Slant Magazine's Scores

Select another publication »
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
view
per page
  1. Why Stop Now
    Shifting between wacky situation comedy and somber familial drama, Why Stop Now? isn't invested enough in either mode to convincingly pull off its genre-hopping ambitions.
  2. 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.
  3. Kin
    Jonathan and Josh Baker's Kin, a feature that comprises little more than an extended introduction to its characters, resembles a TV pilot that's been released into theaters as a standalone property.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Bert Stern: Original Madman
    Rote, rushed, and utterly uninterested in the power of Stern as an innovator of image, making it effectively the opposite of the output of the artist it attempts to document.
  5. Rupture
    It attempts to dress up torture-porn tropes with a late-inning switch to science fiction that spectacularly backfires.
  6. Blumhouse's Truth or Dare
    Director Jeff Wadlow's Truth or Dare is a startlingly mean-spirited but otherwise dimwitted horror film.
  7. Camera Obscura
    The filmmaker has a bad habit of dropping the psychological inquiries to dully go through the genre motions.
  8. The Huntsman: Winter's War
    The overriding despair of Winter's War's imagery calls into question who, exactly, the film is for.
  9. Grudge Match
    It will come as a surprise to none that Grudge Match is so wantonly clichéd that to watch it is to explore the outer perimeters of one's own tolerance for a specific type of feel-good sports film.
  10. My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3
    For devotees of the franchise, Nia Vardalos's film will be a surprisingly emotional trip home.
  11. Mute
    Mute is so slow and arbitrarily over-plotted that it's difficult to believe that Jones also directed the spry and enjoyable Moon and Source Code.
  12. Inner Demons
    There's a disingenuous offering of pathos to accompany the film's ridiculous and violent denouement.
  13. Awake
    It’s difficult to imagine a high-concept thriller that coalesces around its one-line conceit less convincingly than Awake.
  14. For Greater Glory
    The film is awash in blandly brown-toned cinematography, action scenes more violent than rousing, and a whole host of bathetic subplots.
  15. Dorfman in Love
    The film's moral lesson is too contradictory to be taken seriously.
  16. The Guillotines
    Despite the multitude of cinematic tricks the prolific Andrew Lau has up his sleeve, the film is a disappointingly rote entry in the wuxia pantheon.
  17. Venom
    The final act's full-tilt embrace of action effectively undermines Tom Hardy's flashes of actorly idiosyncrasy.
  18. Dream House
    A modest genre entry, Dream House also benefits from the fact that any movie with good enough sense to cast Elias Koteas is automatically better as a result, even if he is utterly wasted here.
  19. Argylle
    And the more each new twist is revealed and summarily falls flat, the faster the next one is slotted into place to get ahead of the story’s anticlimax, leading to a spiral in which the plot becomes even more meaningless.
  20. The Hustle
    Like other gender-swapped films in recent years, The Hustle plays the identity politics game as an end in itself.
  21. Very Good Girls
    Most disheartening is how the female leads aren't given ample space to develop as dynamic characters beyond the most urgent confines of the script's scenarios.
  22. Drift
    The obstacles that the Kelly brothers encounter are as uninspired as the film's treacly lessons about brotherhood and staying true to one's principles.
  23. Marguerite & Julien
    It finds its filmmaker completely lost between impulses to pay homage, play it safe, or offer something—anything—new.
    • 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.
  25. Halloween II (2009)
    Treading well-worn ground to diminishingly creepy returns is a bone-deep problem for Zombie’s latest, especially with regard to his characters.
  26. The Hunter's Prayer
    The Hunter’s Prayer packs its brisk 85 minutes with an impressive array of car chases, gun fights, hand-to-hand combat, and foot pursuits, all cut with a precision and an economy that heightens the impact of every hit.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Mansome
    The sociological commentary and historical perspectives are superficial at best and the targets often too easy.
  28. The Kitchen
    The Kitchen’s inability to criticize its characters without falling back on mild endorsement for their warped empowerment cheapens the film’s moments of reflection, turning them into perfunctory scenes of mild protest.
  29. Identity Thief
    Melissa McCarthy is riveting in simply-penned moments of remorse and confession, adding tearful depth to her ace timing and formidable physical comedy.
  30. Watching TV with the Red Chinese
    The first half of the film is a virtual compendium of high-culture references, topical concerns addressed almost in passing, and narrative fracturing devices.
  31. 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.
  32. Laredoans Speak: Voices on Immigration
    Laredoans Speak is bad in a special kind of way that inspires the obviously piteous description of "well-intentioned."
    • Slant Magazine
      • Posted Feb 11, 2012
  33. Gottfried Helnwein and the Dreaming Child
    Much of the documentary plays like a moderately well produced but tediously uncritical making-of feature that could easily have been included on the opera's DVD release.
