house, but it couldn’t feel less lived in.
  14. Grease 2
    The sequel to Grease is not much more than a remake, wherein every minute detail is nothing more than an attempt to pilfer the magic of the first film.
  15. Never Look Away
    Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s film prioritizes the sentimental over the true, the tidy moral over the messy reality.
  16. Annabelle Comes Home
    The film is at least as likely to elicit laughs as shrieks, and certainly unlikely to leave a lasting impression.
  17. Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile
    The film essentially indulges in the same act of willful distractedness as Ted Bundy’s admirers.
  18. Late Night
    The film lacks for the more lacerating, freely parodic energy of The Larry Sanders Show and 30 Rock.
  19. The Iron Orchard
    Director Ty Roberts’s film is unable to realize that its subject matter is that of a horror story.
  20. 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.
  21. Men in Black: International
    The film wastes its charismatic leads in a parade of wacky CG creations whose occasional novelty is drowned out by its incessance.
  22. Triple Frontier
    J.C. Chandor turns an intensely physical narrative into another of his inadvertently generic studies of procedure.
  23. Under the Eiffel Tower
    It’s tough to root for the pair when neither of them experiences genuine hardship. In the end, all dramatic conflict here is sunny and soporific.
  24. Tolkien
    The film preaches of the love of creative freedom, yet finds no original form of expression of its own.
  25. Paddleton
    The film largely plays its scenario with a straight and gooey face, coaxing its actors to indulge their worst tendencies.
  26. The Hummingbird Project
    Throughout, the film can’t decide what attitude to strike toward its characters’ evident greed.
  27. The Witches
    This is a sleek-looking vehicle that’s eager to be scary but not comfortable being ugly.
  28. Brittany Runs A Marathon
    The film is inspirational only in the sense that it may inspire an uptick in Amazon searches for running gear.
  29. A Vigilante
    It conspicuously tries to distance itself from the revenge film’s propensity toward florid excess.
  30. The Kid
    Its scenes wildly escalate to a fever pitch at the drop of a hat, before then ending, more often than not, with abrupt violence.
  31. The Kindness of Strangers
    The film’s repetitive and lifeless dialogue robs otherwise charismatic performers of distinguishing characteristics.
  32. Dune: Part One
    Dune ends up feeling like an extended prologue for what one can only hope will be a sequel that will clarify its parables and paradoxes.
  33. The Apple
    The Apple is an Old Testament movie in more ways than one, and its relentless bad taste is sure to appeal to the same audience that won’t even realize they’re being slapped in the face.
  34. Body at Brighton Rock
    Appearing to recognize the flimsiness of her material, Roxanne Benjamin overcompensates with insistent direction.
  35. Adopt a Highway
    Viewed charitably, Logan Marshall-Green’s sketchy protagonist and vague atmosphere are meant to achieve the effect of a parable.
  36. Stuffed
    Erin Derham’s unadventurous aesthetic inoculates her from taxidermy’s subversive spirit.
  37. Villains
    Maika Monroe’s engaging performance serves only to highlight how feeble and unconvincing the rest of the film is.
  38. Wall
    So much of the film is given over to highlighting David Hare’s confusion as a tourist in a conflict he can never fully comprehend.
  39. Dreamland
    Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s ultimately succumbs to melodramatic clichés and simplistic political demagoguery.
  40. My Son
    The film seeks to elevate genre clichés by slowing down the speed with which they’re typically offered.
  41. Being Frank
    The film sends the curious message that that any time an abusive parent spends with a child is time well spent.
  42. My Spy
    Peter Segal’s film is pulled in so many different directions that it comes to feel slack.
  43. The Invisible Man
    Through to the end, you can’t get off on the thrill of this film’s craftsmanship without also getting off on the spectacle of more than just Cecilia brought to the brink of destruction. Like its style, The Invisible Man’s cruelty is the point.
  44. Bottom of the 9th
    Raymond De Felitta’s film offers a sampler course of formulas, which creates a strangely unfulfilling tension.
  45. The Great Hack
    It seems so invested in a rehabilitation of Brittany Kaiser’s image that the filmmakers’ own motives end up being its most interesting subject.
