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. Mary Magdalene
    As the plot mechanically moves through Jesus’s greatest hits, the narrative focuses less and less on Mary Magdalene until her life feels completely beside the point.
  2. Unlocked
    With its dull mixture of indifferently staged exposition and action, it suggests a primitive side-scrolling video game.
  3. Mile 22
    When Mark Wahlberg's Silva isn't wielding run-on sentences as military-grade weapons, he barks out derivative commands and asinine statements that make him sound like a 13-year-old playing Call of Duty.
  4. Dolittle
    Dolittle’s inability to completely develop any of its characters reduces the film to all pomp and no circumstance.
  5. The Lion King
    There’s something very cheap at the core of this overtly, ostentatiously expensive film, reliant as it is on our memory of the original to accentuate every significant moment.
  6. The Clapper
    Though it pretends to stick up for all the schmucks in the world, the film is really just laughing along with the assholes.
  7. Aardvark
    The film adopts a half-hearted variation on A Beautiful Mind's gimmicky approach to grappling with a man's mental illness.
  8. Godard Mon Amour
    Michel Hazanavicius co-opts Jean-Luc Godard's personal life for cheap prestige-picture sentiment.
  9. Vincent N Roxxy
    Its gory conclusion is presented with an ostentatious grandiosity that the rest of the film simply doesn’t justify.
  10. Woodshock
    It becomes the obnoxious equivalent of trying to have a serious conversation with people who are high out of their minds.
  11. Austin Found
    The conspicuous means by which Will Raee stacks the deck against Leanne, the real victim of this story, is matched only by a moral grandstanding that seeks to condemn rather than understand the character’s decisions.
  12. Sherlock Gnomes
    Arthur Conan Doyle's legendary characters feel as if they've been air-dropped into a universe where they don't belong.
  13. The Man Who Invented Christmas
    Since “humbug” is already spoken for by Ebenezer Scrooge, “opportunistic” would be the most apt word for The Man Who Invented Christmas.
  14. All the Money in the World
    As released, All the Money in the World is by and large a conspicuously manufactured thriller that moves between manipulative psych-outs.
  15. Temple
    The film is only in the business of supplying the sort of fear that hinges entirely on the shock of the exotic.
  16. 12 Strong
    As Nicolai Fuglsig doesn't allow any complicated thoughts about war, colonization, and mortality to hover around his characters, 12 Strong inevitably proceeds as a jaunty imperial adventure through the wilds of northern Afghanistan.
  17. Kill Me Please
    Anita Rocha da Silveira’s slasher-film plot is simply a tease, as there are no scares here, and the filmmaker’s attempt at genre hybridization never coheres conceptually.
  18. Manolo: The Boy Who Made Shoes for Lizards
    Michael Roberts's documentary is an unabashed exercise in deifying its subject matter with superlatives and hyperbole from the mouths of talking heads, which ultimately results in the cheapening of the artist.
  19. Jungle
    Greg McLean and screenwriter Justin Monjo faithfully hit the key plot points of Yossi Ghinsberg's 1993 book Back from Tuichi but fail to sell the severity of the threats Yossi confronts.
  20. Submergence
    Submergence's globetrotting only succeeds at exposing the hollowness of the characters at the film's center.
  21. The Rhythm Section
    The film’s occasional gestures toward pseudo-feminist empowerment only compound the hollowness of its protagonist.
  22. A Bride for Rip Van Winkle
    The film is an interminable saga full of soap-operatic plot twists involving quickly broken marriages, sexual assault, a secret porn career, terminal illness, and a quasi lesbian love affair.
  23. Overboard
    All of the broad physical humor in the world can't distract from the fact that the film is an endorsement of psychological exploitation.
  24. The Spy Who Dumped Me
    There's an appealingly shaggy buddy comedy hidden somewhere inside of The Spy Who Dumped Me, but good luck finding it amid all the desperate poop jokes, lifeless action sequences, and lazy plot mechanics.
  25. The Vanishing Of Sidney Hall
    The seesaw of effect of oscillating between extolling Sidney’s genius and lingering on his anguish begins to feel like a child slowly burning an ant with a magnifying glass, occasionally taking breaks to truly savor the harm he or she is committing.
  26. Breaking In
    James McTeigue's Breaking In is the sort of incompetently constructed thriller that gives B movies a bad name.
  27. Unicorn Store
    Brie Larson’s directorial debut is nothing so much as a series of quirks.
  28. The Competition
    The will-they-won't-they of the film is a non-starter, and as such the film's climax is stripped of suspense and even the most basic of dramatic payoffs.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    Bleeding Steel
    A film so brazen in its desire to reach a wide audience that it plays like a compilation of disparate action set pieces, each shamelessly stolen from successful Hollywood franchises.
  30. The Miseducation of Cameron Post
    The film's refusal to produce a campy critique feels more like the product of lack of imagination than a purposeful repudiation.
