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. 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.
  2. One for the Money
    One for the Money is like The Bounty Hunter by Andy Tennant, if you dipped it in self-tanner and strapped some Four Loko on it.
  3. Conan the Barbarian
    The re-whatevered Conan the Barbarian feels unexpectedly low-rent, even with its multi-million-dollar backdrops and ear-splitting, rumbling soundtrack and (presumably post-converted) 3D imagery.
  4. We Bought a Zoo
    Far more concerned with pratfalling animal shenanigans and unearned uplift than crafting a single complex or amusing moment, it's a film caged in by formulaic plotting and plentiful pap.
    • 17 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence)
    The desire to eat someone's ass is almost always superficial; there's no thought of sustenance, and more sophisticated pleasures are usually imminent. Not so with The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence).
  6. 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.
  7. Piranha 3DD
    John Gulager is neither artist nor genius, bringing only straight-to-video conviction to Piranha 3DD.
  8. Trespass
    A jerky, clamorous domestic thriller that attempts, with nonsense and expletives turned up to full volume, to say something thrillingly profound about the depths of misery one can reach while doing financial damage control.
  9. The Big Year
    Director David Frankel can't lend the inflated sitcom dilemmas of the characters any life, and most mysteriously screenwriter Howard Franklin, whose work in the '90s frequently had appealing quirk and flavor, gets the dubious credit for adapting a 1998 nonfiction book about these hobbyists' pursuit of pink-footed geese and Northern Shovelers.
  10. Goon
    A second-rate dude comedy in which an untalented knucklehead becomes a star through brute violence.
  11. Tower Heist
    Defiantly graceless, Brett Ratner deals in loudness, haplessness, obviousness, and, certainly, crudeness, reminding you of his directorial presence with such inclusions as a scolded kid who tells his disciplinarian to "suck it."
  12. Albert Nobbs
    Perhaps thrown by the challenge of having to direct women as men and not just as themselves, director Rodrigo Garcia turns in what may be his poorest effort to date, opting for a nearly airless tone, presenting a look that's sadly un-cinematic, and presiding over a collection of performers that seem to be operating on very different planes, and with accents of varying thicknesses.
  13. My Week with Marilyn
    Only the star performances in My Week with Marilyn, cartoonish as they are, make seeing the film worth the effort.
  14. Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer
    Kitsch sprung from the lame imagination of adults who probably wish their tweeners lived their lives like Judy Blume characters.
  15. 47 Ronin
    This botched vision accepts the warrior's nobility at face value and sees the story merely as a springboard for high-flying action and CGI special effects.
  16. Contraband
    Heist, swindle, and other like-minded genre films thrive or flounder on the mechanics of their story's dangerously elaborate scheme, a fact ably proven by Contraband, a tale of high-seas smuggling without a clever thought in its leaden, derivative head.
  17. Battleship
    Shamelessly mimics Michael Bay's larger-than-life dialogue, sweeping cinematography, cornball romance, and military fetishism.
  18. The Dark Tower
    The decade-long effort to bring the Dark Tower books to the screen looks like a cheap, unauthorized cash-in.
  19. Ted
    Seth MacFarlane's comedic modus operandi is to shock with outrageousness and pander with TV and movie citations via one non sequitur after another, a strategy that leads to a few laughs but nothing approaching lasting humor.
  20. I Don't Know How She Does It
    The witticisms are delivered via a suffocating glut of audience hand-holding, which includes constant doc-style confessionals, whimsical on-screen text, studio-audience sound effects, voices in Kate's head, and voiceover narration.
  21. Higher Ground
    Lacking both spiritual and narrative spark, Vera Farmiga's directorial debut suffers from her flat performance and a moribund, weirdly sex-joke-spiked narrative.
  22. Beginning of the Great Revival
    Beginning of the Great Revival is muddled, all right, but it's the helter-skelter speed at which it ticks off names and incidents, both in hopelessly confused action and on-screen text, that seems nearly unprecedented.
  23. Just Like Us
    Rather than a mature, multifaceted approach, the director's portraits of Dubai, Beirut, Riyadh, and Cairo are heavy on still-photo montages comprised primarily of smiling young people and spontaneous encounters with random jokesters.
