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. Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant
    The film bangs the drum loudly on behalf of American exceptionalism.
  2. Leave the World Behind
    In the end, Leave the World Behind is content to blandly shrug in the direction of an amorphous calamity, reaching for a profundity that it fails to achieve.
  3. Pain Hustlers
    The excitement that the film tries to generate for its main characters is disturbingly glib.
  4. Heart of Stone
    The cinematography looks striking enough throughout the various set pieces, but little happens in them to elevate Heart of Stone past its hackneyed foundation.
  5. The Origin of Evil
    The Origin of Evil recalls Ruben Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness for how its prolonged, soft-peddled skewering of the wealthy seems convinced of its Buñuelian irreverence.
  6. No Hard Feelings
    What ultimately sinks No Hard Feelings is its inability to convincingly meld its excessively bawdy humor and its Hallmark Channel-level drama of two opposites who help one another to embrace life.
  7. Problemista
    The film doesn’t lock on a target long enough for it to work up a head of steam as satire about the art world and how it thrives on nepotism, let alone one about the frustrations of the immigration process.
  8. A Good Person
    The more that Zach Braff’s script tries to thematically tie its disparate threads together, the more that A Good Person comes to resemble the very same type of neat and tidy self-contained version of reality that it ironically skewers in its prologue.
  9. Five Nights at Freddy's
    Five Nights at Freddy’s has absolutely no idea what kind of ride it wants to be.
  10. It Lives Inside
    The film views its main character’s culture, as well as her struggles to suppress her identity in order to fit into her suburban world, with a nonchalance that often scans as negligence.
  11. The Mountain
    Thomas Salvador frustratingly never offers a concrete sense of what his character feels that he’s lost, and so we’re tasked with loading meaning onto the character’s journey of apparent self-reclamation.
  12. Jeanne du Barry
    Like the real Countess du Barry, it’s eventually caught up in the very pomp and splendor that it initially lampoons.
  13. Asphalt City
    Shove everything into the meat grinder of cynicism and, in the end, your insights come to feel purely incidental.
  14. Firebrand
    Ultimately, in trying to make Katherine both a historical girlboss and a near-martyr to a vaguely articulated cause, Firebrand’s meandering, under-baked screenplay manages to neither have its cake nor eat it too.
  15. The Sweet East
    Sean Price Williams’s solo feature directorial debut is pretty fuzzy on what it wants its national tour of brainless dogma to mean.
  16. The Stroll
    The Stroll is overtly broad, detached, and full of ready-made empowerment rhetoric.
  17. God Is a Bullet
    Aside from the red stuff, the film is scarcely interested in what’s inside its characters.
  18. Dumb Money
    The film’s status as a corporate entertainment product (among the film’s producers is the Winklevoss twins) also presents an internal discord in and of itself, particularly with the script incessantly preaching financial equality for all.
  19. Mayhem!
    Whenever Mayhem! makes any attempt at character building, it feels as if we’re watching a trashy DTV movie, and as a result reveals itself as a run-of-the-mill revenge flick that practically crawls toward its preordained destination.
  20. Mob Land
    John Travolta’s scenes are islands of tranquility in a jittery sea of rote crime-movie pyrotechnics.
  21. The Exorcist: Believer
    The film is a mélange of tired normcore horror tropes indistinguishable from any film in the Conjuring universe.
  22. Dicks: The Musical
    In the instances where it’s not going hard, Dicks is a surprisingly flaccid affair.
  23. Dance First
    Rather than grappling with the mind and soul of the man who birthed bizarre, fatalistically funny and existentially unsettling works like Waiting for Godot, James Marsh’s film seems content to merely adapt the “Personal Life” section of Samuel Beckett’s Wikipedia page.
  24. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire
    The last 20 minutes live up to the promise of bludgeoning viewers with plenty of rock-‘em-sock-‘em combat and demolished human landscapes, but what any of it is actually for will be forgotten even before the dust begins to settle.
  25. My Neighbor Adolf
    The film at once wrings this premise for whimsical absurdism and slow-burn suspense, on each side vulgarizing the memory of the Holocaust.
  26. DogMan
    Dogman seems outwardly enamored with cosmic possibilities of meaning, but Luc Besson’s script remains earthbound and unimaginative.
  27. 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.
  28. Boy Kills World
    If you’re looking for flash and snark, Boy Kills World has them in spades, but it’s too punch-drunk on its own juvenile grandiosity to bother offering even a whiff of substance.
  29. The Critic
    It’s only the winking malice of Ian McKellen’s title character that prevents the film from imploding entirely, dirigible-like, as the haywire plot begins to nosedive.
  30. 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.
    • 62 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Daddio
    The film is as tedious and predictable as its traffic-clogged Long Island Expressway setting.
  32. The Boys in the Boat
    The film doesn’t break a single mold, and it doesn’t take long to realize that’s entirely the point.
    • 77 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Tatami
    The film limply gestures at ideas around women’s rights and athlete boycotts.