  31. Nancy
    There's vanity in its boutique art-film brand of hopelessness, which derives from a fetishizing of "keeping it real."
  32. Serenity
    The film’s twist ending exists only to retroactively justify writer-director Steven Knight’s feeble stylistic choices.
  33. 1985
    Adrian is too flat as a character, his plight too generic, for his tears to count as something other than a sentimental ready-made.
  34. Terminal
    Terminal's actors are awkward and stiff in trying to project hard-boiled cool, and all while delivering lines that sound as if they had been passed multiple times through an online translation tool.
  35. Dog Days
    Aside from the occasional idiosyncratic comic beat, Dog Days remains committed to coloring within the lines of established tropes in the animal-centric family film.
  36. Replicas
    The climax’s bizarre left turns culminate in a final image so bewildering that were the film not so relentlessly dour it might have clarified Replicas as an absurdist comedy.
  37. 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.
  38. Peppermint
    Pierre Morel's first feature film set in the United States is brainless propaganda for the MAGA market.
  39. The House with a Clock in Its Walls
    The final act of The House with a Clock in Its Walls stumbles between awkward, telegraphed jolts and busy, effects-heavy action, completely losing sight of the trauma and grief that was meant to give the film its emotional core.
  40. Johnny English Strikes Again
    Relying on such arcane gags as prat falls in knight’s armor, fake French accents, and an array of gadget-based explosions, Johnny English Strikes Again seems almost hellbent on aiming for the lowest common denominator at every turn.
  41. Second Act
    A blatantly telegraphed mid-film twist helps turn Second Act into one of the strangest and most misguided rom-coms of any year.
  42. 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.
  43. The Misandrists
    The sexual outbursts in the film are tempered with a tenderness that one hardly associates with Bruce LaBruce's career.
  44. Far from the Tree
    The very act of having kids and demanding perfect conformity from them is never questioned by the film.
  45. Like a Boss
    Its inconsistent, half-baked characterizations would be more forgivable were they at least in the service of some inspired comedy.
  46. 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.
  47. The Hustle
    Like other gender-swapped films in recent years, The Hustle plays the identity politics game as an end in itself.
  48. Maleficent: Mistress of Evil
    In transforming folk metaphors into utilitarian attributes of an action hero, Disney exposes the emptiness of their product.
  49. Vox Lux
    Vox Lux sets up its main character as a beneficiary of tragedy, opening up a compellingly macabre narrative about how school shootings are becoming so commonplace that they can effectively serve as launchpads for stardom. But that idea goes nowhere, as Vox Lux proceeds to play Celeste's experience in the music industry mostly straight.
  50. The Public
    The film is a clunky, overwritten attempt to pack as many tortured subplots and pre-chewed sociological insights as can possibly fit into a two-hour runtime.
  51. Amityville 3-D
    Amityville 3-D—one-dimensional in every way but its hokey visuals—is too poorly written, awkwardly staged, and pathologically stupid to register as campy fun.
  52. The King's Man
    The film is so caught up in its own idea of national exceptionalism that its tagline might as well be Make England Great Again.
  53. 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.
  54. Aladdin
    Guy Ritchie’s live-action remake is content to trace the original’s narrative beats with perfunctory indifference.
  55. The Best of Enemies
    The Best of Enemies may be based on a true story, but in so stubbornly turning the spotlight away from Atwater and the radical, grind-it-out community activism that took on the racism that Ellis helped to foster as a segregationist, it more accurately resembles an all-too-familiar Hollywood tall tale.
  56. Brightburn
    The way the film shuttles through its 90 minutes, it’s as if it’s been stripped of its most crucial narrative parts.
  57. Shaft
    Ultimately, the only truly retro thing about this weirdly reactionary potboiler is its politics.
  58. Outlaws
    The grim Australian biker drama Outlaws is little more than an endless stream of brooding, yelling, and “badass” posturing broken up by grisly violence and gratuitous sex scenes.
  59. The Devil All the Time
    Every moment in The Devil All the Time is meant to be a galvanic, preachifying high point, and so the characters aren’t allowed to reveal themselves apart from the dictates of the plot. One can scarcely imagine a duller lot of sacrificial lambs.
  60. Ghostbusters: Afterlife
    Though flattering through and through, the film is ironically removed from the charms of the worshipped original.
  61. After the Wedding
    The film diverts us away from its hint of a social message using a series of tired twists and turns that don’t signify much of anything.
  62. The Haunting of Sharon Tate
    In a film that features Charles Manson and his disciples, there’s something unsavory about presenting Sharon Tate as one of the crazy ones.
  63. Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse
    The film is a disastrous amalgamation of modern-day tech-savvy thrills and Clancy’s conservative expressions of patriotism.
  64. Ma
    In the end, the filmmakers settle for stigmatizing victimhood, abusing Sue Ann almost as much as her former tormentors.
  65. Space Jam: A New Legacy
    As soon as LeBron and Dom are sucked into computer space, A New Legacy largely abandons its underlying criticism of soulless corporate regurgitation of art-as-product and instead becomes an exhausting tour through the Warner Bros. catalog.