  24. The Perfect Age of Rock 'n' Roll
    There's nothing inherently flawed about this nomadic and potentially life-affirming narrative, but Rosenbaum manages to instill every moment on the road with a sense of shrill conventionality.
  25. The Sleeping Beauty
    Judging from The Sleeping Beauty, and the previous "Bluebeard," the provocations stop with the choice of the material, as the tone and style of these films are jarringly well-behaved.
  26. House at the End of the Street
    The film is essentially toothless, but it never stoops to humorless torture-porn theatrics.
  27. Free Birds
    The film is absent of humor and thrills, and accented with designs and color schemes that are equally notable for their lack of risk.
  28. Poltergeist
    It's the cinematic equivalent of a pat on the back accompanied by a slap in the face.
  29. 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.
  30. Turtle: The Incredible Journey
    Though it boasts its fair share of shots that approximate the turtle's first-person point of view, the film's most dominant presence is its heavy-handed maker.
  31. Small Town Murder Songs
    So intent on being "art" that it's seemingly indifferent to providing simple niceties such as compelling performance, plot, and an atmosphere that isn't predictably oppressive.
  32. Fast & Furious 6
    Justin Lin strives to approximate something like Ocean's Eleven for petrosexuals, but testosterone outweighs wit and cleverness at every turn in Chris Morgan's starched script.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Host
    Its title, very graciously, doesn't end with a "Part 1," but The Host sure has enough plot points and ideas to fill two installments.
  34. Seventh Son
    As is often the case in films like this, Seventh Son is at its weakest when it tries to leaven its brink-of-disaster gravity with a little nerdy humor.
  35. Walking with Dinosaurs
    The strain to make the film both an educational tool and a child-minded entertainment is noticeable throughout.
  36. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
    This film buries its soul beneath its own pretentious rubble, and the youthful, labyrinthine mind in which it places viewers feels less like an offbeat vehicle for healing than it does a kaleidoscopic prison.
  37. The Odd Life of Timothy Green
    Disney draws a big fat bullseye on the fast-growing infertile-couple demographic with this airless misfire.
  38. World War Z
    The zombies twitch, leap, gnash, and destroy, but the film has all the thrill and surprise of a model U.N. summit.
  39. The Way
    The making of The Way must have been a nice moment for father and son, but why must the rest of us suffer?
  40. Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey
    Not everyone's life is compelling enough to warrant the documentary treatment, but whether this truism applies to master puppeteer and current Sesame Street producer Kevin Clash is a question that Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey, Constance Marks's fawning portrait of the Muppet- master fails to answer.
  41. A Proper Violence
    There's absolutely no fresh perspective here; just more juiceless samplings of what's already been cooked to death.
  42. The Caller
    The way in which the action indulges in long, underlined silences furthers the overriding sense of trying too hard to muster up a suspenseful mood from a conceit better suited to a half-hour television program.
  43. Fireflies in the Garden
    The actors are left to go through the motions of a sterile script that director Dennis Lee tries to bring to life not through, for example, Watson's brilliant capacity for facial nuance, but through canned artifice.
  44. Berlin 36
    Excepting a momentary late-film lapse into eye-rolling double-exposure tomfoolery, the film is as aesthetically bland as a film could conceivably be, the perfunctory camerawork imbuing the proceedings with an ugly, indistinctive gloss.
    • 63 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Les Miserables
    One would be hard-pressed to describe this, despite the wealth of beauty on display, as anything but an ugly film, shot and cut ineptly.
  46. Finding Joe
    Finding Joe maintains that every person should, as Joseph Campbell wrote, "find your bliss," a potentially valuable nugget of wisdom that this film manages to reduce to 80 minutes of celebs giving themselves hugs.
  47. Gangster Squad
    Ruben Fleischer's film is a perfect example of Hollywood hypocrisy, something to be ignored diligently.
  48. The Sons of Tennessee Williams
    This time-tested project of tracing gayness back to when its shame was so explicitly enforced feels not only passé, and naïve, but mostly unproductive in a post-Judith Butler world in which drag queens are on TV teaching biological women how to better perform womanhood.
