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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    • 58 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Monday
    Ultimately, the film is unable to overcome the mundanity of its simple, overly familiar scenario.
  2. New Order
    The film utilizes a trendy issue as window dressing for a tedious and delusional exploitation film-slash-museum piece.
  3. I'm Your Woman
    Julia Hart drains the crime film genre of its macho bluster without replacing it with anything.
  4. A Call to Spy
    Because its focus is so split, the film lacks the pervasive sense of danger one expects from a spy thriller.
  5. I Carry You with Me
    Heidi Ewing’s tale of immigration and deportation afflicting the lives of a Mexican gay couple flashes its reason for being at every turn.
  6. A Minecraft Movie
    There’s a self-reflexivity to the game’s artifact-y textures that’s lost in this film adaptation, where the finely detailed look of just about everything says nothing in itself about the endless possibilities of a digital world’s malleability.
  7. Fatman
    If it weren’t so airless, it’d be easier to appreciate Fatman a character study of Santa’s midlife woes.
  8. Triggered
    Once you get past the faux-provocation of the film’s title, it’s difficult to tell what ideologies the filmmakers are trying to skewer.
  9. 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.
  10. Jiu Jitsu
    Nicolas Cage’s amusing turn as a kooky hermit with an affinity for newspaper hats often feels awkwardly spliced into the film.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wander Darkly
    What could have been a profound study of grief and psychological trauma is diluted with needless structural and stylistic obfuscation.
  12. Blue Bayou
    The film’s evocative imagery doesn’t compensate for the story being told with such a heavy hand that it dulls, rather than sharpens, Justin Chon’s urgent political message.
  13. No Man's Land
    No Man’s Land mostly suggests a performance of allyship on the filmmakers’ part.
  14. Malcolm & Marie
    Expending so much energy anticipating our avenues of interpretation, Malcolm & Marie leaves us with little to interpret.
  15. Outside the Wire
    The film’s arguments against endless war end up seeming more than a bit disingenuous, especially given how much time it spends glorifying the actions and morality of those who help buoy ongoing American occupation of foreign nations.
  16. 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.
  17. Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar
    Best exemplified by its fixation on culottes, the film never feels like more than a half-formed in-joke between close friends.
  18. Simple Passion
    The film makes no attempt to embody the themes that form the core of Annie Ernaux’s story in its aesthetics.
  19. The Eyes of Tammy Faye
    The Eyes of Tammy Faye mostly plays out as a showcase for Jessica Chastain to bring as much emotional sturm und drang to the woman as she lurches between various states of turmoil.
  20. Those Who Wish Me Dead
    The film half-heartedly teeters between a kinetic action thriller and something a little more low-key.
  21. First Date
    The shadow of Risky Business looms large, and distractingly, over Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp’s film.
  22. Army of the Dead
    The film’s masterful prologue writes a check that the remainder of this very long, very indulgent film labors mightily to cash.
  23. Shoplifters of the World
    The film lacks for the empathy, curiosity, and sense of humor that are the defining characteristics of the Smiths’s music.
  24. The Vault
    The film misses the opportunity for a suspenseful interweaving of sports spectatorship and its characters’ high-stakes gambits.
  25. The Unholy
    Writer-director Evan Spiliotopoulos barely capitalizes on the luridly sacrilegious implications of the film’s premise.
  26. The Tunnel
    The film lacks for the methodically escalating stakes that makes the best examples of the genre so entertaining.
  27. Stowaway
    By paring their story down so much, the filmmakers only end up highlighting just how little it contains.
  28. Demonic
    Like District 9, the film is a genre outing with big ideas that’s more committed to the power of arsenals and pyrotechnics.
  29. When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit
    The reality of Nazi Germany and its looming atrocities feels as if it exists only beyond the edges of the film’s frame.
  30. Cinderella
    With an overload of winking, Kay Cannon’s Cinderella displays a contemptuous attitude toward fairy tales in general.
  31. Funhouse
    Throughout, it’s difficult to sort the contrivances that writer-director Jason William Lee is parodying from those he’s indulging.
  32. Shotgun Wedding
    The film has a rather perfunctory feel, as if it were unwilling to go all in on its ludicrous concept.
  33. 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.
  34. Samaritan
    Perhaps the fairest description of Stallone’s performance is that it’s only as one-note as the material, his stern tough-guy muttering and grimacing just about right for a screenplay that feels like it’s been plucked out of a dustbin left untouched since 1995.
  35. Aline
    Valérie Lemercier’s film feels at once like a vanity project for its maker and a glorified fan tribute.
