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. 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.
  2. Clue
    Clue is comfortable with its pedigree, even giddily enthused by it, which gives its creators freedom to produce not a nostalgic entertainment, but a sustained and sincerely old-fashioned entertainment, laced with wicked miscreancy.
  3. The Chameleon
    If Barkin and Grondin create a swamp's worth of deceptive intricacies in their moments together, the rest of the cast is regulated to expository mop-up duty.
  4. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island
    Prizes computer-generated wizardry above logical plotting or thoughtful character development, a misguided set of priorities exacerbated by the fact that said digital effects prove so chintzy.
  5. Larry Crowne
    At least Roberts has some star wattage to burn; her megawatt smile is the only thing that ultimately pierces, however faintly, the film's blinding schmaltz.
  6. Fear Street: Prom Queen
    Like its predecessors, the film is an often awkward mix of YA drama and R-rated gore.
  7. Memory
    Martin Campbell’s film never shakes off its familiarity, and as such seems destined to, well, be lost to public memory.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    War of the Buttons
    By the time the drama is wrapped up with a bow and every child has learned a valuable life lesson, even the gap-toothed little tyke there solely for comic relief has begun to grate.
  9. The Sorcerer and the White Snake
    The film looks so glossy, plasticized, and unreal that all you end up thinking about is special effects.
  10. What to Expect When You're Expecting
    Mostly the movie's varied storylines cough up the same platitudes: being pregnant sucks, having young children is a misery, but it's all worth it when you're holding that newborn in your arms.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Crocodile Dundee II
    The sequel exacerbates problems already too evident in the first movie, most painfully the near-total disposability of Kozlowski’s Sue, who spends most of the time reacting to Mick’s quirks with chuckles. No battle of wits, no rejoinders. Sue accepts Mick’s ways wholesale; there’s never any hint at a possible tension between their lifestyles.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    Back to 1942
    In painting a large-scale tableaux of the Henan disaster, Feng Xiaogang has inevitably been forced to sacrifice the specificity and focus on individual characterization that are generally so important for allowing the viewer a point of entry into such an important piece of history.
  13. Black Adam
    The film has the courage of its convictions, suggesting that violence on behalf of an oppressed people isn’t only justifiable but even moral.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 50 Critic Score
    G.I. Joe: Retaliation
    Instead of long takes, which are lovingly utilized in Step Up 3D, Jon M. Chu opts for increasing volatility in the editing room.
  15. Waxwork
    Waxwork is certainly no hidden horror gem, but its flashes of wit and genuine enthusiasm for the horror genre are enough to make it a reasonably enjoyable time.
  16. Superintelligence
    The big disappointment of the film is that Melissa McCarthy’s performance is all Jekyll and no Hyde.
  17. Cinderella
    With an overload of winking, Kay Cannon’s Cinderella displays a contemptuous attitude toward fairy tales in general.
  18. Asthma
    Asthma inevitably becomes another film about a man airing out his traumas and hitting all the requisite marks on his path to healing.
  19. Machete Kills
    The films that Robert Rodriguez emulates here are known for similar unexpected narrative turns, but the crucial value that he misses is their actual cheapness.
  20. False Confessions
    The film is a trim farce with no blood flowing under its skin, as it’s all construction, setup, and payoff.
  21. Consecration
    Consecration ends up not just gimmicky but derivative of Christopher Smith’s own prior work.
  22. Battleship
    Shamelessly mimics Michael Bay's larger-than-life dialogue, sweeping cinematography, cornball romance, and military fetishism.
  23. Venom: The Last Dance
    As the film progresses, it consistently escalates the stakes and scale of its action, which doesn’t devolve into incomprehensible CG murk as it hurtles toward the climax.
  24. Marlowe
    Neil Jordan’s Marlowe is an homage so riddled with noir clichés that one may initially take it for a genre parody, except that the jokes never arrive.
