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. Playback
    Writer-director Michael A. Nickles may momentarily shout out to Peeping Tom via a shot of its DVD, but Playback is merely a voyeurism-tinged horror film of dismal direct-to-video quality.
  2. Alex Cross
    Expositional and often self-serious to the point of genuine awkwardness, the dialogue is never as haltingly unconvincing as when it's attempting to give some approximation of Alex Cross's essential looseness and good humor.
    • 54 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Tomorrow, When the War Began
    It's one thing to defer to archetypes, but Tomorrow is so full of stock types and clichés it makes "The Breakfast Club" look like "Nashville."
    • tbd Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Patriocracy
    To presume that even an explicitly neutral political position lacks its own subjective ideological bias is nothing more than a delusion, and not a particularly useful one.
  5. Darling Companion
    A lost-dog drama so insufferable it makes one wish its human characters would also run off and never return.
  6. Chernobyl Diaries
    With the faux-verité aesthetics of [Rec], the American-tourists-in-Eastern-European-hell setup of Hostel, and the brain of a mushy radioactive mutant zombie thingie, Chernobyl Diaries is little more than decomposed horror leftovers.
  7. Grown Ups 2
    The obvious amount of hard work that went into this out-of-touch sequel is partly what makes it so irritating.
  8. People Like Us
    This dry-as-dust enterprise bogs down in an almost total lack of energy and imagination that no amount of faux earnestness can overcome.
  9. Jesus Henry Christ
    The title alone invites you to cuss at this smug film, and you may do so the second you catch a whiff of the portentous first shot: a Wes Anderson put-on.
    • 47 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    MIS Human Secret Weapon
    The documentary necessitates a degree of respect and sensitivity that makes it difficult to stress how bad it is.
  11. 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.
  12. Grassroots
    It isn't entirely clear what Stephen Gyllenhaal sees in the material apart from some lukewarm raging against the machine.
  13. Hick
    It doesn't take long to gather the influences trickling through Derick Martini's Hick, an aimless tumbleweed of a road movie if ever there was one.
  14. Crazy Eyes
    While the male characters are certainly not presented as models of enlightened behavior, their antics and crises are indulged in a manner not extended to their female counterparts.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Cellmates
    The film offers Tom Sizemore the perfect opportunity to prove himself worthy of a comeback. Alas, he fails spectacularly.
    • 41 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    War of the Buttons
    By the time the drama is wrapped up with a bow and every child has learned a valuable life lesson, even the gap-toothed little tyke there solely for comic relief has begun to grate.
  17. The Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best
    The film has, at its source, a pool of affectations that so often constitute, or plague, American indie films--and, perhaps, American culture more generally.
  18. Compliance
    It seems as if Craig Zobel wants to implicate the audience in these proceedings, but he doesn't have a very clear idea how to go about it.
  19. General Education
    Too derivative to be amusing and too earnest to be parodic, it assumes the form of countless other teen comedies minus any wit or drama.
  20. The Impossible
    A sham realist's disaster movie, tackily insulting the deaths of 300,000 people by reducing the horrors of the Indian Ocean tsunami to a series of genre titillations.
  21. Assassin's Bullet
    Isaac Florentine's film is maligned with gaping plot holes, terrible expository dialogue, and obvious moments of foreshadowing.
  22. The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure
    Enduring this brainless kid's film is akin to witnessing the end of the world.
    • 57 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Painted Skin: The Resurrection
    A vaporous, watered-down frappe of a fantasy epic.
  24. Mama
    The premise isn't even worthy of executive producer Guillermo del Toro, who will apparently lend his name to any film as long as it fulfills its quota of moths and vulvic openings.
  25. Café de Flore
    It's a pretty tired proposition to complain about movies being manipulative, but Café de Flore sets the bar especially low.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Nature Calls
    Writer-director Todd Rohal fills muddled scenes with manic amounts of jokes that all manage to land with a thud.
  27. Last Vegas
    The film is depressing, sub-sitcom fodder that will dull whatever affection you may still harbor for these legendary actors.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Doctored
    Bobby Sheehan doesn't just squander his objectivity, he drowns it out with bleating strings.
  29. Hitchcock
    If you've ever seen Psycho, or even if you know anything at all about the film, Sacha Gervasi's Hitchcock would like to congratulate you on your savvy.
  30. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You
    Roberto Faenza shoots his Manhattan-set action with a glossiness that's as bland as the soundtrack ballads.
  31. Smiley
    Michael J. Gallagher's half-cocked horror fiasco is filled with clichés, pitiful dialogue, and clumsy aesthetics.
    • 31 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Just 45 Minutes from Broadway
    Henry Jaglom applies what must by now qualify as a tradition of pointless agitation to the disruption of theater. Unsurprisingly, the results are disastrous.
  33. I Will Follow You Into the Dark
    A moralistic ending is telegraphed from the beginning and routinely fulfilled by the end, rendering the rest of this trite, visually unappealing mess virtually worthless.