  34. Everly
    Yet another boring ode to heavy breathing that's offered under the hypocritical pretense of celebrating female empowerment.
  35. Manny
    An informative, if largely deferent, biographical documentary that tritely explains the ascendancy of Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao.
  36. 31
    It collapses into repetition and unintended self-parody, as it's devoid of the subtext and empathetic audacity.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 75 Critic Score
    The Toolbox Murders
    Bleak and unabashedly grubby, Dennis Donnelly’s The Toolbox Murders straddles the line between several intersecting genres.
  38. The Expendables 3
    For all the brawn on display, the film never slows down to take in the thrill and talent of hand-to-hand combat.
  39. 7 Minutes
    Whether because of race, shame, shelter, or fright, 7 Minutes remains white in the face throughout.
  40. The Desperate Hour
    The Desperate Hour’s broad, vague rendering of its characters is part and parcel of its troubling approach to its material.
  41. 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.
  42. The Last Exorcism Part II
    Scenes of solemn importance drag on to the point of self-parody in an attempt at establishing mood, while dialogue reeks of connect-the-dots spoonfeeding.
  43. Kraven the Hunter
    Aaron Taylor-Johnson skulks and slays across a slew of gory insert shots that scream “reshoots” from the highest mountain, and while he certainly looks the part with his shirt off, there’s little here that Hugh Jackman hasn’t delivered multiple times over the years and with a deeper well of earned pathos to draw from.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    What's Your Number?
    Watching Faris's reactions to the bizarre material that makes up this film is like witnessing someone with a weird sense of humor make a string of jokes that no one's even catching.
  45. Lullaby
    Garrett Hedlund's performance throbs with an anguish that's far more honest than the sentimental euthanasia subplot at the center of the film.
  46. Scream 7
    This surprisingly refreshing take on familiar material is unconcerned with meta discussions about where the film stands in the canon.
  47. Proud Mary
    Babak Najafi’s Proud Mary is a so-so action melodrama with an insulting whiff of generic blaxploitation stylistics.
  48. Paradise
    The film smartly avoids the sort of cynical hijinks that characterize the majority of Vegas-set flicks, though it can't come up with anything more compelling to place in its stead.
  49. Kingsglaive: Final Fantasy XV
    The film is, at least, a marvelously enticing advertisement for the upcoming Final Fantasy XV video game.
  50. Java Heat
    A middling genre movie, but it's oddly likable for its conflicted, unresolved tension.
  51. Rebel Moon Part 2: The Scargiver
    The Scargiver feels like a loosely threaded series of grand ideas and sincere emotional beats that require so much more connective tissue to thread together into an actual narrative worth investing in.
  52. The Three Musketeers
    A moment's patience is soon rewarded by Anderson's vast store of rich, intoxicating imagery.
  53. Diablo
    It inelegantly attempts to infuse a standard revenge western with the gravitas of a war veteran's coming-home odyssey.
  54. The Wedding Ringer
    This big, brash, occasionally clever, but mostly dumb comedy is so gallingly derivative that watching it feels like playing a game of basic-cable bingo.
  55. Diana
    Are the micro-biopics that don't even bother to provide overviews of their famed subjects' entire lives, but instead lean on the spectacle of celebrity impersonation, the new camp?
    • 35 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Binge
    If The Purge cynically saw humans as itching to unleash their pent-up violence, The Binge recognizes us all as horny nitwit fratboys at heart who need an excuse to cut loose.
  57. Self/less
    The film's corporate blandness is almost as dispiriting as its disinterest in exploiting the inherent saliency of the material.
  58. The Assignment
    Walter Hill and Michelle Rodriguez seem to share Frank’s confusion over the precise difference between cosmetic and biological reality.
  59. Keeping Up with the Joneses
    By the time the film limps toward its Marrakech-set epilogue epilogue, its experiment in social osmosis is as much a failure as its B-sitcom-grade yuks.
  60. A Long Way Down
    An inept trifle, Pascal Chaumeil's film reduces Nick Hornby's novel of the same name to a series of smug self-help gestures.
  61. Twice Born
    Sergio Castellitto's film quickly turns out to be more interested in reveling in the secrets of its storyline than in its sentiments.
  62. The Forest
    The so-called suicide forest's cultural value is trivialized in the bum-rush to liberate the main characters from their agonies.
  63. Bitter Harvest
    The film is an awkward mix of swashbuckling love story and polemic, painted in very broad strokes.
  64. Copperhead
    Ron Maxwell's film, from beginning to end, exudes all the excitement of a textbook history lesson.