  36. Kate
    Kate will leave you wishing that its narrative possessed the same attention to detail as its elaborately violent action set pieces.
  37. Queenpins
    The film’s largely painful humor is informed by the mistaken belief that the main characters’ criminal enterprise is inherently quirky.
  38. Deception
    With his Deception, Arnaud Desplechin renders one of a great author’s slighter works titanic by comparison.
  39. The Electrical Life of Louis Wain
    The film charts Louis Wain’s slow, long mental breakdown in ways that tackily oscillate between the pitying and the whimsical.
  40. Birds of Paradise
    Birds of Paradise lacks the nuance and finesse needed for its story to really take flight.
  41. Together
    Together’s dramaturgy perfectly, if unintentionally, underscores the suffocating nature of pandemic living.
  42. Zeros and Ones
    Zeros and Ones is the unwelcome spectacle of a bad boy attempting to apologize for his badness.
  43. The Last Thing Mary Saw
    The film comes to feel like a parody of a possession flick rather than a straightforward replication of the genre’s tropes.
  44. Hypnotic
    The film is a pointlessly complicated house of cards that crumbles due to its own hollowness.
  45. Don't Worry Darling
    Don’t Worry Darling has the swing-for-the-fences ambition that should have at least made it a noble and compelling folly, but its repetitiveness frustratingly undercuts its grandiosity.
  46. The Tender Bar
    The film insists so forcefully that J.R. has lived a topsy-turvy, singular life that it abandons a potentially more rewarding approach of foregrounding how relatable many of his moments of self-discovery really are.
  47. Mayor Pete
    The film’s approach is completely subsumed by the importance of the Mayor Pete persona as the means and ends of the candidacy.
  48. Let's Scare Jessica to Death
    Great auntie to waking nightmare movies about distaff insanity as diverse as Images, 3 Women, A Woman Under the Influence, and Mulholland Drive, Let’s Scare Jessica to Death spends 90 minutes tapping lightly but incessantly on its heroine’s fragile sanity, as though it were some sort of Fabergé S&M model egg.
  49. Cha Cha Real Smooth
    Rather than thoughtfully reflect on post-collegiate ennui and disillusionment, the film settles for erecting a monument to its main character’s awesomeness.
  50. Sharp Stick
    Sharp Stick shows that Lena Dunham’s preference for solipsistic protagonists with boundary issues has its limitations.
  51. Master
    Mariama Diallo’s film never seems to fully buy into its horror trappings and ends up treating its characters as avatars for multiple grievances.
  52. Hatching
    The ham-handed allegorical construction, generically titled characters, and self-serious tone in its final third drains the story of the specificity that might have resulted in a more incisive critique of the perils of perfectionism.
  53. The Adam Project
    Ultimately, the film tries so hard to do so much that it doesn’t end up doing any of it particularly well.
  54. Firestarter
    This new Firestarter is an almost anachronistically short production whose elements just sit there like mishandled kindling.
  55. Dark Glasses
    After a brilliantly constructed opening, Dario Argento’s film gives the impression only of a giallo doodle.
  56. The Contractor
    The film’s rote action-movie plotting is calibrated in a ponderously straight-faced way so as to give it some semblance of gravity.
  57. You Are Not My Mother
    The primacy that it places on its dopamine drip of dread undercuts whatever genuine commitment it might have toward mental illness and trauma.
  58. The Line
    The Line isn’t without its moments of genuine beauty, but it’s difficult to shake that its distinct lack of a clear story hasn’t given enough space to the characters.
  59. Hustle
    Hustle doesn’t really seem to know who its characters are, much less how they fit into the complicated web of sports, media, and finance that defines the NBA.
  60. Renfield
    The film frustratingly shrouds Nicholas Cage’s manic intensity in thick blankets of winking irony.
  61. Metal Lords
    Peter Sollett’s coming-of-age comedy betrays rather than upholds the values of the very kids it wants to revere.
  62. Barbarians
    Throughout, Barbarians oscillates between smugness and apprehensiveness about the film that it’s trying to be.
  63. Gold
    Throughout, Efron seems almost determined to wipe away the last vestiges of his youthful looks.
  64. Memory
    Martin Campbell’s film never shakes off its familiarity, and as such seems destined to, well, be lost to public memory.
  65. She Said
    Ultimately, She Said is more concerned with eliciting the audience’s admiration than its understanding, its compassion, or even simply its interest.
  66. Violent Night
    Ultimately, it’s the filmmakers’ insistence on both subverting the expectations of the family Christmas film and upholding them that leaves Violent Night feeling like it wants to have its Christmas cookies and eat them too.