    • 20 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    A Haunted House
    If you're wondering why A Haunted House exists alongside the upcoming Scary Movie 5 rather than instead of it, you may already have given the subject more thought than Marlon Wayans had hoped.
  35. First Winter
    The film's interests are mainly relegated to wallowing in the frigid-starvation-suffering of its protagonists.
  36. Ex-Girlfriends
    The romantic quest that's meant to drive the film is meaningless because Alexander Poe has extended empathy to no one besides himself.
  37. King Kelly
    The film decides very early on, as part of its premise, to reduce Louisa Krause's King Kelly to a one-dimensional narcissist.
  38. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales
    Johnny Depp’s perfunctory gestures and flailing pratfalls befit a film that brings the franchise’s theme-park roots full circle.
  39. Hercules
    The film fluctuates haphazardly between semi-serious reverence and tongue-in-cheek camp, with no shortage of opportunities for the inevitable Rifftrax accompaniment.
    • 42 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Mental
    Given the film's garrulous multitude of characters, one wishes they would all just shut up and sing.
  41. Annie
    2014: Annie's America makes director John Huston's elephantine, synthetically charismatic 1982 adaptation look like a Minnelliesque model of focus and concision.
  42. Language of a Broken Heart
    A feigned attempt at a stereotypically quirky indie film that has virtually nothing in the way of formal sophistication or narrative ambition.
  43. What Maisie Knew
    David Siegel and Scott McGehee's film renders the rhapsodic Henry James novel of the same name into an abhorrent slice of tasteless familial drama.
  44. Desperate Acts of Magic
    Tammy Caplan and Joe Tyler Gold's film gives off the alienating feel of an inside joke that you miss in the off chance you're not part of the professional magic business.
  45. Tomorrow You're Gone
    Hardboiled noir play-acting doesn't get more sluggish than in this leaden tale that blurs the line between reality and delusion in a way that's less intriguing than simply confusing.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Pieta
    Kim Ki-duk's film makes an exaggerated, undeserved show of its cruelty, indignity, and aspirations of importance.
  47. Generation Um...
    The levels of insight provided into the characters are exactly commensurate with any conceivable viewer's interest in learning more about these nonentities.
    • 44 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Hammer of the Gods
    An unbearably stupid exercise in gore that deserves to die the same cruel, soulless death that nearly every character does at some point in the film.
  49. Vehicle 19
    As one incoherent action scene follows another, one's left staring at a film with nothing to respond to, waiting for it all to be over.
  50. The Colony
    Greedily tries to cram every dystopian curse into one misbegotten plot, resulting in something wildly disjointed, even if its pieces arguably connect.
  51. 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.
  52. Sex Tape
    By the time a blackmailing plot is introduced, the film seems to be surviving solely on the fumes of curse words and frequent shots of Jason Segal and Cameron Diaz's backsides.
  53. And Now a Word from Our Sponsor
    It's a testament to Bruce Greenwood's acting that Adan never becomes entirely as insufferable as the words that come out of his mouth.
  54. The Best Man Holiday
    The sexism isn't quite as noxious as one might find in Tyler Perry's films, but that's as far as the compliments go when it comes to this overextended and deeply crude sermon.
  55. Assassin's Creed
    The film ends up with both blurry action that often looks digitally faked and a fractious plot that’s stuck over-explaining itself.
  56. Absence
    The tension almost immediately leaks out of the narrative once we realize we're watching a found-footage horror movie.
  57. 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?
  58. Some Girl(s)
    Like most of Neil LaBute's work in the field of "emotional terrorism," the film protests that bad behavior isn't only good, but also essential to art.
  59. Afternoon Delight
    Jill Soloway's film is dishonest in the way it attempts to mask self-pity as enlightened self-criticism.
  60. The Canyons
    Paul Schrader and Brett Easton Ellis don't have the sense of play this kind of narrative of one-upmanship requires, as we're never allowed to enjoy the characters' misdeeds.
  61. The Judge
    One long trial of moral duty, and one that excuses repugnant behavior and psychological warfare in lieu of a repetitive, condescending sermon on honoring thy father.
  62. Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa
    A choppy, feature-length progression of crude, predictable gags, the film plays like a variety show, and yet its main attraction is barely funny enough to warrant his own brief sketch.
    • 25 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    Savannah
    The film is impossible to take seriously as a commemoration of Moultrie's life or Allen's prolific status because of its plethora of contrivances.
  64. Zaytoun
    It misfires in tone, depth, and political tact, dumbing down rather than providing new insights into the Israel-Palestine conflict.
  65. Winter's Tale
    Fantasy is heavily dependent on vision, which Mark Helprin had in spades, but the look of Akiva Goldsman's fantasy is limp, timid, and occasionally outright awkward.
    • 33 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    My Lucky Star
    Yet another limp spy spoof that fails to make any interesting critiques about the genre, let alone construct a humorous gag.
  67. Are You Here
    The female characters on Mad Men are probably the show's strongest asset, but here they're hollow to the point of insult.
  68. Son of God
    The film plays for much of its length like a terrible sketch comedy with one-dimensional caricatures shuffling listlessly through a succession of stilted tableaux.
