Slant Magazine's Scores

For 7,789 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 6.2 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:
7789 movie reviews
  1. An ugly rendering of an infantile script that constantly exploits stereotypes for cheap guffaws, and employs the hollow trend of hoping ultra-specific, zeitgeisty lingo will distract from inert, derivative storytelling.
  2. Watching 30 Minutes or Less, a proudly stupid action comedy that's awfully lethargic for all its slam-bang propulsion, it's tough to pinpoint who exactly Ruben Fleischer thinks he is.
  3. A germophobe's worst nightmare, Contagion touches on all the dramas big and small, mostly big, we've come to associate with catastrophes such as this, and does so as if it were hurriedly going down and adapting a list of bullet points, never lingering on any one drama in a particularly meaningful fashion.
  4. There's something about these films, something about the working-over these songs suffer--a wrongness that's intangible but inescapable, like the unseen menace of a bad dream.
  5. Despite Lurie's part-time efforts to lend the film some sense of place, the impulse to hot-ify everything from Peckinpah's considerably more earthbound original ultimately outpaces his meager good intentions.
    • 75 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    A surprisingly shapeless true-crime farce which never creates a convincing context for the odd relationship between a pious East Texas mortician and his sugar mama.
  6. Of all the vaguely philosophical, calculatedly left-of-center dialogue that peppers Miranda July's The Future, no line is more telling than the writer/director/star's late-film declaration, in the guise of her character Sophie, that "I'm saying okay to nothing."
  7. Anonymous leaves one bereft of any meaningful knowledge of these personages or the theatrical energy of their age, and earns the obscurity it figures to acquire even if the war between Team Edward and Team William blazes on.
  8. Brighton Rock never brings its baby-faced hood antihero, the scarfaced Pinkie Brown (Sam Riley, pouting and hunched in the late-DiCaprio manner), into a semblance of human plausibility.
  9. While full of welcome gore and blood spatter, it's bankrupt of any creative spark.
    • 35 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    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.
  10. As ticklish as one might find the idea of an equivalent Mr. Bean character occupying the driver's seat of a James Bond parody, it's likely that even a competent manifestation of such a scenario would pale in comparison to what Mike Myers and Jay Roach pulled off with apparent ease in their Austin Powers films.
    • 64 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    It aspires to Stanley Kubrick's "2001", but in its maddeningly unresolved plot threads and cornball cosmic mysticism, it lands closer to "Mission to Mars" -though Prometheus lacks any action set piece as gripping as the Brian De Palma film's sentient sandstorm.
  11. That's My Boy lazily exists in a fantasyland of Adam Sandler's perpetual adolescence, even as it generates some moderate comic friction from Sandler and Andy Samberg's testy back-and-forth.
    • 43 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Len Wiseman's Total Recall's a trifling mess, as superfluous as a third breast.
  12. The film takes more than a few pages from the James Cameron playbook.
    • 72 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    Nothing but broad, pandering indexes tailored to appeal to the arcade wistfulness the film never even bothers to convincingly evoke.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    By the time the narrative winds toward its key revelation, even the most earnest viewer is numbed and emotionally desensitized by the unfathomable bleakness already overcrowding the screen.
  13. Michael J. Weithorn's direction underlined its understatement via self-consciously patient camerawork and a doleful score, all in order to further the mournful mood.
  14. Injecting some down time to intimate a vast internal life is one thing, but needlessly approximating patches of wasted time is another, and Trollhunter's dully drawn characters suggest that the latter is closer to what André Øvredal came up with.
    • 65 Metascore
    • 38 Critic Score
    The near-slapstick escapes sit uneasily with the raw bits of very adult sex and cringe-worthy close-ups of brutality that dominate the rest of the proceedings.
  15. Life lessons abound in Buck, most of them tied to endlessly reiterated comparisons between man and horse.
  16. Can't mask that, at heart, it's merely a trifling tour documentary that gives further excessive attention to the late-night star's 2010 ouster as The Tonight Show host.
  17. Despite gestures toward modernity and clumsy humanism, the film feels regressive, presenting a version of modern China that's as much of an anesthetized fairy tale as its costume-drama past.
  18. Although it fancies itself as rigidly complex as a well-played chess match, Nick Tomnay's The Perfect Host is really a game without any rules, one where characters and situations exist in total thrall of the next shocking twist.
  19. The film seems almost to have been produced spontaneously, by gears of a larger system as they mesh together right this instant, culled from the ether with the words "Customers Who Also Liked Dogtooth and Winter's Bone Liked This…"
  20. The film is a collection of consciously quirky indie tropes in place of any meaningful narrative, and you can practically see the notebook the filmmakers may have written in during a brainstorming session in a college screenwriting seminar.
  21. Sarah's Key becomes a musing ("meditation" would be too generous) on the importance of uncovering the past that fails to honestly contemplate why such an act is significant.
  22. Writer-director Josh Shelov (working with co-writer Michael Jaeger) is trolling in fertile, easy territory, but rather than mine the subject for what it's worth, he resorts to depressingly cheap mistaken-identity shenanigans and raunchy "he-milk" gags.
  23. There's a girl, and she's prone to dirty acts, but that's just one patch of this arbitrarily stitched quilt of white-trash, Bible-Belt transgression, which flattens under the weight of a truckload of half-realized ambitions.

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