  66. Lucy in the Sky
    Noah Hawley treats his protagonist’s story as a somber tragedy that at times stoops to trashiness.
  67. Perfect
    Eddie Alcazar’s film is a purposefully inscrutable, wandering, disconnected, symbolic, and highly precious mood bath.
  68. 21 Bridges
    It’s difficult to imagine a worse time to release Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges than the present.
  69. Stuber
    More than its violence, the film is defined by its vileness, its straight-faced attachment to outmoded ideas about masculinity and law enforcement.
  70. The Garbage Pail Kids Movie
    Imagine parents sitting in the audience with their naughty children (who used their Cabbage Patch dolls as driveway obstructions for their Big Wheel obstacle courses) and feeling ruefully double-crassed.
  71. Jumanji: The Next Level
    For all the emphasis on video game characters who can be swapped out on a whim, it’s the players themselves who come across as the most thinly drawn and interchangeable beneath their avatars.
  72. Thor: Love and Thunder
    Across Taika Waititi’s film, a war against the gods feels like an afterthought to a bad rom-com.
  73. Countdown
    If there’s an ethos that Justin Dec’s film believes in, it’s only that “death sucks.”
    • 51 Metascore
    • 25 Critic Score
    The Gentlemen
    The London of this film is practically a match for Guy Ritchie’s filmmaking: a characterless mockery of its former glories, smooth and bland and just a bit more monied than before.
  75. Let Him Go
    Despite a searing performance from Diane Lane, writer-director Thomas Bezucha’s film ultimately self-immolates.
  76. We Summon the Darkness
    The film’s cat-and-mouse antics play out with no sense of escalation or invention.
  77. Infinite
    Symptomatic of the Marvel-ization of modern action cinema, the film seems to exist mostly as an advertisement for future product.
  78. Unhinged
    Unhinged is essentially a nihilistic, style-free destructo-rama that’s designed to make us feel like shit.
  79. Ghosts of War
    The film’s unreflective earnestness is haunting in all the wrong ways.
  80. Ava
    Ava isn’t only banal, but also, in its half-hearted stabs at novel ideas, seemingly content with its banality.
  81. Project Power
    The film is an unwieldy array of muddled ideas that never gel together into a cohesive whole.
    • 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.
  83. Rifkin's Festival
    As Rifkin’s Festival drones on, the wastefulness grows offensive in a manner that’s unusual even for Woody Allen’s misfires.
  84. Mainstream
    The film has the knowing swagger of something on the cutting edge but none of the self-awareness to realize it’s late to the party.
  85. Honest Thief
    The repetitious plot is more ritual than text as we watch yet another Liam Neeson avenger defy the will of younger, unscrupulous men.
  86. The 355
    The film treats its premise as the backdrop for a trite celebration of empowerment and teamwork among professional women.
  87. Hillbilly Elegy
    Hillbilly Elegy feels like a bland feel-good story rather than one part of a longer tragedy with no clear end.
  88. Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things
    Made on the cheap and inspired by early Romero, this zombie flick doesn’t even have the dead rise until the final half-hour. Until then, we’re stuck with an amateur theater troupe chattering away as they venture out to an abandoned island for a goofy séance.
  89. The Midnight Sky
    The film minimizes the tragedy of the human race’s near-complete annihilation by positioning it as the backdrop for the world’s most grandiose deadbeat-dad redemption arc.
  90. 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.
  91. Mortal Kombat
    In spite of its occasionally engaging displays of gnarly brutality, the film too often feels like an adaptation of a player select screen.
  92. Locked Down
    Had the filmmakers taken a more easygoing approach, Locked Down might have landed in the realm of The Thomas Crown Affair.
  93. Babylon
    [Chazelle’s] torturously glib cynicism is quite the attitude around which to build an epic boondoggle of this sort. Equally as heinous is the 11th-hour optimism that he then attempts to tack onto Babylon via a jaw-droppingly wrongheaded climactic montage.
  94. Fear of Rain
    The film portrays mental illness with all the nuance and insight of Jared Leto in Suicide Squad.
  95. Boogie
    The film’s characters hardly possess a sense of a history or an interior life to adequately convey racism’s psychic toll.
  96. Zack Snyder's Justice League
    The film could be taken as an intentional travesty of the superhero genre, if only it weren’t so tortuously tedious.
  97. Prisoners of the Ghostland
    The film is a profound disappointment in part because it feels so overdetermined to live up to Sion Sono and Nicholas Cage’s respective brands.
  98. Every Breath You Take
    Sam Claflin is best in show, but his performance is undercut by the film’s inability to escalate or explore the ramifications of its premise.
  99. Moffie
    Oliver Hermanus’s film is a rumination on the consequences of apartheid on those who benefit from it most.
  100. The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard
    The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard improves on its 2017 predecessor only insofar as it runs 20 minutes shorter.
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