  25. Struck by Lightning
    A class-five pity party so unbearably condescending and unconvincing that it might just make you run out and buy an "I'm With Mitt" t-shirt, it makes an inadvertent but hugely compelling pro-bullying argument.
  26. In the Lost Lands
    The film provides Paul W.S. Anderson with a sturdy canvas for his unique brand of gaudy, campy cool.
  27. The Purge
    A rote home-invasion thriller afraid to be seen as just another rote home-invasion thriller, the film turgidly grasps for profundity by framing bloodlust as patriotic duty.
  28. The Female Brain
    The Female Brain never seems quite sure whether it wants to probe the depths of its title subject or just make us laugh. And given the shallowness of its quasi-scientific blather and the tepidness of its comedy, it ultimately does neither.
  29. Stand Up Guys
    Fails to plumb the dramatic depths of its setups, but every now and then the actors pick up the slack, filling in the blanks with three decades's worth of mythic resonance.
  30. Tonight You're Mine
    The film's narrative conceit is so rigidly formulaic and lethargically spun that even the looseness and spontaneity that the setting affords feels dull and constricting.
  31. Hellbound: Hellraiser II
    The sequel’s cure proves infinitely bloodier than the original’s disease, and its over-the-top depictions of brimstone and flesh are so loopy and unmoored, you’d swear the place where nobody dared to go suddenly became Xanadu.
  32. Child 44
    The film is at once devoted to corroborating and casting an exaggerated light on Soviet paranoia and the state's rhetoric of unmasking its enemies.
  33. Ride Along
    The film refuses to openly engage the isolationism and hardened cynicism that's often part and parcel of being a career police officer.
  34. Crisis
    Time and again, the film shortchanges the human elements of its stories for drug stats that can be Googled in a matter of seconds.
  35. 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.
  36. Dragon Blade
    Slacker and even less involving than the similarly terrible global kill-fest Last Knights, but easier to watch for the inadvertent camp value of two of the prominent performances.
  37. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse
    The film is a disastrous amalgamation of modern-day tech-savvy thrills and Clancy’s conservative expressions of patriotism.
  38. A Proper Violence
    There's absolutely no fresh perspective here; just more juiceless samplings of what's already been cooked to death.
  39. Jesus Henry Christ
    The title alone invites you to cuss at this smug film, and you may do so the second you catch a whiff of the portentous first shot: a Wes Anderson put-on.
  40. The 9th Life of Louis Drax
    Every incident in the film is a time-bidding maneuver, completely and unimaginatively untethered from logic.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 63 Critic Score
    Olympus Has Fallen
    The film spends its first act establishing a flimsy emotional groundwork before gleefully taking a sledgehammer to it just seconds into act two.
  42. Kick-Ass 2
    The film doubles down on the love-hate relationship with ultra-violence that typified its predecessor, but A History of Violence this is not.
  43. Hell Baby
    Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon display a freewheelin' sense of invention that should be watched closely, because they have the raw stuff of major comic filmmakers.
  44. Free Ride
    Shana Betz's too-insistent refusal to commit to the melodramatic or to the suspenseful only makes the film seem like empty dramatization.
  45. The Truth About Emanuel
    What's missing, in the end, is any provocative or poignant insights into the "truth" about Emanuel; all we get are vague hints.
  46. The Curse of La Llorona
    With The Curse of La Llorona, the Conjuring universe has damned itself to an eternal cycle of rinse and repeat.
  47. Being Frank
    The film sends the curious message that that any time an abusive parent spends with a child is time well spent.
  48. Sal
    It functions under the delusion that subtext will magically appear if you linger on a character long enough, and the significance of most of its scenes is nothing if not inscrutable.
  49. Pompeii
    Shockingly, the violent release of smoke, fire, and meteoric debris is positioned more as a climactic afterthought than as the main attraction.
  50. Lucky
    The film is a collection of consciously quirky indie tropes in place of any meaningful narrative, and you can practically see the notebook the filmmakers may have written in during a brainstorming session in a college screenwriting seminar.