  46. The Addams Family
    Until the finale, the film tirelessly hammers home the importance of being true to yourself, yet its ultimate resolution, one of relatively uneasy compromise, confuses even that simple point.
  47. Last Christmas
    Clarke works hard to make the messy, perpetually flustered Kate relatable, but the film surrounds the character with a community as kitschy and false as the trinkets she sells in Santa’s shop.
    • 52 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Amazing Johnathan Documentary
    Over and over, the film reminds us that banking on a gimmick isn’t an adequate substitute for an incisive character portrait.
  49. Black Widow
    In its final moments, Black Widow gives its heroine the humanity she never quite gained in her appearances in prior Marvel films, and it’s a shame that this slight but crucial wrinkle to the familiar morality of so many superhero stories ultimately feels more like a twist than a springboard for a new, more morally enlightened era of the MCU.
  50. Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
    On the screen, Shang-Chi is rotely defined by the same “gifted kid” impostor syndrome as so many other self-doubting MCU heroes before him.
  51. Harriet
    Portraying Tubman above all else as a vessel for a higher power ironically only makes her appear less tangible.
  52. Motherless Brooklyn
    Motherless Brooklyn feels altogether too tidy, a film that revives many of the touchstones of noir, but never that throbbing unease that courses through the classics of the genre.
  53. The Laundromat
    Steven Soderbergh takes a macro approach to the scandal, though the results, with rare exception, are vexingly micro.
  54. Zombieland: Double Tap
    Behind the self-awareness and the irony is merely a hollow emotional core, a lack of anything to say because saying something would require ambition rather than complacent winks and nods.
  55. Halloween Kills
    As far as improvements go, Michael Myers’s revitalized brutality is arguably the only successful one that Halloween Kills makes.
  56. Halloween Ends
    Just as David Gordon Green seems to have finally unshackled his legacyquel trilogy from the dead weight of the past, the film loses the courage of its convictions.
  57. Daniel Isn't Real
    Its performatively extreme imagery thinly masks a rather banal view of male subjectivity and inner conflict.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Underwater
    William Eubank’s Underwater is neither a too-big-to-fail event film nor a relatively low-budget genre sleeper. In other words, it doesn’t put in the effort to reach for the heights of Alien or plant its tongue firmly in cheek a la Deep Blue Sea.
  59. Cruella
    The film’s outward liveliness can’t mask the inner inertia it has as just another lifeless product assembled in a factory.
  60. Mary
    With the filmmakers unwilling to explore a kinky, psychosexual bond between a man and his demonic lady ghost-boat, Mary comes to feel as if lacks a through line, collapsing into a series of disconnected horror-movie beats.
  61. The Two Popes
    There isn’t anything in the bleeding-heart positions espoused by Jorge Bergoglio that complicates Pope Francis’s public persona.
  62. Cyrano, My Love
    The film is imbued with an airless blend of buoyant comedy and soap-operatic backstage drama that recalls Shakespeare in Love.
  63. Black Christmas
    The filmmakers’ overly simplistic depiction of good and evil is mitigated to some degree by the presence of Landon (Caleb Eberhardt).
  64. In the Tall Grass
    Vincenzo Natali’s film divests itself of stakes in the name of total meaninglessness.
  65. Saint Maud
    Rose Glass utilizes a provocative scenario for a vague and deadly serious art exercise.
  66. Guns Akimbo
    Writer-director Jason Lei Howden’s humor might have been tolerable if his film was at least reasonably imaginative.
  67. The Last Full Measure
    The film largely evades any perspectives that might question the institutions that put our soldiers in harm’s way.
  68. Primal
    The film too often suggests an Under Siege that’s been pointlessly larded with critters from Jumanji.
  69. Race with the Devil
    Fonda might have been able to look good in most everything he was in, but even he can’t save a turd like Race with the Devil.
  70. The Turning
    The film casts its source narrative as a delusional fantasy through which to enact the effects of possible traumas that go completely unexplored.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bombshell
    The film is too irreverent in tone and narrow in scope to place Roger Ailes’s criminality in a larger, more meaningful context.