  34. Love Me
    The further Love Me develops its scenario, the less plausible it becomes, even by lovelorn sci-fi standards.
  35. Spaceman
    Spaceman seems to want to be an allegory about men’s emotional unavailability and its impact on heterosexual relationships, but instead of coming across universal, the film’s human characters, along with much of the drama, are mostly empty space.
  36. The Strangers: Chapter 1
    This film’s approach to slasher film mayhem is liable to induce some serious déjà vu.
  37. Kinds of Kindness
    The abstraction is presented with cloying cuteness, the sadism is juvenile and purposeless, and the humor is stomach-turningly glib.
  38. 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.
  39. Realm of Satan
    The film isn’t designed to challenge what you think you know about the Church of Satan.
  40. Road House
    Not quite a grim-dark reimagining of a cult favorite, this Road House is still a needlessly un-nice rework that takes the business end of a broken beer bottle to the soul of the original.
    • 46 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Back in Action
    Seth Gordon’s film is largely, and awkwardly, beholden to the most banal of spy tropes.
  42. Michael
    The film turns the realities of a tragic, deeply complicated life into a sanitized popcorn film.
  43. The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
    The film has, figuratively and literally, somehow even less gravity than its source material and predecessor. The visual language is divorced from reality and referent to the games; even Looney Tunes action is grounded in the real world—the better to subvert it.
  44. TRON: Ares
    For a story that seeks to champion the unpredictability and finite quality of life, Ares ultimately feels trapped by the inertia of working within the parameters set by its no less flimsy predecessors.
  45. Young Woman and the Sea
    The film leaves no room for doubt about what Trudy Ederle will accomplish, and thus creates virtually no dramatic tension in her inevitable rise to the top ranks of women’s swimming.
  46. You're Cordially Invited
    By the time You’re Cordially Invited finds the correct mode to operate in, it’s about five minutes before the end credits roll.
  47. The Apprentice
    Perhaps there are limits on how deeply a film can explore the psyches of people who so nakedly show us their worst qualities.
  48. Emilia Pérez
    If a musical is supposed to communicate things that can’t be conveyed through normal dialogue, Emilia Pérez’s biggest problem is that it falls prey to redundancy, regurgitating the same ideas about identity, desire, violence, and redemption, betraying how little it has to say in the first place.
  49. Inheritance
    Its bizarre mismatch of form and content mostly saps it of life, tamping down the tension and frequently suggesting an accidentally distributed proof of concept for a project that never managed to secure funding.
  50. Here
    Here is all moments, some small and many big, but it’s lacking in gravitas, concerned as it is with tugging at our heartstrings by serving up little more than signifiers that we can project our own memories or personal baggage into.
  51. Never Let Go
    As the film goes on, it stretches its own internal logic and, following a genuinely shocking third-act twist, renders the world that it’s created virtually incoherent merely in a ploy to keep the audience on the edge of their seats.
  52. The Killer
    This remake is absent the far richer character development that made the original as much a melodrama as a shoot-’em-up.
  53. A Complete Unknown
    The bevy of documentaries, narrative films, and books about Bob Dylan’s breakout, ascent, and impact on the 1960s pop zeitgeist could fill a library, which makes this oversimplified retread of the same topic all the more tedious and superfluous.
  54. The 4:30 Movie
    Jam-packed with his familiar brand of vulgar yet verbose stoner humor and free-flowing riffs on movies—especially his own—the vibes are certainly off the charts in Kevin Smith’s film.
  55. Apartment 7A
    Rather than deepening or complicating the original work, Apartment 7A engages with it purely on franchise terms, as in how it foregrounds the Castavets for much of the runtime.
  56. September 5
    The film isn’t interested in anything that would detract from providing audiences with the sustained pleasure of watching a clock-ticking thriller.
  57. Jurassic World Rebirth
    There’s a grating meta-ness to Gareth Edwards’s Jurassic World Rebirth that speaks to the filmmakers’ knowledge that they’re at the mercy of pressures to bring something new to a franchise that’s now on its seventh installment.
  58. Saturday Night
    There’s a certain pleasure in basking in the anarchic behavior of the SNL cast as depicted in Saturday Night, but it’s rendered hollow by the film’s often grating mythologizing of them, which includes trying to turn the 90 minutes before the first episode into a frenetic comedy of Safdie-esque proportions.
  59. The Life of Chuck
    Mike Flanagan’s film doesn’t escape the mires of unpersuasive pop psychology.
    • 50 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Wolf Man
    Wolf Man neither embraces the fundamentals of the werewolf folklore from which it draws nor convincingly reinvents them.
    • 51 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Lord of the Rings
    Not even the Dark Lord Sauron would want to put his name to this movie.
  62. Hurry Up Tomorrow
    The film desperately tries to convince us that it’s peeling back the layers of the Weeknd’s persona in order to show you what’s really going on inside his head. But, in defiance of Anima’s wishes, Hurry Up Tomorrow lacks the honesty to confront what’s there.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The Housemaid
    The Housemaid’s twist is a doozy, but it falls just short of being a deconstruction of tradwife values.