  51. Padre Pio
    Offering visceral immediacy over meticulous construction, Padre Pio bristles with arresting images.
  52. The Woman in the Window
    The Woman in the Window never manages to transcend the impression that it’s merely being clever.
  53. When the Game Stands Tall
    Jim Caviezel commits only to the level of God-like omniscience that Mel Gibson whipped into him a decade ago, and as such his character often seems less a teacher than an appropriately shadowy figurehead of authority.
  54. Little Birds
    A film of precious, romanticized misery and squalor.
  55. The Day
    Despite being a nasty and skillful action film, The Day goes off the rails in the final stretch.
  56. Mumia: Long Distance Revolutionary
    Purports to tell the true story of the titular imprisoned, controversially outspoken death-penalty opponent, but eventually degenerates into an orgy of congratulation.
  57. Passengers
    Monogamy, Passengers seems to suggest, is tantamount to existing in a world where nothing else matters outside of the bond you and your partner share.
  58. Grassroots
    It isn't entirely clear what Stephen Gyllenhaal sees in the material apart from some lukewarm raging against the machine.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    5 Star Day
    Danny Buday's film is not so much skeptical of astrology as confused about it.
  60. Monster Trucks
    The film cartoonishly admonishing Big Oil while hypocritically fetishizing the gas-guzzling appetite of a cute and cuddly machine-creature hybrid.
  61. Sabotage
    There's no sense of visual artifice to match the ludicrous pitch of the script, and subsequently, the film comes off as awkward and uncertain.
  62. Miss Bala
    The Mexico of this film is merely a place of abject lawlessness, whose hellishness exists only to stoke our fascination for how the protagonist grows as a person by drawing on her inner strength.
  63. Before I Go to Sleep
    It's hard to tell if the film is hampered or helped by the performances of its three stars, because it's so amateurishly written and directed that their participation beggars belief.
  64. Super Troopers 2
    Given the sheer amount of comic material here, some of the jokes are bound to fall flat, but the hit-to-miss ratio is depressingly low.
  65. Raze
    Raze leaves the background particulars about this competition oblique, partly because it adds a layer of ominous mystery, but primarily because it doesn't matter; witnessing women-on-women violence is the thing here, regardless of any narrative context.
  66. The Hollow Point
    Gonzalo López-Gallego's direction isn't confident enough to allow us to ignore The Hollow Point's contrivances.
  67. The Grudge
    Nicolas Pesce evincing little of the promise he showed in his prior films, and even less drive to remake the old into something new.
  68. Shelby Oaks
    Chris Stuckmann’s utilitarian approach is doubly frustrating considering that Shelby Oaks does, at least in the early going, point toward potentially having something to say about the vlogger space, internet infamy, and the way tragedy takes on a cultural virality.
  69. The Forgiven
    Roland Joffé's film is largely successful in its attempt to grapple with the terrible truths of apartheid and its legacy.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A Girl and a Gun
    Had director Catheryne Czubek focused on just one or two of the several interesting or lesser-explored topics under the umbrella of her debut film's subject matter, A Girl and a Gun might have amounted to a sharper, more interesting documentary.
  71. Staten Island Summer
    Breaking the laws of human nature is an ancient comic convention, but it only works when it leads to a laugh.
  72. Mojave
    With the film, director William Monahan offers audiences a bundle of fetishes dressed up as an existentialist thriller about the class system.
  73. Chappie
    The film's exasperating atonality washes out any legitimate idea about identity, education, nature versus nurture, or artificial intelligence that Neill Blomkamp hoped to evince.
  74. The Unforgivable
    The Unforgivable is devoid of all textures and emotions that don’t readily affirm the film’s rigid worldview of redemption.
  75. Romeo & Juliet
    Not even when the doomed Juliet reaches for Romeo's dagger do you feel a single vicarious pain in your gut.