  72. Knives and Skin
    The film gets so lost in its affected idiosyncrasies that it stops probing any discernible human feelings.
  73. Night of the Lepus
    William F. Claxton’s film is a radically dull riff on the nature-run-amok genre, utilizing what must’ve felt at the time like the only animal not yet exploited to scare audiences. But scares are exactly what the filmmakers didn’t get.
  74. Three Christs
    By the end, it’s as if a good doctor’s god complex has been taken up by the film itself.
  75. Free Guy
    There’s so much discernible IP baked into Shawn Levy’s film to make its calls for artistic ingenuity feel hypocritical at best.
  76. The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run
    If the SpongeBob franchise has finally gone on the run, it seems like it’s left the audience that matters most in the dust.
  77. VHYes
    The film settles much too comfortably into the well-trodden footsteps of other works.
  78. The Evening Hour
    In spite of the film’s strikingly lived-in sense of place, the script’s melodramatic storytelling works against that verisimilitude.
  79. Intrigo: Death of an Author
    The film evinces neither the visceral pleasures of noir nor the precision to uncover deeper thematic resonances.
  80. The Forever Purge
    As it strives for a grander metaphor of life in America, The Forever Purge resorts to sweeping generalizations that make the prior films in the series feel like pinnacles of subtlety.
  81. King Richard
    Rarely has a film used its foreknowledge of a happy ending as a reason to remain so uncritical and incurious of its central subject.
  82. News of the World
    The film sanctimoniously suggests that ignorance or distrust of the news is nothing new, but rather the bedrock of America’s formation.
  83. The Courier
    Dominic Cooke’s film is content to regurgitate some of the more tired artistic tropes about the Cold War.
  84. The Beyond
    Even by Argento standards, Fulci’s film is nonsensical to the point of distraction.
  85. Spiral: From the Book of Saw
    The film doesn’t reset the Saw template in any marked way. It seems primed to explore the present-day fight against police brutality, but it never lives up to that promise.
  86. My Salinger Year
    The film fails to effectively seize on how its main character’s life and work experiences have affected her as a person and artist.
  87. The Salt of Tears
    Philippe Garrel illustrates the absurdity behind the myth of the complementary couple with the same cynicism that permeates his previous work but none of the humor or wit.
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 23, 2020
  88. The High Note
    Everything here wraps up as tidily as it does in your average Hallmark Channel movie.
  89. The Tomorrow War
    The Tomorrow War is little more than a clunky, Nolan-esque exercise in instruction-manual cinema.
  90. Artemis Fowl
    Artemis Fowl concocts an adventure that requires its privileged hero to go virtually nowhere, physically or emotionally. As if he ordered it on Instacart, conflict is simply dropped off on his front stoop, and all he has to do is throw on some shoes and sunglasses to pick it up.
  91. Nobody
    The film offers chaos by the yard with no real stakes or emotional reverberations.
  92. Capone
    Every scene is virtually self-contained, and so Capone feels as if it’s starting all over again from frame to frame.
  93. Shazam! Fury of the Gods
    The film fails to build on the whimsical foundation of the first film in any way.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
    The overreliance on wisecracks and employing, and then mocking, clichés make it seem as if Honor Among Thieves is outright embarrassed by its source material and wants you to know it.
  95. Run with the Hunted
    Some of the film’s narrative threads are frustratingly unresolved, while others are wrapped up in arbitrary fashion.
  96. Finch
    The end of the world may never have had less impact than it does in Miguel Sapochnik’s Finch.
  97. Save Yourselves!
    The film fails to use its millennial characters to investigate contemporary attitudes about the possibility of world annihilation.
  98. Summerland
    Throughout, the film’s characters exhibit little life outside of their moments of tragedy and symbolic connections.
  99. The Way I See It
    The final product feels like it would have been most appropriate as a video presentation for the Democratic National Convention.
  100. Random Acts of Violence
    For all of its ostensible thoughtfulness, in trying to describe “real art,” Random Acts of Violence ultimately doesn’t describe anything at all.
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