  64. A Working Man
    David Ayer’s film proceeds as an unambiguous celebration of its hero’s vigilantism.
  65. Opus
    The film takes dozens of different anecdotes about cults and celebrities and manages to render them pedestrian, unoriginal, staid.
  66. 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.
  67. Jimpa
    Jimpa’s exploration of non-binary identity ultimately proves superficial.
  68. Smurfs
    Its pastiche of Into the Spider-Verse is revealed to be nothing more than window dressing.
  69. Dreams
    The film exposes the incontestable American art of getting more with blunt obviousness.
  70. Fear Street: Prom Queen
    Like its predecessors, the film is an often awkward mix of YA drama and R-rated gore.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A Big Bold Beautiful Journey
    The film cloyingly asks us to embrace the sincerity of its impersonal romance.
  72. Ghost Trail
    Jonathan Millet’s film is unconvincing and unnaturally contorted into its shape.
  73. Henry Johnson
    Ultimately, Henry Johnson’s cynical assertions about society and human nature are the only aspects that end up resonating, for better or worse.
  74. Now You See Me: Now You Don't
    The third film in the series reliably delivers on the promise of both flamboyant showmanship and a steadfast refusal to adhere to more than just the rules of physics.
  75. Bone Lake
    The horror here proves as much a dead end as the main characters’ relationship.
  76. Echo Valley
    A story that might have been benefited by being allowed to breathe over a six-episode arc instead feels rushed and schematic rather than lived-in.
  77. Resurrection
    At times, Resurrection seems to outright taunt viewers for trying to make sense of it all.
  78. The Wizard of the Kremlin
    Olivier Assayas’s knack for fostering insight through irony is nowhere to be found in the film.
  79. Regretting You
    The decision to have Allison Williams and Dave Franco, both in their late 30s when the film was shot, play their characters as teens may be the most egregious example of Regretting You’s indifference to verisimilitude.
  80. Anniversary
    This is an overtly political film that’s hesitant to express its own political views.
  81. Play Dirty
    Shane Black’s film plays like a misguided action extravaganza from the 1980s.
  82. The Carpenter's Son
    The Carpenter’s Son fails to even offer decent frights, unless one finds the preponderance of CGI snakes particularly scary.
  83. Dust Bunny
    The film’s writing is the sort that begs you to find it cute and quirky, which makes it quite grating if you don’t.
  84. 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.
  85. The Choral
    This is a historical drama with a handsome enough period setting and a couple of pleasant musical moments but whose roteness keeps it from resonating.
  86. Reminders of Him
    Vanessa Caswill’s film feels reverse engineered to maximize emotional impact.
  87. I Only Rest in the Storm
    Whatever the post-colonial lessons are, I Only Rest in the Storm’s characters articulate them too evidently, as if preemptively justifying the making of a film in or about “Africa” on the condition that the white man’s presence is relentlessly denounced.
  88. Dracula
    Not even a typically scenery-chewing Christoph Waltz can enliven the proceedings.
  89. Lee Cronin's The Mummy
    In lieu of any competently developed drama, we get a blitzkrieg of scares and gooey body horror that can best be described as arbitrary.
  90. Rosebush Pruning
    Only cheap shock value can be gleaned from the film’s cavalcade of blood, semen, animal carcasses, dick pics, and erotic toothbrushing.
  91. Two Pianos
    Arnaud Desplechin’s film only flirts with questions about the sacrifices made for art.
  92. Restless
    Gus Van Sant's cinema, which of late has been fixated on immersing viewers in particular times and spaces, takes a detour into excruciating quirkland with Restless.
  93. Apollo 18
    A nasty, cleverly revealed monster might have redeemed some of the monotony of the first (seemingly endless) hour, but the beasty here manages to be ludicrous, dull, and unoriginal somehow all at once, compromising the marginal hope you may have been holding out for the film.
  94. 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.
  95. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1
    Intended as the cinematic equivalent of an orgasm, this tirelessly hyped insta-blockbuster is loaded with OMG developments (marriage! Sex! Baby!) and seemingly regarded by everyone to include the most epic and gratifying scenes of romantic release in modern movie history.
  96. Cowboys & Aliens
    Brandishing a literal-minded title as laughable as the rest of its action, Cowboys & Aliens mashes up genres with a staunch dedication to getting everything wrong, making sure that each scene is more inane than the one that preceded it.
  97. The Help
    High school creative-writing-class ironies of all kinds abound in The Help.
  98. Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows
    Wither the rollicking verve and whip-crack humor in Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows?
  99. Mr. Popper's Penguins
    If you're wondering where the Jim Carrey of "Ace Ventura: Pet Detective" and "Dumb and Dumber" fame went, don't look to Mr. Popper's Penguins for answers.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Cars 2
    A crass and uncharacteristically threadbare cash-grab.
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