  76. The Quiet Ones
    If the stock concessions made to genre cliché by The Woman in Black can be charitably viewed as deliberate tips of the hat to the heyday of Hammer Films, then John Pogue's period-set exorcism yarn The Quiet Ones more interestingly upends those tropes.
  77. Darling Companion
    A lost-dog drama so insufferable it makes one wish its human characters would also run off and never return.
  78. American Meat
    Despite the intensity of its scope and research, American Meat is a decidedly soft-hitting display of an overweening good faith that, frankly, just can't jibe with the times.
  79. The Girl from the Naked Eye
    The Girl from the Naked Eye has heart, which is more than can be said of some other recent genre throwbacks, but it ultimately makes barely a splash.
  80. Molly's Theory of Relativity
    The characters never sound like they're actually talking to one another, but rather delivering Jeff Lipsky's echo-chamber monologues.
  81. Come Away
    The film can’t seem to decide whether it’s fantasy or allegory and whether its characters are fan fiction or flesh and blood.
  82. Gangster Squad
    Ruben Fleischer's film is a perfect example of Hollywood hypocrisy, something to be ignored diligently.
  83. Better Living Through Chemistry
    A sexily chaotic parody of entitlement becomes just another tale of a white dude learning that there are worse things in life than essentially having no problems.
  84. Fatman
    If it weren’t so airless, it’d be easier to appreciate Fatman a character study of Santa’s midlife woes.
  85. Paranormal Activity 4
    Paranormal Activity 4 sadly continues the series' downslide, most drearily with a mid-film twist that enables the filmmakers to go about essentially remaking the second entry.
  86. The Perfect Family
    Having the far from goody-goody Kathleen Turner play a holier-than-thou mother bent on winning a devout church title is an inherently hilarious premise.
  87. Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1
    Because it actively defies and outright ridicules all notions of aesthetic intent, proper form, and moral propriety, this lazy Z-film pastiche is essentially impervious to standard critical evaluation.
  88. Dark Was the Night
    The film may take the notion of implication over illustration a bit too far.
  89. Reversion
    It may look like a dream, but it plays like someone reading a congressional report on corporate finagling out loud.
  90. Season of the Witch
    Romero’s own Belle du Jour, a tale of a lonely, neglected housewife whose discontent and suppressed erotic desires are efficiently conveyed in a series of bondage-tinged dream sequences.
  91. An Acceptable Loss
    Writer-director Joe Chappelle’s An Acceptable Loss is a B movie with a morally urgent message.
  92. Table 19
    Each of Table 19‘s faint glimmers of grace are overwhelmed by elements of general spatial and narrative incompetence.
  93. Act of Valor
    A movie whose cinematic ineptitude is matched only by its ideological rottenness, Act of Valor features a cast of real-life active-duty Navy SEALS in order to grant the project's us-versus-them geopolitical worldview a sham moral authority.
  94. The Boss
    The incongruity between Melissa McCarthy's eagerness as a performer and her character's total lack of compassion makes the film somehow both restless and tedious.
  95. The Carpenter's Son
    The Carpenter’s Son fails to even offer decent frights, unless one finds the preponderance of CGI snakes particularly scary.
  96. Horrible Bosses 2
    If your answer to the question "When are rape jokes funny?" is anything aside from "never," the good news is that you may still find a lot to hoot over throughout the film.
  97. Video Games: The Movie
    Jeremy Snead's doc comes off more as a commercial for a grand, overarching product that isn't finished being developed.
  98. Maniac Cop
    Maniac Cop is the type of movie that you would want to watch through the slits in a sewer grate, only its execution sits perched well above its scummy aim, and the end result is that you feel guilty for wishing for something more perverted.
  99. Unhinged
    Unhinged is essentially a nihilistic, style-free destructo-rama that’s designed to make us feel like shit.
  100. Shaft
    Ultimately, the only truly retro thing about this weirdly reactionary potboiler is its politics.
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