  49. The Last Ride
    A typical wax-museum reproduction of the American South in which every detail is Southern in bold all caps, and not a single scene over the course of the film's 102 minutes rings true.
  50. Salmon Fishing in the Yemen
    The ill use made of the stars' charms in this initially strained, then egregiously dopey mushfest can likely be credited to market-tested notions of modern popular romance.
  51. Loosies
    Loosies never establishes a consistent tone; it feels made up as it went along, and not in the electrifyingly free-wheeling fashion of, say, a Godard or Altman film.
  52. RA. One
    But all the charm in the world wouldn't make Ra.One's sanctimoniousness seem any more genuine.
  53. Chasing Mavericks
    The filmmakers' kinship to Moriarity is obvious, and it makes for a tone of unflinching hope and optimism, though it leaves little room for grit or nuance.
  54. To Rome with Love
    "With age comes exhaustion," according to a rueful line late in the film, and it serves as a fitting diagnosis for Woody Allen's latest fallen souffle set in a European cultural capital.
  55. Trouble with the Curve
    Clint Eastwood makes his infamous chair speech look like chapter one of a season of self-parody.
    • 26 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Reunion
    Importing WWE's brand of hokey fighting--the most memorable scene, during which Cena jumps from a ledge onto a helicoper, recalls in-the-ring rope-jumping than anything else--into a place where there is an alarming amount of real bloodshed seems unnecessary and somewhat imperious.
  57. 13
    The filmmakers are so generally clueless about getting the most out of a provocative concept that it's like running into a subtextual brick wall.
  58. Stuck Between Stations
    Brady Kiernan's Stuck Between Stations has sweetness to it, but it's a sweetness borrowed from innumerable other films and constantly corrupted by biased politics and crass emotional digressions.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    5 Star Day
    Danny Buday's film is not so much skeptical of astrology as confused about it.
  60. The Lie
    It's hard to say which is worse: the unfunny caricatures or the indulgent soul-searching.
  61. RED 2
    An awfully expensive and grossly extended Cialis commercial.
    • 23 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    A Novel Romance
    For a film about writing a novel, A Novel Romance is surprisingly shallow in regard to its characters and superficial in terms of its chapter-structured façade.
    • 81 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Silver Linings Playbook
    When one stops to consider how irksomely on the nose so much of this is, the qualities which intend to most readily ingratiate the film with us begin to appear perceptibly disingenuous and false.
  64. Being Flynn
    If Robert De Niro knew what was good for him, he'd certainly distance himself from this director and find a new path.
  65. Beneath the Darkness
    Overly expository dialogue abounds throughout Martin Guigui's movie, as do questionable filmmaking choices and plenty of stupidly unconvincing actions taken on the part of the film's characters.
  66. Pixels
    This is a Happy Madison production, and as such it's exhaustively lazy, outside of its righteous dedication to the valorization of the man-child.
  67. My Piece of the Pie
    Cédric Klapisch settles for a mixture of bland obviousness and crudely manufactured drama.
  68. Seducing Charlie Barker
    Charlie is a stereotype who doesn't know it--basically your typical broke dude in a near midlife crisis who thinks he's the first to have his dull problems.
  69. Miss Minoes
    After 30 long minutes, I stopped trying to make allowances for its varying ineptitudes, and Carice van Houten's work as the spunky human cat was the only reason I held out that long.
  70. Albatross
    Albatross is simply a compendium of bad ideas.
    • 55 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    It's About You
    While there aren't many films shot on Super 8 anymore, It's About You, a documentary that isn't really about John Mellencamp's 2009 No Better Than This tour, doesn't make the case that moviegoing is missing anything because of that.
  72. Don't Go in the Woods
    Coming across as a promotional showcase for a gaggle of young up-and-coming singer-actors, Don't Go in the Woods tethers together numerous indie-rock musical numbers with a backwoods-horror-film framework that's the definition of an afterthought.
  73. Neon Flesh
    With no slick moves and no brains backing its skuzzy narrative, Neon Flesh is just a proudly tacky film about unconscionably tawdry people.