  65. Aloft
    The film's images, so continually heartrending so as to never become redundant, effectively function as visual proselytizing.
  66. The Dark Tower
    The decade-long effort to bring the Dark Tower books to the screen looks like a cheap, unauthorized cash-in.
  67. The Last Witch Hunter
    It has enough ingredients for a reasonably entertaining fantasy adventure—except, that is, for an interesting lead character with an emotionally compelling hook.
  68. The Color of Time
    If The Tree of Life was a contemplation of the universal mysteries and verities of life, The Color of Time is an hour spent scrolling through a stranger's family album.
  69. The War with Grandpa
    Only when left to their own devices do the film’s stars enter the less manic, more heartfelt realm of the book.
  70. Festival of Lights
    Fifteen minutes into Festival of Lights you come to the discouraging realization that you know every infuriating plot beat that will follow.
  71. Get Hard
    The filmmakers largely stand out of Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart's way, but they also refuse to modulate the story's racial humor with any sense of subversion.
  72. Beyond the Reach
    If all a movie needed was a boy with abs and a gun (or slingshot), then Beyond the Reach would be a masterpiece.
  73. Hide Away
    A banal "poetic" drama of a grieving stranger licking his wounds in a bayside Michigan town.
  74. Vanguard
    The film is an uncanny reflection of the jingoism that Hollywood has been wrapping in glossy spectacle and exporting to foreign markets for decades.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
    To question where things went wrong feels somehow strange, as the project seems to have been ill-conceived from the very start.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Mother's Day
    A home-invasion film like Mother's Day is elongated coitus interruptus.
  77. 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.
  78. Red One
    It’s neither naughty or nice, and in Santa’s book, that likely means it just ends up getting nothing this Christmas.
  79. The Ledge
    There's nothing wrong with establishing a field of unlikable characters, but The Ledge not only relies on paper-thin stereotypes, it keeps its allegiances clear from the beginning.
  80. Mercy
    More than anything, this twisty dystopian thriller commits to the jittery anxiety of doomscrolling.
  81. The Smurfs 2
    Raja Gosnell's particular zeal to modernize the Smurfs only develops this would-be family comedy into a shamelessly manipulative smurftastrophe.
  82. Imaginary
    The film never thinks to lean into the blatant silliness that its premise invites.
  83. Amityville II: The Possession
    Supremely awful.
  84. Baggage Claim
    Writer-director David E. Talbert adapts his own 2003 novel into something as useless as it is implosive.
  85. The Wait
    By the end, audiences will most likely feel as if they've been locked out of the drama that's presumably unfolding right in front of them.
  86. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    The new Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a deeply miscalculated mix of incoherent social commentary and over-the-top gore.
  87. Bringing Up Bobby
    Just an extended dramatization of the 1980s anti-drug PSA that memorably cautioned "I learned it by watching you!"
  88. Beneath
    The film is impersonal and populated with wisps of characters who spend most of the running time wandering around in the dark yelling at one another.
  89. Addicted to Fresno
    The film's larger points essentially fall by the wayside in the name of black comedy that's largely without genuine edge.
  90. My All American
    All of the film's nuances are ultimately negated by the its relentless canonization of its subject.
  91. Yakuza Princess
    This grimly self-serious tale of violent destiny is consistently drowned out by Vicente Amorim’s overreaching visual style.
  92. Siberia
    The film has the tone and look of a direct-to-video feature, and some shots of Keanu Reeves are so waxen that the actor almost looks rotoscoped.
  93. ATM
    If both good and evil characters don't behave in ways that make sense vis-à-vis their circumstances, any sense of terror quickly dissipates.
    • 34 Metascore
    • 0 Critic Score
    Sexual Chronicles of a French Family
    Its scope is too limited for it to muster much of a response in us beyond basic titillation. And there are plenty of better places to go for that.
  95. Jellyfish Eyes
    Takashi Murakami has invested the film with the same sort of primal pop-art aesthetic that distinguishes much of his art.
  96. Refuge
    The problem with the film isn't the contrivance of its premise, it's that writer-director Jessica Goldberg doesn't know it's contrived.
  97. The Last Victim
    Distractingly indebted to No Country for Old Men, the film’s wild tonal swings mostly leave it feeling impossibly disjointed.
  98. Knife Fight
    Bill Guttentag exaggerates the absurd lengths advisors go to win an election and yet ultimately aggrandizes their behavior.
  99. Zoolander 2
    The film is frequently guilty of the same obsolescence it accuses the characters of embodying.
  100. 21 and Over
    By the dictates of the boys-will-be-boys party genre, 21 and Over is so tame that it barely manages to even be offensive.
Page:

Top Trailers

See all »
See all trailers »