  69. Nurse 3D
    Rather than capture truly pained souls tangled in exuberant horror tropes, the filmmakers settle for retrograde anguish and warmed-over artistry.
  70. Crave
    The film's method of admitting its own hypocrisy so as to enable it to further indulge said hypocrisy grows more grating than if it were merely indifferently conceived junk like Falling Down.
  71. Some Velvet Morning
    To watch the film is to wonder once again why Neil LaBute was ever taken seriously as a so-called dramatist of the gulf between the sexes.
  72. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Enter Here
    The research that went into the film seems a largesse, but it's compromised at every turn by filmmaker Amei Wallach's sloppy, pedantic delivery.
  73. Enemies Closer
    JCVD may not say it best, but he does say it aptly, when his manically cartoonish baddie caps one murder with the assertion that "shit happens."
  74. Cold Comes the Night
    Tze Chun's film exudes no flair in rehashing the violence and suspense of its predictable noir-thriller material.
  75. The Boy Next Door
    The camera regards Guzman's buttocks and Lopez's breasts with an evasion of visual pleasure that could be blamed on the actors' nudity clauses if the entirety of the film didn't resemble a Lifetime movie embarrassed to have found its way to theaters.
    • 30 Metascore
    • 12 Critic Score
    The Right Kind of Wrong
    The film is so in love with its unoriginal premise that it can't see the forest for the trees, treating reality like an occasionally relevant prop and stalking as a sweetly romantic gesture.
  77. Jamesy Boy
    The movie adds up to little more than an interminable bildungsroman, sunk early and often by the desperately miscast Spencer Lofranco.
  78. Return to Nuke 'Em High Volume 1
    Because it actively defies and outright ridicules all notions of aesthetic intent, proper form, and moral propriety, this lazy Z-film pastiche is essentially impervious to standard critical evaluation.
  79. The Cobbler
    Thomas McCarthy evinces no interest in the people who come into Max's store and wind up as fodder for his increasingly violent and self-absorbed escapades. Not a shred.
  80. Equals
    The Drake Doremus film all comes down, simplistically and repeatedly, to “feelings make us feel alive.”
  81. The Voices
    For most of the film's running time, one mistakes the main character's callousness for the filmmakers'.
  82. Towheads
    There's but one sequence in the entire movie that offers even the slightest bit of filmmaking verve, and even this speaks to the project's essential myopia.
  83. Bad Johnson
    Huck Botko's film asks us to laugh at, even revel in, the misadventures of womanizing men, even as it condemns them for their behavior.
  84. Tasting Menu
    There's a sinister, even insidious quality to a film that insists upon using incessant food montages not as a source of passion, but fodder for class-based self-congratulation.
  85. Space Station 76
    As a space-opera lampoon, it's incoherent primarily because it's never clear what the filmmakers are attempting to spoof.
  86. Left Behind
    Left Behind is one of those films so deeply, fundamentally terrible that it feels unwittingly high-concept.
  87. The Hero of Color City
    No cartoon has ever conveyed the struggle for self-actualization with such an inexpressive sense of imagination as this cheap and glorified babysitter.
  88. Trust Me
    Almost none of the film's characters or scenarios escape feeling contrived under writer-director-star Clark Gregg's bizarro tonal shifts and plot developments.
  89. The Letters
    A brain-dead slog whose bankrupt aesthetics ironically soil the very legacy it purports to aggrandize.
  90. After
    Throughout After, the filmmakers crank the trials of the film's Valentino family up to 11, sans irony or subversion.
  91. Reclaim
    Reclaim's highly mechanized plot ensures that the film is over before it even ends.
  92. Men, Women & Children
    Jason Reitman fails to take into account any of the positive endeavors enabled by social media, which will no doubt be used to promote and market his film.
  93. Taken 3
    Empowerment porn for those who long for the Cold War's clarity of purpose and American dominance in this murky age of terror.
  94. Jem and the Holograms
    It's the screenwriting equivalent of Ryan Adams sucking the pop vitality out of Taylor Swift's deliriously produced tunes.
  95. Dying of the Light
    Paul Schrader's personality reveals itself in the film's joylessness, which is meaningless without the director's accompanying and occasionally poignant existentialism.
  96. Trash
    Director Stephen Daldry, working from an exploitative script by Richard Curtis, opts for a full-on Slumdog Millionaire imitation.
  97. Vice
    Vice takes the basic premise from 1973's Westworld and morphs it into an incoherent slog.
  98. Strange Magic
    As juvenile and frivolous a wish-fulfillment fantasy as one might expect from the visionary behind the lightsaber and Princess Leia hogtied to Jabba the Hut, Strange Magic depicts war as a series of scarcely muddied binary oppositions: between good and evil, the beautiful and the ugly, and singing and death by karaoke.
  99. Old Fashioned
    Any masochistic joy that can be derived from watching the film owes to seeing it take its bullheaded conceit to its logical, artless extreme.
  100. I Am Michael
    Justin Kelly's film is more interested in rushing through the narrative's events than contemplating their environment.
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