  67. Bells Are Ringing
    It has the unfortunate effect of being a movie that seems stuck on a Broadway stage.
  68. Stay Awake
    Jamie Sisley’s film looks at its serious subject matter through a maudlin lens.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Super Mario Bros. Movie
    The film feels like it’s content to check off to-do notes and scratch the viewer’s nostalgia itch.
  70. The Gray Man
    The Gray Man is a noisy, flashy spectacle that piles clichés atop ludicrous plotting and sprinkles it all with half-funny quips, all in the hope of bulldozing the audience into submission.
  71. Firebird
    There are clichés and then there are only clichés, and Firebird is suffocated by them.
  72. 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.
  73. Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths
    The film signals that Alejandro G. Iñárritu, perhaps, is unable to push the limits of his own artistic expression.
    • 66 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    White Noise
    The film rarely articulates the book's ideas with any real sense of the outside world without resorting to the easy exaggerations that Don DeLillo peddled in the name of satire, which, while maybe fresh back in 1985, ring completely hollow today.
  75. Final Cut
    Unlike One Cut of the Dead, Michel Hazanavicius’s similar ode to low-budget resourcefulness often rings false.
  76. Catherine Called Birdy
    In simplistic and self-congratulatory fashion, the film renders its main character as a sort of feminist crusader who undermines the sexist traditions of her time.
  77. The Last Voyage of the Demeter
    The film suggests a gene splice of a slasher flick and supernatural horror. But as enticing as that combination may sound, André Øvredal’s rendering of it is as bland and listless as the blues and grays that dominate the film’s color palette.
  78. Tori and Lokita
    The film subjects its main characters to one indignity after another, and to such a suffocating degree that it crosses the line between representation and exploitation.
  79. Champions
    As Champions tediously veers between the increasingly rote narrative beats of an inspirational sports story and a love story of opposites attract, it further stresses its own archaic qualities with a consciously anachronistic soundtrack that includes Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping,” EMF’s “Unbelievable,” and Outkast’s “Hey Ya.”
  80. Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
    Quantumania feels less the start of a new phase of Marvel films than a tired retread of adventures we’ve already been on.
  81. My Mother's Wedding
    Where Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married completely immersed viewers in the sometimes messy intimacies of family, My Mother’s Wedding feels more like a stage production that forgot to include its first act.
  82. Human Flowers of Flesh
    There’s an emptiness to Helena Wittmann’s Human Flowers of Flesh that no amount of striking cinematography, thematic suggestion, and allusions to Jean Painlevé can disguise.
  83. Slumberland
    Slumberland lacks the sense of danger that Winsor McCay liberally infused into his stories.
  84. The Pale Blue Eye
    The film often feels like one of the corpses in its story: cold, lifeless, and without a heart.
  85. The Whale
    With The Whale, Darren Aronofsky brings a hollow sense of dignity to his schematic brand of cinematic misery porn.
  86. The Little Mermaid
    This Little Mermaid feels more or less like two-hour-plus cosplay with the texture and gravitas of a Disneyland sideshow.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Lost King
    The film, a shabby account of the story behind the story, muddles its themes and only superficially conveys the importance of the historical insights it contains.
  88. Last Flight Home
    Last Flight Home is an anguished therapy session disguised as a meditation on life and death.
  89. A Man Called Otto
    The film is so toothless that its protagonist is ultimately about as forbidding as a warm hug.
  90. Twisters
    The film proceeds as a jumble of poorly sketched backstories and subplots, half-hearted topical references, and tepid fan service.
  91. Skinamarink
    Skinamarink is confidently made, and certain upside-down images are especially creepy, but its spell is broken by its sheer, ungodly slowness, which springs from a paucity of ideas.
  92. Consecration
    Consecration ends up not just gimmicky but derivative of Christopher Smith’s own prior work.
  93. Baby Ruby
    The film’s depiction of the fear and uncertainty of motherhood gives in to monotony.
  94. 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.
  95. Flora and Son
    Flora and Son is far more invested in making its characters likable and cute rather than risking audience sympathies.
  96. When It Melts
    When It Melts is a film that lives and dies on the games that it plays with audiences.
  97. Hunt Her, Kill Her
    Hunt Her, Kill Her simply isn’t tight enough to maintain the tension that it seeks to create.
  98. Tetris
    There’s a riveting story somewhere here about the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the stranglehold of capitalism on ’80s culture, but Tetris never quite locates it.
  99. Paint
    The film doesn’t have a clear opinion on its main subject and the scourge of misogyny in media.
  100. She Came to Me
    The fatal flaw of the film is that it genuinely believes in the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie.
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