  74. Detachment
    Endng in risible bathos, Tony Kaye's urban high school melodrama is all about the cute teacher's crises and the girls who love him.
  75. 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.
  76. Silent House
    Silent House dies a sudden and egregious death when the amateur players in Olsen's company, Adam Trese and Eric Sheffer Stevens, as her character Sarah's father and uncle, respectively, open their traps.
  77. Girl in Progress
    Girl in Progress operates like a training-wheels melodrama for genre-uneducated tweens.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Scalene
    More concerned with the novelty of its three-act, "three-perspective" structure than with how that structure actually functions (hint: poorly), Scalene epitomizes the pitfalls of the Memento-copping trend, its strained conceptual ingenuity an exercise in aid of nothing.
  79. After Fall, Winter
    Taking the pedestrian and decidedly unsexy American male to Paris so he can become a sexual human being attuned to life's small pleasures is a tired device that perhaps only Woody Allen could possibly resurrect from the stinky pile of cinematic clichés.
  80. Seeking Justice
    The film's tossed-off look and clunky editorial construction are still secondary to the sheer silliness of its story.
    • 28 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    A Good Day to Die Hard
    The film feels like it was reverse-engineered from its "Yippee Ki-Yay Mother Russia" tagline, a wholly generic international actioner barely distinguished by the presence of Bruce Willis's banner hero.
  82. Escape Plan
    A dim anti-privatization parable that preaches a familiar strain of cynical, unchallenged self-righteousness in the face of widespread abuse of civil liberties.
  83. The Samaritan
    The Samaritan treads a fine line between film-noir moodiness and crime-thriller triteness, mostly settling for the latter.
  84. How to Start a Revolution
    Much of this content, which involves complex social movements in Burma, Iran, and elsewhere, is necessarily abridged, but it's often done so to the point of incoherence, making Gene Sharp's connection to what we're seeing seem contrived.
  85. The Woods
    It's all very "found footage," Impolex by way of Discovery's The Colony, only with a lot more in the way of familiar consumer products.
  86. High School
    As sure as marijuana gets you high, you can count on weed-themed comedies cropping up every few years, each hoping to become a stoner-classic staple--a fate to which High School falls far short of achieving.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    My Way
    Many films are saved in the editing room, but how many are ruined there?
  88. Jack Reacher
    The film is as incompetent, manipulative, safe, and disposable as any number of nickel-and-dime actioners, but goes to great, unconvincing lengths to insist it's different.
  89. The Smurfs 2
    Raja Gosnell's particular zeal to modernize the Smurfs only develops this would-be family comedy into a shamelessly manipulative smurftastrophe.
  90. 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.
  91. Lola Versus
    A year in the life of a young woman unhappy in love and uncertain in career, Lola Versus could easily be faulted for the narrowness of its worldview.
  92. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
    A film so overworked to ensure mass-market appeal that it loses the charming oddness and loose goofiness that has allowed these characters to endure.
  93. A Little Bit of Heaven
    Unsurprisingly for a film detailing terminal disease, this is a largely solemn affair, often verging on morbidity in its elongated deathwatch.
  94. The Words
    The film folds narratives on top of narratives in a vain attempt to mask the fact that there's nothing to read between its graceless lines.
  95. Come on Eileen
    Rarely leaves the realm of the obvious and the literal.
  96. 300: Rise of an Empire
    Noam Murro gives the film nothing so much as a hit-refresh on the same glistening, impossibly golden and gray flecks of pixel-barf that have invaded the frames of every tent-pole studio release since the Bush administration.
    • 48 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Womb
    Too abstract to suggest a coherent moral lesson, but too remote to foster a satisfying emotional connection, Womb feels barren, an attempt to do too much that ultimately does very little.
  98. Deadline
    By the end of it, you'll be crying uncle--or wish you were watching The Help instead. At least that was a more artful lie.
  99. A Green Story
    Writer-director Nika Agiashvili buys into the concept of the American dream with the zeal of a true believer.
  100. Inside Hana's Suitcase
    A film relating a story of the Holocaust is destined to provoke a number of adjectives, but "cloying" shouldn't be one of them.
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